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UAE Lab Releases Open-Source Model to Rival China's DeepSeek

16 hours 20 minutes ago
"The United Arab Emirates wants to compete with the U.S. and China in AI," writes Gizmodo, "and a new open source model may be its strongest contender yet. "An Emirati AI lab called the Institute of Foundation Models (IFM) released K2 Think on Tuesday, a model that researchers say rivals OpenAI's ChatGPT and China's DeepSeek in standard benchmark tests." "With just 32 billion parameters, it outperforms flagship reasoning models that are 20x larger," the lab wrote in a press release on Tuesday. DeepSeek's R1 has 671 billion parameters, though only 37 billion are active. Meta's latest Llama 4 models range from 17 billion to 288 billion active parameters. OpenAI doesn't share parameter information. OpenAI doesn't share parameter information. Researchers also claim that K2 Think leads "all open-source models in math performance" across several benchmarks. The model is intended to be more focused on math, coding, and scientific research than most other AI chatbots. The Emirati lab's selling point for the model is similar to DeepSeek's strategy that disrupted the AI market earlier this year: optimized efficiency that will have better or the same computing power at a lower cost... The lab is also aiming to be transparent in everything, "open-sourcing not just models but entire development processes" that provide "researchers with complete materials including training code, datasets, and model checkpoints," IFM said in a press release from May. The UAE and other Arab countries are investing in AI to try reducing their economic dependence on fossil fuels, the article points out.

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EditorDavid

A Single Exercise Session May Slow Cancer Cell Growth, Study Finds

17 hours 20 minutes ago
The Washington Post notes that past research "indicates that exercise helps some cancer survivors avoid recurrence of their disease." But a new study "offers an explanation of how, showing that exercise changes the inner workings of our muscles and cells, although more study is still needed..." The study, published last month, involved 32 women who'd survived breast cancer. After a single session of interval training or weightlifting, their blood contained higher levels of certain molecules, and those factors helped put the brakes on laboratory-grown breast cancer cells. "Our work shows that exercise can directly influence cancer biology, suppressing tumor growth through powerful molecular signals," said Robert Newton, the deputy director of the Exercise Medicine Research Institute at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, and senior author of the new study. His group's experiment adds to mounting evidence that exercise upends the risks of not only developing but also surviving cancer... Scientists know contracting muscles release a slew of hormones and biochemicals, known as myokines, into our bloodstreams and have long suspected these myokines fight cancer. In some past studies with mice and healthy people, blood drawn after exercise and added to live cancer cells killed or suppressed the cancer's growth... [The new study tested cancer cells in high-tech petri dishes with blood drawn from cancer survivors.] Drenched in plasma from either the interval trainers or the lifters, many cancer cells quit growing. Quite a few died. (The blood drawn before exercise had no effects.) The cancer-fighting impacts were greatest with the blood drawn after interval training. Why? Additional testing showed this blood contained the highest concentrations of certain, beneficial myokines, especially IL-6, a protein that affects immune responses and inflammation... What these results mean, Newton said, is that "exercise doesn't just improve fitness and well-being" in people who've had cancer. "It also orchestrates a complex biological response that includes direct anticancer signals from muscles..." Questions remain, of course. Can any type of exercise fight cancer? Newton and other researchers have doubts. The exercise in this study was strenuous, by design. "Earlier studies suggested that the stronger the exercise stimulus, the greater the release of anticancer myokines," Newton said... Even the weight training in this study was less potent than the intense intervals. But Newton believes weight training remains key to cancer fighting. "People with cancer who increase their muscle mass through resistance training also experience greater rises in circulating myokines," he said. More muscle means more myokines.

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EditorDavid

The Software Engineers Paid To Fix Vibe Coded Messes

18 hours 20 minutes ago
"Freelance developers and entire companies are making a business out of fixing shoddy vibe coded software," writes 404 Media, interviewing one of the "dozens of people on Fiverr... now offering services specifically catering to people with shoddy vibe coded projects." Hamid Siddiqi, who offers to "review, fix your vibe code" on Fiverr, told the 404 Media that "Currently, I work with around 15-20 clients regularly, with additional one-off projects throughout the year. ("Siddiqi said common issues he fixes in vibe coded projects include inconsistent UI/UX design in AI-generated frontends, poorly optimized code that impacts performance, misaligned branding elements, and features that function but feel clunky or unintuitive," as well as work o color schemes, animations, and layouts.) And others coders are also pursuing the "vibe coded mess" market: Swatantra Sohni, who started VibeCodeFixers.com, a site for people with vibe coded projects who need help from experienced developers to fix or finish their projects, says that almost 300 experienced developers have posted their profiles to the site. He said so far VibeCodeFixers.com has only connected between 30-40 vibe code projects with fixers, but that he hasn't done anything to promote the service and at the moment is focused on adding as many software developers to the platform as possible... "Most of these vibe coders, either they are product managers or they are sales guys, or they are small business owners, and they think that they can build something," Sohni told me. "So for them it's more for prototyping..." Another big issue Sohni identified is "credit burn," meaning the money vibe coders waste on AI usage fees in the final 10-20 percent stage of developing the app, when adding new features breaks existing features. Sohni told me he thinks vibe coding is not going anywhere, but neither are human developers. "I feel like the role [of human developers] would be slightly limited, but we will still need humans to keep this AI on the leash," he said. The article also notes that established software development companies like Ulam Labs, now say "we clean up after vibe coding. Literally." "Built something fast? Now it's time to make it solid," Ulam Labs pitches on its site," suggesting that for their potential customers "the tech debt is holding you back: no tests, shaky architecture, CI/CD is a dream, and every change feels like defusing a bomb. That's where we come in."

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EditorDavid