All posts tagged: Labs

Donut Lab’s ‘miracle’ solid-state battery is fraud, says insider, Donut Lab denies

Donut Lab’s ‘miracle’ solid-state battery is fraud, says insider, Donut Lab denies

Published by skeptic

Donut Lab’s miraculous solid state battery, promising energy density, charging and durability numbers unseen by the industry, has been subject to a criminal complaint in Finland from an insider who says it doesn’t live up to the public promises Donut Lab has made. But the company says that the insider didn’t work on the battery project, and denies any fraudulent behavior. Solid state batteries have long been promised as the next evolution of battery technology, using a solid electrolyte for theoretically much higher energy density. Despite these many promises over more than a decade, none have yet turned out to be manufacturable at scale and to offer better overall performance than current liquid/gel electrolyte batteries. But early this year, Finnish company Donut Lab shocked the industry with claims of a 400Wh/kg, 100k cycle life, 5-minute-charging solid state battery that it claimed was ready for production in Q1. Advertisement – scroll for more content Since then, Donut Lab has engaged in independent testing which validates some of its claims, but has left out important details, like …

I did a speedrun through Under Armour’s innovation labs to learn how a marathon supershoe crosses the finish line

I did a speedrun through Under Armour’s innovation labs to learn how a marathon supershoe crosses the finish line

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sign Up For Goods 🛍️ Product news, reviews, and must-have deals. Baltimore speaks before anyone at Under Armour gets to say a word. Driving along the seams of the Baltimore Peninsula, the city does what it does so well, giving off stubborn grit and industrial sprawl. Pulling off I-95, freight trucks, not tour buses, share the road with me. Like much of the city, it’s a waterfront neighborhood (re)shaped by salvage and second acts. Formerly known as Port Covington, it’s not a full-on reinvention, but it’s definitely hard-won reclamation. Warehouse bones, fresh glass. Muscles learning new memories. And appropriately home to the Under Armour campus and its five-story office and performance center, a Lighthouse with glazed-curtain-wall façade shining under the adjacent stadium’s lights. That a former Sam’s Club building now houses parts of R&D, rapid prototyping, materials testing, biomechanics, and quick customization facilities makes a weird kind of sense. It speaks to what the company and its products represent: resilience turned into result. As Kyle Blakely, Senior Vice President, Innovation, Design Studio, Development, & Testing, …

Meet the 5 New AI Tools Hiding Inside Google Labs

Meet the 5 New AI Tools Hiding Inside Google Labs

Published by skeptic

Google has unveiled a range of AI-driven applications through its Google Labs platform, each tailored to specific professional tasks. One standout example is Pomelli, a program designed for social media campaigns that generates branded assets by combining elements like colors, fonts and tone. It also features “Photo Shoot,” a function that creates digital product images, removing the need for traditional photoshoots. These developments, as outlined by Skill Leap AI, highlight practical ways AI is being integrated into creative workflows. Dive into how these applications can support tasks such as app development with Opal or streamline video production using Flow. Discover the capabilities of Jules, a coding and debugging assistant and Notebook LM, which helps organize and manage information. This breakdown provides clear insights into how these technologies can be applied effectively in professional contexts. Google Labs AI Tools TL;DR Key Takeaways : Google has introduced a suite of AI tools via Google Labs, designed to enhance creativity, productivity and automation for professionals across various industries. Key tools include Pomelli for social media campaigns, Opal for …

Goodbye, Llama? Meta launches new proprietary AI model Muse Spark — first since Superintelligence Labs’ formation

Goodbye, Llama? Meta launches new proprietary AI model Muse Spark — first since Superintelligence Labs’ formation

Published by skeptic

Meta has been one of the most interesting companies of the generative AI era — initially gaining a loyal and huge following of users for the release of its mostly open source Llama family of large language models (LLMs) beginning in early 2023 but coming to screeching halt last year after Llama 4 debuted to mixed reviews and ultimately, admissions of gaming benchmarks. That bumpy rollout of Llama 4 apparently spurred Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to totally overhaul Meta’s AI operations in the summer of 2025, forming a new internal division, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) which he recruited 29-year-old former Scale AI co-founder and CEO Alexandr Wang to lead as Chief AI Officer. Now, today, Meta is showing us the fruits of that effort: Muse Spark, a new proprietary model that Wang says (posting on rival social network X, used more often by the machine learning community) is “the most powerful model that meta has released,” and has “support for tool-use, visual chain of thought, & multi-agent orchestration.” He also says it will …

US satellite firm Planet Labs announces blackout on war on Iran images | US-Israel war on Iran News

US satellite firm Planet Labs announces blackout on war on Iran images | US-Israel war on Iran News

Published by Sam Flores

Company says move amid US-Israel war on Iran comes after a request from the US government. Published On 5 Apr 20265 Apr 2026 Satellite imaging company Planet Labs has said it will indefinitely withhold visuals of Iran and the ⁠region of conflict in the Middle East to comply with a request from United States President Donald Trump’s administration. The US company announced the decision in an email to customers on Saturday, with news agencies quoting it as saying the government had asked satellite imagery providers ⁠to impose an “indefinite withhold of imagery”. The restriction expands upon a 14-day delay on imagery of the Middle East that Planet Labs implemented last month, which extended an initial 96-hour delay, a move the firm said was meant to prevent adversaries from using the imagery to attack the US and its allies. Planet Labs said it will withhold imagery dating back to March 9 and ‌that it expects the policy to remain in effect until the end of the war, which began on February 28 when the US and …

