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ZKcandy has closed a $4 million private round of funding to put towards building an ecosystem around its gaming-focused Layer 2 chain.Read More

Sony revealed more details about upcoming adaptations of its PlayStation games, including a Ghost of Tsushima anime and Helldivers film.Read More

Neil Druckmann of Naughty Dog announced that Sony is working on a location-based physical entertainment experience based on The Last of Us.Read More

If you were looking for your own personal AI supercomputer, Nvidia has you covered.The chipmaker announced at CES its launching a personal AI supercomputer called Project Digits in May. The heart of Project Digits is the new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, which packs enough processing power to run sophisticated AI models while being compact enough to fit on a desk and run from a standard power outlet (this kind of processing power used to require much larger, more power-hungry systems). This desktop-sized system can handle AI models with up to 200 billion parameters, and has a starting price of $3,000. The product itself looks a lot like a Mac Mini.AI will be mainstream in every application for every industry. With Project Digits, the Grace Blackwell Superchip comes to millions of developers, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release. Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI.Project Digits looks like a mini PC. Image: NvidiaEach Project Digits system comes equipped with 128GB of unified, coherent memory (by comparison, a good laptop might have 16GB or 32GB of RAM) and up to 4TB of NVMe storage. For even more demanding applications, two Project Digits systems can be linked together to handle models with up to 405 billion parameters (Metas best model, Llama 3.1, has 405 billion parameters).The GB10 chip delivers up to 1 petaflop of AI performance (which means it can perform 1 quadrillion AI calculations per second) at FP4 precision (which helps make the calculations faster by making approximations), and the system features Nvidias latest-generation CUDA cores and fifth-generation Tensor Cores, connected via NVLink-C2C to a Grace CPU containing 20 power-efficient Arm-based cores. MediaTek, known for their Arm-based chip designs, collaborated on the GB10s development to optimize its power efficiency and performance.The Digits supercomputer specs. Image: NvidiaUsers will also get access to Nvidias AI software library, including development kits, orchestration tools, and pre-trained models available through the Nvidia NGC catalog. The system runs on Linux-based Nvidia DGX OS and supports popular frameworks like PyTorch, Python, and Jupyter notebooks. Developers can fine-tune models using the Nvidia NeMo framework and accelerate data science workflows with Nvidia RAPIDS libraries.Users can develop and test their AI models locally on Project Digits, then deploy them to cloud services or data center infrastructure using the same Grace Blackwell architecture and Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform.Nvidia offers a range of similar devices in the same accessibility style in December, it announced a $249 version of its Jetson computer for AI applications, targeting hobbyists and startups, called the Jetson Orin Nano Super (it handles models up to 8 billion parameters).

Alienware is joining Asus, Samsung, and MSI in making a silly worlds first claim all four of them are now set to launch a genuinely exciting new wave of 27-inch 4K QD-OLED gaming monitors with an excellent 240Hz refresh rate. Remember when I called Alienwares 32-inch version the best monitor of CES last year because it finally offered the best of all worlds? Now, youll be able to buy a smaller 27-inch version, without a curved screen, in a far more subtle design that no longer dominates your desk. Like competitors that are using the same Samsung panel, the Alienware AW2725Q has a technically 26-inch screen that offers 166 pixels per inch and 250 nits of typical brightness (1,000 nits of HDR at peak), while displaying 99 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut. Unlike some competitors, though, Alienwares G-Sync and FreeSync Premium Pro screen only offers DisplayPort 1.4 rather than DisplayPort 2.1, which could theoretically mean dealing with the occasional Display Stream Compression (DSC) hiccup to get your 4K at 240Hz. It also features a pair of HDMI 2.1 ports that offer 4K at 240 with HDR, VRR, ALLM, and eARC for Dolby Atmos passthrough. Theres no USB-C video in, but the 15-pound monitor does offer a very basic USB-A hub and a single USB-C port with 15W charging.The ports. Tap here to enhance. Image: DellThe monitor supports Dolby Vision HDR and offers a three-year burn-in warranty with a graphite sheet placed between the panel layers to help fight burn-in and image retention, plus AI-based technology that actively monitors on-screen images and makes adjustments to help prevent burn-in.For now, the best thing it has going for it over the competition is a firm price and release window: March for $900 in the US or $1,230 CAD in Canada. (Alienwares competitors for the 32-inch version took a good bit longer to hit the market, and I wonder if thatll be the same this time.) The monitor will actually hit China this month and arrive in EMEA territories in April.

