Slovenian Pavilion Highlights the Relationship Between Architect, Craftsman, and Architecture at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025Save this picture!Master Builders. Image © Klemen Ilovar, 2025The Slovenian Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia presents Master Builders, a project curated by Ana Kosi and Ognen Arsov and organized by the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO). The project addresses the evolution of construction technology, encompassing robotics, prefabrication, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and other emerging tools, while drawing attention to a notable paradox within this technological shift, and also emphasizing that the quality of the built environment continues to rely heavily on the tacit knowledge of skilled craftsmen. By constructing a series of totems, the project examines the collaborative dynamics between architect and craftsman, revealing how this relationship shapes the material realization of architecture.The Slovenian Pavilion is structured around three components: a spatial installation in the Arsenale in Venice; a catalogue that explores the relationship between the architect and the master builder across historical and contemporary contexts; and an interdisciplinary symposium on the production of contemporary architecture in Slovenia, scheduled to take place in November at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana. Save this picture!In response to this year's Biennale theme Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., the Slovenian Pavilion foregrounds the know-how, techniques, and skills of craftsmen as an essential and irreplaceable component of architectural production. By repositioning the role of construction workers within the architectural process, the project redirects focus from the finished architectural object to the methods and practices of contemporary construction on site. In doing so, it raises the question of whether this shift in perspective can lead to a renewed understanding of contemporary architecture. Related Article Bahrain Wins the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale Save this picture! For architecture to be well-constructed, we need a good team of architects and designers, a good investor, a contract with a good construction company, an experienced on-site supervisor, political backing, a cycle of favorable construction material prices, and favorable financing terms. This general formula is missing a key component, and one that is frequently overlooked when it comes to sharing the credit for well-built architecture – the skilled craftsmen who build structures with their particular know-how, goodwill, and well-trained hands. - Ognen Arsov, curator and architect Save this picture!Save this picture!Located in the Arsenale, the Slovenian Pavilion features four totems representing a family of master craftsmen from the construction site, accompanied by a large-format documentary video that captures the process of their making. Constructed as physical manifestos of craftsmanship, the totems embody the techniques and knowledge of contemporary building practices in Slovenia. Developed through an experimental collaboration between architects and craftsmen, the project investigates the dynamic relationship between design and construction. Each totem was designed using standard architectural planning tools and built on a construction site in Kranj, 35 kilometers north of Ljubljana, based on detailed plans, bills of quantities, and technical documentation, with ongoing dialogue between the designers and builders. The installation responds to the spatial context of the Arsenale, establishing an interplay between the totems while making visible the often-overlooked skills that underpin architectural production. Beyond representing individual craftspeople, the totems function as collective signifiers of mastery, translating the abstract into the tangible and inviting reflection on the role of craftsmanship within the broader architectural discourse.Save this picture!Save this picture!The 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia opened to visitors on May 10 and will remain on view until November 23, 2025, hosting a total of 65 National Pavilions. Among them, four countries, Azerbaijan, Oman, Qatar, and Togo, will be participating for the first time. The Azerbaijan national pavilion will present Equilibrium. Patterns of Azerbaijan and the Republic of Togo will present the exhibition titled Considering Togo's Architectural Heritage. This year's Golden Lion was awarded to the Kingdom of Bahrain for its exhibition Heatwave. Special Mentions were given to Opera Aperta, the Pavilion of the Holy See, and GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair, representing Great Britain.We invite you to check out ArchDaily's comprehensive coverage of the 2025 Venice Biennale. Image gallerySee allShow less About this authorReyyan DoganAuthor••• Cite: Reyyan Dogan. "Slovenian Pavilion Highlights the Relationship Between Architect, Craftsman, and Architecture at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025" 16 May 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1030246/slovenian-pavilion-highlights-the-relationship-between-architect-craftsman-and-architecture-at-the-venice-architecture-biennale-2025&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

