ASUS has opened a dedicated Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the Directorate-General of Education in the Al Dhahirah Governorate in Ibri, Oman. Developed in collaboration with Intel and Bahwan Projects and Telecoms, the facility provides students and educators with AI-ready hardware, including high-performance PCs and Chromebooks, to support Oman Vision 2040’s goal of building a … Read more
MacAgentBench is a new evaluation framework designed to measure how AI agents perform autonomous tasks on macOS, revealing that high success rates often depend on pre-written “skill libraries” rather than general reasoning. According to the benchmark data, agents using the OpenClaw harness with Claude Opus achieved a 73.7% success rate, but this dropped significantly when … Read more
By integrating AI into existing electricity infrastructure, utilities can optimize grid stability, manage two-way power flows, and accelerate the transition toward renewable energy sources. How AI Transforms Australia’s Electricity Grid Australia’s energy transition is currently among the fastest globally, with renewables providing nearly half of electricity, according to the federal government. This rapid shift, combined … Read more
Perplexity is developing an internal AI-powered coding tool, codenamed “Teammate,” which could signal the company’s entry into the competitive software development market. According to a person familiar with the matter, the tool has been used by Perplexity engineers since May to manage projects and debug systems, though the company has not confirmed a public release … Read more
The Feminization of AI: How Tech Companies Use Influencers to Normalize Surveillance Tech companies are increasingly utilizing high-profile female influencers and beauty culture to market AI-integrated wearables, a strategy sociologists describe as the “feminization of AI” to mitigate public concern over privacy and surveillance. According to sociologist Saska, companies like Meta and Snap are pivoting … Read more
Actor Sandy Tumiwa has apologized following a legal warning (somasi) from his ex-wife, Tessa Kaunang, after he posted an AI-generated image of her wearing a hijab. According to Tumiwa in an interview with detikcom on July 6, 2026, the image was intended as a compliment and not to mislead the public regarding Kaunang’s religious beliefs. … Read more
Tidal has announced a new policy to tag 100% AI-generated music with a specific interface icon and eliminate royalty payments for such tracks, starting in mid-July. This move, reported by industry analyst Bill Rosenblatt, positions Tidal as having one of the most stringent AI policies among music streaming services, joining platforms like Qobuz, Deezer, and … Read more
Anthropic’s Claude models are now generally available via Microsoft Azure Foundry, allowing customers to access Claude 3.5 Sonnet, 3.5 Haiku, and 3.0 Opus using existing Azure billing and governance. While this integration streamlines procurement for US-based enterprises, it does not currently provide guaranteed data residency in Europe, according to Microsoft and Anthropic documentation. Why does … Read more
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced on Friday that the Philippines is ready to advance the digital economy through partnership with Canada. During a roundtable in Vancouver with executives from the information technology-business process management (IT-BPM) sector, the President emphasized that the upcoming Philippine-Canada Free Trade Agreement aims to usher in more bilateral trade, strategic investments, … Read more
Hardwood, an open-source library for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), has reached version 1.0, offering a high-performance, near zero-dependency alternative for reading Apache Parquet files. Initiated by Gunnar Morling, the project utilizes multi-threaded page decoding to maximize CPU utilization, achieving throughputs of 16.5 million rows per second on 8 vCPUs. How Hardwood Improves Parquet Performance … Read more