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„Beam-down“ solární reaktor vyrábí zelený vodík bez elektřiny

OSEL.cz - 24 Červen, 2025 - 00:00
Průmysl potřebuje vodík kvůli dekarbonizaci, ale výroba vodíku je sama o sobě velmi energeticky náročná. Má-li zezelenat, je nutné nahradit tradiční elektrolýzu vodíku důmyslnějšími procesy. Zajímavým kandidátem je „beam-down“ solární reaktor, který pohání výrobu vodíku termosolárním žárem, nasbíraným velkou soustavou zrcadel.
Kategorie: Věda a technika

Microsoft’s new genAI model to power agents in Windows 11

Computerworld.com [Hacking News] - 23 Červen, 2025 - 21:40

Microsoft is laying the groundwork for Windows 11 to morph into a genAI-driven OS.

The company on Monday announced a critical AI technology that will make it possible to run generative AI (genAI) agents on Windows without Internet connectivity.

Microsoft’s small language model, called Mu, is designed to respond to natural language queries within the Windows OS, the company said in a blog post Monday. Mu takes advantage of the neural processing units (NPUs) of Copilot PCs, Vivek Pradeep, vice president and distinguished engineer for Windows Applied Sciences, said in the post.

Three chip makers — Intel, AMD and Qualcomm — provide NPUs in Copilot PCs prebuilt with Windows 11.

Mu already powers an agent that handles queries in the Settings menus in a preview version of Windows 11 available to early adopters with Copilot+ PCs. The feature is available in the Windows 11 preview version 26200.5651 that shipped  June 13. 

The model provides a better understanding and context of queries, and “has been designed to operate efficiently, delivering high performance while running locally,” Pradeep wrote.

Microsoft is aggressively pushing genAI features into the core of Windows 11 and Microsoft 365. The company introduced a new developer stack called Windows ML 2.0 last month for developers to make AI features accessible in software applications.

The company is also developing feature- or application-specific AI models for Microsoft 365 applications.

The 330-million parameter Mu model is designed to reduce AI computing cycles so it can run locally on Windows 11 PCs.  Laptops have limited hardware and battery life and need a cloud service for AI.

“This involved adjusting model architecture and parameter shapes to better fit the hardware’s parallelism and memory limits,” Pradeep wrote.

The model also generates high-quality responses with a better understanding of queries. Microsoft fine-tuned a custom Mu model for the Settings menu that could respond to ambiguous user queries on system settings. For example, the model can handle queries that do not specify whether to raise brightness on a main or secondary monitor.

The Mu encoder-decoder model breaks down large queries into a more compact representation of information, which is then used to generate responses. That’s different from large language models (LLMs), which are only decoder models and require all of the text to generate responses.

“By separating the input tokens from output tokens, Mu’s one-time encoding greatly reduces computation and memory overhead,” Pradeep said.

The encoder–decoder approach was significantly faster than LLMs such as Microsoft’s Phi-3.5, which is a decoder-only model. “When comparing Mu to a similarly fine-tuned Phi-3.5-mini, we found that Mu is nearly comparable in performance despite being one-tenth of the size,” Pradeep said.

Those gains are crucial for on-device and real-time applications. “Managing the extensive array of Windows settings posed its own challenges, particularly with overlapping functionalities,” Pradeep said.

The response time was under 500 milliseconds, which aligned with “goals for a responsive and reliable agent in Settings that scaled to hundreds of settings,” Pradeep said.

Microsoft has many genAI technologies that include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its latest homegrown Phi 4 model, which can generate images, video and text.

Kategorie: Hacking & Security

Iran cyberattacks against US biz more likely following air strikes

The Register - Anti-Virus - 23 Červen, 2025 - 20:41
Plus 'low-level' hacktivist attempts

The US Department of Homeland Security has warned American businesses to guard their networks against Iranian government-sponsored cyberattacks along with "low-level" digital intrusions by pro-Iran hacktivists.…

Kategorie: Viry a Červi

Máte chytrý kartáček na zuby, nebo vám stačí obyčejný elektrický či manuální?

