All posts tagged: Apache

U.S. and Iran exchange strikes after Apache helicopter downed near the Strait of Hormuz : NPR

U.S. and Iran exchange strikes after Apache helicopter downed near the Strait of Hormuz : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

President Donald Trump speaks to the press before boarding Air Force One prior to departure from John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images The U.S. completed strikes on Iran Tuesday night in response to Monday’s downed helicopter, the military said at about 9p.m. The strikes, which began at 5 p.m., were a “proportional response to unjustified Iranian aggression,” U.S. Central Command said on social media. The U.S. struck “Iranian air defense, ground control stations, and surveillance radar sites near the Strait of Hormuz,” CENTCOM said, adding “U.S. forces remain vigilant and postured to defend against unjustified Iranian aggression.” President Trump announced the intent to strike earlier in the day, saying the U.S. “must” respond to Iran’s attack on the US Apache helicopter. “I have just been informed by our Great Military that last night the Iranians shot down one of our highly sophisticated Apache Helicopters while patrolling over the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth …

Cohere cracks lossless quantization and native citations with first full Apache 2.0 licensed open model Command A+

Cohere cracks lossless quantization and native citations with first full Apache 2.0 licensed open model Command A+

Published by skeptic

Canadian AI lab Cohere made waves recently by announcing a merger with German AI startup Aleph Alpha, but now it has even more in store for enterprise builders around the globe: today, the firm co-founded by former Googler and “Attention Is All You Need” co-author Aidan Gomez unveiled Command A+, a highly optimized, 218-billion-parameter language model engineered specifically for complex reasoning, multimodal document processing, and agentic workflows. The most significant aspect of the release is not just the model’s capabilities; it is its accessibility. By releasing the model weights free on the popular AI code sharing repository Hugging Face under a highly permissive Apache 2.0 open-source license — a first for the company, according to a post by Gomez, now Cohere’s CEO, on X — Cohere is making a calculated bet on “sovereign AI”—the thesis that enterprises, governments, and developers should have the ability to run, control, and adapt frontier-grade AI entirely within their own secure environments, without sacrificing performance. Sparse architecture with extreme quantization At the architectural level, Command A+ represents a major evolution …

Google releases Gemma 4 under Apache 2.0 — and that license change may matter more than benchmarks

Google releases Gemma 4 under Apache 2.0 — and that license change may matter more than benchmarks

Published by skeptic

For the past two years, enterprises evaluating open-weight models have faced an awkward trade-off. Google’s Gemma line consistently delivered strong performance, but its custom license — with usage restrictions and terms Google could update at will — pushed many teams toward Mistral or Alibaba’s Qwen instead. Legal review added friction. Compliance teams flagged edge cases. And capable as Gemma 3 was, “open” with asterisks isn’t the same as open. Gemma 4 eliminates that friction entirely. Google DeepMind’s newest open model family ships under a standard Apache 2.0 license — the same permissive terms used by Qwen, Mistral, Arcee, and most of the open-weight ecosystem. No custom clauses, no “Harmful Use” carve-outs that required legal interpretation, no restrictions on redistribution or commercial deployment. For enterprise teams that had been waiting for Google to play on the same licensing terms as the rest of the field, the wait is over. The timing is notable. As some Chinese AI labs (most notably Alibaba’s latest Qwen models, Qwen3.5 Omni and Qwen 3.6 Plus) have begun pulling back from fully …