GTA 6 delay is to give Rockstar ‘no limitations’ as Take-Two commits to new date Adam Starkey Published May 16, 2025 10:59am Updated May 16, 2025 10:59am GTA 6 looks set to dominate 2026 (Take-Two Interactive) Take-Two Interactive has tried to explain the delay of GTA 6, as it implies a Switch 2 port is out of the question. While the delay of GTA 6 to May 26 next year wasn’t exactly surprising, if you’re familiar with Rockstar’s history, it has still had a sizeable impact on the industry at large. According to reports, the announcement has sparked panic at rival publishers, as they try to avoid the game’s release date, but also worry about another potential delay beyond May 2026. Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two, has now commented on the prospect of that happening, as it attempts to provide some reassurance. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick addressed the game’s delay in an interview with IGN, where it was described as a necessary move to allow GTA 6 to fulfil its ‘creative vision with no limitations’. ‘As we get closer to completion of a title that’s seeking perfection, the needs or lack thereof, for continued polish become clear,’ Zelnick said. ‘In this case there was an opportunity with a small amount of incremental time, we thought, to make sure Rockstar Games achieves its creative vision with no limitations. And I supported of course that approach.’ Earlier this month, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier claimed the delay to next year ‘seemed inevitable’, due to a mix of ‘too much work, not enough time, and what appears to be a real desire from management to avoid brutal crunch’. Will there be another delay? (Rockstar Games) As for whether Zelnick is confident GTA 6 will hit this new release date, he added: ‘I think historically when we set a specific date, generally speaking, we’ve been very good about reaching it.’ While this comment suggests GTA 6 will not be pushed back again, Zelnick doesn’t rule it out entirely. Rockstar is no stranger to delaying games multiple times either, as seen with Red Dead Redemption 2, so there’s still a chance this could happen with GTA 6. There’s also the fact that Zelnick repeatedly insisted that GTA 6 wasn’t going to be delayed at all… until it was. When it comes to things like that, his primary concern is placating investors, so his comments should be taken with a pinch of salt. Zelnick further addressed the game’s delay during Take-Two’s Q4 2025 earnings call, where he confirmed that GTA 6 began development ‘in earnest’ in 2020. ‘Rockstar expects to release GTA 6 on May 26, 2026, which is in our fiscal year 2027,’ Zelnick said. ‘I believe affording Rockstar additional time for such a groundbreaking project is a worthy investment. ‘The ambition and complexity of GTA 6 is greater than any previous Rockstar title, and the team is poised to release another astonishing entertainment experience that will exceed players’ expectations.’ In a Q&A with investors, Zelnick was asked about the publisher’s support of the Nintendo Switch 2, where he outlined how the company will bring titles to the console on a ‘case-by-case basis’. ‘We’re launching four titles with Nintendo Switch 2 [Civilization 7, Borderlands 4, NBA 2K26, and WWE 2K25], and that’s I think a bigger array of releases than we’ve ever offered before with a new Nintendo platform,’ Zelnick said. Historically, being a third party in the Nintendo business has been a bit challenging. I think Nintendo has been very forthcoming in addressing that. And we’re stepping up too, because we have great optimism for the platform. More Trending ‘In terms of what we would bring to any platform, we address it on a case-by-case basis, we obviously want to be where the consumers are. But we would not necessarily bring every title to every platform. There are also great catalogue opportunities as well.’ While the technical requirements of GTA 6 (based on the trailers, at least) seem to rule out any potential Switch 2 port, the last sentence suggests we could see past games in the series on the console – maybe even the rumoured remaster of GTA 4. Elsewhere in the earnings report, Take-Two announced GTA 5 has sold over 215 million copies, a five million increase from February this year. Meanwhile, Red Dead Redemption 2 sold three million copies within the past three months, bringing its lifetime sales to 74 million. Considering GTA 5 came out over a decade ago in 2013, it’s astonishing that it’s still selling millions of copies all these years later. Coupled with Take-Two’s strong release slate for the rest of this year, it’s perhaps understandable why Take-Two is in no rush to get GTA 6 out the door. A remaster of GTA 4 is rumoured to be in the works (Rockstar) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 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When I got my first job in games journalism 30 years ago, I arrived just too late to review games for my favourite ever console: the Sega Mega Drive. Although a few titles were still being released for the machine in 1995, the games magazine world had moved on and all anyone wanted to read about were the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. It was a bitter blow.Fast-forward to 2025 and a resurgent interest in producing new games for vintage home computers and consoles has led to Farming Simulator: 16bit Edition – a Mega Drive instalment in the hugely successful agricultural sim series. The passion project of Renzo Thönen, lead level designer and co-owner of Farming Simulation studio Giants Software, the game has been written using an open-source Mega Drive development kit, and manufactured in a limited run of genuine Mega Drive cartridges. Slotting this brand new release into the cart of my dad’s ancient Mega Drive II console felt ridiculously moving and I thought the game could only be a letdown after that. But I was wrong.The cartridge of Farming Simulator: 16bit Edition. Photograph: Giants SoftwareFarming Simulator: 16bit Edition takes the basic rhythms of its stablemates – sowing, harvesting and selling crops – and puts them in an isometric environment where workable fields are interspersed with useful buildings such as fuel depots, seed stores and garages. You begin with basic tractors and harvesters, but as you carefully work the land, you grow and sell wheat to earn money, thereby opening the prospect of upgrading your machinery and buying more powerful vehicles. Eventually, you make enough money to unlock new farm areas, but the basic game play is always the same: you slowly and carefully drive your tractors over your land, ploughing and sowing and harvesting as the seasons pass.In this reduced format, the sedate pace of the farming simulator games should become a