Živě.cz - 23 Červen, 2025 - 20:15
Už jste do péče o bílé zuby zapojili i modrozubku? Chytré kartáčky s Bluetooth sledují, kolik času věnujete ústní hygieně. Díky senzorům také poznají, jestli si zuby čistíte správně. Řeknou také, kdy je třeba vyměnit hlavici. A ještě z této rutiny dělají zábavu či hru. Máte doma takový? Vyšší ...
Kategorie: IT News

S jakou navigací na dovolenou? Vybrali jsme 11 nejlepších aplikací, které vám ukážou cestu

Živě.cz - 23 Červen, 2025 - 19:45
Vybrali jsme nejlepší navigační aplikace pro Android a iOS • Využijí je řidiči, cyklisté i chodci • Většinu aplikací lze používat zdarma
Kategorie: IT News

Recenze filmu 28 let poté. Postapokalyptický horor s duší – syrový, stylový a překvapivě osobní

Živě.cz - 23 Červen, 2025 - 18:45
Danny Boyle a Alex Garland se vrátili k filmu, který mezi milovníky hororu a sci-fi platí za výborný počin, a rovnou zahájili celou novou sérii ze známého ponurého světa. Do 28 let poté (28 Years After) se pustili se stejnou vervou a energií jako před 19 lety do svého zombie hitu.
Kategorie: IT News

Malware on Google Play, Apple App Store stole your photos—and crypto

Bleeping Computer - 23 Červen, 2025 - 18:44
A new mobile crypto-stealing malware called SparkKitty was found in apps on Google Play and the Apple App Store, targeting Android and iOS devices. [...]
Kategorie: Hacking & Security

Has Apple become addicted to ‘No’?

Computerworld.com [Hacking News] - 23 Červen, 2025 - 18:29

In a world loaded with existential challenge, it should not surprise anyone that Apple faces its own crisis. It should do what any cornered animal will always do and fight hard and dirty to regain freedom. That’s why it’s of concern to once again learn this weekend that Apple is “considering” acquisitions in the generative AI (genAI) space, because by this time in the fight, I want that chatter to be about acquisitions that have been made

Look, anyone can consider making a purchase and then come up with a dozen reasons not to go through with it. That’s not hard at all, it’s the inevitable articulation of small-C conservatism, which tends to favor stasis over change. My concern is that Apple’s own growth mindset might have been replaced by a more conservative approach, which means that the company becomes really good at finding reasons not to do things, and less good at identifying when it really should do something.

No can’t be the default

Apple’s history is packed with conflict between good ideas the company rejected and brilliant ideas it chose to move forward with. It is arguable that some of the ideas the company has looked at historically are only now becoming viable devices. (I’m thinking of the speculated HomePod as an idea of that kind.) Apple executives have frequently discussed how the company is just as proud of the things it doesn’t do as of those it does. It’s a company instinctively good at saying “No” — until it finds a good reason to say “Yes.”

The problem is that when it comes to genAI, it still feels like there’s a lot of creative mileage to be had from injecting some creative chaos into the R&D crib. To achieve that, it seems necessary that Apple find the spleen to take a few risks on the M&A journey. 

The company can’t simply wander down to the genAI development shops and find reasons not to purchase things; it needs to pick up all the shiniest things it comes across, using whatever financial muscle it takes to ensure they end up in Apple’s hold rather than elsewhere. 

Why must it do this? Because genAI isn’t finished yet

The genAI evolution continues

Sure, Apple’s widely disclosed challenges with Siri mean it is motivated to try new approaches to push that project ahead, but the truth is that no one — not even OpenAI — really has genAI that is anything other than a hint of what this tech is likely to be able to accomplish in a decade or two. We are still early in the AI race, and that means today’s winners can still lose and those at the back of the pack have an opportunity to get ahead. 

So, it makes sense for Apple to take a few expensive risks, rather than staying inside the safe zone. Does Perplexity have a few tools that could boost Apple Intelligence? Then grab them. Are there others in AI with tools that could help make Siri smart and hardware products sing? 

Bring them in. Take risks. Get hungry, be foolish. Make it happen.

It is also worth thinking about retention at this point. 

Keep them keen

Several pieces by Mark Gurman in recent years tell us that in many cases, people Apple has hired on the purchase of their companies have subsequently jumped ship, as they did not find their happiness. If that is the case, that’s a problem that needs to be fixed; it suggests at least some of the assumptions the company has concerning how it works with its employees must be challenged, and new ways found to ensure acquired staffers actually want to stick around. 

Apple has tried stock options to boost retention. That’s not enough. Money helps, but as Maslow says, agency and empowerment are more important. Steve Jobs understood this, saying during his last D: All Things Digital interview in 2010, “If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, [you] have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy…. The best ideas have to win — otherwise good people don’t want to stay.” 

