All posts tagged: Layer

Mercury has a 10-mile-thick layer of diamonds under its surface

Mercury has a 10-mile-thick layer of diamonds under its surface

Mercury does not look like a world built for extravagance. It is small, battered, sun-scorched and gray. Yet far below that dark surface, the innermost planet may hold one of the stranger planetary treasures in the solar system: a layer of diamond formed under conditions unlike those on Earth. That possibility emerges from a new analysis of Mercury’s interior, built on data from NASA’s MESSENGER mission and laboratory experiments designed to recreate the planet’s deep past. The work suggests that carbon inside Mercury may not be sitting only in the form of graphite, the soft mineral long tied to the planet’s unusually dark crust. Some of it may have ended up as diamond at the boundary between Mercury’s mantle and core. “We calculate that, given the new estimate of the pressure at the mantle-core boundary, and knowing that Mercury is a carbon-rich planet, the carbon-bearing mineral that would form at the interface between mantle and core is diamond and not graphite,” said Olivier Namur, an associate professor at KU Leuven. The proposed layer is not …

The RAG era is ending for agentic AI — a new compilation-stage knowledge layer is what comes next

The RAG era is ending for agentic AI — a new compilation-stage knowledge layer is what comes next

The vector database category is undergoing a shift in response to the needs of agentic AI.  The retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-to-vector database pipeline doesn’t cut it anymore; agentic AI requires a different approach that incorporates context. VentureBeat’s Q1 2026 Pulse survey underscores this trend: Every standalone vector database is losing adoption share, while hybrid retrieval intent has tripled to 33.3%, the fastest-growing strategic position in the dataset. Vector database pioneer Pinecone recognizes this and is pivoting to meet the specific needs of agentic AI. The company today announced Nexus, which it positions as a knowledge engine rather than an improvement on retrieval. Nexus introduces a context compiler that converts raw enterprise data into persistent, task-specific knowledge artifacts before agents query them, and a composable retriever that serves those artifacts with field-level citations and deterministic conflict resolution. Alongside Nexus, Pinecone is releasing KnowQL, a declarative query language that gives agents a vocabulary to specify output shape, confidence requirements, and latency budgets. In Pinecone’s own internal benchmark, one financial analysis task that previously consumed 2.8 million tokens was …

The AI scaffolding layer is collapsing. LlamaIndex’s CEO explains what survives.

The AI scaffolding layer is collapsing. LlamaIndex’s CEO explains what survives.

The scaffolding layer that developers once needed to ship LLM applications — indexing layers, query engines, retrieval pipelines, carefully orchestrated agent loops — is collapsing. And according to Jerry Liu, co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, that’s not a problem. It’s the point. “As a result, there’s less of a need for frameworks to actually help users compose these deterministic workflows in a light and shallow manner,” Jerry Liu, co-founder and CEO of LlamaIndex, explains in a new VentureBeat Beyond the Pilot podcast.  Context is becoming the moat Liu’s LlamaIndex is one of the foremost retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks connecting private, custom, and domain-specific data to LLMs. But even he acknowledges that these types of frameworks are becoming less relevant.  With every new release, models demonstrate incremental capabilities to reason over “massive amounts” of unstructured data, and they’re getting better at it than humans, he notes. They can be trusted to reason extensively, self-correct, and perform multi-step planning; Modern Context Protocol (MCP) and Claude Agent Skills plug-ins allow models to discover and use tools without requiring …

Treating enterprise AI as an operating layer

Treating enterprise AI as an operating layer

At Ensemble, the strategy for addressing this challenge is knowledge distillation. The systematic conversion of expert judgment and operational decisions into machine-readable training signals. In health-care revenue cycle management, for example, systems can be seeded with explicit domain knowledge and then deepen their coverage through structured daily interaction with operators. In Ensemble’s implementation, the system identifies gaps, formulates targeted questions, and cross-checks answers across multiple experts to capture both consensus and edge-case nuance. It then synthesizes these inputs into a living knowledge base that reflects the situational reasoning behind expert-level performance. Turning decisions into a learning flywheel Once a system is constrained enough to be trusted, the next question is how it gets better without waiting for annual model upgrades. Every time a skilled operator makes a decision, they generate more than a completed task. They generate a potential labeled example—context paired with an expert action (and sometimes an outcome). At scale, across thousands of operators and millions of decisions, that stream can power supervised learning, evaluation, and targeted forms of reinforcement—teaching systems to behave …

Nvidia BlueField-4 STX adds a context memory layer to storage to close the agentic AI throughput gap

Nvidia BlueField-4 STX adds a context memory layer to storage to close the agentic AI throughput gap

When an AI agent loses context mid-task because traditional storage can’t keep pace with inference, it is not a model problem — it is a storage problem. At GTC 2026, Nvidia announced BlueField-4 STX, a modular reference architecture that inserts a dedicated context memory layer between GPUs and traditional storage, claiming 5x the token throughput, 4x the energy efficiency and 2x the data ingestion speed of conventional CPU-based storage. The bottleneck STX targets is key-value cache data. KV cache is the stored record of what a model has already processed — the intermediate calculations an LLM saves so it does not have to recompute attention across the entire context on every inference step. It is what allows an agent to maintain coherent working memory across sessions, tool calls and reasoning steps. As context windows grow and agents take more steps, that cache grows with them. When it has to traverse a traditional storage path to get back to the GPU, inference slows and GPU utilization drops. STX is not a product Nvidia sells directly. It …

