Nvidia's general-purpose GPU chips have once again made a nearly clean sweep of one of the most popular benchmarks for measuring chip performance in artificial intelligence, this time with a new focus on generative AI applications such as large language models (LLMs). Systems put together by SuperMicro, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, and others -- packed with as many as eight Nvidia chips -- on Wednesday took most of the top honors in the MLPerf benchmark test organized by the MLCommons, an industry consortium. The test, measuring how fast machines can produce tokens, process queries, or output samples of data -- known as AI inference -- is the fifth installment of the prediction-making benchmark that has been going on for years. This time, the MLCommons updated the speed tests with two tests representing common generative AI uses. One test is how fast the chips perform on Meta's open-source LLM Llama 3.1 405b, which is one of the larger gen AI programs in common use.

AI SPOTS WILDFIRES: FireSat is a new satellite project designed to detect and track wildfires early. The project aims to detect a fire that's merely 270 square feet – about the size of a classroom – within 20 minutes. It's also able to detect fires two to three acres in size, roughly the size of two football fields. TECHNOLOGICAL MIRACLE: The Trump administration recently asked American developers, including OpenAI, for input on what the U.S. needs to do to stay ahead in the global AI competition. We believe that preserving AI's ability to learn should be at the top of the list.

Executives at artificial intelligence companies may like to tell us that AGI is almost here, but the latest models still need some additional tutoring to help them be as clever as they can. Scale AI, a company that's played a key role in helping frontier AI firms build advanced models, has developed a platform that can automatically test a model across thousands of benchmarks and tasks, pinpoint weaknesses, and flag additional training data that ought to help enhance their skills. Scale, of course, will supply the data required. Scale rose to prominence providing human labor for training and testing advanced AI models. Large language models (LLMs) are trained on oodles of text scraped from books, the web, and other sources.

If you've found yourself wandering aimlessly around the maps of The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo just added a handy new tool: map directions. Announced the company's Nintendo Direct event on Wednesday, along with the Switch 2, the special editions of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom made for the new console come not only with advanced frame rates and resolution and support for HDR, but a new app called Zelda Notes. Zelda Notes is a new platform that can be accessed through the Nintendo Switch app on your smartphone, where you can find a Navigation tool that can guide you to various locations in the games -- like Shrines you know are there but you just don't know how to find them. An audio track gives you step by step directions as if you were using Google Maps. If you're a Tears of the Kingdom building fiend and want to see what happens when you hit "random", Nintendo also announced an "autobuild" feature that just takes whatever you have and throws it together.

When the sun is out, it's just about warm enough here in north-east London to read outside – which means it's time to crack out the best new science fiction and find a sheltered spot. I love the way the genre continues to tackle the biggest issues of our day, whether that's ageing or artificial intelligence. Top of my pile is Lucy Lapinska's look at how a robot might deal with being freed from human governance, but I'm also looking forward to Nick Harkaway's latest, set in a world where a drug can (for a huge price) stop you from ageing, but it will also make you grow very large. And I'm keen to try out Sayaka Murata's strange and disturbing vision of the future, Vanishing World. Amane lives in a society where children are conceived by artificial insemination and raised by parents in "clean", sexless marriages. When she and her husband hear about an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there.

Rami Sinno is crouched beside a filing cabinet, wrestling a beach-ball sized disc out of a box, when a dull thump echoes around his laboratory. "I just dropped tens of thousands of dollars' worth of material," he says with a laugh. Straightening up, Sinno reveals the goods: a golden silicon wafer, which glitters in the fluorescent light of the lab. This circular platter is divided into some 100 rectangular tiles, each of which contains billions of microscopic electrical switches. These are the brains of Amazon's most advanced chip yet: the Trainium 2, announced in December.

MediaTek launched the Kompanio Ultra as the company's premium Chromebook processor on Wednesday, predicting that it will easily offer the highest Minecraft performance of any Chromebook chip while bringing AI to the platform, too. Essentially, MediaTek launched the Kompanio Ultra to help answer the question: Which Chromebook should I buy? Besides Google's own Chromebook Plus brand, there aren't too many answers. Instead, the list of Chromebooks is a hodgepodge of various processors, including the Intel Celeron, Pentium, and Core processors; AMD's A-series and Ryzen chips, and Arm processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon and the existing MediaTek Kompanio 500 and 800 series. Google launched the Chromebook Plus specification to help clarify matters, but it certainly doesn't help to differentiate the performance each chip can offer.

Roblox is equipping parents with more oversight power for their young players, introducing new blocking and monitoring tools to their recently revamped parental control settings. The update includes new options for parents seeking to block and report specific friends on their child's friends lists, as well as individual experiences -- until this update, parents could only prevent children from accessing experiences by blocking that entire maturity level. Children under the age of 13 can request to unblock a friend or experience at any time, but it must be approved by the parent. Parents can also find more detailed weekly insights into their children's activity, including their child's top 20 most-visited experiences over the last week. They can access additional safety resources on Roblox's updated Safety Center, as well.

From slices of toast to patches of clouds, Jesus's face has a habit of appearing in some unusual places. But this mind-boggling optical illusion might be the most bizarre appearance yet.

Ch Supt Dan Card from the Met, local policing commander for north-east London, said the force was committed to finding Kaliyah, and were using drone technology and boats as part of their "thorough search over a wide area". "Specialist officers are supporting Kaliyah's family through this deeply upsetting time and our thoughts go out to all those impacted by what has happened." He added: "I'd like to thank the members of public, our first-responding officers, and colleagues from other emergency services, as they responded rapidly to carry out a large-scale search during a highly pressurised and distressing time." The force is appealing for witnesses. The search on Monday involved boats and helicopters from HM Coastguard, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and London Fire Brigade.