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The Smart ForTwo became a huge hit when it arrived in Britain at the turn of the Millennium. Its incredibly petite dimensions made it the ideal motor for city living. In 2027, it is back.

Google announced two new tensor processing units (TPUs) for the "agentic era," with separate processors dedicated to training and inference. "With the rise of AI agents, we determined the community would benefit from chips individually specialized to the needs of training and serving," Amin Vahdat, a Google senior vice president and chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said in a blog post. Both chips will become available later this year. CNBC reports: After years of producing chips that can both train artificial intelligence models and handle inference work, Google is separating those tasks into distinct processors, its latest effort to take on Nvidia in AI hardware. [...] None of the tech giants are displacing Nvidia, and Google isn't even comparing the performance of its new chips with those from the AI chip leader. Google did say the training chip enables 2.8 times the performance of the seventh-generation Ironwood TPU, announced in November, for the same price, while performance is 80% better for the inference processor. Nvidia said its upcoming Groq 3 LPU hardware will draw on large quantities of static random-access memory, or SRAM, which is used by Cerebras, an AI chipmaker that filed to go public earlier this month. Google's new inference chip, dubbed TPU 8i, also relies on SRAM. Each chip contains 384 megabytes of SRAM, triple the amount in Ironwood. The architecture is designed "to deliver the massive throughput and low latency needed to concurrently run millions of agents cost-effectively," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, wrote in a blog post.

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She said that the incident was 'disgusting' and when she asked for a replacement exactly the same thing happened again

Colorado amendments could exempt open source OSes, code repos, and containers

The prospect of OS-level age checks applying to open source systems is a serious concern for FOSS advocates. Campaigners appear to have secured proposed exemptions for open source operating systems, code repositories, and containers in one US state, but stricter federal legislation has already been introduced in Congress.…

In a boost for millions of borrowers, the average two-year fixed rate fell from 5.87 per cent to 5.83 per cent while a typical five-year deal dipped from 5.76 per cent to 5.73 per cent.

The Osmonds star passed away on Monday at the age of 76 and his younger sister Marie, 66, has now revealed Alan knew he was reaching the end of his life.

I loathe weddings. No other festivity provides such fertile ground for drama, from the planning stages to the day itself.

The café has thanked everyone who supported the business

I was applying a slick of lippy in the bedroom mirror before work when I froze. My downstairs neighbour was shouting at me, again - this time in a disturbing football-chant tune.

There is mounting evidence that the scrapping of the triple lock governing the annual increase applied to the state pension could be on the agenda.

Essex Police have quashed rumours being circulated online that a 'migrant' had been taking pictures of children in an Essex park

The ex-Austria international was killed on Thursday in Salzburg, with local media outlet Salzburg ORF claiming his car was struck by a train on a level crossing at Pabing, near Nussdorf am Haunsberg.

Longstanding Chelmsford councillor dies 'completely unexpectedly'

After David took another vile swipe at Adam on social media this week, the actor has revealed he is now receiving therapy following their run-in.

Happy Earth Day!

Datacenter growth in the US is helping keep aging fossil-fuel plants online longer, slowing the shift to a cleaner grid and worsening air pollution, according to new research from a group of environmental nonprofits.…

The upcoming blockbuster film The Devil Wears Prada 2 has sparked a racism furore in China over its 'nerdy "Chin Chou"' character. 

When it comes to what parents really care about exam results and sports day races fall well behind their children saying, 'please and thank you' a new poll has shown.

A satirical but working tool called Malus uses AI to create "clean room" clones of open-source software, aiming to reproduce the same functionality while shedding attribution and copyleft obligations. "It works," Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for the United Nations, told 404 Media. "The Stripe charge will provide you the thing, and it was important for us to do that, because we felt that if it was just satire, it would end up like every other piece of research I've done on open source, which ends up being largely dismissed by open source tech workers who felt that they were too special and too unique and too intelligent to ever be the ones on the bad side of the layoffs or the economics of the situation." 404 Media reports: Malus's legal strategy for bypassing copyright is based on a historically pivotal moment for software and copyright law dating back to 1982. Back then, IBM dominated home computing, and competitors like Columbia Data Products wanted to sell products that were compatible with software that IBM customers were already using. Reverse engineering IBM's computer would have infringed on the company's copyright, so Columbia Data Products came up with what we now know as a "clean room" design. It tasked one team with examining IBM's BIOS and creating specifications for what a clone of that system would require. A different "clean" team, one that was never exposed to IBM's code, then created BIOS that met those specifications from scratch. The result was a system that was compatible with IBM's ecosystem but didn't violate its copyright because it did not copy IBM's technical process and counted as original work. This clean room method, which has been validated by case law and dramatized in the first season of Halt and Catch Fire, made computing more open and competitive than it would have been otherwise. But it has taken on new meaning in the age of generative AI. It is now easier than ever to ask AI tools to produce software that is identical in function to existing open source projects, and that, some would argue, are built from scratch and are therefore original work that can bypass existing copyright licenses. Others would say that software produced by large language models is inherently derivative, because like any LLM output, it is trained on the collective output of humans scraped from the internet, including specific open source projects. Malus (pronounced malice), uses AI to do the same thing. "Finally, liberation from open source license obligations," Malus's site says. "Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems." Copyleft is a type of copyright license that ensures reproductions or applications of the software keep it free to share and modify.

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Did he stand by his unlikely alibi regarding the Robbins rub-out? 'Yes I do!' cried Sir Keir Starmer, all neck-tweaky and macho.

Rebel Wilson's letter was shown to the Federal Court during defamation proceedings against her by Charlotte MacInnes, who was the lead actor in musical comedy film The Deb.