When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Panther Lake unveiled: A deep dive into Intel's next-gen laptop CPU Take the low power of Lunar Lake, combine it with the performance of Arrow Lake, and you've got Panther Lake, Intel says. Intel's next-generation mobile processor, "Panther Lake," builds incrementally on the excellent "Lunar Lake" chip populating laptops right now. But there's something odd afoot: a "16-core, 12 Xe graphics cores" version that could be Intel's answer to AMD's Ryzen AI Max, complete with multi-frame graphics generation powered by AI. Intel has officially revealed its new Panther Lake architecture, and it gives enthusiasts a lot to chew on: a return to the performance (P-cores), efficiency (E-cores), and low-power efficiency (LP E-cores) cores of Intel's first Core Ultra chip, Meteor Lake. Intel has returned with a fifth-generation NPU capable of 50 TOPS and an image processing unit (IPU) that actually uses AI for some functions. Intel's "Xe3" GPU is worth some discussion all by itself, with its awkward branding and powerful multi-frame generation that will potentially elevate frame rates three or four times what they were before. Can Panther Lake address mainstream laptops, handheld PCs, and this new breed of "AI workstations" AMD's Strix Halo is aiming for? Intel's confidence in its 18A manufacturing process may be a bit overblown, however, as several portions of Panther Lake are still being manufactured overseas, including the 12Xe version of the new, disaggregated (separate) GPU tile.

On a Wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane--which was, thankfully, empty--and immediately jerked back. That sense of peril felt right for the moment. As I stepped into the cab, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was delivering a speech criticizing President Donald Trump's economic policies, and in particular the administration's sweeping on-again, off-again tariffs. A day earlier, the White House had claimed that Chinese goods would be subject to overall levies as high as 245 percent when accounting for preexisting tariffs, and the AI giant Nvidia's stock had plummeted after the company reported that it expected to take a quarterly hit of more than 5 billion for selling to China.

We propose a neural control method to provide guaranteed stabilization for mechanical systems using a novel negative imaginary neural ordinary differential equation (NINODE) controller. Specifically, we employ neural networks with desired properties as state-space function matrices within a Hamiltonian framework to ensure the system possesses the NI property. This NINODE system can serve as a controller that asymptotically stabilizes an NI plant under certain conditions. For mechanical plants with colocated force actuators and position sensors, we demonstrate that all the conditions required for stability can be translated into regularity constraints on the neural networks used in the controller. We illustrate the utility, effectiveness, and stability guarantees of the NINODE controller through an example involving a nonlinear mass-spring system.

Felix Petersen, who did this work as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, has a strategy for making that happen. He designed networks composed of logic gates, which are some of the basic building blocks of computer chips. Made up of a few transistors apiece, logic gates accept two bits--1s or 0s--as inputs and, according to a rule determined by their specific pattern of transistors, output a single bit. Just like perceptrons, logic gates can be chained up into networks. And running logic-gate networks is cheap, fast, and easy: in his talk at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, Petersen said that they consume less energy than perceptron networks by a factor of hundreds of thousands.

In late August 1993, a young programmer named Dave Taylor walked into an office block on the Lyndon B Johnson freeway in Mesquite, Texas, to start a new job. The building had a jet black glass exterior and sat utterly incongruent amid acres of car parks, single-storey industrial units and strip malls. Game designer Sandy Petersen called it the Devil's Rubik's Cube. Taylor's new workplace was on the sixth floor in office 615. The carpets, he discovered, were stained with spilled soda, the ceiling tiles yellowed by water leaks from above.

Displaying bias, foreign adversaries like China becoming dominant, and outsmarting humans were all top artificial intelligence concerns for members of Congress. The surprising ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has renewed concern over the state of artificial intelligence regulation as the industry continues to grow at a rapid pace. "Now is the perfect time to create common sense guard rails," Christopher Alexander, the chief analytics officer of Pioneer Development Group, told Fox News Digital. Alexander's comments come after OpenAI's board made the move last week to push out Altman, arguing that the company's founder had not communicated well with the board and that he had lost the confidence of those on it. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," the company said in a release.

Intel's new 14th-gen Core chip, Meteor Lake, is designed as much for Intel as it is for you. But a doubling of graphics performance and a new AI engine helps cater to consumers seeking new features. Let's be clear, though: Meteor Lake was not designed with CPU performance in mind. Intel executives describe Meteor Lake as offering the performance of the current 13th-gen chip, Raptor Lake, but at half the power -- aided by new low-voltage efficiency cores (E-cores) that are new to the platform. Even the way Intel assigns CPU tasks has been flipped on its head, pushing them first towards the lowest-power E-cores, then migrating them to the more power-hungry performance cores if need be. Intel unveiled its new Meteor Lake platform in an offsite press event in Penang, Malaysia, though the company will talk more about Meteor Lake at its Intel Innovation conference in San Jose this week. At Intel's Intel Innovation conference in San Jose, Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger added two more details: that Meteor Lake will launch on Dec. 14, and it will be branded as the Core Ultra. Acer appeared on stage to show off its own Meteor Lake laptop, and Intel used MSI-branded laptops in Malaysia.

Conditional local independence is an asymmetric independence relation among continuous time stochastic processes. It describes whether the evolution of one process is directly influenced by another process given the histories of additional processes, and it is important for the description and learning of causal relations among processes. We formulate a model-free framework for testing the hypothesis that a counting process is conditionally locally independent of another process. To this end, we introduce a new functional parameter called the Local Covariance Measure (LCM), which quantifies deviations from the hypothesis. Following the principles of double machine learning, we propose an estimator of the LCM and a test of the hypothesis using nonparametric estimators and sample splitting or cross-fitting. We call this test the (cross-fitted) Local Covariance Test ((X)-LCT), and we show that its level and power can be controlled uniformly, provided that the nonparametric estimators are consistent with modest rates. We illustrate the theory by an example based on a marginalized Cox model with time-dependent covariates, and we show in simulations that when double machine learning is used in combination with cross-fitting, then the test works well without restrictive parametric assumptions.

Samuel Greengard is an author and journalist based in West Linn, OR, USA.

Attending ICRA is a great opportunity to see many state-of-the-art (and famous?) robots in a single venue. Indeed, a quick trip to the exhibitors' booths is enough to get introduced to the large and diverse group of commercial robots we have today. Yet, one can easily notice that these amazing state-of-the-art robots do not interact with each other. At least they do not do it without human mediation. Although in the exhibitions one can find two or three robots that appear to be joyfully playing together, the reality is that their operators are creating these inter-robot interactions.