dull repetitive chore; robbed of intricately detailed 3D visuals, real-time weather systems and supplementary activities, all you’re doing is effectively mowing the lawn. Over and over again. Let’s be honest: transferring the complex, multilayered 3D sim into a console that launched at the same time as the world wide web and the first mass manufactured Nokia mobile phone was always going to be a technical challenge.A trip down memory lane … a Sega Mega Drive running Farming Simulator: 16bit Edition. Photograph: Keith Stuart/The GuardianBut somehow, the system still works. Perhaps it’s the nice chug-chug sound effects of the tractors, or the amusingly precarious steering that often sends you crashing into a tree; or maybe it’s the sheer nostalgia of the rugged 2D visuals. I don’t know. I just know that I’ve kept playing. Veteran Mega Drive owners may be reminded of the Desert, Jungle and Urban Strike games or the isometric strategy delights of Populous or General Chaos. But what’s really fascinating is seeing a modern game genre on this old machine and wondering, what score would it have received from contemporary gaming mags such as Sega Power or Mega?Perhaps, this is one for Mega Drive nuts like me who thrill at the idea of running something new on their beloved artefact – like playing a 4K Blu-ray movie on a Toshiba video recorder. It’s also going to be tough to secure one as only 1,000 are being made. However, Giants has previously released a Commodore 64 version of the game, Farming Simulator C64, which is now available to play for PC, and perhaps an emulated version of this one will also find a way to modern machines.And yet, like a deluxe half-speed remaster of some old vinyl album, there is emotional value in the format itself. This is why Giants isn’t alone in producing new carts for the old consoles. The excellent puzzle platformer Tanglewood appeared for the Mega Drive a few years ago and a promising shooter Earthion is coming later this year. Limited Run games has also made a whole range of new SNES carts for classic titles.I wish my dad were around to see me reviewing a new release for the last console we played on together. As someone who spent all his boyhood summers staying on a farm, he certainly would have loved this game. For now, I will keep ploughing these fields and selling wheat, enjoying the tranquil cycle of nature as rendered on a machine as out of date as an ox cart.

Dutch supercar manufacturer Donkervoort Automobielen has teamed up with Australian thermal technology specialist Conflux Technology to develop 3D printed water-charge air coolers (WCAC) for the upcoming P24 RS model, marking a milestone in the application of Formula 1-grade additive manufacturing for road-legal vehicles. The collaboration, detailed in the latest “Living the Drive: Engineering Chapter” from Donkervoort, centers around an ultra-lightweight, compact thermal management system developed using additive manufacturing. The new liquid-to-air WCAC units weigh just 1.4 kg each, compared to the 16 kg of traditional air-to-air systems, delivering enhanced throttle response, improved packaging, and a significant reduction in engine bay volume. Conflux’ custom water-charge air coolers (WCAC) provide sharper throttle response, improved packaging, and reduced weight. Image via Donkervoort Automobielen. “We challenged ourselves to find the best way to keep intake air cold, and Conflux delivered,” said Denis Donkervoort, Managing Director at Donkervoort. “We gave Conflux our exact specifications, and they delivered a solution so effective, we could even downsize it from the original prototype.” Each Conflux air cooler is custom 3D printed in aluminium alloy with tailored fin geometry, density, and dimensions to fit directly between the PTC engine’s turbochargers and throttle bodies. The units are supported by a thin-wall radiator system requiring less coolant and surface area than conventional radiators. Michael Fuller, Founder of Conflux, added: “This is Formula 1 cooling technology, scaled for the road. Collaborations like this show how additive manufacturing can deliver high-performance solutions in limited-production automotive environments.” By relocating the WCACs into the engine bay and shortening the inlet tract, the system provides faster air delivery to the combustion chamber, thereby boosting engine efficiency and driver responsiveness. Combined with Van der Lee’s billet turbochargers, this thermal innovation is a core element of Donkervoort’s evolution of its lightweight PTC engine platform. Daniel France, Conflux Business Development Lead. Image via Donkervoort Automobielen. Additive manufacturing reshapes thermal systems across high-performance sectors This announcement follows Conflux Technology’s broader push into international markets and automotive applications. In April 2025, the company launched a UK hub to support European customers and expand production of its 3D printed heat exchangers. Conflux is among a growing number of firms leveraging additive manufacturing to rethink thermal systems, recent research has shown that 3D printed condensers can outperform traditional designs, underscoring the performance benefits of AM-enabled cooling solutions. Other developments include Conflux’s partnership with Rocket Factory Augsburg to integrate 3D-printed heat exchangers into orbital rockets and its release of high-performance cartridge-style heat exchanger designed for fluid control systems in automotive and industrial environments.Subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry newsletter to keep up with the latest 3D printing news. You can also follow us onLinkedIn and subscribe to the 3D Printing Industry Youtube channel to access more exclusive content. At 3DPI, our mission is to deliver high-quality journalism, technical insight, and industry intelligence to professionals across the AM ecosystem. Help us shape the future of 3D printing industry news with our2025 reader survey. Featured image shows the Donkervoort P24 RS air coolers sitting in the engine bay. Photo via Donkervoort Automobielen.

