Following recent tests, Amazon is finally ready to launch its Project Kuiper space internet project in a bid to rival Elon Musk's Starlink, the company announced. The first batch of 27 satellites on the KA-01 (Kuiper Atlas 1) mission are set to launch into low earth orbit (LEO) aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on April 9th next week from Cape Canaveral if conditions allow. Amazon hopes to start offering the high-speed internet service "later this year," it said.Amazon's network will eventually comprise 3,200 satellites launched from partners including ULA, Arianespace, Blue Origin and even SpaceX. Much like that company's Starlink, Project Kuiper's service will cover the entire planet when completed. It will work with a dish as small as seven inches that will deliver speeds up to 100Mbps, smaller than Starlink's Mini, or up to 1Gbps with larger dishes. The company said the cost of terminals will be under $400.The satellites will cruise at 17,000 mph at 392 miles above earth, circling the planet in about 90 minutes. They'll use a dialectic mirror film coating that's supposed to scatter light and make them less visible to ground-based astronomers, Amazon said. SpaceX's constellation currently uses over 7,000 satellites, so the Project Kuiper and Starlink fleet will use over 10,000 LEO satellites once Amazon's network is complete.AmazonAmazon launched two test satellites in October 2023 and proclaimed its early tests a success, with the pair sending and retrieving data at speeds of up to 100 gigabits per second. Later in December, it bolstered the network with a network of high-speed laser cross-links that promise further speed boosts. The company claims its mesh network can move data about 30 percent faster than terrestrial fiber optic cables.Project Kuipers first launch will be the heaviest payload yet for the Atlas V, which will fly in its most powerful configuration. The rocket will include five solid rocket boosters in addition to the main booster, and a payload fairing 77 feet high and 16.4 feet wide.Despite past successful tests, the mission isn't without risk. "Weve done extensive testing on the ground to prepare for this first mission, but there are some things you can only learn in flight, and this will be the first time weve flown our final satellite design and the first time weve deployed so many satellites at once," Project Kuiper vice president Rajeev Badyal wrote. "No matter how the mission unfolds, this is just the start of our journey, and we have all the pieces in place to learn and adapt as we prepare to launch again and again over the coming years."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/amazon-will-start-launching-its-project-kuiper-starlink-rival-next-week-123011012.html?src=rss

Nintendo has released a list of over 120 Switch games that have "start up" and "compatibility issues" on the Switch 2.

Some Google Keep features could soon be getting a modern revamp here's what we know so far.

Get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Marvel Studios Thunderbolts*, hitting theaters on May 2. This special featurette dives into the making of Marvels bold new chapter, blending anti-heroes, high-stakes missions, and explosive action.From stunt choreography to visual effects, the team reveals how they brought together fan-favorite characters in one gritty, high-energy film. With powerful performances, dynamic team-ups, and Marvels signature storytelling, Thunderbolts promises a darker, edgier tone.The post Marvel Studios Thunderbolts Making Of Featurette appeared first on Vfxexpress.

The team meticulously crafted a realistic hurricane, integrating torrential rain, wind-ripped environments, and dynamic debris to enhance immersion. Every raindrop and gust of wind reacted realistically to surfaces and motion, ensuring the world felt alive and weighty.More than just a visual element, the storm became an atmospheric force, heightening tension and urgency. This before-and-after breakdown reveals how FX can seamlessly blend into storytelling, making animation feel cinematic and real.PlatigeThe post Secret Level: Crossfire FX Simulations Breakdown appeared first on Vfxexpress.

