All posts tagged: Frontier

Roundtables: Longevity’s Next Frontier: “Reprogramming” Your Body

Roundtables: Longevity’s Next Frontier: “Reprogramming” Your Body

Published by skeptic

Listen to the session or watch below Billions of dollars are flooding into efforts to reverse aging as scientists explore ways to return cells to a younger state. But how far off are these experimental treatments? Will they really work? Watch a conversation exploring longevity’s new focus. Speakers: Mary Beth Griggs, science editor and Jessica Hamzelou, senior biotechnology reporter Recorded on June 30, 2026 Related Stories: Why “reprogramming” is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now How scientists want to make you young again Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death Source link

Christian missionaries find new frontier in VRChat

Christian missionaries find new frontier in VRChat

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Ten figures stand in a circle inside a Japanese-style penthouse. The lights are low. A white stormtrooper huddles beside a large, orange cat, who bows his head and clears his throat. “Father God, just thank you for this opportunity to go and reach out to people who need you,” said the cat, in the voice of Curt Curtis, a Christian missionary in his 60s from Texas. The room is virtual, but the prayer is not. “Guide us and direct us to people who have a need in their heart,” Curtis continued. For three years, Christian missionaries with the evangelical organization Cru have gathered every Friday in VRChat, a popular social platform where millions of people from around the world interact through avatars resembling anime characters, animals, robots and humans. Users can explore thousands of virtual worlds where they talk, flirt, play games and, in the missionaries’ case, spread the gospel. As more people build friendships and spend significant portions of their lives in virtual spaces, Cru’s missionaries are adapting familiar evangelistic practices to …

Agent confidence on the technical frontier

Agent confidence on the technical frontier

Published by skeptic

The ultimate promise of agents is not only to automate tasks but to manage and coordinate entire workflows, pursuing business goals in a way that allows humans and agents to work together. Given the risks involved in automated decision-making, teams cannot delegate the work that agents do without confidence that they are fully capable of performing the task and that it will do so in a safe, reliable, and secure manner. Among technology experts, our research shows that teams are exceedingly confident about using agentic AI across a significant amount of AI, data, and cloud tasks. Where agent readiness drops is largely due to a lack of business context being supplied to agentic systems. The more complex the task, the more reasoning capability an agent requires and the greater its need for business context. Such context-generation capabilities for agents are still at an early stage of development, especially in situations where enterprise data is difficult to wrangle and connect into the agent lifecycle at the speed and quality in which developers and executives need it. …

No Claude Fable 5? No problem: Sakana achieves frontier performance with new Fugu multi-model, auto synthesis system

No Claude Fable 5? No problem: Sakana achieves frontier performance with new Fugu multi-model, auto synthesis system

Published by skeptic

Last night, the increasingly enterprise-focused AI startup Sakana launched Fugu, a multi-agent orchestration system that delivers frontier-level AI performance through a single, OpenAI-compatible API. Designed for developers, enterprises, and nations seeking resilience against vendor lock-in and geopolitical export controls, Fugu (Japanese for “pufferfish”), bypasses the traditional monolithic model structure by dynamically routing queries to a swappable pool of specialized AI agents. Sakana CEO and co-founder David Ha, formerly of Google Brain, positioned Fugu as a more reliable option for enterprise workflows than any single AI model provider in the wake of Anthropic’s move on June 12 to revoke public access to its most powerful models, Claude Mythos 5 and Claude Fable 5, in the wake of a U.S. government export control order. As Ha wrote in a post today on X: “Fugu dynamically orchestrates the world’s best models to tackle complex tasks. We are proving that a well-orchestrated pool of swappable agents can match restricted frontier models like Fable and Mythos. But Fugu is about more than just performance. I believe that Orchestration Models are …

UK industry giants join forces to develop sovereign frontier AI model

UK industry giants join forces to develop sovereign frontier AI model

Published by skeptic

British artificial intelligence (AI) company Cosine has brought together some of the UK’s largest organisations to help design Lumen Sovereign, a new frontier AI model that will be trained entirely within the UK. The project is being developed under the government’s £500m  Sovereign AI programme and will run exclusively on Isambard-AI, one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputing systems. Among the organisations participating in the design phase are Babcock International Group, BT, Lloyds Banking Group, London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), NatWest Group, PwC, Thales UK, and Telefónica Tech UK&I. The companies have signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) with Cosine and will help shape the model’s technical requirements, governance framework and real-world applications. The initiative aims to provide UK organisations with greater control over how advanced AI systems are trained, deployed and managed. Lumen Sovereign is expected to reach deployment readiness by the end of 2026 and is designed to operate entirely within a customer’s own infrastructure, eliminating the need for external data transfers. Commenting on the landmark frontier AI model, Alistair Pullen, CEO and co-founder, Cosine, …

MMA fighter steps in as passenger ‘tries to open plane door’ on Frontier flight | World | News

MMA fighter steps in as passenger ‘tries to open plane door’ on Frontier flight | World | News