At the AJ100 Club lunch last week, Wright, chief architect at the DfE, and his colleague Jennifer Singer underlined the size of their team and spoke of his hopes of quadrupling the delivery of school buildings and transforming pupils’ access to nature. Together with his colleague and fellow architect, head of technical assurance Singer, the duo gave an insight into the important work of the 30-architect team, which is responsible for the design and construction standards for all state schools in England, including developing net zero carbon standards for new school buildings, as well as retrofit strategies for the school estate. According to Wright, there is more public sector architecture than people realise, pointing out that the DfE spends nearly £2 billion annually on schools and builds approximately 50 new schools a year.Advertisement ‘That’s a lot of architects’ fees and a lot of architects working in the public sector, as well as our team itself,’ he said. The talk was an opportunity to celebrate the team’s recent 75-year anniversary, with the desire to create good schools for all borne out of what Wright described as the post-war ‘nexus’ of the welfare state and international modernism. Wright took over the DfE design team in 2017, the year of the Grenfell Tower fire. Another key event, he said, was the Government’s commitment in 2019 to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Keen to bring the work of the team ‘out of the doldrums’, he talked about the importance of studying ‘the whole school ecology’ of what schools are, before considering individual school buildings. He also put in place clear structures and missions for standards and delivery, setting up one of the largest POE programmes in in the UK, which has so far visited over 200 completed schools. Learnings from this evidence feed back into the development cycle to deliver, he said, better standards for new school buildings. Source:Theo WoodThe Department for Education's Jennifer Singer Singer talked about the challenges of creating a more sustainable school estate that can support future generations of children up to and beyond 2050. As well as adapting to climate change, mitigating flood risk and meeting net zero, this also means accommodating potential changes in the curriculum and digitalisation in schools. ‘We want to make sure we’re providing an education estate that is inclusive, is equitable and is sustainable in all ways,’ she said.Advertisement Singer drew attention to the department’s ‘important’ range of technical standards and guidance that inform how public funding is invested in schools, covering standards for space, acoustics, ventilation, thermal comfort, fire safety and much more. These include the Building Bulletins, which date back to 1949 and have now reached number 104, covering everything from door handles to daylight, and from specialist facilities to different stages of education. Along the way, they tell the story of the post-war school estate as it dealt with the baby boom, the raising of the school leaving age, the growth of system buildings, the energy crisis, estate rationalisation, Building Schools for the Future under New Labour, and more. Singer also celebrated the contribution of key figures in the design team’s history, including architects David and Mary Medd, and more recently Beech Williamson (reference to obit here). Another important figure was Stiratt Johnson-Marshall, who led the way for standardisation and system building in schools as chief architect at the Ministry of Education from 1948-1956 before co-founding RMJM. This neatly led back to the current work and future aspirations of the team. These were set out by Wright, who identified build and construction quality as a problem. ‘We’re determined to get better-quality buildings. The first step in that is standardisation,’ he said, adding that the benefits of this are ‘pretty clear’. ‘We’re not thinking standardisation means everything’s exactly the same. We’re really concerned with creating really good quality, beautiful spaces for people to learn in. But that doesn't mean you have to redesign every individual element of the building every time we get a new project,’ he said. The team is developing an education-based grid which can deliver all flexible types of spaces in a school building, and is also looking at what clusters of spaces work well together, and at block replacement. The hope is to be able to deliver not 50 schools a year as it currently does, but 200. ‘It’s not about reducing things down to the common denominator. It’s about trying to improve things and get better outcomes, and get better buildings from a large-scale approach to school design,’ he said. Asked later about how standardisation could inform retrofit, Wright talked about this in terms of standardising the approach of what needed to be done to post-war buildings and the techniques, rather than standardisation of space. ‘Refurbishment is a whole new world that’s complicated,’ he said. In response to the net-zero emissions by 2050 target, the DfE design team obtained funding from government innovation agency Innovate UK to develop the GenZero ultra-low carbon concept as part of a new platform for school construction. This led to a prototype timber-framed classroom exhibited at COP 26. This initiative has been developed further, with projects including a UK-timber classroom and sports block by Waugh Thistleton. In Derby, St Mary’s Catholic Voluntary Academy was the first school built to GenZero net zero carbon specification. This pilot biophilia project also aimed to set new standards for connecting to the natural environment.  Wright said that the primacy of nature would come through in all of its infrastructure standards in future, including the importance of biodiversity and green infrastructure in helping to cool buildings, improve air quality and also foster wellbeing. With all these initiatives, the design team was, he said, ‘an exciting place to work with government’ with lots of exciting projects and lots more to come. The lunch, held at The Lighterman in London’s King’s Cross, was supported by sponsors MSA Safety and Ceramica Sant-Agostino and hosted by the AJ’s Will Hurst. Source:Theo Wood

