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AI

What happens when a kid’s robot best friend dies?

When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they’ve known each other,…

AI

Not every AI-in-education tale is a horror story. How the world’s leading education company makes AI that’s actually useful for students

Most of the AI industry treats a model’s ability to answer questions as a basic measure of progress. That standard becomes less useful when the goal is learning. In education, an answer can be factually correct and still fail the student because it gives away too much or solves a problem without helping the learner understand it.

AI

AI film startups are setting up studios in Hollywood, using US and Chinese AI models while touting lower production costs and a way around traditional financing (Robert Booth/The Guardian)

Amid fears for jobs, some film-makers say AI could enable them bypass studio giants and take more creative risks

  • Promise AI film studio in Hollywood uses US and Chinese AI models for production.
  • Actors collaborate with AI to create scenes in real time, reducing production time.
  • AI film studios anticipate creative renaissance and democratize filmmaking process.

AI

Modern OCR narrows gap on doctors’ handwriting

A new benchmark of handwritten medical prescriptions shows that compact modern optical character recognition systems can decipher doctors’ handwriting far better than established OCR engines, while…

  • GLM-OCR achieved highest Character Error Rate (CER) of 0.328 in April 2026 test
  • PP-OCRv5 provided lower Word Error Rate (WER) of 0.789
  • GLM-OCR correctly reproduced only 32.6% of tested words

AI

How AI Is Making Mobile Accessibility Easier Than Ever

The OS is now covering for your mistakes: VoiceOver and TalkBack generate descriptions for unlabeled elements on device Automated audits catch more than they used to, but still not everything…

  • AI enables automatic descriptions for unlabeled elements and images in mobile screen readers.
  • AI used in development stages, from on-device assistive AI to AI-powered testing.
  • Generative AI creates alt text, captions, and audio descriptions for mobile apps.

AI

Stripe Bought the Routing Layer

Stripe just acquired OpenRouter, and everyone's talking about the number. Big deal. But the real signal is what layer they're buying into. OpenRouter is the router.

AI

Models retire faster than operating systems

When an operating system deprecates an API , you get a year's notice, a migration guide, and a conference talk. When a model provider retires a model, you get a blog post, a date a few months out, and…

  • Model providers retire models with minimal formal notice, unlike API deprecations.
  • Models are catalog entries, not hardwired into code, allowing easy swapping.
  • Retirement process involves catalog update, dialect adaptation, and evaluation suite testing.

AI

When AI Becomes the Travel Agent, Who Owns the Journey?

Watch more: Monday Conversation With Booking Holdings’ Daniel Marovitz Travel has always had a front door and an operating layer. The front door was the search box, the app or the website. The operating layer was everything the consumer rarely saw: payments, currencies, supplier relationships, fraud controls, compliance, refunds and…

AI

Zanzibar to Train 600 Officials in AI and Cybersecurity

Tanzania · TECHNOLOGY Key Facts —New MoU: On 16 August 2026, Zanzibar’s Ministry of Communications. Information Technology and Innovation signed a three-year deal with Emerson Education Institute to…

  • Zanzibar trains 600 officials in AI and cybersecurity over three years
  • India's Supreme Audit Institution provides cybersecurity and AI training
  • 53.39 billion Tanzanian shillings allocated for digital transformation

AI

Agents in Orbs

  • Amp introduces new feature to launch agents remotely in orbs.
  • Orbs are standalone machines for agent operation without supervision.
  • Agents can be used for tasks beyond traditional ticket management.

AI

Malaysia’s sovereign AI bet: Local context becomes the next startup moat

For years, Southeast Asia’s digital economy has grown on top of technologies built elsewhere. Cloud infrastructure, operating systems, search, social media, e-commerce tools and, more recently, large language models have largely come from the US and China. The region adapted quickly, but rarely controlled the deepest layers of the stack.

AI

Qwen 3.8 27B shows a 17GB open-weight general purpose model can have long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)

Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab.

  • Qwen 3.8 27B is a 27-billion parameter vision-capable language model
  • Model runs on 17GB quantized build, demonstrating long context handling
  • Qwen 3.8 27B excels in tool calling, vision, and code generation tasks

AI

Chey Tae-won, Bill Gates Meet Again as SK Steps Up SMR Strategy for AI Power Demand

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won and Bill Gates, chairman of TerraPower, have met again to discuss ways to secure power for the rapidly growing electricity demand of the artificial intelligence era…

  • Chey Tae-won and Bill Gates meet on August 14 to discuss AI power demand
  • SK Group invests $250 million in TerraPower in 2022, becoming second-largest shareholder
  • SK aims to offer integrated power solutions (LNG, ESS, SMRs) for AI data centers

AI

Uganda: Ai, Future of Education in Focus As Uganda Hosts 2nd International Curriculum Conference Next Week

[Nile Post] The growing impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) changing workplace demands and the need for new skills will take centre stage at the second International Conference on Curriculum…

  • Second International Conference on Curriculum Development focuses on AI's role in education.
  • Conference in Uganda on August 20-21 for 700+ delegates from 11 countries.
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