TikTok is shutting down TikTok Noteswait, you didnt even know it existed? Well, that explains a lot.TikTok Notes, the platforms short-lived attempt to take on Instagram (just as Instagram Reels was built to mimic TikTok), is officially being retired. Launched in limited markets like Canada, Australia, and Vietnam last year, the photo-sharing app let users post images with captionssimple enough, but apparently not compelling enough.Users are now being notified that TikTok Notes will shut down on May 8, with TikTok instead shifting focus to another ByteDance-owned platform: Lemon8.Were excited to bring the feedback from TikTok Notes to Lemon8 as we continue building a dedicated space for our community to share and experience photo content, designed to complement and enhance the TikTok experience, a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.Lemon8think Instagram meets Pinteresthas quietly been gaining traction, tripling its U.S. user base since last summer and hitting 12 million downloads. It reportedly had around 12.5 million global monthly active users by December 2024. TikTok didnt spell out why Notes is getting the axe, but given how few people knew about it . . . the writing was on the wall.In a notice to users, TikTok is urging anyone who used Notes to download and save their content before the app disappears for good. Theyre also encouraging creators to continue their creative journey on Lemon8 instead.Unlike TikToks vertical video scroll, Lemon8 leans photo-first, allowing users to post curated carousels and slideshows. Still, it borrows TikToks dual-feed format, with both a Following and For You feed for discovery.Dj vu? Thats because TikTok already started plugging Lemon8 as a backup late last year when a potential U.S. ban first loomed. Now, with a fresh April 5 deadline hanging over TikToks head, the strategy looks familiarand unchanged.The short lesson of TikTok Notes: if it aint broke, dont fix it. And if the whole app banned, I guess everyone panic.

On Wednesday, President Trump unveiled a series of sweeping tariffs that not only targeted major U.S. trading partners but also included small, remote islands and territories.Among the most unexpected entries on the list were the Heard and McDonald Islands, isolated sub-Antarctic volcanic islands located in the southern Indian Ocean, roughly halfway between Australia and South Africa. Though these islands are Australian territories, they are virtually uninhabited, with the only significant human presence occurring during Australian Antarctic Science expeditions. These expeditions generally take place every three years, lasting only a couple of months during the summer. For the majority of the time, the islands are left to their resident penguins and seals, with only occasional visits from commercial tourist groups, private expeditions, or fisheries and defense surveillance patrols.Despite their isolation, the islands appeared on a White House list of territories subject to new trade tariffs. According to the list, the Heard and McDonald Islands currently impose a 10 percent Tariff to the U.S.A., with a small note specifying that this includes currency manipulation and trade barriers. In return, the U.S. has announced discounted reciprocal tariffs at the same 10% rate.A White House official explained that the inclusion of the Heard and McDonald Islands is due to their status as Australian territory, as reported by Axios. The islands reportedly had no trade with the U.S. last year, according to the most recent U.S. data.The export figures from the Heard and McDonald Islands are equally perplexing. Despite having no permanent human population and only a fishery, the islands were recorded as having exported $1.4 million worth of goods to the U.S. in 2022, mostly classified as machinery and electrical imports. The exact nature of these goods remains unclear. Over the previous five years, imports from the islands ranged between $15,000 and $325,000 annually, as reported by The Guardian.Another unusual entry on Trumps tariff list is Jan Mayen, a volcanic island in the Arctic Ocean. Like the Heard and McDonald Islands, Jan Mayen has no permanent human inhabitants and is grouped with Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago known for its polar bears and small human population. Trump has set a 10 percent tariff for both Svalbard and Jan Mayen, while Norway itself faces a 15 percent tax on imports from the U.S.

Im not convinced.