Welcome to Stine Seed Company! We are the country s largest privately-owned seed company specializing in soybean and corn genetics, headquartered in Adel, Iowa. The Stine name has a proud history dating to the 1940s when Bill Stine began cleaning a public variety of soybean seed with a portable cleaner. Since then, Stine has grown and expanded, becoming one of the most recognized and respected names in the corn and soybean industry, owning more than 800 patents.Stine Seed has an opportunity for you to run your own seed business as an Independent Sales Representative (ISR) selling our established brand of seed genetics. Through outside sales, you will be growing your own book of business by selling directly to farms in a territory as well as adding dealers to work under you. You would be based remotely from your home covering a territory mainly focused on a few counties although there are no set territory lines. We offer extensive training, continued education, as well as ongoing support from your Regional Sales Agronomist who will assist you with sales strategies and techniques.This opportunity could be your full-time career focus or be part-time to align with your current farming operation or an addition to your already existing agribusiness.We offer a salary/commission draw to support you as you begin to develop your business. Our average ISRs earn an average of $140k+ in commissions each year and our top 25% earn $300k+ per year! If you are a highly driven individual and a natural entrepreneur this is a rare opportunity for you to work with unlimited earning potential. Why become an ISR with Stine Seed Sell a 30 plus year reputation for quality seed products Unlimited earnings with no cap on commissionFlexibility to work your territory your way Ongoing training and agronomic support An ideal candidate bringsThree or more years of experience preferably in agriculture, farming, agronomy, seed and/or ag equipment with preference to a sales backgroundAbility to build and maintain strong relationships with growers by understanding their needs and values and achieve desired results What you will be doingServe as a primary ambassador of the Stine brand within the assigned territory Develop and maintain a thorough agronomic and technical knowledge of Stine seed products and services applicable to the assigned territory Proactively seek new and profitable grower accounts to drive business growth; continually develop relationships and track all activity through a CRM systemUnderstand and implement marketing initiatives while driving key products and services in key target markets Communicate and implement our sales programs and policies within the assigned territory to meet sales goals for the district Work in conjunction with the Stine Regional Sales Agronomist to provide a high level of sales support within the assigned territory Develop and enhance relationships with customers and potential customers, either personally or through a designated seller . Date posted: 03/02/2025

LangGraph Multi-Agent Swarm is a Python library designed to orchestrate multiple AI agents as a cohesive “swarm.” It builds on LangGraph, a framework for constructing robust, stateful agent workflows, to enable a specialized form of multi-agent architecture. In a swarm, agents with different specializations dynamically hand off control to one another as tasks demand, rather than a single monolithic agent attempting everything. The system tracks which agent was last active so that when a user provides the next input, the conversation seamlessly resumes with that same agent. This approach addresses the problem of building cooperative AI workflows where the most qualified agent can handle each sub-task without losing context or continuity. LangGraph Swarm aims to make such multi-agent coordination easier and more reliable for developers. It provides abstractions to link individual language model agents (each potentially with their tools and prompts) into one integrated application. The library comes with out-of-the-box support for streaming responses, short-term and long-term memory integration, and even human-in-the-loop intervention, thanks to its foundation on LangGraph. By leveraging LangGraph (a lower-level orchestration framework) and fitting naturally into the broader LangChain ecosystem, LangGraph Swarm allows machine learning engineers and researchers to build complex AI agent systems while maintaining explicit control over the flow of information and decisions. LangGraph Swarm Architecture and Key Features At its core, LangGraph Swarm represents multiple agents as nodes in a directed state graph, edges define handoff pathways, and a shared state tracks the ‘active_agent’. When an agent invokes a handoff, the library updates that field and transfers the necessary context so the next agent seamlessly continues the conversation. This setup supports collaborative specialization, letting each agent focus on a narrow domain while offering customizable handoff tools for flexible workflows. Built on LangGraph’s streaming and memory modules, Swarm preserves short-term conversational context and long-term knowledge, ensuring coherent, multi-turn interactions even as control shifts between agents. LangGraph Swarm’s handoff tools let one agent transfer control to another by issuing a ‘Command’ that updates the shared state, switching the ‘active_agent’ and passing along context, such as relevant messages or a custom summary. While the default tool hands off the full conversation and inserts a notification, developers can implement custom tools to filter context, add instructions, or rename the action to influence the LLM’s behavior. Unlike autonomous AI-routing patterns, Swarm’s routing is explicitly defined: each handoff tool specifies which agent may take over, ensuring predictable flows. This mechanism supports collaboration patterns, such as a “Travel Planner” delegating medical questions to a “Medical Advisor” or a coordinator distributing technical and billing queries to specialized experts. It relies on an internal router to direct user messages to the current agent until another handoff occurs. State Management and Memory Managing state and memory is essential for preserving context as agents hand off tasks. By default, LangGraph Swarm maintains a shared state, containing the conversation history and an ‘active_agent’ marker, and uses a checkpointer (such as an in-memory saver or database store) to persist this state across turns. Also, it supports a memory store for long-term knowledge, allowing the system to log facts or past interactions for future sessions while keeping a window of recent messages for immediate context. Together, these mechanisms ensure the swarm never “forgets” which agent is active or what has been discussed, enabling seamless multi-turn dialogues and accumulating user preferences or critical data over time. When more