Short: DoorDash is reportedly in late-stage talks with Instacart to acquire the popular grocery delivery service in a deal worth around $17 billion. An announcement could come as early as midweek, sources said, who also warned that nothing had been finalized and the deal could still fall apart. Instacart was also recently linked to rumors … Read more
Faster chips alone no longer determine AI expansion. Hundreds of thousands of processors now work together as one machine, so the AI infrastructure hardware is designed and evaluated as a complete system. This system extends from the optical connections between racks to the memory, storage, and power that employ the GPUs. The next phase is … Read more
Innovation is often described as a breakthrough. In practice it is slower, messier and far less predictable. This category examines how new ideas actually go from concept to implementation and why many don’t make it very far. Interesting Engineering’s coverage includes new technologies, novel manufacturing methods, and unconventional approaches to long-standing problems. But the focus … Read more
Short: Apple’s slow decline in new product releases continues Tuesday with the launch of an updated MacBook Pro with the company’s new M6 processor. The chip consists of a 12-core CPU, a 12-core GPU with neural accelerators in each core, a dual 16-core Neural Engine for AI workloads, and unified memory for faster overall performance. … Read more
Regal Voice Inc., an enterprise artificial voice intelligence company, today added goal-oriented agents to its platform, allowing businesses to define what a call should do and deploy two AI models that split the work of getting there. The new agents are targeting a problem that Regal says comes up in calls like car insurance claims, … Read more
Sensitive military equipment exposed to chemical or biological warfare agents could be cleaned and returned to service using a transportable system currently being developed for U.S. special forces. Ohio-based defense contractor BLADE, formerly HDT Global, announced Oct. 26 that it has been awarded a contract to advance the large-scale variant of the Critical Equipment Decontamination … Read more
In context: Microsoft’s surge in layoffs, which has affected tens of thousands of workers since 2023, accelerated earlier this year as the company focused on AI spending. Months after offering voluntary buyouts to a small percentage of its workforce, Microsoft has now expanded the practice to a scale that could dwarf previous rounds of layoffs … Read more
Australia will host the USS Colorado, the US’s first nuclear-powered attack submarine under the AUKUS (Australia-UK-US) defense pact, strengthening military cooperation between the three allied nations. The deployment represents a step toward establishing a regular American submarine presence in the country and expanding the three nations’ collective deterrent capabilities in the Indo-Pacific. The agreement aims … Read more
Akamai Technologies Inc. is expanding its AI Cloud infrastructure platform with two new core components called Akamai Inference and Akamai Agent Sandbox. They provide their enterprise customers with a highly customizable managed environment from which they can deploy and run artificial intelligence workloads and agents on any infrastructure, from the cloud data centers to the … Read more
Big beautiful registers: Three years after Intel introduced the technology, x86 APX extensions are finally making their way into the Windows ecosystem. Further development of the new instruction set will initially be limited to Xeon processors, but the performance gains could still be significant. Windows enthusiast Xeno recently revealed what could be one of the … Read more