By Vikhyaat Vivek Researchers at the University of Tartu are developing a smartwatch-like wearable that uses spectrometry to detect plastic particles in the human body without drawing blood.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Shikhar Mehrotra Tired of productivity tools that treat your data as their business model? Proton Workspace bundles everything from encrypted email to video calls under Swiss privacy law, and it costs less than you’d expect.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Nadeem Sarwar Nothing is reportedly planning to launch smart glasses with built-in cameras and a pair of AI-powered earbuds. Let’s hope they do it in their signature style.

Source:: Digital Trends

A group of European technology firms has launched a new open-source office suite aimed at offering a sovereign alternative to Microsoft Office.

Euro-Office consists of four core applications — a document editor, spreadsheet program, presentation tool, and PDF editor — and is built on the open-source OnlyOffice suite. It supports Microsoft Office file formats DOCX, PPTX and XLSX, as well as Open Document Format (ODF) files such as ODS, ODT and ODP.

Those involved include open-source productivity software vendor Nextcloud, cloud hosting provider Ionos, and Proton, a Swiss software-as-a-service provider that sells privacy-focused email and other productivity tools.

The Euro-Office initiative is driven by demand for a “complete sovereign, open-source, decentralized solution” among European organizations, Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud, told Computerworld, amid a growing push for alternatives to US technology providers in the region.

“Europe needs to reduce its reliance on big tech — open source is an essential tool,” said Harald Wehnes, professor at the University of Würzburg Institute of Computer Science and speaker for the German Informatics Society’s Working Group on Digital Sovereignty.

Euro-Office is targeted at Europe’s “extremely dependent businesses and governments,” which largely rely on US technology providers, he said. “Customers are unhappy with current offerings and want a true European alternative.”

Karlitschek plans to introduce a new product based on Euro-Office into its Nextcloud Hub, he told Computerworld, though pricing and availability are yet to be confirmed.

Nextcloud currently provides productivity apps from OnlyOffice and Collabora as part of its Nextcloud Hub suite. Both have drawbacks, according to Karlitschek: Collabora’s software is built on LibreOffice, a fork of OpenOffice, and has usability limitations, he said. (Nextcloud will continue to offer Collabora as an option to customers, however, and some of Collabora’s code will be incorporated into Euro-Office software.) With regards to OnlyOffice, Karlitschek cited customer concerns about the owner company’s supposed roots in Russia.

Nextcloud, Proton, and Ionos have each allocated “two-digit” numbers of developers to development of Euro-Office, said Karlitschek, with others contributing on a slightly smaller scale.

It’s early days for the project — a preview version of the software is available now on GitHub, with a 1.0 release set for the summer — but Karlitschek said that initial priorities include development of mobile and desktop apps, as well as addressing document incompatibilities.

There are several reasons why organizations might wish to use an open-source productivity suite such as Euro-Office.

European organizations, particularly in public sector and regulated industries, are “evaluating an exit strategy from the US-owned productivity suites like Microsoft Office,” said Dario Maisto, senior analyst at Forrester.

“Organizations are mainly moved by a desire to improve their digital sovereignty posture, escape vendor lock-in, and have a ready alternative to avoid costly price increases from one enterprise agreement renewal to the other,” Maisto said.

The European Union recently launched an initiative intended to support the growth and sustainability of its open-source sector, while some member state governments have signalled intentions for wider open-source adoption.

Aerospace and defense sector organizations often need to inspect and certify code, Maisto said, particularly as geopolitical volatility increases. Whether this means a “deliberate choice for Euro-Office is a whole different discussion,” he said.

Gaining traction among end-user organizations will likely be challenging. An open-source implementation can be a significant undertaking for IT teams, said Maisto, particularly at the scale required to achieve cost savings versus proprietary tools.  A lack of advanced functionality such as Excel macros can be problematic for a subset of office workers.

He also cited the axiom “nobody was ever fired for choosing Microsoft.”

“While this attitude is changing, it will take time to instill a culture of — and trust in — open-source alternatives,” said Maisto.

Related reading:

Global uncertainty is reshaping cloud strategies in Europe

EU looks to bolster its open-source sector to counter US cloud dominance

EuroStack: Europe’s path to digital independence?

Local clouds shape Europe’s AI future

Source:: Computer World

By Shimul Sood Yes, seriously. That’s exactly what it says.

Source:: Digital Trends

It’s no big deal, you’d think, that researchers have found a way to reduce the computing requirements for one of the many steps involved in training an AI model to help robots manipulate simple geometric objects.