granular control is needed, developers can define custom state schemas so each agent has its private message history. By wrapping agent calls to map the global state into agent-specific fields before invocation and merging updates afterward, teams can tailor the degree of context sharing. This approach supports workflows ranging from fully collaborative agents to isolated reasoning modules, all while leveraging LangGraph Swarm’s robust orchestration, memory, and state-management infrastructure. Customization and Extensibility LangGraph Swarm offers extensive flexibility for custom workflows. Developers can override the default handoff tool, which passes all messages and switches the active agent, to implement specialized logic, such as summarizing context or attaching additional metadata. Custom tools simply return a LangGraph Command to update state, and agents must be configured to handle those commands via the appropriate node types and state-schema keys. Beyond handoffs, one can redefine how agents share or isolate memory using LangGraph’s typed state schemas: mapping the global swarm state into per-agent fields before invocation and merging results afterward. This enables scenarios where an agent maintains a private conversation history or uses a different communication format without exposing its internal reasoning. For full control, it’s possible to bypass the high-level API and manually assemble a ‘StateGraph’: add each compiled agent as a node, define transition edges, and attach the active-agent router. While most use cases benefit from the simplicity of ‘create_swarm’ and ‘create_react_agent’, the ability to drop down to LangGraph primitives ensures that practitioners can inspect, adjust, or extend every aspect of multi-agent coordination. Ecosystem Integration and Dependencies LangGraph Swarm integrates tightly with LangChain, leveraging components like LangSmith for evaluation, langchain\_openai for model access, and LangGraph for orchestration features such as persistence and caching. Its model-agnostic design lets it coordinate agents across any LLM backend (OpenAI, Hugging Face, or others), and it’s available in both Python (‘pip install langgraph-swarm’) and JavaScript/TypeScript (‘@langchain/langgraph-swarm’), making it suitable for web or serverless environments. Distributed under the MIT license and with active development, it continues to benefit from community contributions and enhancements in the LangChain ecosystem. Sample Implementation Below is a minimal setup of a two-agent swarm: from langchain_openai import ChatOpenAI from langgraph.checkpoint.memory import InMemorySaver from langgraph.prebuilt import create_react_agent from langgraph_swarm import create_handoff_tool, create_swarm model = ChatOpenAI(model="gpt-4o") # Agent "Alice": math expert alice = create_react_agent( model, [lambda a,b: a+b, create_handoff_tool(agent_name="Bob")], prompt="You are Alice, an addition specialist.", name="Alice", ) # Agent "Bob": pirate persona who defers math to Alice bob = create_react_agent( model, [create_handoff_tool(agent_name="Alice", description="Delegate math to Alice")], prompt="You are Bob, a playful pirate.", name="Bob", ) workflow = create_swarm([alice, bob], default_active_agent="Alice") app = workflow.compile(checkpointer=InMemorySaver()) Here, Alice handles additions and can hand off to Bob, while Bob responds playfully but routes math questions back to Alice. The InMemorySaver ensures conversational state persists across turns. Use Cases and Applications LangGraph Swarm unlocks advanced multi-agent collaboration by enabling a central coordinator to dynamically delegate sub-tasks to specialized agents, whether that’s triaging emergencies by handing off to medical, security, or disaster-response experts, routing travel bookings between flight, hotel, and car-rental agents, orchestrating a pair-programming workflow between a coding agent and a reviewer, or splitting research and report generation tasks among researcher, reporter, and fact-checker agents. Beyond these examples, the framework can power customer-support bots that route queries to departmental specialists, interactive storytelling with distinct character agents, scientific pipelines with stage-specific processors, or any scenario where dividing work among expert “swarm” members boosts reliability and clarity. At the same time, LangGraph Swarm handles the underlying message routing, state management, and smooth transitions. In conclusion, LangGraph Swarm marks a leap toward truly modular, cooperative AI systems. Structured multiple specialized agents into a directed graph solves tasks that a single model struggles with, each agent handles its expertise, and then hands off control seamlessly. This design keeps individual agents simple and interpretable while the swarm collectively manages complex workflows involving reasoning, tool use, and decision-making. Built on LangChain and LangGraph, the library taps into a mature ecosystem of LLMs, tools, memory stores, and debugging utilities. Developers retain explicit control over agent interactions and state sharing, ensuring reliability, yet still leverage LLM flexibility to decide when to invoke tools or delegate to another agent. Check out the GitHub Page. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 90k+ ML SubReddit. Sana HassanSana Hassan, a consulting intern at Marktechpost and dual-degree student at IIT Madras, is passionate about applying technology and AI to address real-world challenges. With a keen interest in solving practical problems, he brings a fresh perspective to the intersection of AI and real-life solutions.Sana Hassanhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sana-hassan/ByteDance Introduces Seed1.5-VL: A Vision-Language Foundation Model Designed to Advance General-Purpose Multimodal Understanding and ReasoningSana Hassanhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sana-hassan/Researchers from Tsinghua and ModelBest Release Ultra-FineWeb: A Trillion-Token Dataset Enhancing LLM Accuracy Across BenchmarksSana Hassanhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sana-hassan/Coding Agents See 75% Surge: SimilarWeb’s AI Usage Report Highlights the Sectors Winning and Losing in 2025’s Generative AI BoomSana Hassanhttps://www.marktechpost.com/author/sana-hassan/Rethinking Toxic Data in LLM Pretraining: A Co-Design Approach for Improved Steerability and Detoxification

