All posts tagged: Scale

Razor wire put up at new Chinese super embassy site after youths scale gate in security incident

Razor wire put up at new Chinese super embassy site after youths scale gate in security incident

Published by Sam Flores

Razor wire has been put up at the site of the planned new Chinese super embassy in London after a security incident. A small group of youths are understood to have clambered over a gate, around ten feet high, to access a slip road to the site of the new diplomatic complex. They are believed to have been confronted by a security guard as objects were hurled over the gate by other youngsters. Around 20 youths in total were involved in the incident. In response razor wire has been put up around the area. Razor wire around the site of the planned new Chinese super embassy in Tower Hamlets (Unknown) But the wire has fuelled concerns of local residents over the scale of security measures that will be built for the new embassy. “That’s an excessive reaction. They have got CCTV and security guards,” said Mark Nygate, treasurer for the Royal Mint Court Residents’ Association. “It adds into our fears about what it will be like once the embassy is alive and active and being …

A Hacker Group Is Poisoning Open Source Code at an Unprecedented Scale

A Hacker Group Is Poisoning Open Source Code at an Unprecedented Scale

Published by skeptic

A so-called software supply chain attack, in which hackers corrupt a legitimate piece of software to hide their own malicious code, was once a relatively rare event but one that haunted the cybersecurity world with its insidious threat of turning any innocent application into a dangerous foothold in a victim’s network. Now one group of cybercriminals has turned that occasional nightmare into a near-weekly episode, corrupting hundreds of open source tools, extorting victims for profit, and sowing a new level of distrust in an entire ecosystem used to create the world’s software. On Tuesday night, open source code platform GitHub announced that it had been breached by hackers in one such software supply chain attack: A GitHub developer had installed a “poisoned” extension for VSCode, a plug-in for a commonly used code editor that, like GitHub itself, is owned by Microsoft. As a result, the hackers behind the breach, an increasingly notorious group called TeamPCP, claim to have accessed around 4,000 of GitHub’s code repositories. GitHub’s statement confirmed that it had found at least 3,800 …

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,” …

Operationalizing AI for Scale and Sovereignty

Operationalizing AI for Scale and Sovereignty

Published by skeptic

About the speakers Chris Davidson, Vice President, HPC & AI Customer Solutions, HPE Chris Davidson is Vice President of HPC & AI Customer Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. He leads HPE’s global strategy for AI Factory solutions and Sovereign AI, working with governments, enterprises, and research institutions to build secure, scalable national- and enterprise-grade AI capabilities. He also directs Product Management and Performance Engineering across HPE’s HPC and AI portfolio, including large-model training platforms and Cray exascale systems. His teams define product strategy, performance architecture, and deployment models that position HPE at the forefront of high-performance and AI computing. During his nine years at HPE, Chris has led key initiatives across Performance Engineering, AI Cloud, and Professional Services, shaping how HPE delivers optimized, cloud-native, and globally deployed high-performance systems. He previously held technical and leadership roles in the biotech and medical diagnostics sectors. Chris holds an M.B.A. in Entrepreneurship and Finance and a B.S. in Biology from Loyola University Chicago. Arjun Shankar, Division Director, National Center for Computational Science, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Mallikarjun (Arjun) …

8 deep-tech firms advance under €146m EIC STEP Scale Up call

8 deep-tech firms advance under €146m EIC STEP Scale Up call

Published by skeptic

The European Commission has identified eight high-growth technology companies for major equity support through the EIC Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP) Scale Up initiative. This flagship funding stream accelerates Europe’s most strategic innovations. The selected firms are now moving toward final investment decisions by the EIC Fund, pending due diligence. The programme targets companies at a critical inflexion point, where scaling operations and securing market position require significant capital. Each company could receive between €10m and €30m, with total potential investment reaching €146.5m if negotiations conclude successfully. Out of 44 applicants, 28 were shortlisted for interviews with independent experts. Only eight met the full set of technical, commercial, and strategic criteria, underscoring the competitive nature of the EIC STEP Scale Up process and its focus on high-impact technologies. Selected companies span Europe’s strategic sectors The eight companies represent a cross-section of deep-tech innovation aligned with Europe’s long-term industrial priorities. Germany’s Aignostics is applying artificial intelligence (AI) to drug development, aiming to improve clinical outcomes and reduce timelines. France-based Alice & Bob is working toward …

The retrieval rebuild: Why hybrid retrieval intent tripled as enterprise RAG programs hit the scale wall

The retrieval rebuild: Why hybrid retrieval intent tripled as enterprise RAG programs hit the scale wall

Published by skeptic

Something shifted in enterprise RAG in Q1 2026. VB Pulse data spanning January through March tells a consistent story: the market stopped adding retrieval layers and started fixing the ones it already has. Call it the retrieval rebuild. The survey covered three consecutive monthly waves from organizations with 100 or more employees, with between 45 and 58 qualified respondents per month across platform adoption, buyer intent, architecture outlook and evaluation criteria. The data should be treated as directional. Enterprise intent to adopt hybrid retrieval tripled from 10.3% to 33.3% in a single quarter — even as 22% of qualified enterprise respondents reported having no production RAG systems at all. For data engineers and enterprise architects building agentic AI infrastructure, the data reveals a market in active transition: the RAG architecture most enterprises built to scale is not the one they expect to run by year-end.  Credit: VentureBeat Pulse survey Hybrid retrieval has become the consensus enterprise strategy. Unlike single-method RAG pipelines that rely on vector similarity alone, hybrid retrieval combines dense embeddings with sparse keyword …

Ian Katz’s Channel 4 Legacy: Cultural Impact vs. Scale

Ian Katz’s Channel 4 Legacy: Cultural Impact vs. Scale

Published by Daniella Wilson

For much of the past eight years, Channel 4, the British free-to-air public broadcaster, has felt louder than ever. More confrontational. More willing to step into contested territory. More determined to provoke a reaction rather than quietly earn one. Behind that noise, a quieter and more complicated conversation has been playing out among the people who actually make its programs. That tension defines Ian Katz’s tenure more than any single commission. When Katz arrived in 2017, he was not the obvious candidate. His background was in journalism, not television production. He had edited Newsnight, not built formats or sustained returning series. He brought a sharp instinct for narrative and public debate. What he did not bring was a track record of delivering repeatable hits at scale. That distinction shaped both his strengths and his limitations. Inside Channel 4, Katz pushed hard on what the broadcaster should say. The slate leaned into difficult subjects, from dramas like It’s a Sin, to fast-moving stories designed to land in the middle of national conversations, including investigations such as …