Yet such is the concern about the rising cost of powering data centers for AI applications that this one small and largely unremarkable finding prompted breathless headlines such as “100x Less Power: The Breakthrough That Could Solve AI’s Massive Energy Crisis.”

Don’t believe the hype

No-one’s disputing the researchers’ findings, but reports about them may be somewhat exaggerated: “The leap from the research conducted in the arXiv study to the conclusion in the associated news articles is the stuff of myth. It’s the kind of hype that Gartner warns clients to avoid,” said Gartner VP analyst Nader Henein.

The researchers, from Human-Robot Interaction Lab at Tufts University in the US and the Center for Vision, Automation, and Control in Vienna, Austria, compared the training cost and performance of vision-language-action (VLA) models with that of a neuro-symbolic architecture using PDDL-based symbolic planning, reporting the results in a paper, The Price Is Not Right: Neuro-Symbolic Methods Outperform VLAs on Structured Long-Horizon Manipulation Tasks with Significantly Lower Energy Consumption. The paper has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Yuri Goryunov, who is the CIO for consulting firm Acceligence, also questioned whether the study’s energy-saving findings are applicable to broader problems in the enterprise.

“The ‘100x less power’ headline is misleading. What the researchers actually showed is that a rule-based system uses less energy than a neural model on a single puzzle. And it was in simulation, with the rules hand-coded by experts in advance,” Goryunov said. “That’s not a breakthrough. That’s a calculator beating a supercomputer at arithmetic.”

Goryunov argued that “the savings disappear the moment you hit real-world complexity. Disparate data sources and messy inputs, ambiguous situations without clear rule sets, or actually any domain where the rules aren’t already obvious. And someone still has to write all those rules.”

The researchers did not respond to a request for comment — but they likely wouldn’t disagree with Goryunov. In their conclusion, they state, “These results highlight important trade-offs between end-to-end foundation-model approaches and structured reasoning architectures. For manipulation tasks governed by explicit procedural constraints, incorporating symbolic structure can yield substantial advantages in reliability, data efficiency, and energy consumption.”

Some of these discussed hypothetical new approaches to AI do have potential, Goryunov said, specifically citing research work done by Google. “Google’s approach is to make the AI we’re already running dramatically cheaper and faster. Tufts’ approach is to replace it with something architecturally different for a narrow class of tasks. From an enterprise standpoint, there’s no contest. You can deploy Google’s findings tomorrow through your existing model providers. Tufts requires you to rewrite your architecture, hand-code your domain rules, and hope your problem looks like a puzzle.”

The benefits of short-termism

Nathan Marlor, the head of data and AI at Irish consulting firm Version 1, said that even though the Tufts research may not have immediate applicability to enterprise IT deployments, it could impact pricing negotiations with hyperscalers.

“For enterprise IT there’s nothing to do here. Nobody’s building PDDL planners in-house. But the cost angle matters if you’re watching AI compute bills climb and vendors keep telling you the answer is more GPUs. This is one more reason to push back on that,” Marlor said. “If hybrid architectures prove out more broadly, it shows up downstream as cheaper inference and lower cloud bills. But that’s on the platform and hyperscalers to figure out and not enterprise IT teams.”

Another consultant, Brian Levine, executive director of FormerGov, agrees that the Tufts report could color how IT views future AI pricing.

Enterprise IT executives “should absolutely track this space, not because they’ll deploy these models next quarter, but because the economics of AI are getting even more volatile. Enterprises need to stay flexible with their AI vendors,” Levine said. “This market can pivot on a dime. Locking yourself into a single hyperscaler’s stack or a single model architecture is a recipe for regret when breakthroughs like this start to commercialize.” Levine advocated staying flexible and avoiding long-term obligations. “This is a reason to avoid overcommitting to any one vendor’s roadmap. The ground under AI is shifting faster than most procurement cycles. The winners will be the CIOs and orgs that build for portability, negotiate for flexibility, and assume that today’s state of the art may look outdated sooner than anyone expects.”

