Eliana Willis

Cerebras used chain of thought at inference time to make a smaller AI model equal or better to a larger model. Cerebras SystemsCerebras Systems announced on Tuesday that it’s made Meta Platforms’s Llama perform as well in a small version as it does on a large version by adding the increasingly popular approach in generative artificial intelligence (AI) known as “chain of thought.”  The AI computer maker announced the advance at the start of the annual NeurIPS conference on AI.”This is a closed-source only capability, but we wanted to bring this capability to the most popular ecosystem, which is Llama,” said James Wang, head of Cerebras’s product marketing effort, in an interview with ZDNET. The project is the latest in a line of open-source projects Cerebras has done to demonstrate the capabilities of its purpose-built AI computer, the “CS-3,” which it sells in competition with the status quo in AI — GPU chips from the customary vendors, Nvidia and AMD.Also: DeepSeek challenges OpenAI’s o1 in chain of thought – but it’s missing a few linksThe company was able to train the Llama 3.1 open-source AI model that uses only 70 billion parameters to reach the same accuracy or better accuracy on various benchmark tests as the much larger 405-billion parameter version of Llama. Those tests include the CRUX test of “complex reasoning tasks,” developed at MIT and Meta, and the LiveCodeBench for code generation challenges, developed at U.C. Berkeley, MIT and Cornell University, among others. Chain of thought can enable models using less training time, data, and computing power, to equal or surpass a large model’s performance.  More

Jack Wallen/ZDNETWhen System76 announced that it would be creating a new Linux desktop environment from scratch and using the Rust programming language, I was skeptical, not in the company’s ability to deliver but the reason behind the choice. Pop!_OS has been an outstanding OS to date, a perfect re-imagining of the GNOME desktop (from which it was based) that was efficient and easy to use.Then, I started seeing the early mockups and realized the company wasn’t reinventing the wheel. It was re-creating what it already had… only without the GNOME dependencies. Also: You can test all the best Linux distros right in your web browser with this siteThat’s when it all made sense. By creating the OS in-house, it could tweak it to the exact specifications needed so that it would run beautifully on its hardware. And given the speed of Rust, it also made perfect sense that it’d use that particular language to build its new platform.According to the Pop!_OS site, System76 had this to say about its new OS: “We aim to liberate the computer with a new desktop environment powerful enough to build custom OS experiences — for users, developers, and makers of any device with a screen.”Well, the latest Alpha of Pop!_OS (a4) has been released, and it shows just how serious System76 is with its new operating system.I’ve been using Pop!_OS for nearly 10 years now (with a brief excursion into Ubuntu Budgie land), so I feel pretty confident when I say that the new COSMIC desktop takes everything that was good in Pop!_OS and made it even better.Also: This Linux distribution surprised me with its minimalistic yet highly-functional OSFirst off, COSMIC is more customizable than the previous incarnation. Without having to install a third-party extension, you can tweak the transparency of both the top bar and the dock. You can also configure the dock to “float” so it doesn’t touch the edge of the display. But more than anything, it’s the sheer speed of COSMIC desktop that makes the previous iteration feel sluggish. I installed Pop!_OS Alpha 4 as a virtual machine with only 3GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores and it performed as well (and better in some cases) than the host OS which had the full complement of RAM and CPU cores. That’s impressive.One of the biggest performance bumps is found in Pop Shop (the Pop!_OS app store, which is now called COSMIC Shop). Previous versions were well known for being slow and problematic. It would take forever to open and randomly crash. The new COSMIC Shop is light years ahead of that. Not only is the new COSMIC Shop exponentially more stable, but it also opens immediately… which is a relief.Same as it ever wasSystem76 made the right choice in not totally reinventing the wheel. The developers and designers could have gone back to the drawing board and created a desktop environment that was a total departure from what they’d been offering.That would have been a mistake.Also: Want to save your old computer? Try these 5 Linux distributionsInstead, they decided to simply remake what they had, keeping the UI almost identical to the previous releases. By doing this, System76 won’t have a bunch of frustrated users on its hands when COSMIC desktop is finally released for general availability. System76 smartly retained Flathub support for the OS (as well as baking it into Pop Shop), so installing applications of all sorts is just a click away. More

Get a Babbel lifetime language subscription at a big discount right now.  StackSocial Learning a new language can be daunting. But right now, you can buy a lifetime subscription to Babbel Language Learning from Stack Social that lets you choose from 14 languages and access more than 10,000 hours of online language education for $150 — […] More

Solos/ZDNETUntil today, if you wanted to a pair of smart glasses that can both put an AI voice assistant in your ears and be able to process visual information, you’d have — realistically — only one option: the Ray-Ban Metas.Also: Forget the Ray-Ban Metas: Samsung’s upcoming smart glasses are the wearables I’ve been waiting forBut competition is a wonderful thing, and smart eyewear brand Solos is releasing today its pair of multimodal smart glasses: the AirGo Vision. Much like previous versions of Solos AirGo glasses, there’s a ChatGPT-powered voice assistant baked into the system, allowing you ask questions and communicate hands-free. With the AirGo Vision model, the addition of camera sensors in the side frames allows the glasses to process visual information for more context and environmental-based queries. For example, you can ask the Solos to identify people, objects, activities, and text, according to the company. Theoretically, the glasses can help translate text in a foreign language. Users can also tell the glasses to capture photos. More

Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images A new PC or Mac is a major purchase. Buying a high-quality device that’s built to perform well and last for years can easily cost you $1,500 or more. How much more? Well, Microsoft’s most expensive business laptop costs roughly $3,000, and a fully loaded MacBook Pro tops out at […] More

<!–> ZDNET’s key takeaways The Boox Note Air4 C is a color ePaper tablet for notes and reading, available for $500. The tablet’s display is crisp and paper-like, and the included pen is accurate and pressure-sensitve, making it easy to create highly detailed sketches. The Note Air4 C isn’t cheap, at $500, and the included […] More

Jason Hiner/ZDNETApple recently unveiled new AirPods, and while you might be considering buying the brand’s latest headphones, you shouldn’t forget about the sweet, sweet discounts that activate on earlier models once Apple releases new hardware — especially if you’re looking for a great holiday gift.The AirPods Pro (2nd generation) More

Andrei Haurylau/Getty Images Lately, it seems like each day brings a new security threat or data leak. According to cybersecurity company Check Point, Q3 of 2024 alone logged a 75% increase in cyberattacks over Q3 of 2023, with the research noting that organizations in education and research were targeted most — 3,828 per week. Many actors […] More