Alienware has built some of the easiest-to-open toolless gaming PCs around but for years, the Dell-owned brand has stifled their upgrade potential by limiting them to Dells own proprietary power supplies and motherboards.But the 2025 Alienware Area-51, an 80-liter tower just introduced at CES in Las Vegas, finally ditches the proprietary parts in favor of standard ATX components. Even though the tempered glass sided chassis features fancy compartments for liquid cooling and power supplies, its no longer a hexagonal monster or even a proprietary tower: itll come with a standard power supply, standard based motherboard, and even feature standard fan mounting locations. And even though theres a dedicated daughterboard to easily control and cable manage its lighting, fans, I/O, and power switch, Dell will offer a conversion kit to make it work with third-party motherboards.You can see the daughterboard here. Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The VergeWith this edition, we are returning to our roots with a machine that caters to the desires of PC gaming enthusiasts and longtime Alienware fans who have a deep appreciation for technology and a can-do attitude for manually customizing their build to their needs, writes brand manager Matt McGowan, promising the ability to make serious upgrades for years to come.Alienware Area-51 key detailsBeyond the shift in strategy, whats this gaming PC all about? Like the Alienware Aurora, its ditched the spaceship look for that new stadium loop design language with tempered glass sideIntel Z890 motherboard comes with up to 24-core Intel Core Ultra 9 285KFits ATX and mATX motherboardsNvidias next-gen GeForce GPUs; room for 4-slot, 450mm cardUp to 64GB DDR5 RAM and up to 8TB of PCIe SSD storagePCIe x16 Gen 5 GPU slot and PCIe Gen 5 SSD slot (2TB Gen 5 SSD is an option)850W Gold or 1500W Platinum ATX PSUsNo exhaust fans; active intake with at least four fans, passive exhaust, gaskets to prevent leakage240mm or 360mm liquid cooling options for CPU, room for aftermarket 420mm heat exchangerThree SSD slots, two 2.5-inch drive bays, one 3.5-inch drive bayWi-Fi 7 (2x2), 2.5G ethernet standard2x 10Gbps USB-C ports, 2x 5Gbps USB-A ports, and audio jacks up top2x Thunderbolt 4 ports, 2x 10Gbps USB-C ports, and an assortment of six slower USB-A ports around back, plus audio and ethernetSeven lighting zonesWhy now? I asked McGowan, and his primary answer is that hes listening to his customers. Im talking with customers, reading reviews, understanding what the sentiment is in the market and where things are going, he tells The Verge, and what hes hearing is demand for standard mounting locations a demand so loud that Alienware decided to make a wholesale shift toward a fully upgradable computer.Thats not to say there werent reasons to go proprietary, or that Alienware is promising to do this on every PC. In fact, Alienware built its own nonproprietary ATX motherboard for this Alienware Area-51, and the new 2025 version of its smaller Aurora (a spec bump with new Nvidia and Intel chips) will still feature proprietary motherboards and power supplies, at least for now.McGowan says thats because of the leverage Dell gets with proprietary parts. If you go back years and years, there was a decision to take the power supply unit and go and drive commonality between our Dell Precision products and Alienware products, he explains. Dell got better prices that way and, he argues, more efficient, higher-quality power supplies, too, by unifying its supply chain and taking advantage of those economies of scale. And, he says, it allowed Dell to shrink the size of its PC cases at a time its commercial customers, in particular, valued a form factor aggressive chassis. Images: DellSo, does that mean the Alienware Aurora, the smaller and less expensive desktop that Dell is more likely to sell in volume, will get the ATX treatment, too? Were evaluating that for Aurora as well, McGowan tells me, but he isnt promising anything today. We have to hit an inflection point ... where we apply resources to go and redesign the internals of that chassis, he says. But Dell would need to see the numbers add up not just in terms of price, but the ratios of price, performance, size, and quality that would allow a new Aurora to compete. Theres a clear customer advantage around how much power we can put into a compact mini tower. The other [consideration] is cost related; when we get economies of scale across other Dell product and its something we can adopt with little impact on the gaming side, were going to take that and pass that savings on to the user, he says. Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The VergeThis is far from Dells only shift in strategy this year in an attempt to become more consumer-friendly: its also killing off the XPS brand for Apple-like Pro and Pro Max product lines instead, and those Pro laptops will now all feature consumer-replaceable USB-C ports in addition to user-replaceable batteries.Alienware hasnt shared the entry price or configuration of the Area-51 quite yet but says itll ship later in Q1 starting at $4,499 with a high-end, next-gen Nvidia GPU. The company is also announcing a pair of new Area-51 laptops.