Published by Sam Flores

A Mansfield native was flying to Chicago when he jumped into action to restrain an unruly passenger who attempted to open an emergency exit door.Mansfield native Josh Longood was heading home to Chicago from his brother’s bachelor’s party in Puerto Rico May 31 when another passenger allegedly assaulted a flight attendant and attempted to open an emergency exit door on the Frontier flight.https://www.instagram.com/longood135/ (Image: Instagram) A former MMA fighter has revealed how he stepped in to save the day after a fellow passenger allegedly attempted to open an emergency exit door mid-flight. Josh Longood was travelling home to Chicago following his brother’s bachelor party in Puerto Rico on 31 May when another passenger allegedly assaulted a flight attendant and tried to force open the emergency exit door aboard the Frontier aircraft. The 37 year old Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt swiftly leapt into action, deploying his martial arts expertise to subdue the man for approximately 10 minutes — before being called upon a second time after the passenger broke free from his restraints. Josh kept him …

Pinterest cut AI costs 90% by gutting a frontier model’s vision layer

Pinterest cut AI costs 90% by gutting a frontier model’s vision layer

Published by skeptic

At 620 million monthly users, calling a frontier model for every image recommendation isn’t a strategy — it’s a bill. Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal solved it by gutting Qwen3-VL’s vision layer and rebuilding it with proprietary embeddings, cutting costs 90% and boosting accuracy 30%. Madrigal’s team has been heavily investing in customizing open-source models “foundationally in-house.” “If you’ve got really unique data that you can then fine-tune an open source model with, data quality will, frankly, outweigh or overcome model size,” Madrigal explained in a recent VB Beyond the Pilot podcast.  How Pinterest customized Qwen for visual discovery Pinterest, which has around 620 million monthly active users, has long applied open source models for visual search and discovery, going back to Google’s BERT and OpenAI’s CLIP. The company fine-tuned its own Pin CLIP on the latter, incorporating proprietary visual embeddings and image metadata.  Pinterest’s conversational shopping assistant, Navigator 1, was built on Qwen3-VL and customized in “pretty significant” ways. Madrigal’s team essentially “ripped out” Qwen’s vision encoder layer and fine-tuned the model on proprietary multimodal …

‘We have no time to waste’: Germany launches €125M push to build Europe’s frontier AI

‘We have no time to waste’: Germany launches €125M push to build Europe’s frontier AI

Published by Sam Flores

Germany is launching a €125 million artificial intelligence (AI) competition to help Europe build its own frontier artificial intelligence labs amid a global race. The initiative by Germany’s federal innovation agency SPRIND, called “Next Frontier AI,” aims to fund companies that could eventually become Europe’s own OpenAI or DeepSeek. Next Frontier AI comes as governments across Europe are becoming more concerned about dependence on American and Chinese AI companies. “Germany is leading this because we have no time to waste in waiting for other actors to get in that space. A competition globally is not waiting. So we need to act now. And that’s why we do this in a European manner,” Jano Costard, SPRIND’s head of challenges, told Euronews Next. Most leading AI firms, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are based in the US and have raised billions of dollars in private investment. China is also moving quickly. DeepSeek released its V4 model in April, adding pressure on Europe to build stronger AI companies of its own. SPRIND’s initiative will run in three stages over …

AI IQ is here: a new site scores frontier AI models on the human IQ scale. The results are already dividing tech.

AI IQ is here: a new site scores frontier AI models on the human IQ scale. The results are already dividing tech.

Published by skeptic

For decades, the IQ test has been one of the most familiar — and most contested — yardsticks for human intelligence. Now, a startup project called AI IQ is applying the same metaphor to artificial intelligence, assigning estimated intelligence quotients to more than 50 of the world’s most powerful language models and plotting them on a standard bell curve. The result is a set of interactive visualizations at aiiq.org that have ricocheted across social media in the past week, drawing praise from enterprise technologists who say the charts make an impossibly complex market legible — and sharp criticism from researchers and commentators who warn the entire framework is misleading. “This is super useful,” wrote Thibaut Mélen, a technology commentator, on X. “Much easier to understand model progress when it’s mapped like this instead of another giant leaderboard table.” Brian Vellmure, a business strategist, offered a similar endorsement: “This is helpful. Anecdotally tracks with personal experience.” But the backlash arrived just as quickly. “It’s nonsense. AI is far too jagged. The map is not the territory,” …

Frontier AI models don’t just delete document content — they rewrite it, and the errors are nearly impossible to catch

Frontier AI models don’t just delete document content — they rewrite it, and the errors are nearly impossible to catch

Published by skeptic

As large language models become more capable, users are tempted to delegate knowledge tasks where models process documents on their behalf and provide the finished results. But how far can you trust the model to stay faithful to the content of your documents when it has to iterate over them across multiple rounds? A new study by researchers at Microsoft shows that large language models silently corrupt documents that they work on by introducing errors. The researchers developed a benchmark that simulates multi-step autonomous workflows across 52 professional domains, using a method that automatically measures how much content degrades over time. Their findings show that even top-tier frontier models corrupt an average of 25% of document content by the end of these workflows. And providing models with agentic tools or realistic distractor documents actually worsens their performance. This serves as a warning that while there is increasing pressure to automate knowledge work, current language models are not fully reliable for these tasks. The mechanics of delegated work The Microsoft study focuses on “delegated work,” an …