‘Broken and shattered’ Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang surrendered during resignation meeting, report claims

Jensen Huang reportedly called himself 'a piece of sh--" after his forced departure, but employees still want him back.

Microsoft's latest email outage turned into a full blown global cloud crisis

Microsoft's day-long outage began with Outlook and Teams, and ended up taking much of the company's cloud services offline. Microsoft says it's gradually restoring service.

Quantum Systems drones back in the air after malware scare

Germany's Bundeswehr lifted precautionary grounding after malicious update reportedly reached military servers

The Download: Silicon Valley’s blind spot and Nvidia’s chip-tracking plan

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. Silicon Valley claims to know the future. So why did it get the midterms so wrong? —Aaron Zamost, a tech communications consultant and a former executive at Square The self-styled visionaries...

How AI Is Helping Care Teams Get Patients the Right Care, Sooner

From pediatric research to smart hospitals, AI is helping care teams spend less time on routine tasks and more time with patients.  Health systems and startups are putting it to work across healthcare, from matching patients to clinical trials to supporting radiologists, hospital teams and patients at home. Clinicians stay at the center, reviewing AI [...]

Apple should have made the MacBook logo RGB

When Apple CEO John Ternus announced the first touchscreen Mac last month, the biggest reaction in the room wasn't for the PROLED MacBook Pro's OLED touchscreen or the thinner and lighter chassis; it was for the illuminated lid logo. It's a throwback to the light-up logos on the old MacBooks, which Apple started phasing out [...]

Surface Laptop Ultra review: The most powerful Surface yet, but it still lags behind Apple

Microsoft's latest Surface is a beautiful flagship device for NVIDIA's RTX Spark.

Ministry of Defence delays decision on £2bn military satellite contest

Ministers weigh between awarding contract to US defence giant Lockheed or sticking with Europe’s Airbus as pressure mounts

ETATrack combines visible light, heat and selected earlier frames to track objects

Researchers from the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed ETATrack, a single-stream network that combines visible-light and thermal-infrared images with selected historical frames. The study is published in the journal Infrared Physics & Technology.

How a sex scandal at Nvidia is putting pressure on the White House

Jensen Huang's personal life may have triggered the crisis, but the questions now reach into the White House itself.

Rocket Report: Starship set for historic test flight; a century of Electron

"You can simplify it as a big tank feeding engines."

Engineer Overhead Lines to Withstand Ice, Wind and FreezingRain

This White Paper explains how ice, wind and vegetation load overhead distribution lines at the same time. It shows engineers how to assess the complete line and compare resilience options.What you will learn about:How freezing rain, rime ice and wet snow add weight to conductors and change their shape in the wind.Why a moderate wind on a heavily iced line can govern design, and how galloping and vegetation contact create outages.How a messenger-supported spacer cable separates the electrical function of covered conductors from the main mechanical load path.How monitored severe-weather test data compares tension changes in bare, covered and spacer cable systems.What utility records from the December 2008 Northeast ice storm show about circuit availability and restoration.How to compare options at corridor level, check the full load path of poles, brackets and foundations, and apply energized-line safety rules.Download this free whitepaper now!

Companies Linked to Alice Huang Invested in DeepSeek

A network of companies tied to Alice Huang, the alleged Chinese spy romantically involved with Nvidia’s former CEO Jensen Huang, recently invested in Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, The Information reported. The companies, Century Litong and its parent, Shanghai-listed Jiangsu Lettall Electronics, ...

Chip Industry Week In Review

Nvidia faces questions about security and oversight; 300mm SiC breakthrough; Siemens buys Lauterbach; chiplet standards; new memory bets; imec interposer process flow; TPUs with CPUs; 2D transistors; anti-smuggling tools for chips. The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

How Amplitude ships product improvements in 1–2 days with OpenAI

Built primarily on OpenAI models, Amplitude’s proactive product agent, Wave, identifies what to build, helps teams ship changes with coding agents, and measures the impact.

AgentSSL: Can MLE Agents Leverage Unlabeled Data?