In a time when global health faces persistent threats from emerging pandemics, the need for advanced biosurveillance and pathogen detection systems is increasingly evident. Traditional genomic analysis methods, while effective in isolated cases, often struggle to address the complexities of large-scale health monitoring. A significant challenge is identifying and understanding the genomic diversity in environments such as wastewater, which contains a rich mix of microbial and viral DNA and RNA. The rapid advancements in biological research have further emphasized the importance of scalable, accurate, and interpretable models to analyze vast amounts of metagenomic data, aiding in the prediction and mitigation of health crises.Researchers from the University of Southern California, Prime Intellect, and the Nucleic Acid Observatory have introduced METAGENE-1, a metagenomic foundation model. This 7-billion-parameter autoregressive transformer model is specifically designed to analyze metagenomic sequences. METAGENE-1 is trained on a dataset comprising over 1.5 trillion DNA and RNA base pairs derived from human wastewater samples, utilizing next-generation sequencing technologies and a tailored byte-pair encoding (BPE) tokenization strategy to capture the intricate genomic diversity present in these datasets. The model is open-sourced, encouraging collaboration and further advancements in the field.Technical Highlights and BenefitsMETAGENE-1s architecture draws on modern transformer models, including GPT and Llama families. This decoder-only transformer uses a causal language modeling objective to predict the next token in a sequence based on preceding tokens. Its key features include:Dataset Diversity: The training data encompasses sequences from tens of thousands of species, representing the microbial and viral diversity found in human wastewater.Tokenization Strategy: The use of BPE tokenization enables the model to process novel nucleic acid sequences efficiently.Training Infrastructure: Advanced distributed training setups ensured stable training on large datasets despite hardware limitations.Applications: METAGENE-1 supports tasks like pathogen detection, anomaly detection, and species classification, making it valuable for metagenomic studies and public health research.These features enable METAGENE-1 to generate high-quality sequence embeddings and adapt to specific tasks, enhancing its utility in the genomic and public health domains.Results and InsightsThe capabilities of METAGENE-1 were assessed using multiple benchmarks, where it demonstrated notable performance. In a pathogen detection benchmark based on human wastewater samples, the model achieved an average Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 92.96, significantly outperforming other models. Additionally, METAGENE-1 showed strong results in anomaly detection tasks, effectively distinguishing metagenomic sequences from other genomic data sources.In embedding-based genomic analyses, METAGENE-1 excelled on the Gene-MTEB benchmark, achieving a global average score of 0.59. This performance underscores its adaptability in both zero-shot and fine-tuning scenarios, reinforcing its value in handling complex and diverse metagenomic data.ConclusionMETAGENE-1 represents a thoughtful integration of artificial intelligence and metagenomics. By leveraging transformer architectures, the model offers practical solutions for biosurveillance and pandemic preparedness. Its open-source release invites researchers to collaborate and innovate, advancing the field of genomic science. As challenges related to emerging pathogens and global pandemics continue, METAGENE-1 demonstrates how technology can play a crucial role in addressing public health concerns effectively and responsibly.Check out the Paper, Website, GitHub Page, and Model on Hugging Face. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also,dont forget to follow us onTwitter and join ourTelegram Channel andLinkedIn Group. Dont Forget to join our60k+ ML SubReddit. Asif RazzaqAsif 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. [Recommended Read] Nebius AI Studio expands with vision models, new language models, embeddings and LoRA (Promoted)

LatestMachine LearningAI Innovations and Insights 16: ASSISTRAG 0 like January 6, 2025Share this postAuthor(s): Florian June Originally published on Towards AI. The Dual RAG Engine of Thinking and MemoryThis member-only story is on us. Upgrade to access all of Medium.This article is the 16th in this promising series. Today, we will explore the advancement of RAG.The video contains a mind map:Training code and data: https://github.com/smallporridge/AssistRAG.ASSISTRAG works as a helpful assistant that helps organize your work materials and keeps track of whats important. When you have a difficult problem to solve, ASSISTRAG helps by breaking it into smaller, easier parts and finding the information you need.Now, lets dive into the detailed introduction.Early RAG methods like the Retrieve-Read framework were inadequate for complex reasoning tasks. While subsequent prompt-based RAG strategies and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) methods improved performance, they required frequent retraining and risked altering foundational LLM capabilities.Figure 1: Comparisons of Naive, Prompt-based, SFT-based and our Assistant-based RAG frameworks. Source: ASSISTRAG.By introducing an intelligent information assistant that integrates memory and knowledge management, ASSISTRAG compensates for LLMs shortcomings in information accuracy and reasoning depth. As shown in Figure 1, this approach consists of a trainable assistant that manages information and a static main LLM that handles task execution.Figure 2: Overview of ASSISTRAG. ASSISTRAG enhances LLMs by providing an intelligent information assistant. Endowed with the ability of tool usage, action execution, memory building Read the full blog for free on Medium.Join thousands of data leaders on the AI newsletter. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. From research to projects and ideas. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming asponsor. Published via Towards AITowards AI - Medium Share this post