Knife designer Joe Caswell designed this Provoke First Responder knife, designed for EMTs working in close quarters.Caswell has extended his mastery of mechanisms to a new product in the line, the Provoke X: This is a folding axe, and it works like this:I'd thought it would be aimed at bushcraftershatchets are a cumbersome thing to carry, and this design obviates the need for a blade guard, which can get lostbut I was wrong. Perhaps as a sign of the times, this is being billed as a "tactical axe," a "powerful, portable, self-defense tool."The Provoke X generated strong buzz at last week's annual SHOT Show (Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade Show). Caswell is putting the $350 tool/weapon into production through his company, CRKT, and expects to ship in April.

Samsungs S25 launch event solidified its position as a leader in mobile AI innovation, demonstrating how its strong partnerships with Google and Qualcomm are fostering significant advancements for users. The panel discussion, hosted by Jay Kim, Samsungs Executive Vice President and Head of the Customer Experience Office, featured AI thought leaders who offered an in-depth look at the collaborative effort behind seamlessly integrating AI into everyday experiences.A Unified Vision for AI AccessibilityDr. Chris Brauer, Director of Innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London, shared findings from an ongoing longitudinal study conducted with Symmetry Research. The research, supported by Samsung, highlighted an important shift in user behavior: frequent consumer use of mobile AI globally has nearly doubled in just six months, jumping from 16% in July 2024 to 27% by January 2025.Dr. Chris Brauer, Director of Innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London, presents research on mobile AI adoption and the barriers to widespread use.Frequent consumer use of mobile AI globally has nearly doubled in just six months, jumping from 16% in July to 27% in January, said Dr. Brauer. As we analyzed the motivations and challenges surrounding mobile AI use, we found a really interesting theme among those less willing to adopt the technology: doubt. Doubt in AIs ability to bring meaningful benefits to everyday life (56%), doubt and a lack of high confidence to use AI to its full potential (85%), and doubt around privacy and whether AI can be trusted (90%).However, discoverability and confidence in AIs usefulness remain significant barriers. Many users still struggle to understand how to access and fully utilize these tools. Samsungs approach, as explained by Jay Kim, addresses these challenges by embedding AI capabilities directly into the device interface. Features such as long-press activation for the Gemini Assistant and multi-modal interactions aim to make AI accessible without disrupting user routines.Jay Kim, Executive Vice President and Head of Samsungs Customer Experience Office, discusses how intuitive AI integration enhances user experiences.Even though the benefit value of mobile AI is really high, if you cant access it, its no use, said Kim. On Galaxy S25, accessing Gemini with a simple long-press of the side button is a perfect example. The AI behind that action is complicated, but not for the user. The important thing is to make it easy and intuitive, to encourage repetition so that these capabilities are eventually baked into your life.Building Smarter Experiences Through PartnershipThe collaboration between Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm represents a new level of industry partnership aimed at maximizing AIs potential. Qualcomms Christopher Patrick, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mobile Handset, Voice & Music, and Wearables, emphasized the importance of on-device AI processing in delivering instant results without relying entirely on cloud resources. This approach maintains user privacy while ensuring real-time functionality. Qualcomms Snapdragon platform, co-engineered with Samsung, integrates AI across various components, including display upscaling and advanced voice recognition.Christopher Patrick, Senior Vice President and General Manager at Qualcomm, discusses the importance of on-device AI processing and its integration with the Snapdragon platform.Galaxy S25 marks a big step forward, able to engage with your personalized AI assistant in all new ways. It doesnt just feel like interacting with a real person; it can perceive your environment and interact with content shown on your camera, said Patrick. Our close collaboration with Samsung to customize the processor makes these new capabilities feel seamless, something we are excited to see unfold.Googles Sameer Samat, President of the Android Ecosystem, added perspective on AIs evolving role, comparing it to other transformative technologies.Truly helpful AI must fit naturally into our daily lives, explained Samat. AI is a tool and not an end in itself, and what matters to consumers the most is how helpful AI can be for them. LLMs represent a massive leap in how computers understand human language. Previously, using AI felt a little like being trained by your machine. You had to learn rigid and rehearsed