Month: April 2025

Laut US-Transportminister Sean Duffy sind Katy Perry und Jeff Bezos' Verlobte Lauren Sanchez keine Astronautinnen - die FAA vergibt den Titel ohnehin nicht mehr. (Blue Origin, Nasa)

In Peking haben Roboter an einem Halbmarathon teilgenommen - einige kamen ans Ziel, die menschliche Konkurrenz war aber schneller. (Roboter, Wissenschaft)

ChatLLM will mehrere Premiummodelle unter einem Dach vereinen - für zehn Euro im Monat. Es ist im Praxistest gut, hat aber einen Haken. Ein Test von Oliver Jessner (KI, Test)

Der Sprung von der Computeranimation eines Games hin zur animierten Fernsehserie ist nicht so groß. Wir bieten einen Überblick. Von Peter Osteried (Filme & Serien, Assassin's Creed)

Moderne Webanwendungen erfordern strukturierte und performante Architekturen. Wie sich diese mit React, Typescript und Next.js effizient umsetzen lassen, zeigt ein dreitägiger Online-Workshop anhand praxisnaher Übungen. (Golem Karrierewelt, Programmiersprachen)

Google's history with music services is almost as convoluted and frustrating as its history with messaging. However, things have gotten calmer (and slower) ever since Google ceded music to the YouTube division. The YouTube Music app has its share of annoyances, to be sure, but it's getting a long-overdue feature that users have been requesting for ages: consistent volume.

Listening to a single album from beginning to end is increasingly unusual in this age of unlimited access to music. As your playlist wheels from one genre or era to the next, the inevitable vibe shifts can be grating. Different tracks can have wildly different volumes, which can be shocking and potentially damaging to your ears if you've got your volume up for a ballad only to be hit with a heavy guitar riff after the break.

The gist of consistent volume simple—it normalizes volume across tracks, making the volume roughly the same. Consistent volume builds on a feature from the YouTube app called "stable volume." When Google released stable volume for YouTube, it noted that the feature would continuously adjust volume throughout the video. Because of that, it was disabled for music content on the platform.

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When Nintendo introduces the Switch 2 earlier this month the company said it would go up for pre-order on April 9th. Two days later the company put those plans on hold while it tried to gauge the impact of global tariffs imposed by the Trump administration. Now Nintendo says its next game console will go […]

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This week's flight of the New Shepard spacecraft, NS-31, and its all-female crew has stirred up a mess of coverage, from tabloids to high-brow journalism outlets. And why not? Six women, led by superstar Katy Perry, were flying into space!

By contrast, Ars Technica has been largely silent. Why? Because yet another suborbital flight on New Shepard matters little in the long arc of spaceflight history. Beyond that, I did not want to be too negative about someone else's happiness, especially since it was privately funded. Live and let live, and all of that.

However, if I'm being frank, this flight and its breathless promotion made me uncomfortable. Let me explain. Perhaps the most important change in spaceflight over the last two decades has been the rise of commercial spaceflight, which is bringing down the cost of access to space and marks an essential step to humanity becoming a spacefaring species. This rising tide has been spurred in large part by billionaires, particularly Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and, to a lesser extent, Richard Branson.

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When it comes to actually storing the numerical weights that power a large language model's underlying neural network, most modern AI models rely on the precision of 16- or 32-bit floating point numbers. But that level of precision can come at the cost of large memory footprints (in the hundreds of gigabytes for the largest models) and significant processing resources needed for the complex matrix multiplication used when responding to prompts.

Now, researchers at Microsoft's General Artificial Intelligence group have released a new neural network model that works with just three distinct weight values: -1, 0, or 1. Building on top of previous work Microsoft Research published in 2023, the new model's "ternary" architecture reduces overall complexity and "substantial advantages in computational efficiency," the researchers write, allowing it to run effectively on a simple desktop CPU. And despite the massive reduction in weight precision, the researchers claim that the model "can achieve performance comparable to leading open-weight, full-precision models of similar size across a wide range of tasks."

Watching your weights

The idea of simplifying model weights isn't a completely new one in AI research. For years, researchers have been experimenting with quantization techniques that squeeze their neural network weights into smaller memory envelopes. In recent years, the most extreme quantization efforts have focused on so-called "BitNets" that represent each weight in a single bit (representing +1 or -1).

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Asus is refreshing its Chromebook CX14 and CX15 line of laptops with several new models sporting 1080p displays and support for up to an Intel Core i3-N355 Twin Lake processor. The new Asus Chromebook CX14 models have 14 inch displays and starting weighs of 1.39 kg (3.1 pounds), while the Chromebook CX15 is a 1.59kg […]

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