China’s economic growth likely slowed in third quarter
China’s National Bureau of Statistics is set to release the third-quarter GDP and economic data for September on Monday.
Category: Business
The alleged ‘sweeping betrayal of trust’ that rocked Zions bank and spooked Wall Street
Zions Bancorporation lost $1 billion of its valuation in a single day on Thursday after disclosing $60 million worth of…
Companies are blaming AI for job cuts. Critics say it’s a ‘good excuse’
Workers are spooked as firms declare AI-driven layoffs, but some critics say the current reductions may be a “market clearance”…
An Implementation to Build Dynamic AI Systems with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for Real-Time Resource and Tool Integration
In this tutorial, we explore the Advanced Model Context Protocol (MCP) and demonstrate how to use it to address one…
Israel launches air strikes in Gaza, accusing Hamas of ‘blatant violation of ceasefire’
Hamas said it was “unaware of any events or clashes” in Rafah. It remains unclear if this will affect the…
Louvre museum in Paris closed after robbery, French culture minister says
French media say jewellery has been stolen, after three masked men used a freight lift to access the world’s most-visited…
Weak-for-Strong (W4S): A Novel Reinforcement Learning Algorithm that Trains a weak Meta Agent to Design Agentic Workflows with Stronger LLMs
Researchers from Stanford, EPFL, and UNC introduce Weak-for-Strong Harnessing, W4S, a new Reinforcement Learning RL framework that trains a small…
Microsoft AI Proposes BitNet Distillation (BitDistill): A Lightweight Pipeline that Delivers up to 10x Memory Savings and about 2.65x CPU Speedup
Microsoft Research proposes BitNet Distillation, a pipeline that converts existing full precision LLMs into 1.58 bit BitNet students for specific…
Global week ahead: ‘Cockroaches’ crawling toward Europe?
Europe’s banks take center stage this week as earnings season gets underway.
No Kings protests draw huge crowds as anti-Trump rallies sweep across US
Protests are planned in over 2,500 cities across the US, including New York, DC, Atlanta and Los Angeles.
Kong Releases Volcano: A TypeScript, MCP-native SDK for Building Production Ready AI Agents with LLM Reasoning and Real-World actions
Kong has open-sourced Volcano, a TypeScript SDK that composes multi-step agent workflows across multiple LLM providers with native Model Context…
AutoCode: A New AI Framework that Lets LLMs Create and Verify Competitive Programming Problems, Mirroring the Workflow of Human Problem Setters
Are your LLM code benchmarks actually rejecting wrong-complexity solutions and interactive-protocol violations, or are they passing under-specified unit tests? A…
Bitcoin Plunges To $105k As Investors Shift To Gold After Crypto Carnage
Bitcoin fell sharply this week as investors stepped away from risky bets and piled into gold, based on reports from…
As secondhand luxury soars, authentication becomes a new gold standard
Secondhand fashion and luxury is gaining ground fast, with the global resale market expected to hit up to $360 billion…
Sigmoidal Scaling Curves Make Reinforcement Learning RL Post-Training Predictable for LLMs
Reinforcement Learning RL post-training is now a major lever for reasoning-centric LLMs, but unlike pre-training, it hasn’t had predictive scaling…
Zelensky guarded on Tomahawk missile talks with Trump after White House meeting
Following the meeting, Trump calls for Kyiv and Moscow to “stop where they are” and end the war.
A Coding Implementation to Build a Unified Tool Orchestration Framework from Documentation to Automated Pipelines
In this tutorial, we build a compact, efficient framework that demonstrates how to convert tool documentation into standardized, callable interfaces,…
Red Cross retrieves body of dead hostage in Gaza, Israel says
The Israeli military says “a coffin of a deceased hostage” is now on the way to its troops in the…
Can Putin’s ‘Flying Kremlin’ travel through EU airspace to Budapest?
If Putin does go to Budapest to meet Trump in the next two weeks, he would need to clear a…
UK Finance Minister Rachel Reeves: November budget will respond to the global challenges we face
U.K. Chancellor Rachel Reeves cited the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the tensions in the Middle East, and the impact of global trade…
How TP ICAP transformed CRM data into real-time insights with Amazon Bedrock
This post is co-written with Ross Ashworth at TP ICAP. The ability to quickly extract insights from customer relationship management…
Trump puts Russia on notice over Ukraine as two leaders prepare to meet
After pushing for a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas, U.S. President Donald Trump is now turning his sights on…
Europe’s private equity giants tumble as U.S. bank lending fears spread
ICG, CVC and Partners Group were all in negative territory as concerns over credit stress in U.S. markets continued into…
Global bank stocks sell off as fears mount over bad loans
Shares of banks listed around the world were rattled on Friday following concerns over bad loans in the United States.
Credit concerns reach European markets as bank stocks slide 2.8%
European markets traded firmly in the red on Friday morning as concerns over the banking sector reached the region.