I’m not saying Apple has become hierarchical, though I look with suspicion at work-from-home mandates and opposition to employee unionization as hints that hierarchy exists in some parts of the company. What I am saying is that if the old M.O. isn’t working, and if the important new recruits the company needs to tackle genAI don’t want to stick around, then something’s got to change. And if that means a lot more collaboration and empowerment and a few internal changes in approach, that’s a small price to pay in contrast to the global opportunity to lead the AI-driven tech future on a planet seemingly owned by billionaires and technocrats.

Sometimes you got to play your hunches — how else are you going to find what you love?

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.

Kategorie: Hacking & Security

US Homeland Security warns of escalating Iranian cyberattack risks

Bleeping Computer - 23 Červen, 2025 - 18:22
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) warned over the weekend of escalating cyberattack risks by Iran-backed hacking groups and pro-Iranian hacktivists. [...]
Kategorie: Hacking & Security

Second attack on McLaren Health Care in a year affects 743k people

The Register - Anti-Virus - 23 Červen, 2025 - 17:48
Criminals targeted the hospital and physician network’s Detroit cancer clinic this time

McLaren Health Care is in the process of writing to 743,131 individuals now that it fully understands the impact of its July 2024 cyberattack.…

Kategorie: Viry a Červi

Bill Gates a Linus Torvalds se poprvé setkali. Rivalita šla stranou

Živě.cz - 23 Červen, 2025 - 17:45
O víkendu se setkali Bill Gates a Linus Torvalds na neformální večeři. • Dlouholetí rivalové spolu osobně byli vůbec poprvé. S nimi i autor Windows NT. • Microsoft dnes do Linuxu přispívá a podporuje linuxové aplikace na svých systémech.
Kategorie: IT News

AI, cybersecurity, and quantum computing shape UK’s new 10-year economic plan

Computerworld.com [Hacking News] - 23 Červen, 2025 - 17:43

Artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cybersecurity are “frontier technologies” the UK government plans to prioritize as part of its blueprint to overhaul the nation’s economy and industries over the next decade.

That’s according to its long-awaited industrial strategy policy paper and a separate plan going into more detail on digital and other technologies.

It would perhaps have been bigger news if the government hadn’t put AI, cybersecurity and quantum computing at the heart of its plans, given that it has already trailed this heavily in a sequence of reports, including January’s AI Opportunities Action Plan.

But the hope for the tech sector expressed in the paper, titled The UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy, is still ambitious, including that by 2035 the UK should aim to be one of the world’s top three R&D superpowers and home to a tech business worth a trillion dollars.

All that has to happen in a mere decade in a country unaccustomed to talking about its future more than one four-year election cycle ahead. It’s also interventionist in tone, an idea at odds with half a century of thinking in Britain which assumed technology should be left to its own devices.

AI and quantum computing will build the companies of the future. However, because this infrastructure will be vulnerable to disruption, it will need cybersecurity innovation to ensure its operation.

“We will enable new sectors to establish themselves e.g., our rapidly growing AI sector. […] Driving investment into our internationally renowned cybersecurity sector and supporting cutting-edge innovation to address the challenges that prevent widespread technology adoption,” the government wrote in the the Digital Technologies Sector Plan.

With a combined value of £1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) the UK’s tech sector was currently the world’s third most valuable behind only the US and China, it calculated.

The Plan’s focus on AI in particular sets out ambitious uptake goals. As soon as 2030, the UK should have several AI growth zones, with 7.5 million people upskilled to use the technology while the country’s AI research capacity will grow twentyfold, the plan projects. By the same date, the CyberASAP accelerator program should be supporting 250 cybersecurity companies and 28 spinouts.

Big interventions

Some optimism is probably justified — the country is home to a good collection of AI expertise for example — but it wouldn’t be Britain if there weren’t doubts.

The first is that while the UK has a reasonable track record at creating AI, cybersecurity, and technology companies, its record of keeping them British is less positive. Two examples are Google getting its hands on AI specialist DeepMind at a bargain-basement price in 2014, and Softbank’s purchase of chip designer Arm two years later. Both are still based in the UK, but with their profits flowing elsewhere.

That’s not always an issue but, without a core of sovereign businesses, it’s debatable whether a country is really in charge of its technology ecosystem in the long run.

A second issue is the size of the government interventions necessary to fuel local technology businesses today from startup to unicorn and beyond. In a sector that thinks in the hundreds of billions, the UK Government’s budget, doled out in tens of millions in a variety of programs, remains more constrained.

There’s also doubt about whether the rest of the UK economy will be able to profit from AI developments.