Applying machine learning systems to new domains introduces bottlenecks in both labeled data acquisition and manual pipeline engineering. While recent MLE agents show promise in automating pipeline design, they have been studied almost exclusively in fully supervised settings, leaving them untested in realistic regimes where labeled data is scarce but unlabeled data is abundant. In this work, we introduce Agentic Semi-Supervised Learning (AgentSSL), framing SSL as a program search problem and studying how agents navigate this space under limited supervision. We find that even under weak feedback and matched compute, agents can synthesize code that combines and adapts established SSL techniques, exceeding the strongest human-engineered baselines in 8 of 12 settings by up to +21.8%. However, our results identify program selection as a critical bottleneck in AgentSSL, where performance drops by as much as 47% when selecting based on the agent's feedback metric. To systematically study this bottleneck, we introduce ProgramSelectBench, a large-scale benchmark with a combined total of 16,977 agent-generated and human-engineered SSL programs, and evaluate both unsupervised and active program selection methods. We further evaluate AgentSSL on real-world ecology detection tasks, highlighting the opportunities and challenges of transferring agent-discovered strategies beyond controlled benchmarks.

Introducing Gemini 4 Hydrogen

Google Search gets a major upgrade with Gemini 4 Hydrogen

We are bringing Gemini 4 Hydrogen to Google Search globally to provide you with more helpful, visual, and intuitive responses.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship: Why the Rocket Is Critical to Its Future

For the full experience visit: SpaceX’s Future Hinges on Starship. Can It Deliver?

Japanese workers return to fax machines during ongoing Microsoft 365 outage

Japanese workers are breaking out fax machines to deal with Microsoft's 365 outage.

Israel's VCs see opportunity for challengers in Nvidia's turmoil

Given Nvidia’s stronghold on AI and its importance in Israel, many in the country's startup ecosystem are worried about the impact of his departure.

Palantir adds three UK police forces to its beat with £10.1M deal

Five-year contract follows London setback as former Met chief Cressida Dick emerges as a paid adviser

More autonomy, fewer NDAs: Volunteers have new requests for brain implant trials

Scientists have been working on ways to decode brain activity for decades. Teams have developed brain implants that can be used to control robotic limbs and computers, and even to “speak.” The people who volunteer for trials of those devices play a vital role in that research, and they ought to be recognized for their...

A New Dawn in the Cloud: ‘Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV’ Is Coming to GeForce NOW

Rally the ranks this GFN Thursday. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV is coming to GeForce NOW, allowing players to experience the battle for Kronus through cloud gaming. There’s more on the horizon, with NVIDIA DLSS 5 technology coming to War Thunder and Where Winds Meet. Meanwhile, Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen brings new tales [...]

Microsoft's massive Outlook outage continues

Service is gradually starting to recover for Microsoft Outlook and 365 after an almost two-day outage impacting millions of users around the world. While some apps and features are still running in a degradated state, some people (including Verge staffers) are reporting that access to their emails has been restored, though the flow of Outlook [...]

Bloomberg details web of Chinese AI companies with smuggled NVIDIA chips linked to Alice Huang

Bloomberg found evidence of a network of Chinese companies smuggling NVIDIA chips with Alice Huang at the center.

Ministry of Defence delays decision on £2bn UK military satellite contest

Ministers weigh between awarding contract to US defence giant Lockheed or sticking with Europe’s Airbus as pressure mounts

Autonomous drones detect cracks in concrete bridges

A research team at Ruhr University Bochum is developing an autonomous flying drone that detects cracks in concrete bridges. The drone is intended to make costly, labor-intensive bridge inspections more efficient, safer and more affordable. It is being developed by David Müller and Dr. Raphael Dyrska from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Theory, alongside Patrick Herbers from the Department of Civil Engineering and Dr. Marcel Neuhausen from the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Formal Methods. Rubin, the science magazine of Ruhr University Bochum, reports on the project.