Why Chinese AI Labs Are Falling Behind on Nvidia Compute

Why Chinese AI Labs Are Falling Behind on Nvidia Compute

Published by skeptic

Chinese AI development is facing significant hurdles, particularly in comparison to advancements in the United States. According to Caleb Writes Code, one major factor contributing to this disparity is the limited access Chinese labs have to state-of-the-art computing hardware, such as NVIDIA’s Gro 3 LPU and VR Rubin NVL72 modules. These systems are critical for achieving efficiency and scalability, yet their restricted availability has left Chinese labs dependent on older, less capable technology. This technological gap not only hampers innovation but also increases operational costs, further widening the divide between Chinese and U.S. AI research. Gain insight into the economic and technological challenges confronting Chinese AI labs, including the impact of hardware limitations on research progress. Explore the strategic advantages that advanced hardware provides to U.S.-based labs, allowing faster development and cost efficiency. Understand the broader implications of these trends for global AI competition and the potential long-term effects on innovation across the field. U.S. Dominance in AI TL;DR Key Takeaways : U.S. AI labs are dominating the global AI landscape due to superior access …

Y Combinator-backed Random Labs launches Slate V1, claiming the first ‘swarm-native’ coding agent

Y Combinator-backed Random Labs launches Slate V1, claiming the first ‘swarm-native’ coding agent

Published by skeptic

The software engineering world is currently wrestling with a fundamental paradox of the AI era: as models become more capable, the “systems problem” of managing them has become the primary bottleneck to real-world productivity. While a developer might have access to the raw intelligence of a frontier model, that intelligence often degrades the moment a task requires a long horizon or a deep context window. But help appears to be on the way: San Francisco-based, Y Combinator-backed startup Random Labs has officially launched Slate V1, described as the industry’s first “swarm native” autonomous coding agent designed to execute massively parallel, complex engineering tasks. Emerging from an open beta, the tool utilizes a “dynamic pruning algorithm” to maintain context in large codebases while scaling output to enterprise complexity. Co-founded by Kiran and Mihir Chintawar in 2024, the company aims to bridge the global engineering shortage by positioning Slate as a collaborative tool for the “next 20 million engineers” rather than a replacement for human developers. With the release of Slate V1, the team at Random Labs …

The Download: murky AI surveillance laws, and the White House cracks down on defiant labs

The Download: murky AI surveillance laws, and the White House cracks down on defiant labs

Published by skeptic

Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s collection of bulk metadata from the phones of Americans, the US is still navigating a gap between what ordinary people think and what the law allows.  Today, the legal complexity has a new edge: AI is supercharging surveillance—and our laws haven’t caught up. Read the full story. —Michelle Kim The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 The White House has tightened its AI rules amid the Anthropic spatNew guidelines require companies to allow “any lawful” use of their ‌models. (FT $)+ London’s mayor has slammed Trump’s treatment of Anthropic and invited the firm to expand in the city. (BBC) 2 A satellite firm has stopped sharing imagery after exposing Iranian strikesPlanet Lab said it wants to stop “adversarial actors” from using the data. (Ars Technica)+ AI is turbocharging the conflict in Iran. (WSJ $)+ War is adding a brutal new element to the country’s internet issues. (Wired $) 3 The …

Black Forest Labs’ new Self-Flow technique makes training multimodal AI models 2.8x more efficient

Black Forest Labs’ new Self-Flow technique makes training multimodal AI models 2.8x more efficient

Published by skeptic

To create coherent images or videos, generative AI diffusion models like Stable Diffusion or FLUX have typically relied on external “teachers”—frozen encoders like CLIP or DINOv2—to provide the semantic understanding they couldn’t learn on their own. But this reliance has come at a cost: a “bottleneck” where scaling up the model no longer yields better results because the external teacher has hit its limit. Today, German AI startup Black Forest Labs (maker of the FLUX series of AI image models) has announced a potential end to this era of academic borrowing with the release of Self-Flow, a self-supervised flow matching framework that allows models to learn representation and generation simultaneously. By integrating a novel Dual-Timestep Scheduling mechanism, Black Forest Labs has demonstrated that a single model can achieve state-of-the-art results across images, video, and audio without any external supervision. The technology: breaking the “semantic gap” The fundamental problem with traditional generative training is that it’s a “denoising” task. The model is shown noise and asked to find an image; it has very little incentive to …

Endor Labs launches free tool AURI after study finds only 10% of AI-generated code is secure

Endor Labs launches free tool AURI after study finds only 10% of AI-generated code is secure

Published by skeptic

Endor Labs, the application security startup backed by more than $208 million in venture funding, today launched AURI, a platform that embeds real-time security intelligence directly into the AI coding tools that are reshaping how software gets built. The product is available free to individual developers and integrates natively with popular AI coding assistants including Cursor, Claude, and Augment through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The announcement arrives against a sobering backdrop. While 90% of development teams now use AI coding assistants, research published in December by Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins University found that leading models produce functionally correct code only about 61% of the time — and just 10% of that output is both functional and secure. “Even though AI can now produce functionally correct code 61% of the time, only 10% of that output is both functional and secure,” Endor Labs CEO Varun Badhwar told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “These coding agents were trained on open source code from across the internet, so they’ve learned best practices — …