Enterprise agentic AI requires a process layer most companies haven’t built

Enterprise agentic AI requires a process layer most companies haven’t built

Presented by Celonis 85% of enterprises want to become agentic within three years — yet 76% admit their operations can’t support it. According to the Celonis 2026 Process Optimization Report, based on a survey of more than 1,600 global business leaders, organizations are aggressively pursuing AI-driven transformation. Yet most acknowledge that the foundational work — modernizing workflows, reducing process friction, and building operational resilience — remains unfinished. The ambition is clear. The infrastructure to execute on it is not. To act autonomously and effectively, AI agents need optimized, AI-ready processes and the process data and operational context that only comes from process intelligence. Without that, they’re guessing. And 82% of decision-makers believe AI will fail to deliver return on investment (ROI) if it doesn’t understand how the business runs. “The scale of the opportunity is truly remarkable: 89% of leaders see AI as their biggest competitive opportunity,” says Patrick Thompson, global SVP of customer transformation. “That’s not a marginal finding. What’s interesting is the shift in the framing. Leaders are confident that AI will transform …

Best Mid Layer for Hiking, Backpacking, and Travel (2026)

Best Mid Layer for Hiking, Backpacking, and Travel (2026)

Arc’teryx’s Delta Jacket is an ultralight fleece made of Octa Fleece, one of the newer, high-tech fleeces to hit the market in the past couple of years. The name comes from the octopus-like weaving which creates air gaps, which help trap warmth while also allowing moisture to escape. It’s very popular with cottage industry ultralight brands, but Arc’teryx adopted it for the 2025 revamp of the company’s popular Delta fleece jacket. I hesitated to put this jacket in this guide because, while I like it as an ultralight mid layer for summer trips, there is an older, heavier version of the Delta jacket. Judging by the angry reviews on Arc’teryx’s website, it was very popular. This jacket is something else entirely, but disgruntled fans of the older version aside, this is a great mid layer for summer trips, especially when paired with a sun shirt hoodie. At 8.5 oz for this, and 6 oz for a sun hoodie like the one from Kuiu below, you have a combo that allows multiple layering options and still …

How to Layer Your Clothes to Stay Warm in Any Season (2026)

How to Layer Your Clothes to Stay Warm in Any Season (2026)

Layering is not complicated. It’s the process of adding and removing layers of clothing to keep your body comfortable in changing weather and temperature conditions. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to optimize this process (and sell you stuff), but it’s really very simple: Put clothing on when you’re cold, take clothing off when you’re hot. Which clothing? That’s the rub, as they say. But don’t worry. We’ll walk you through what each layer is, how to layer, and when you’ll want it. Once you’re done here, check out our guides to the Best Base Layers, Best Puffer Jackets, Best Merino Wool, and Best Rain Jackets for more. Updated February 2026: We’ve updated our advice based on new experiences, and put in a few new picks culled from all the gear we’ve tested in the last year. Layering Basics Photograph: Carol Yepes/Getty Images The key to layering is knowing what the layers are for and when to add and remove them. The high level overview looks like this: Base layer: The layer that touches …

The enterprise AI land grab is on. Glean is building the layer beneath the interface.

The enterprise AI land grab is on. Glean is building the layer beneath the interface.

The battle for enterprise AI is heating up. Microsoft is bundling Copilot into Office. Google is pushing Gemini into Workspace. OpenAI and Anthropic are selling directly to enterprises. Every SaaS vendor now ships an AI assistant.  In the scramble for the interface, Glean is betting on something less visible: becoming the intelligence layer beneath it.  Seven years ago, Glean set out to be the Google for enterprise — an AI-powered search tool designed to index and search across a company’s SaaS tool library, from Slack to Jira, Google Drive to Salesforce. Today, the company’s strategy has shifted from building a better enterprise chatbot to becoming the connective tissue between models and enterprise systems. “The layer we built initially – a good search product – required us to deeply understand people and how they work and what their preferences are,” Jain told TechCrunch on last week’s episode of Equity, which we recorded at Web Summit Qatar. “All of that is now becoming foundational in terms of building high quality agents.” He says that while large language …

The missing layer between agent connectivity and true collaboration

The missing layer between agent connectivity and true collaboration

Today’s AI challenge is about agent coordination, context, and collaboration. How do you enable them to truly think together, with all the contextual understanding, negotiation, and shared purpose that entails? It’s a critical next step toward a new kind of distributed intelligence that keeps humans firmly in the loop. At the latest stop on VentureBeat’s AI Impact Series, Vijoy Pandey, SVP and GM of Outshift by Cisco, and Noah Goodman, Stanford professor and co-founder of Humans&, sat down to talk about how to move beyond agents that just connect to agents that are steeped in collective intelligence. The need for collective intelligence, not coordinated actions The core challenge, Pandey said, is that “agents today can connect together, but they can’t really think together.” While protocols like MCP and A2A have solved basic connectivity, and AGNTCY tackles the problems of discovery, identity management to inter-agent communication and observability, they’ve only addressed the equivalent of making a phone call between two people who don’t speak the same language. But Pandey’s team has identified something deeper than technical …