Courts, spies and MPs: How the Microsoft outage has been felt around the world

From city governments in the US to spy agencies in Australia, the Microsoft outage is being felt around the world.

Specialized’s Tarmac SL9 S-Level is built to wreck your Zone 2 ride

Specialized’s second-fastest bike may be the smart buy.

Speech Processing Pioneer Bishnu Saroop Atal Dies at 93

Bishnu Saroop AtalAcoustics and signal processing pioneerLife Fellow, 93; died 19 AugustAtal was an acoustics and signal processing researcher at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., and later at AT&T’s Shannon Laboratory, in Florham Park, N.J. His pioneering work on voice-coding techniques became the foundation for efficient, high-quality voice transmission over cellular networks. He received the 2013 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal for “fundamental and pioneering contributions to speech coding.”He joined Bell Labs in 1961 as a communications researcher, and his early work there focused on speaker identification technology. During the 1960s he helped develop linear predictive coding, a powerful method for analyzing and compressing speech. LPC is now the most widely used method for encoding speech at a low bit rate.Atal developed increasingly sophisticated low-bit-rate speech-coding techniques. They included multipulse LPC, which improved the quality of compressed speech. Bishnu Saroop AtalNokia Bell LabsHe also worked with his colleague Manfred R. Schroeder to develop code-excited linear prediction, a method for producing high-quality speech at very low bit rates. CELP became a foundational technique in modern speech coding, letting digital communications systems carry voice using less bandwidth. The extra efficiency expanded cellular capacity, allowing wireless networks to handle more simultaneous calls.Later in his career, he led the acoustics and speech research departments at Bell.The company named him a Fellow in 1994. When AT&T Bell Laboratories split into separate research organizations in 1996, Atal continued his career at the AT&T Florham Park headquarters, and he was named a Fellow the following year.He retired in 2002 and became an affiliate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington, in Seattle. There he continued his research in speech processing, speech recognition, and high-dimensional computing.Atal was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1993. He received numerous awards including the 2018 International Speech Communication Association Medal for Scientific Achievement and a 2003 medal from the Franklin Institute.He received a bachelor’s degree in physics in 1952 from the University of Lucknow, in India, and a master’s degree in 1955 in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, in Bengaluru. While working full time at Bell he earned a Ph.D. in EE in 1968 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now New York University’s Tandon engineering school), in New York City.Darryl Palmer Jr.Chair of the IEEE Central Illinois SectionSenior member, 55; died 30 AugustPalmer was a dedicated IEEE volunteer, serving as chair of the Central Illinois Section and as the government relations chair of Region 4. He was a member of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society and its industrial activity committee. He also served as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.In 1986, at age 16, Palmer completed a summer internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, in Cleveland. He helped develop FoilSim, an interactive educational software program that introduces aerodynamic engineering to preuniversity students.While studying computer science at Cleveland State University in 1996, he joined the university’s Allen-Bradley PLC lab as a research assistant. He designed hardware and software systems for the Glenn Research Center to collect and process thermal wave imaging data. He also designed software for General Motors’ North American robotic and welding division.In 1999 he completed a second internship at the research center and helped develop EngineSim, an educational software program that models jet engine design and testing.For his work, NASA recognized him with a Space Act Award.In 2000 he earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and became a software engineer at the Danfoss Drives manufacturing facility in Loves Park, Ill. He worked on embedded control systems for variable-frequency drives and high-power equipment. He also developed sensorless control technology for beam pumps used in the oil and gas industry.In 2014 Palmer and his wife, Alexandra “Sasha” Goodwin, founded Janus Choice, a health technology platform that matches hospital patients with post-acute care facilities. He served as its CEO until the company closed in 2020.From 2018 to 2023, he was a lead software engineer at Adept Coalescence, a startup in Rockford, Ill., focused on developing front-end software for control systems. He then worked in Peoria, Ill., as a control systems team lead at Caterpillar, a manufacturer of construction and mining equipment.Henry Leopold RichterTelecommunications engineerLife senior member, 99; died 12 AugustRichter was a spacecraft engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., before starting his own public safety communications consultancy.He earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. at Caltech in 1952 and 1956, respectively. In 1955 he joined JPL as an engineer and supervisor of its new circuit elements group. Later, he was assigned to NASA’s Explorer program as project manager for satellite design, serving as a liaison between the organization’s satellite instrumentation group and its operations and