phrases. Now, you can speak in completely natural language, removing any friction from the overall experience.Real-Life Use Cases Driving AdoptionConcrete examples shared during the discussion demonstrated how AI simplifies everyday tasks. Jay Kim described using AI to translate a menu, recommend dishes within a budget, and even place an orderall through a single interaction. Imagine being able to point your phone at a menu in another language, have it translated instantly, and even receive dish recommendations within your budget. Thats the kind of efficiency AI brings, said Kim.Another compelling use case involves using AI to navigate public transportation systems by analyzing schedules, suggesting optimal routes, and even purchasing tickets within seconds. Similarly, AI can assist users in finding relevant sections within dense documents or manuals simply by posing a question, such as Where is the warranty information? These capabilities illustrate how AI can streamline complex tasks into a seamless experience, freeing users to focus on the moment rather than navigating multiple apps or services.Similarly, Sameer Samat shared a personal anecdote about his son using AI to set laundry machine settings by taking a photo of the control panel and asking the AI for the correct settings. These are everyday tasks that become far easier when AI steps in to simplify the process. Its about removing the friction, noted Samat.Christopher Patrick highlighted AIs ability to enhance photo management, saying: Weve all experienced the frustration of scrolling through thousands of photos to find one image. AI eliminates that by making the search as simple as describing the memory. For example, searching for a picture with the dog and the sweater and the cupcake becomes effortless.Privacy and Trust as CornerstonesAs AI becomes more personal, concerns around privacy and trust take center stage. Dr. Brauers research revealed that 90% of consumers still harbor significant doubts about AIs privacy and trustworthiness. These concerns stem from fears about how personal data is collected, stored, and used, particularly as AI applications become more context-aware and intimately integrated into daily life.Samsungs solution lies in its Knox security platform and the use of on-device data processing. Features like Now Brief, which summarizes personalized daily updates using private data stored securely on the device, demonstrate this approach. Samsungs Knox platform ensures that user data remains entirely private and secure, giving users the confidence they need to trust the technology, explained Kim.Sameer Samat, President of Android Ecosystem at Google, highlights how natural language processing is reshaping AI to fit seamlessly into daily life.Googles hybrid AI model, which balances cloud and on-device processing, also addresses privacy concerns. Sameer Samat noted: This model ensures that users can access powerful AI capabilities while maintaining control over their data.A Bold but Responsible FutureThe panelists acknowledged the rapid pace of AI development as both exciting and daunting. Dr. Brauers research framed this moment as a pivotal point, likening it to the early days of the smartphone revolution.The rate of AI innovation is astounding. But what struck me about the research we did with Samsung is that the rate of mobile AI adoption is also rising at a rapid rate, said Dr. Brauer. Were standing at a critical juncture where AI is no longer a niche technology but something that can genuinely enhance lives.Looking ahead, Samsungs integration of AI and XR technologies signals a transformative shift in how users will engage with devices. AI-powered XR glasses, for instance, could enable users to navigate their surroundings with real-time contextual information, further blurring the line between physical and digital worlds.The fusion of AI and XR represents the next frontier in technology, creating entirely new ways to interact with the world around us, explained Patrick.Collaborative Innovation as a Driving ForceThe success of the S25 and its AI capabilities highlights the importance of collaborative innovation. Samsungs philosophy of open collaboration has allowed it to work closely with industry leaders like Google and Qualcomm to develop solutions that benefit users. Jay Kim reflected on the process, saying: The process of getting AI integration right isnt easy. Its about constant collaboration and iteration to create something truly impactful.Googles Sameer Samat added: Trust is the cornerstone of any successful partnership, and its what allowed us to push the boundaries with the S25.The S25 launch shows how AI can naturally fit into daily routines. By making access simple and addressing privacy concerns, Samsung and its partners have ensured users can easily adopt AI tools. These changes make the technology more accessible and relevant to everyday life. Combining on-device and cloud-based AI processing ensures the technology is both effective and secure, tailored to meet a wide range of user needs.The post Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and the Era of Collaborative AI Innovation first appeared on Yanko Design.