Baidu’s PaddlePaddle Team Releases PaddleOCR-VL (0.9B): a NaViT-style + ERNIE-4.5-0.3B VLM Targeting End-to-End Multilingual Document Parsing
How do you convert complex, multilingual documents—dense layouts, small scripts, formulas, charts, and handwriting—into faithful structured Markdown/JSON with state-of-the-art accuracy…
EU leaders urge swift action on unlocking frozen Russian assets to finance Ukraine, document shows
EU heads of state will call for quicker action on the use of immobilized Russian assets at a meeting next…
Iterative fine-tuning on Amazon Bedrock for strategic model improvement
Organizations often face challenges when implementing single-shot fine-tuning approaches for their generative AI models. The single-shot fine-tuning method involves selecting…
Trump says he will meet Putin in Hungary for Ukraine talks after ‘very productive’ call
The Trump-Putin phone call came a day before Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky visits the White House.
Voice AI-powered drive-thru ordering with Amazon Nova Sonic and dynamic menu displays
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the quick-service restaurant industry, particularly in drive-thru operations where efficiency and customer satisfaction intersect. Traditional…
Netanyahu ‘determined’ to pressure Hamas to find remaining dead hostages
The Israeli prime minister’s comments come after Hamas said it could not access the bodies of 19 hostages in Gaza.
Qualifire AI Open-Sources Rogue: An End-to-End Agentic AI Testing Framework Designed to Evaluate the Performance, Compliance, and Reliability of AI Agents
Agentic systems are stochastic, context-dependent, and policy-bounded. Conventional QA—unit tests, static prompts, or scalar “LLM-as-a-judge” scores—fails to expose multi-turn vulnerabilities…
French PM survives major test but breathing space will not last long
Sébastien Lecornu survives two confidence votes in parliament and can now focus on passing the 2026 budget.
China accuses U.S. of deliberately causing panic over rare earth controls, says it is open to talks
Beijing last week announced sweeping controls on rare earths ahead of an expected meeting between President Donald Trump and President…
TSMC profit surges 39% to beat estimates and hit yet another record on AI chip demand
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company reported a 39.1% increase in third-quarter profit, hitting a fresh record despite missing estimates.
Swiss government slashes growth outlook as Trump tariffs put ‘heavy burden’ on economy
The risks are mounting for the Swiss economy as the country’s goods face one of the Trump administration’s most punitive…
Trump says he authorised CIA in Venezuela as Maduro says ‘no to regime change’
Trump would not be drawn on whether the CIA was seeking to topple Maduro.
Top European Central Bank board members see sticky inflation but clear rate path
ECB board members speak exclusively to CNBC at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings in Washington about the interest…
Nestle gains 6% after consumer goods giant announces plans to slash 16,000 jobs
Nestle said Thursday it will cut 16,000 jobs as the firm’s new CEO Philipp Navratil looks to accelerate a turnaround…
‘Worse than starting from scratch’: How big is the task of rebuilding Gaza?
BBC Verify investigates the damage done by two years of war, which could take $70bn and decades to repair.
Thirsty AI mega projects raise alarm in some of Europe’s driest regions
Europe is planning to at least triple its data center capacity as part of a push to become a world-class…
QeRL: NVFP4-Quantized Reinforcement Learning (RL) Brings 32B LLM Training to a Single H100—While Improving Exploration
What would you build if you could run Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training on a 32B LLM in 4-bit NVFP4—on a…
Building a Context-Folding LLM Agent for Long-Horizon Reasoning with Memory Compression and Tool Use
In this tutorial, we explore how to build a Context-Folding LLM Agent that efficiently solves long, complex tasks by intelligently…
CNBC’s The China Connection newsletter: Beijing gears up for a big strategy meeting as tensions with Washington deepen
Beijing will discuss goals for tech and economic development at a five-year planning meeting next week.
Hamas returns two more bodies but says it cannot retrieve remaining dead hostages
The group’s armed wing says it has returned all the bodies of hostages it can reach in the ruins of…
UN humanitarian chief urges Israel to open more crossings into Gaza
Palestinians in Gaza are reported to be stockpiling food, amid anxiety that the ceasefire will unravel.
Transforming enterprise operations: Four high-impact use cases with Amazon Nova
Since the launch of Amazon Nova at AWS re:Invent 2024, we have seen adoption trends across industries, with notable gains…
Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 4.5: Small AI Model that Delivers Sonnet-4-Level Coding Performance at One-Third the Cost and more than Twice the Speed
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, a latency-optimized “small” model that delivers similar levels of coding performance to Claude Sonnet 4…
Configure and verify a distributed training cluster with AWS Deep Learning Containers on Amazon EKS
Training state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) demands massive, distributed compute infrastructure. Meta’s Llama 3, for instance, ran on 16,000 NVIDIA…
Treasury Secretary Bessent says a stock market decline won’t deter the U.S. from taking strong action against China
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted that the U.S. won’t change its negotiating stance on China due to stock market volatility.