Source:: Computer World

By Hisan Kidwai When BGMI first came out, it was just another battle royale game that took pride in…
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By Shikhar Mehrotra Samsung’s Hearapy app tackles travel nausea with a science-backed 60-second audio session, no pills, no side effects, just a precise bass tone.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Omair Khaliq Sultan The Beats Solo 4 is down to $119.99 at Amazon as part of the Big Spring Sale, a $80 saving off its $199.95 list price. That’s 40% off a pair of on-ear Bluetooth headphones that offer 50 hours of battery life, a lightweight build, and a tuning that’s more balanced than anything Beats has put […]

Source:: Digital Trends

By Callum Turner Interactive content now generates 52.6% higher engagement than static formats, with users spending significantly longer interacting with dynamic media and showing higher recall for brands that use it. In practical terms, that shift may have transformed expectations around how digital content should be produced, especially in commerce and B2B environments, where attention is often a […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Alina Maria Stan The current wave of investment in artificial intelligence reflects one of the largest capital shifts in modern technology, yet questions around financial return remain central to how this growth is being interpreted. According to a report, global venture capital investment in AI firms reached over $258 billion in 2025, accounting for 61% of all global […] This story continues at The Next Web

Source:: The Next Web

By Hisan Kidwai It’s no secret that 2025 was the golden age of budget phones. A year where you…
The post OPPO K14 5G Review: Big Battery, Decent Performance, But Is It Enough? appeared first on Fossbytes.

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By Deepti Pathak The story of Sung Jinwoo in Solo Leveling is characterized by his special power of creating…
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By Pranob Mehrotra Researchers have developed a new silicon-carbon battery design that can store up to nine times more energy while staying stable over time.

Source:: Digital Trends

Anthropic didn’t intend to introduce Mythos this way. Details of what it calls its most capable AI model yet surfaced through a data leak in its content management system (CMS), revealing a LLM with sharply improved reasoning and coding skills.

The data leak, which was the result of the company’s staffers inadvertently exposing material about the LLM, including a draft blog post about it, via a publicly accessible data repository, was first identified by independent security researchers last week.

Following disclosure of the issue, Anthropic restricted public access to the data store, only to later attribute the exposure to a configuration error in its CMS and confirm the existence of the model to Fortune, which was the first to report the leak.

Apple-focused leaker M1Astra also flagged the exposure, archiving a copy of a draft Anthropic blog post about Mythos on X before access was restricted.

In that draft, Anthropic itself struck a cautious tone, signaling concern about the model’s potential implications on cybersecurity.

“In preparing to release Claude Mythos, we want to act with extra caution and understand the risks it poses — even beyond what we learn in our own testing,” the company wrote, adding that it is particularly focused on assessing near-term cybersecurity risks.

The blog further stated that Anthropic wants to seed Mythos across enterprise security teams first and has already been testing the model’s cybersecurity prowess with a “small number of early access customers.”

The rationale seems straightforward: if today’s models can already identify and even help exploit software vulnerabilities, a more capable system like Mythos could significantly accelerate both discovery and misuse — raising the stakes for defenders and attackers alike.

Pareekh Jain, principal analyst at Pareekh Consulting, says Mythos could cut both ways for CISOs and enterprise security teams, compressing the gap between cyber offense and defense.

While at one end, models like Mythos could transform security by automating vulnerability discovery, continuous red-teaming, faster triage, and large-scale threat hunting areas, on the other hand, it could make cyberattacks easier by letting AI agents act autonomously with high skill, Jain said.

That risk for CISOs is not theoretical, Jain added, as earlier-generation models were quickly repurposed into tools for developing malware.

The risk is even higher with Mythos because of its capabilities like “recursive self-fixing,” Vladimir Belomestnov, senior technical specialist at HCLTech, wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

“The leaked files highlight a capability for the AI to autonomously identify and patch vulnerabilities in its own code. Even if this is currently limited to assisted exploitation, it suggests a narrowing gap between human and machine software engineering,” Belomestnov wrote.

However, Anthropic appears to be some distance from a full release of the model.

“Mythos is also a large, compute-intensive model. It’s very expensive for us to serve, and will be very expensive for our customers to use. We’re working to make the model much more efficient before any general release,” the copy of the draft blog post reads.

What is clear, however, is that the company is already planning a phased rollout targeting cybersecurity use cases.

“We’ll be slowly expanding access to Claude Mythos to more customers using the Claude API over the coming weeks. Since we’re particularly interested in cybersecurity uses, that’s where we aim to expand the EAP initially,” the company wrote in the draft blog post.

There is another copy of the blog post, which also names the model as Capybara. Anthropic hasn’t made it clear what the final name of the model will be.

The indecision over the model’s name, though, didn’t stop it from rattling markets last week. Shares of cybersecurity vendors, including CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, and Fortinet, fell as investors assessed what more capable models within Claude Code Security could mean for the competitive landscape.

However, Avasant’s research director, Gaurav Dewan, was more optimistic about Mythos’ impact on vendors: “Powerful models will not replace cybersecurity platforms”.

Rather, Dewan sees vendors increasingly embedding frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI and others into their stacks for vulnerability discovery, code and cloud posture management, and threat investigation and response automation.