Audi has just unveiled an electric off-road vehicle concept powered by a dual motor system poised to take on any rough terrain you throw at it. Based on the Q6 Sportback e-tron SUV, the vehicle is a more feasible design than the AI-Climber concept, and a glimpse into the future of off-roading as perceived by the German automaker. As per Audi CEO Gernot Dllner, this new all-terrain version is a highly emotive reinterpretation of Quattro, that will push the boundaries of on and off-road travel.Dubbed the Q6 e-tron Offroad Concept, the EV tested the capabilities of driving in snow over inhospitable terrain during the Kitzbhel World Cup weekend in Austria. It manages to tackle 45-degree gradients with ease thanks to the ride height and optimized approach and decline angles. This performance car based on the in-house Premium Platform Electric (PPE), delivers a total of 380 kW power to the dual electric motors. The Q6 e-tron lineup has a good driving range, efficiency, and fast charging, so we can expect this graduated EV version to carry the same features or at best even better them.Designer: AudiOne highlight of the concept youll notice instantly is its massive ride height which is 6.3 inches more than the standard model, giving it a dominating domineer. Audi has beefed up the suspension system with four portal axles that are designed from scratch, and integrated into the wheel assembly. This results in an increased torque by almost 50 percent 9,883 pound-feet for 10 seconds, which makes it a capable off-road vehicle ready to take on the likes of Tacoma, Ford 150 Raptor, or Wrangler. The off-roader also gets a 9.8-inch wider track for superior control on uneven terrain while looking absolutely gorgeous crawling over the big rocks and ditches.Coming on to the electric powertrain, the e-tron Offroad is capable of churning out 510 horsepower for more power at lower gears and goes at a top speed of 108 mph when riding normal roads. Last year the camouflaged Q6 e-tron Sportback was spotted riding on big chunky tires, and now the all-terrain SUV is finally official, even though it is just a concept prototype for now. We could see it coming out in a special edition variant in the future to see the response, and then release a widely available production model.The post Audi Q6 e-tron Offroad Concept is a broad-shouldered SUV ready for any terrain first appeared on Yanko Design.

In iOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence is now turned on by default. Heres how to disable it.

MacworldWe now have our best look at what is supposed to be the iPhone SE 4, due for launch this spring. Notable leaker Majin Bu posted a short video on X showing the iPhone SE 4 from all angles, and a series of clear photographs showing the white and black models.MajinBuOfficial/XIf you have been following the rumors and expected the iPhone SE 4 to look like an iPhone 14 with a single rear camera, you wont be surprised by these photos at all. The video doesnt show much new either but appears to offer confirmation that the iPhone SE will have a notch rather than a Dynamic Island. While this is hardly a surprising look, and definitely not innovative, its exactly what we expect from an iPhone SE: modern processors in an older body with reduced camera capabilities.Notably, Apple still sells the iPhone 14 for $599 (U.S.), which makes one wonder what will happen once this launches. Why buy an iPhone 14 for more money when the presumably less-expensive iPhone SE 4 looks and feels the same has a faster processor and presumably costs less? We should know the answer soon enough, as Apple is expected to launch the new phone in March or April.For more, check out our roundup of all the latest iPhone SE 4 rumors and leaks.