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Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced the integration of visual and textual modalities, enabling progress in tasks such as image captioning, visual question answering, and document interpretation. However, the replication and further development of these models are often hindered by a lack of transparency. Many state-of-the-art MLLMs do not release key components, including training code, data curation methodologies, and pretraining datasets. Furthermore, the substantial computational resources required for training these models pose a significant barrier, particularly for academic researchers with limited infrastructure. This lack of accessibility impedes reproducibility and slows the dissemination of new techniques within the research community.Researchers from UC Santa Barbara, Bytedance and NVIDIA introduce Open-Qwen2VL, a 2-billion parameter Multimodal Large Language Model that has been pre-trained on 29 million image-text pairs using approximately 220 A100-40G GPU hours. Developed collaboratively by researchers from UC Santa Barbara, ByteDance, and Nvidia Research, Open-Qwen2VL is designed to address reproducibility and resource constraints in MLLM research. The project provides a complete suite of open-source resources, including the training codebase, data filtering scripts, WebDataset-formatted pretraining data, and both base and instruction-tuned model checkpoints. This comprehensive release aims to support transparent experimentation and method development in the multimodal learning domain.Open-Qwen2VL is based on the Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct LLM backbone, coupled with a SigLIP-SO-400M vision encoder. An Adaptive Average-Pooling Visual Projector reduces the number of visual tokens from 729 to 144 during pretraining, which improves computational efficiency. The token count is increased back to 729 during the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) stage. This low-to-high resolution strategy maintains image understanding capabilities while optimizing for resource usage.To further enhance training efficiency, Open-Qwen2VL implements multimodal sequence packing, allowing the concatenation of multiple image-text pairs into sequences of approximately 4096 tokens, thereby minimizing padding and computational overhead. The vision encoder parameters remain frozen during pretraining to conserve resources and are optionally unfrozen during SFT to improve downstream performance.Open-Qwen2VL is trained on only 0.36% of the token count used in Qwen2-VL, yet demonstrates comparable or superior performance across several benchmarks. The model achieves a score of 80.9 on MMBench, and performs competitively on SEEDBench (72.5), MMStar (49.7), and MathVista (53.1). Ablation studies indicate that integrating a small subset (5M samples) of high-quality image-text pairs filtered using MLM-based techniques can result in measurable performance improvements, highlighting the importance of data quality over volume.In addition, Open-Qwen2VL exhibits robust few-shot multimodal in-context learning capabilities. When evaluated on datasets such as GQA and TextVQA, the model shows 3% to 12% accuracy gains from 0-shot to 8-shot scenarios. Fine-tuning performance scales predictably with the size of the instruction tuning dataset, with performance gains plateauing around 8M examples from the MAmmoTH-VL-10M dataset.Open-Qwen2VL introduces a reproducible and resource-efficient pipeline for training multimodal large language models. By systematically addressing the limitations of prior models in terms of openness and compute requirements, it enables broader participation in MLLM research. The models design choicesincluding efficient visual token handling, multimodal sequence packing, and judicious data selectionillustrate a viable path forward for academic institutions aiming to contribute to the field. Open-Qwen2VL establishes a reproducible baseline and provides a foundation for future work on scalable, high-performance MLLMs within constrained computational environments.Check outthe Paper, Model, Data and Code.All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,feel free to follow us onTwitterand dont forget to join our85k+ ML SubReddit. Asif RazzaqWebsite| + postsBioAsif Razzaq is the CEO of Marktechpost Media Inc.. As a visionary entrepreneur and engineer, Asif is committed to harnessing the potential of Artificial Intelligence for social good. His most recent endeavor is the launch of an Artificial Intelligence Media Platform, Marktechpost, which stands out for its in-depth coverage of machine learning and deep learning news that is both technically sound and easily understandable by a wide audience. The platform boasts of over 2 million monthly views, illustrating its popularity among audiences.Asif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Researchers from Dataocean AI and Tsinghua University Introduces Dolphin: A Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition ASR Model Optimized for Eastern Languages and DialectsAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Introduction to MCP: The Ultimate Guide to Model Context Protocol for AI AssistantsAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Snowflake Proposes ExCoT: A Novel AI Framework that Iteratively Optimizes Open-Source LLMs by Combining CoT Reasoning with off-Policy and on-Policy DPO, Relying Solely on Execution Accuracy as FeedbackAsif Razzaqhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/6flvq/Salesforce AI Introduce BingoGuard: An LLM-based Moderation System Designed to Predict both Binary Safety Labels and Severity Levels