data groups. Since 1958 the program has launched more than 90 missions for physics, geophysics, and astrophysics research.As NASA prepared to launch Explorer 1 in January 1958, Richter worked with the San Gabriel Valley Radio Club in Los Angeles to set up stations across the United States to track the satellite.He eventually was named JPL section chief and was responsible for scientific instruments on the lunar Ranger, Surveyor, and Mariner programs. He also helped develop NASA’s Deep Space Network, an international tracking and communications system.Richter left NASA to become vice president and technical director of Xerox Electro-Optical Systems, in Pasadena, Calif.In the mid-1970s, he joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department as a communications engineer, overseeing the department’s microwave and mobile radio networks.He later ran a telecommunications consulting practice for more than 20 years. His clients included federal, state, and local government agencies, school districts, universities, and organizations. His work covered strategic technology planning and the design and implementation of public safety radio, microwave, CCTV, and paging systems.He wrote several books including America’s Leap Into Space: My Time at JPL and the First Explorer Satellites (2015), a personal account of his experience working on the Explorer 1 and America’s space program.In 2019 the Radio Club of America presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award for “significant achievements and a major body of work that has advanced the art and science of wireless technology.”Raymond L. GiordanoFormer RCA engineerLife member, 91; died 19 JulyGiordano was an electrical engineer who designed integrated circuits and defense electronics at companies including Harris, Intersil, and RCA.After earning his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1956 from the Newark College of Engineering (now the New Jersey Institute of Technology), Giordano joined RCA in Moorestown, N.J., as an engineer. He helped develop a video formatter for the company’s missile and surface radar division, and he taught in-house engineering courses, eventually attaining the rank of senior technical staff member.Later he developed technologies for General Electric (which acquired RCA in 1986), Intersil, and Harris. He designed the circuitry for Kodak’s Cameo cameras and one of its laser printers.Giordano was awarded several patents for his designs including a smoke detector chip for Siemens, a speed control chip for Ford, an engine control system for Delco Remy, and a control component for Chrysler.He earned a master’s degree in EE in 1964 from the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.Delano D. WilsonPresident of Power TechnologiesLife Fellow, 92; died 26 MayWilson was president and CEO of Power Technologies, a consulting firm in Schenectady, N.Y., that specialized in electric power systems.He was a director of R&D at General Electric in Schenectady until he joined Power Technologies in 1974 as a principal engineer. He developed utility systems and software for the company.Wilson authored six books and 65 technical papers, and he held two patents.Outside of his engineering work, he served on the boards of several hospitals, YMCAs, Rotary clubs, and chambers of commerce.After returning to his hometown of Great Falls, Mont., in 1995, he volunteered as a court-appointed advocate, a trained community volunteer appointed by a judge to represent the interests of children in foster care.Daniel I. Amey Jr.Electronic packaging engineerLife Fellow, 84; died 12 MarchAmey was an electronic packaging engineer, working at several companies including General Dynamics, Sperry Univac, and E.I. du Pont de Nemours (now DuPont). His research interests included connectors, chip packages, and high-frequency materials.He began his career in 1963 as an engineer in the General Dynamics electronics division, where he designed military electronic hardware including analog and digital support equipment for aerospace applications.In 1967 he joined Sperry Univac in Blue Bell, Pa. From 1972 to 1981 he was engineering manager of packaging techniques, responsible for interconnection hardware for small and medium computer systems. His work focused on large-scale integration packages, hybrid circuits, connectors, and printed wiring board processes.He left the company to serve as director of electronics technology at Thomas & Betts of Raritan, N.J. He led research and development of packaging and interconnection products there.In 1986 he became a director of Elco, an electrical component manufacturer in Huntingdon, Pa., where he was responsible for the design and development of connector and packaging hardware.In 1988 he joined E.I. du Pont de Nemours as director of its electronics and communications technology group in Research Triangle Park, N.C. He worked on packaging technology development, high-frequency materials characterization, and applications engineering. He retired from there as a research fellow.Amey wrote or cowrote more than 70 technical papers and held more than 14 patents. He developed courses on electronic packaging and printed wiring technology for education companies McGraw-Hill and Cobblestone (formerly the Center for Professional Advancement).He received the International Microelectronics Assembly and Packaging Society’s 2004 Wagnon Technical Achievement Award and the Electronic Industries Association’s 1984 Distinguished Engineering Contribution Award.After receiving a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in engineering science from Pennsylvania State University, he earned an MBA from Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, Pa.