“According to Cisco’s latest UK AI Readiness Index, only 10% of UK organisations are fully prepared to harness AI’s potential,” said Cico’s UK and Ireland chief executive, Sarah Walker.

Cisco collaborated with the development of the Government’s plan, but Walker pointed out that its success still depended on overcoming deeper workforce challenges:

“AI adoption and implementation is primarily a people challenge. From traditional IT roles to marketing and supply chain management, almost every job will require AI literacy in the very near future,” she said.

In some parts of the UK, this would be easier than in others. “We need to ensure up-skilling is addressed with equality, to avoid exacerbating economic gaps that already exist across demographics and regions.”

Kategorie: Hacking & Security

Canada says Salt Typhoon hacked telecom firm via Cisco flaw

Bleeping Computer - 23 Červen, 2025 - 17:23
The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and the FBI confirm that the Chinese state-sponsored 'Salt Typhoon' hacking group is also targeting Canadian telecommunication firms, breaching a telecom provider in February. [...]
Kategorie: Hacking & Security

Revil ransomware members released after time served on carding charges

Bleeping Computer - 23 Červen, 2025 - 17:12
Four REvil ransomware members arrested in January 2022 were released by Russia on time served after they pleaded guilty to carding and malware distribution charges. [...]
Kategorie: Hacking & Security

Recenze hry Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. Pokračování příběhu kurýra vylepšuje vše podstatné, oslní především grafikou

Živě.cz - 23 Červen, 2025 - 16:45
Amerika je propojená, ale zbytek světa zůstává izolovaný. Se Samem jsem se vydal na další epickou cestu za rozšířením chirální sítě, která se táhne skrz Mexiko a celou Austrálii. A cesta je to podle očekávání epická se vším všudy. 
Kategorie: IT News

McLaren Health Care says data breach impacts 743,000 patients

Bleeping Computer - 23 Červen, 2025 - 16:28
McLaren Health Care is warning 743,000 patients that the health system suffered a data breach caused by a July 2024 attack by the INC ransomware gang. [...]
Kategorie: Hacking & Security

Trumpův telefon T1 vůbec není americký. Navíc je to noční můra pro soukromí uživatelů

Živě.cz - 23 Červen, 2025 - 16:15
Trumpův nový telefon T1 Phone se nevyrábí v USA, ale v Číně • Panují velké pochybnosti o nakládání s daty a soukromím uživatelů • Spíš než o mobil jde o poltický symbol
Kategorie: IT News

Will AI Take Your Job? It Depends on These 4 Key Advantages AI Has Over Humans

Singularity HUB - 23 Červen, 2025 - 16:00

This framework can help you understand where AI provides value.

If you’ve worried that AI might take your job, deprive you of your livelihood, or maybe even replace your role in society, it probably feels good to see the latest AI tools fail spectacularly. If AI recommends glue as a pizza topping, then you’re safe for another day.

But the fact remains that AI already has definite advantages over even the most skilled humans, and knowing where these advantages arise—and where they don’t—will be key to adapting to the AI-infused workforce.

AI will often not be as effective as a human doing the same job. It won’t always know more or be more accurate. And it definitely won’t always be fairer or more reliable. But it may still be used whenever it has an advantage over humans in one of four dimensions: speed, scale, scope, and sophistication. Understanding these dimensions is the key to understanding AI-human replacement.

Speed

First, speed. There are tasks that humans are perfectly good at but are not nearly as fast as AI. One example is restoring or upscaling images: taking pixelated, noisy or blurry images and making a crisper and higher-resolution version. Humans are good at this; given the right digital tools and enough time, they can fill in fine details. But they are too slow to efficiently process large images or videos.

AI models can do the job blazingly fast, a capability with important industrial applications. AI-based software is used to enhance satellite and remote sensing data, to compress video files, to make video games run better with cheaper hardware and less energy, to help robots make the right movements, and to model turbulence to help build better internal combustion engines.

Real-time performance matters in these cases, and the speed of AI is necessary to enable them.

Scale

The second dimension of AI’s advantage over humans is scale. AI will increasingly be used in tasks that humans can do well in one place at a time, but that AI can do in millions of places simultaneously. A familiar example is ad targeting and personalization. Human marketers can collect data and predict what types of people will respond to certain advertisements. This capability is important commercially; advertising is a trillion-dollar market globally.

AI models can do this for every single product, TV show, website, and internet user. This is how the modern ad-tech industry works. Real-time bidding markets price the display ads that appear alongside the websites you visit, and advertisers use AI models to decide when they want to pay that price—thousands of times per second.