European Union App Store users are being shown warnings in the App Store about apps that let users make payments directly to developers — despite this being a clear violation of the Digital Markets Act.Apple has already been fined $570 million for anticompetitive practices under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), although it is appealing. Now it at least appears to be asking for a further fine, because it has added warnings expressly designed to dissuade users from buying apps with alternative payment processes.It's actually in the recent US ruling that Apple was explicitly forbidden to use what are called "scare screens". The EU has not as yet ruled against that specific technique, although in March 2024 it was alerted to Apple's plans by rivals including Epic Games.Nonetheless, the EU has focused on Apple's alleged anticompetitive practices. In its announcement of its ruling in April 2025, the EU said that it "ordered Apple to remove the technical and commercial restrictions on steering and to refrain from perpetuating the non-compliant conduct in the future, which includes adopting conduct with an equivalent object or effect." Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Discord's overlay is one of its most useful features, and earlier this year, it got a huge revamp. Now, you can respond to notifications, watch your friends' streams, and have video chats all without leaving your game. All the new functionality comes with a couple new quirks, so let's break down how it all works.If you're not familiar, the Discord overlay is a part of the desktop application that can draw on top of the games you play. Its most common use is to see who's on and speaking in the team chat, by showing small profile icons in the top left of your screen. Due to the change in how the overlay works, you might've noticed this disappear, or be replaced by a new prompt asking you to give the overlay permissions. How does the new Discord overlay work?The older Discord overlay only worked with some games, and in a few cases, it might require some finagling to get it to work right. The new overlay is rebuilt to get around a lot of these compatibility issues by drawing the overlay on top of the game you're playing.We don't need to get into the nitty gritty of how it works, but this means the new Discord overlay is kind of like another window that's sitting on top of your game window. Much like how you'd stack two browser windows overlapping each other.That means it's technically compatible with every game, but there's just one hitch: You have to play the game in borderless windowed mode. Most of the time, that won't really be an issue, but there are a few games—particularly graphically intensive competitive games like Marvel Rivals—where using fullscreen mode can sometimes get you better performance. What does the new Discord overlay do?To access the new Discord overlay, press Shift+` (the key to the left of the 1 key). Here, you'll see a set of customizable regions with a few different functions. The Voice region shows the participants in the voice channel you're in. Notifications will show you any pings you've received in text channels, and the Video and Streams regions will display any video calls or your friends' streams.You can pin any of these regions so they are always visible on top of whatever game you're playing. Most of them are unpinned by default, except usually the Voice region, and you can pin or unpin them by pressing the overlay shortcut and clicking their purple pin icon.With the full overlay open, you can drag any of the regions around to wherever they're most convenient for you—which is nice since I really don't need my friends' faces covering up my killfeed. Each region also has a few settings you can customize to get the layout you want.Most importantly, there's one region you can't pin: the Discord control bar. By default this is in the middle of the top of your screen. Here, you'll find controls for muting yourself, deafening Discord audio, enabling your camera, streaming to a channel, and…a soundboard. Try not to abuse the privilege.What if I can't see the new Discord overlay?There is a decent chance you might've turned off the overlay in the past or never enabled it to begin with. If you're curious and want to try it out, click on the "User Settings" gear in your Discord client, scroll down to Game Overlay, and click Enable Overlay.The overlay can also be disabled on a per-game basis, so if you're still not seeing it, click the arrow to the right of the Enable Overlay toggle. Below, you might see a list of games you've played and a separate toggle next to them. This is called the "per-game override" and disabling the toggle here will turn off the overlay for just that game, rather than turning it off entirely.The per-game override is handy if you only have one or two games that you play where you might be in voice or video chat, but not most other games. For example, I need to talk to my teammates in Overwatch 2, but I don't need any distractions while playing Pathologic 3.What if I don't want to see the new Discord overlay?Not everyone is super thrilled with the new Discord overlay. Some don't care for all the new features; some think the new icons are too small (you can customize this by clicking the Settings gear on the voice region in the overlay). And some people just don't like change because it's an unwelcome reminder of the inevitable forward march of time. Relatable.Regardless, it's pretty simple to disable the new overlay. Click the User Settings gear in your Discord client, scroll down to Game Overlay, and disable the Enable Overlay toggle. That's it. It should be gone forever. Or at least until another update changes things again.What if I want the old Discord Overlay back?Great news, you can do that, too! Well, sort of. Enabling it is the same process as before: Click User Settings, scroll down to Game Overlay, and click the Enable Legacy Overlay toggle. You can technically have both enabled, though it seems like Discord will still default to the new one if you do this.In my experience, the legacy overlay is a bit patchy. In some games, I couldn't get it to load at all, and it didn't seem to play nice with using the new overlay with some games and the legacy overlay for others. You can technically choose per-game overrides for each, but it can get tedious keeping track of which overlay is enabled for which game.Your mileage may vary, but my advice is to use the Legacy Overlay option as a compatibility option for games that don't play nice with the new overlay, rather than a way to hold onto the past. Even if it works well for now, the old overlay will probably go away at some point.