MacworldAnytime you can get an iPad for $200 off, its a great deal, especially when it has the largest screen and best chip. Were talking about the 13-inch M4 iPad Pro, of course, the very best tablet Apple makes, which is down to its very best price of $1,099.It probably comes as no surprise that when we reviewed the new iPad Pro, we gave it a super rare five-star rating, appreciating the first-class display, stellar performance, great battery life, and incredibly thin design: The new iPad Pro is the best tablet you can currently get. Its performance and range of functions are first-class, while the new OLED display saves on weight and makes a flatter chassis possible, we wrote.The M4 chip on this tablet really makes it shine, allowing it to deliver a performance thats well above what we saw in previous iPad Pro models. The tablets AI-powered features also make the whole experience better, while the 16-core Neural Engine makes the iPad ready for any other functions Apple may want to bring in the future.If you want some accessories, the tablet works with the Apple Pencil Pro ($14 off) and the Magic Keyboard, which basically turns your tablet into a laptop. The 13-inch display is gorgeous, as well, and perfectly suitable for anything you have to watch and work on.Dont miss out on this $200 off deal for the M4 iPad Pro, and get a gorgeous tablet thats tons of fun for work and play.Buy now at Amazon

As if from nowhere, OpenAI competitorDeepSeek has somersaulted to the top of the iPhone App Store chart, overtaking ChatGPTs OpenAI. Its the latest in a growing line of generative AI (genAI) services and seems to offer some significant advantages, not least its relatively lower development and production costs. You can also ask it how many Rs the word strawberry contains andexpect an accurate response.Now on iPhonesReleased last week, the DeepSeek app raced to the top of Apples App Store charts in multiple countries, including the US. People using the app have noted that the genAI tool can match or beat other similar models in performance.It also does so at afraction of the development and deployment costs. Its also free to use on the web and on the iPhone. In other words, for the price of nothing, you get all the genAI utility you can expect from ChatGPT.What the industry saysNvidias senior research scientist, Jim Fan, calls DeepSeek the biggest dark horse in the open-source LLM field, praising the extent to which the developers have managed to deliver such power with such scant resources.We are living in a timeline where a non-US company is keeping the original mission of OpenAI alive truly open, frontier research that empowers all. It makes no sense. The most entertaining outcome is the most likely, hewrote on social media.Whats the market model?DeepSeek was introduced as open-source models the Chinese developer believes can compete with OpenAIs and Metas best systems. That means the models are available under an MIT license from the popularHugging Face platform, which itself means these models can be used commercially and without restrictions. Theoretically,even Apple could use it and many developers are already trying it on relatively modest hardware.The full package of DeepSeeks R1 models is available and costs almost 95% less than OpenAI wants for its o1 models. Theresmore information available on Github, including an in-depth30-page technical report.How good is it?DeepSeek says its R1 model surpasses OpenAI o1 on the AIME, MATH-500, and SWE-bench Verified benchmarks.It contains 671 billion parameters, a massive number that means the model can perform very well.Of course, most on-device AI cant possibly handle that many parameters, so DeepSeek has made smaller versions of the same model available, the smallest of which should run on an old Mac.DeepSeek R1 is also built as a self-checking reasoning model, which helps it avoid some of the stupid mistakes other models make. While that reasoning means responses can be a little slower to arrive, they tend to be more reliable.Toward an open-source AIIt shows that open-source AI is catching up, and in the future well have a multiplicity of such models, rather than just the big commercial models,The AtlanticCEO Nicholas Thompson points out.One estimate suggests the models might have been trained on a budget as small as $6 million. In comparison, while Metas most recent Lama used an estimated 30.8 million GPU-hours to train, DeepSeek required just 2.8 million GPU-hours, according toAndrej Karpathy at EurekaLabs.In other words, rather than throwing money at a problem, the Chinese researchers are figuring out how to get more from less.It is impressive that DeepSeek seems to have succeeded in matching OpenAI and Metas AI at approximately 10% of the resources, cost, and parameters.DeepSeeks researchers said DeepSeek-V3 used Nvidias H800 chips for training. (Not everyone accepts the explanation. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang expressed doubts about this claim, but still calls the introduction of DeepSeek earth-shattering.)To achieve this, the developers achieved significant technological breakthroughs, such as the capacity to predict consecutive words in a sequence, rather than just the next word. They also figured out to make the system answer questions more efficiently. This is explained well by Thompson.Good for everyone?China has figured out how to deliver powerful AI while using fewer resources and (perhaps most significantly on a planet equipped with finite resources) far less energy.Is this a bad thing for US interests? Almost certainly not. The fact that China achieved this on such limited resources should be a wake-up call to the US government and investor communities that its possible to deliver this technology at much lower costs.If there truly has been a breakthrough in the cost to train models from $ 100 million+ to this alleged $6 million number, this is actually very positive for productivity and AI end users, as cost is obviously much lower meaning lower cost of access, Jon Withaar, a senior portfolio manager at Pictet Asset Management,told Reuters.Thats a good thing, assuming AI is a good thing in the first place. But its a less good option for the big developers in the space. AI stocks are taking a battering today as investors evaluate the achievement. They want value for money, and if DeepSeek can get for $1 what other companies spend a sawbuck on, theyll want to invest in that.Ideological AIIt is worth mentioning one other limitation of the system. As it is a Chinese model, it isbenchmarked by the Chinese Internet regulator who ensures the genAI responses embody core socialist values.Whats interesting about that is the extent to which this shows how AI models from China, or from anywhere else can be built to bake in sets of values that may do more than just reflect their society. No wonder OpenAIwants the US government to invest in US AI.Getting more for lessIf it is indeed correct that DeepSeek has been able to achieve this degree of performance at such low costs using lower-specified tech, it suggests:That while cash is required to enable the tech, the biggest currency is creative innovation, which flourishes most in open environments.That the social and environmental costs in terms of energy, water, and technology we expect AI to require can be dramatically reduced.Its good business to do so.These reduced costs make AI more accessible to a wider number of developers.Some of the implications of this areexplained in more depth here. But if youre searching for an iPhone app that manages to capture the technology story while reflecting the evolving global geo-political tension and conversation around environment and industry, you can download it at the App Store today.You can follow me on social media! Join me onBlueSky, LinkedIn,Mastodon, andMeWe.

The designer of the new title sequence for season two of Apple TV+ hit "Severance," has detailed the many clues and hints in the sequence even though he doesn't know what they mean either.Still from the new "Severance" title sequence image credit: AppleSomewhere around the middle of the 2000s, the television drama title sequence was dead. Just compare Aaron Sorkin's "The West Wing" with its 1999 soaring theme and sequence, to the stark title card of Sorkin's 2006 "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip."The idea was that a sequence lasting up to 60 seconds is a whole minute's advertising lost. Hour-long dramas have already shrunk from around 55 minutes to around 45 over the decades, every second possible taken out for an advert, so title sequences were an obvious target. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple has rolled out tvOS 18.3, and as expected, it's another standard minor update focused on quality-of-life upgrades.Apple TV 4KUnlike Apple's other operating systems, tvOS doesn't tend to get many feature updates between major releases. Most of the updates to tvOS focus on improving stability and addressing any bugs that have popped up.However, tvOS 18.2 did see the introduction of new Snoopy-themed screensavers. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

The Gensler-designed 350-acre New Home Office campus for Walmart has been unveiled in Bentonville, Arkansas, marking the realization of the retail giants transformative "vision" that first began in 2019.One of twelve mass timber office buildings. Image courtesy WalmartIn total, the project includes 12 mass timber office buildings (two of which have now opened) that represent the largest application of the material to date in the United States according to a press release. To these LEED Platinum-certified buildings are added a 360,000-square-foot wellness/fitness center, an on-site childcare facility, an amphitheater, a food hall, a welcome center, and a 200,000-square-foot auditorium and conference space. Multiple street-level retail opportunities are included in the design as well.Walton Family Whole Health and Fitness center. Image courtesy WalmartSam Walton Hall. Image courtesy WalmartSurrounding the built components is a rich "Big Nature" landscaped tapestry of outdoor spac...