“One can expect partnerships and controlled integrations, not disintermediation. Vendors that already own telemetry, workflows, and enforcement will benefit most,” Dewan added.

The article originally appeared in CSO.

Source:: Computer World

Microsoft has reportedly had a hard time convincing corporate customers to pay premium prices for its enterprise AI products, particularly as their employees prefer ChatGPT or Gemini. The Information reported in December that Microsoft quietly slashed sales targets for some of those products — a report that Microsoft denied. Nevertheless, by Microsoft’s own admission, just 3.3% of its vast Microsoft 365 user base has a paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

Customers’ reluctance to pay top dollar for Microsoft’s AI tools likely reflects the pace at which new AI alternatives have raced to market. With so many services to choose between and the industry at such a febrile and inventive stage, customers want to dance between the options as they seek those they prefer, rather than being in thrall to one provider — while recent Microsoft 365 price increases show the extent to which sector dominance can leave customers exposed to price hikes. Now bitten, customers are shy to commit too much to one provider.

Spoiled for choice

Why would they want to, given that there are so many alternatives to choose from? AI services are like streaming services, except you don’t need to subscribe to them all: they pretty much all offer the same thing, though some are better for some tasks.

Apple understands this. By its actions, it is showing us that that AI models are destined to become commodities, which is why the company is resolutely focused on making sure its systems become the best platforms on which to run the models.

This recognition means Apple Intelligence is likely to only ever become a selection of hand-picked on-device assistants most of us will use some of the time, with additional tasks supported by third-party providers. We know that Apple plans to use Google Gemini to help it fast-track development of additional Apple Intelligence services, but we also know it intends to support multiple AI services. 

Apple’s App Store for AI

I think the best way to look at this is as an App Store for AI. You’ll be able to do a certain amount using on-device AI and Siri, and you’ll be able to choose between third-party AI services to handle other tasks. That plan means the existing exclusive arrangement with OpenAI’s ChatGPT will be abandoned as the company opens Siri up so its customers can choose which third-party AI services to use. It isn’t clear yet if this will extend to use of on-prem AI systems, which will be a particularly attractive proposition to regulated industries and privacy advocates using Mac minis to run independent LLMs. 

An App Store model also gives Apple a chance to offer up APIs to AI developers to enable sophisticated AI applications that do not devour personal privacy. That seems a very Apple-like approach to these things.

What is clear is the extent to which Apple the hardware company now understands that AI doesn’t replace platforms, but depends on them. Apple as a hardware and operating systems provider just needs to focus on providing the best available ecosystem on which to build and run AI systems, with a user experience to match.

Pop goes the weasel

Asymco’s Horace Dediu notes the significance of such a shift: “If foundation models are heading toward commodity status, then the strategic value shifts to whoever controls the integration layer and the user relationship,” he wrote. 

Apple’s 2-billion-plus ecosystem gives it the edge in distribution, while its tried and tested App Store approach helps validate and optimize the user relationship. The idea that AI services become apps to be bought and sold on Apple’s platforms isn’t far-fetched. Bloomberg suggests that Apple is building tools to let chatbot apps installed via the App Store work with Siri and other Apple Intelligence features. 

Reflecting that some AI services are better at some tasks than they are at others, Apple will also make it possible for customers to choose which AI service handles each request. Apple will probably take a slice from any AI services subscription sales made via its platform as part of this plan, just as it makes bank from every other fee-based app.

I do wonder if this could end up with a weird Catch 22-like situation for Microsoft Office users, in which everything they do on their Apple device is handled by their chosen AI service, except when using an Office app when they may find themselves trapped with Copilot. 

More to come at WWDC?

Summing up, it looks very much as if after the filth and the fury of the first stage of AI evolution, the song remains the same — you still need solid platforms to run this stuff on. Which is, of course, where Apple’s powerful Apple silicon-powered devices have so much to bring.

The company is expected to introduce this with its 27-series of OS updates, the first glance of which we will gain at WWDC in early June. Once we see what kind of system Apple is putting together, we’ll have a much better understanding of what the future of the AI industry is going to be. From where I sit, it seems obvious: while AI may change the world, it’s likely to do so while running on an Apple product.

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Source:: Computer World

By Varun Mirchandani AI-powered smart glasses are raising new concerns as users reportedly exploit them for exam cheating, alongside ongoing privacy fears.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Varun Mirchandani New research suggests AI can match average human creativity, but true originality and top-level creativity remain uniquely human.

Source:: Digital Trends

By Hisan Kidwai We’ve just witnessed a stellar BGIS Grand Finals tournament, filled with ups and downs for many…
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