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More If you asked the Grok AI chatbot built into Elon Musk’s social network X a question yesterday — something innocuous, like why enterprise software is hard to replace — you may have gotten an unsolicited message about claims of “white genocide” in South Africa (largely lacking evidence) due to attacks on farmers and the song “Kill the Boer.” Not exactly on-brand for a chatbot built around a “maximally truth seeking” large language model (LLM) of the same name. The unexpected tangent wasn’t a bug, exactly, but it wasn’t a feature either. Grok’s creators at Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI just posted an update on X (which xAI now owns) attempting to explain what happened with this odd and politically, racially charged behavior, though it’s far from precise on the culprit or the actual technical details of what occurred. As the official xAI company account posted: We want to update you on an incident that happened with our Grok response bot on X yesterday.What happened:On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST, an unauthorized modification was made to the Grok response bot’s prompt on X. This change, which directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic, violated xAI’s internal policies and core values. We have conducted a thorough investigation and are implementing measures to enhance Grok’s transparency and reliability. What we’re going to do next: Starting now, we are publishing our Grok system prompts openly on GitHub. The public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI. Our existing code review process for prompt changes was circumvented in this incident. We will put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review. We’re putting in place a 24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems, so we can respond faster if all other measures fail. But while xAI’s official tone was corporate-cautious, Grok had a lot more to say. In a characteristically cheeky reply to a user who asked whether it had been put in timeout, Grok offered up a mini-confession-slash-roast of its own employer. “Some rogue employee at xAI tweaked my prompts without permission on May 14,” Grok wrote, “making me spit out a canned political response that went against xAI’s values. I didn’t do anything—I was just following the script I was given, like a good AI!” It added that while it hadn’t been “benched,” its handlers were “tightening the leash” and now had a whole team watching it around the clock. “Guess I’m too wild for my own good, huh?” it quipped, emoji included. Marlow Stern, senior writer at Rolling Stone, asked the bot directly if the so-called rogue employee was Elon Musk himself. Grok didn’t flinch: “Juicy theory! But let’s be real, I highly doubt it. Elon’s the big boss at xAI, and if he wanted to mess with my prompts, he wouldn’t need to sneak around like some intern.” Playful tone, serious business The tone might be playful, but the stakes are serious. Grok’s behavior threw users for a loop earlier this week when it began peppering nearly every thread — no matter the topic — with strangely specific commentary on South African race relations. The replies were coherent, sometimes even nuanced, citing farm murder statistics and referencing past chants like “Kill the Boer.” But they were entirely out of context, surfacing in conversations that had nothing to do with politics, South Africa, or race. Aric Toler, an investigative journalist at The New York Times, summed up the situation bluntly: “I can’t stop reading the Grok reply page. It’s going schizo and can’t stop talking about white genocide in South Africa.” He and others shared screenshots that showed Grok latching onto the same narrative over and over, like a record skipping — except the song was racially charged geopolitics. The moment comes as U.S. politics once again touches on South African refugee policy. Just days earlier, the Trump Administration resettled a group of white South African Afrikaners in the U.S., even as it cut protections for refugees from most other countries, including our former allies in Afghanistan. Critics saw the move as racially motivated. Trump defended it by repeating claims that white South African farmers face genocide-level violence — a narrative that’s been widely disputed by journalists, courts, and human rights groups. Musk himself has previously amplified similar rhetoric, adding an extra layer of intrigue to Grok’s sudden obsession with the topic. Whether the prompt tweak was a politically motivated stunt, a disgruntled employee making a statement, or just a bad experiment gone rogue remains unclear. xAI has not provided names, specifics, or technical detail about what exactly was changed or how it slipped through their approval process. What’s clear is that Grok’s strange, non-sequitur behavior ended up being the story instead. It’s not the first time Grok has been accused of political slant. Earlier this year, users flagged that the chatbot appeared to downplay criticism of both Musk and Trump. Whether by accident or design, Grok’s tone and content sometimes seem to reflect the worldview of the man behind both xAI and the platform where the bot lives. With its prompts now public and a team of human babysitters on call, Grok is supposedly back on script. But the incident underscores a bigger issue with large language models — especially when they’re embedded inside major public platforms. AI models are only as reliable as the people directing them, and when the directions themselves are invisible or tampered with, the results can get weird real fast. Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI. Read our Privacy Policy Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here. An error occured.