Microsoft Labors to Fix Long Outage of Office, Outlook, Copilot

Microsoft said it was attempting to restore service to customers of Office, Copilot, and its Outlook email service after an outage took the applications offline for more than six hours for users across the globe on Thursday. The company first said it was investigating the outages shortly before ...

The Semiconductor Singularity

Accelerating IC innovation with AI. The post The Semiconductor Singularity appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Gondola doubles revenue as its team builds more with Codex

Gondola helps creatives get credit and get hired, with Codex raising its lead engineer’s output by 50% and ChatGPT simplifying daily work.

Sketching Language Models for Context Attribution

Context attribution asks how removing parts of a prompt changes a language model's output. We study leave-one-out (LOO) attribution for a prompt of $n$ tokens and a fixed measurement function. Computing all LOO values directly requires $n$ model evaluations. Under a stability assumption, our algorithm estimates all LOO values to error proportional to $\varepsilon$ with constant probability using $O(\sqrt{\log(1/\varepsilon)}/\varepsilon)$ evaluation calls. To complement our upper bound, we prove a matching $Ω(\sqrt{\log(1/\varepsilon)}/\varepsilon)$ lower bound on the number of evaluation calls in an oracle model. Empirically, we verify coefficient decay consistent with stability and evaluate the performance of our sketching algorithm on a small language-model retrieval task. Technically, our result is based on a sketching algorithm for arithmetic circuits whose Taylor coefficients satisfy the stability condition recently introduced by Gunn [Gun26]. A direct adaptation of their forward differentiation sketches would require $\widetilde{O}(\log(n)/\varepsilon^2)$ evaluation calls. Our key observation is that we can apply forward differentiation to the backpropagation circuit, with only constant overhead over a forward sketch of the same Taylor degree. This reduces the variance of the sketches and is key to our improved evaluation bound. Our lower bound builds on the techniques of Amsel, Chen, Duman Keles, Halikias, Musco, and Musco [ACDH+26, SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications] for lower bounding the number of matrix-vector queries to estimate the diagonal elements of random matrices.

AlphaGenome 2: Deciphering how cells read DNA to better understand disease

Predicting how DNA sequences and their variations impact specific human cell types and disease.

Gemini Decisions API: Fast, calibrated multimodal decisions

Meet the Gemini Decisions API, powered by our state-of-the-art model Gemini Decision for fast, calibrated multimodal decisions.

Nvidia’s Biggest Risk Is Product Pace: Windsor

Radio Free Mobile founder Richard Windsor says the immediate damage to Nvidia is reputational, with its products, contracts and financial outlook still intact. He says the critical test for Jensen Huang’s successor will be maintaining the rapid product-development cycle that underpinned Nvidia’s dominance and warns that any slowdown could cost the company market share and margins. Windsor was speaking to Tom Mackenzie on the latest episode of Bloomberg Tech: Europe which explored the risks and rewards for Europe following Jensen Huang's departure as Nvidia CEO. (Source: Bloomberg)

Walmart has slashed $730 off this monster gaming PC with RTX 5070 Ti

Save $730 on this CyberPowerPC with Intel Core Ultra 9 285 and RTX 5070 Ti.