Scope

Next, scope. AI can be advantageous when it does more things than any one person could, even when a human might do better at any one of those tasks. Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT can engage in conversation on any topic, write an essay espousing any position, create poetry in any style and language, write computer code in any programming language, and more. These models may not be superior to skilled humans at any one of these things, but no single human could outperform top-tier generative models across them all.

It’s the combination of these competencies that generates value. Employers often struggle to find people with talents in disciplines such as software development and data science who also have strong prior knowledge of the employer’s domain. Organizations are likely to continue to rely on human specialists to write the best code and the best persuasive text, but they will increasingly be satisfied with AI when they just need a passable version of either.

Sophistication

Finally, sophistication. AIs can consider more factors in their decisions than humans can, and this can endow them with superhuman performance on specialized tasks. Computers have long been used to keep track of a multiplicity of factors that compound and interact in ways more complex than a human could trace. The 1990s chess-playing computer systems such as Deep Blue succeeded by thinking a dozen or more moves ahead.

Modern AI systems use a radically different approach: Deep learning systems built from many-layered neural networks take account of complex interactions—often many billions—among many factors. Neural networks now power the best chess-playing models and most other AI systems.

Chess is not the only domain where eschewing conventional rules and formal logic in favor of highly sophisticated and inscrutable systems has generated progress. The stunning advance of AlphaFold 2, the AI model of structural biology whose creators Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were recognized with the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024, is another example.

This breakthrough replaced traditional physics-based systems for predicting how sequences of amino acids would fold into three-dimensional shapes with a 93 million-parameter model, even though it doesn’t account for physical laws. That lack of real-world grounding is not desirable: No one likes the enigmatic nature of these AI systems, and scientists are eager to understand better how they work.

But the sophistication of AI is providing value to scientists, and its use across scientific fields has grown exponentially in recent years.

Context Matters

Those are the four dimensions where AI can excel over humans. Accuracy still matters. You wouldn’t want to use an AI that makes graphics look glitchy or targets ads randomly—yet accuracy isn’t the differentiator. The AI doesn’t need superhuman accuracy. It’s enough for AI to be merely good and fast, or adequate and scalable. Increasing scope often comes with an accuracy penalty, because AI can generalize poorly to truly novel tasks. The 4 S’s are sometimes at odds. With a given amount of computing power, you generally have to trade off scale for sophistication.

Even more interestingly, when an AI takes over a human task, the task can change. Sometimes the AI is just doing things differently. Other times, AI starts doing different things. These changes bring new opportunities and new risks.

For example, high-frequency trading isn’t just computers trading stocks faster; it’s a fundamentally different kind of trading that enables entirely new strategies, tactics, and associated risks. Likewise, AI has developed more sophisticated strategies for the games of chess and Go. And the scale of AI chatbots has changed the nature of propaganda by allowing artificial voices to overwhelm human speech.

It is this “phase shift,” when changes in degree may transform into changes in kind, where AI’s impacts to society are likely to be most keenly felt. All of this points to the places that AI can have a positive impact. When a system has a bottleneck related to speed, scale, scope, or sophistication, or when one of these factors poses a real barrier to being able to accomplish a goal, it makes sense to think about how AI could help.

Equally, when speed, scale, scope, and sophistication are not primary barriers, it makes less sense to use AI. This is why AI auto-suggest features for short communications such as text messages can feel so annoying. They offer little speed advantage and no benefit from sophistication, while sacrificing the sincerity of human communication.

Many deployments of customer service chatbots also fail this test, which may explain their unpopularity. Companies invest in them because of their scalability, and yet the bots often become a barrier to support rather than a speedy or sophisticated problem solver.

Where the Advantage Lies

Keep this in mind when you encounter a new application for AI or consider AI as a replacement for or an augmentation to a human process. Looking for bottlenecks in speed, scale, scope, and sophistication provides a framework for understanding where AI provides value, and equally where the unique capabilities of the human species give us an enduring advantage.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Will AI Take Your Job? It Depends on These 4 Key Advantages AI Has Over Humans appeared first on SingularityHub.

Kategorie: Transhumanismus

Above the Law: Big Tech’s Bid to Block AI Oversight

Singularity Weblog - 23 Červen, 2025 - 15:36
In recent years, Big Tech leaders — including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Sam Altman — have made public pronouncements calling for the regulation of artificial intelligence. Some did it in glossy op-eds, while others performed moments of “humility” at congressional hearings. They spoke of responsibility. Of safety. Of the need for oversight. […]
Kategorie: Transhumanismus
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