2025-09-04 08:02:00
Switzerland has launched Apertus, a fully open-source, multilingual LLM trained on 15 trillion tokens and over 1,000 languages. "What distinguishes Apertus from many other generative AI systems is its commitment to complete openness," reports CyberInsider. From the report: Unlike popular proprietary models, where users can only interact via APIs or hosted interfaces, Apertus provides open access to its model weights, training datasets, documentation, and even intermediate checkpoints. The source code and all training materials are released under a permissive open-source license that allows commercial use. Since the full training process is documented and reproducible, researchers and watchdogs can audit the data sources, verify compliance with data protection laws, and inspect how the model was trained. Apertus' development explicitly adhered to Swiss data protection and copyright laws, and incorporated retroactive opt-out mechanisms to respect data source preferences. From a privacy perspective, Apertus represents a compelling shift in the AI landscape. The model only uses publicly available data, filtered to exclude personal information and to honor opt-out signals from content sources. This not only aligns with emerging regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act, but also provides a tangible example of how AI can be both powerful and privacy-respecting. According to ETH Zurich's Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the project at ETH Zurich, Apertus is "built for the public good" and is a demonstration of how AI can be deployed as a public digital infrastructure, much like utilities or transportation. The model is available via Swisscom's Sovereign Swiss AI Platform. It's also available through Hugging Face and the Public AI Inference Utility.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
2025-09-04 07:20:00
Google's September Pixel drop brings the new Material 3 Expressive UI, AI-powered Gboard writing tools, and Bluetooth Auracast upgrades to older Pixel devices, including the Pixel 6 and Pixel Tablet. "Among other tweaks, Google made it possible to add 'Live Effects,' including a few that cover the weather, to your phone's lock screen wallpaper," notes Engadget. "Material 3 Expressive also gives you more control over how the contact cards your phone displays when your friends and family call you look. Even if you're not one to endlessly tweak Android's appearance, as part of the redesign Google has once again reworked the Quick Settings pane in hopes of making it easier to use." On the audio front, Pixel Buds Pro 2 gain intuitive nod-and-shake gesture controls, Adaptive Audio for balanced awareness, and Loud Noise Protection to guard against sudden sound spikes. Voice clarity has also been improved with Gemini Live in noisy environments. A full breakdown of what's new can be found here.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
2025-09-04 06:40:00
Just days before Apple's expected launch of the satellite-enabled Apple Watch Ultra 3, Garmin unveiled its Fenix 8 Pro -- the company's first smartwatch with built-in inReach satellite and cellular connectivity, SOS features, and a blindingly bright 4,500-nit microLED display. MacRumors reports: With inReach, the Fenix 8 Pro can send location check-ins and text messages over satellite using the Garmin Messenger app. There is also included cellular connectivity, so the smartwatch can make phone calls, send 30-second voice messages, and provide LiveTrack links and weather forecasts when an LTE connection is available. LiveTrack is a feature that allows the wearer's family and friends to keep track of their location during an activity or adventure. For emergencies, there is an SOS feature that will send a message to the Garmin Response center over a satellite or cellular connection. Garmin Response will then communicate with the user, their emergency contacts, and search and rescue organizations to provide help. Garmin says that its Response team has supported over 17,000 inReach incident responses across over 150 countries. The Fenix 8 Pro smartwatch launches September 8, with the AMOLED model starting at $1,200 and the 51mm microLED version priced at $2,000. Both require a paid inReach satellite plan beginning at $7.99 per month for full functionality.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
2025-09-04 06:00:00
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going "FEEEEEEEE." The video was called "Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more." It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. "In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," the narrator says in a fake British accent. "By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire," it continued. The video was from a channel I hadn't seen before, called "Sleepless Historian." I took my headphones out, didn't think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep. The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don't know much about. Some video titles include "Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses," "The Entire History of the American Frontier," "What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii," and "What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times." One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks. In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on "mass produced" videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change. "It's completely shocking to me," Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told Koebler in a phone interview. "It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I'm fearful because this is everywhere." "I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they're historically inaccurate," Kelly added. "So it worries me because it's just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. [...] It's worrying to me just for humanity. Not to get too high brow, but it's not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
2025-09-04 05:20:00
Tesco is suing Broadcom and reseller Computacenter for at least $134 million, claiming that VMware's perpetual license support agreements were breached after Broadcom's acquisition. The supermarket giant warned it "may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped," writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. From the report: Court documents seen by The Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years. All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions. The supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid," and "is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualization Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns." The complaint also alleges that Tesco's contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that Broadcom won't let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the new Cloud Foundation 9. The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the retailer feels it's breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price. Tesco's filing also mentions Broadcom's patch publication policy, which means users who don't acquire subscriptions can't receive all security updates and don't receive other fixes. The retailer thinks its contracts mean it is entitled to those updates. The filing suggests that lack of support is not just a legal matter, but may have wider implications because VMware software, and support for it "are essential for the operations and resilience of Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the UK and Republic of Ireland." "VMware Virtualization Software underpins the servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores," the filing states. Tesco's filing warns that Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter are each liable for at least $134 million damages, plus interest, and that the longer the dispute persists the higher damages will climb.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
2025-09-04 04:40:00
After years of requests, Instagram is finally releasing a dedicated iPad app on September 3rd... "But it will be slightly different than the mobile app users are accustomed to," reports The Verge. From the report: Most significantly, the iPad app will open directly to a feed of Reels, the company's TikTok competitor -- perhaps a sign of the short-form-video times. [...] Other features will be available on iPad: Stories will still line the top of the homepage, and users will be able to switch to a "Following" tab where they'll be able to swipe between feeds that more resemble the mobile Instagram experience (including a chronological option). The bigger screen means more space and fewer clicks: comments on Reels will appear next to full-size videos, and the DMs page will have your inbox alongside chats, similar to what Messenger looks like on desktop.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
