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When we started Reach , the plan was simple. We had a bunch of small businesses we were already in touch with - real SMBs, the kind that live on WhatsApp and don't have a "tech team." We'd give each of them an AI agent that talks to their customers, hand them a clean starter template for the instructions, and let them tweak it from there. That was the whole bet: give people a good starting prompt and a template, and they'll play along. We were so wrong it's almost funny now. The part nobody warns you about Here's the thing about prompt engineering that you only learn by watching non-technical people try to do it: writing the instructions is not the hard part. The hard part is thinking about the task in the abstract . We'd hand a business owner an agent that mostly worked, and say "just adjust the instructions when it gets something wrong." Sounds easy. It is not. Sitting down and imagining all the ways a conversation could go, then writing rules for a machine to follow - that's a skill. It's basically a job. And it's a completely different job from running a flower shop or a real estate office. So they got stuck. They'd open the instructions editor, stare at it, and close it. The agent stayed mediocre because the iteration loop we designed required them to be part-time prompt engineers. A few of them just quietly left. That stung, but it taught us the actual problem. What "iteration" actually looked like We started doing the iterations for them, manually. And once we did that a few dozen times, a pattern jumped out. The feedback never led to an abstract change. It was never something that made us "rethink the agent's persona" or "restructure the system prompt." It was tiny, concrete, and tied to a real conversation: "It suggests all of our services, but honestly most customers only care about these three - push those." "It pulled our opening hours from the website and they're just wrong. We changed them months ago." These were one-line corrections. The owner knew ex

Technology companies are extending AI beyond code generation into earlier stages of the software lifecycle, including PRD validation, design inputs, and code review. Initiatives from Uber, DoorDash, and Cloudflare highlight a shift toward AI-driven governance layers that evaluate engineering artifacts before implementation while preserving human oversight across the development pipeline. By Leela Kumili

Branches received exceptions to Hegseth's policy that made the shot optional.

Named Jalapeño, the new processor was designed specifically for the unique needs of OpenAI's inference systems.

OpenAI has just revealed a new "intelligence processor" chip for AI servers made in partnership with Broadcom. The chip, called Jalapeño, is designed to power current and future large language models, according to an announcement on Wednesday. Jalapeño is an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), meaning it's designed for a specific purpose: AI inference. With AI […]

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Quando comecei a trabalhar com tecnologia, há mais de duas décadas, a Inteligência Artificial era algo restrito a laboratórios de pesquisa e ficção científica. Hoje, ela está embutida no aplicativo que recomenda sua próxima série, no e-mail que filtra spam automaticamente e até no GPS que recalcula sua rota em tempo real. A IA deixou de ser promessa para se tornar infraestrutura invisível do cotidiano. Neste artigo, quero ir além do hype e mostrar, com exemplos concretos, como essa tecnologia já transforma a forma como vivemos e trabalhamos. Produtividade pessoal e profissional turbinada O caso de uso mais palpável da IA hoje está na produtividade. Assistentes baseados em modelos de linguagem (LLMs) como ChatGPT, Claude e Gemini reduziram drasticamente o tempo gasto em tarefas que antes consumiam horas: redação de e-mails, geração de relatórios, resumos de reuniões e até depuração de código. Na minha rotina como gestor de TI, integrei essas ferramentas a fluxos de trabalho reais. Por exemplo, utilizo modelos de IA para revisar contratos de smart contracts escritos em Rust para a rede Stellar, identificando padrões de vulnerabilidade antes mesmo da auditoria formal. Não substitui a perícia humana, mas funciona como uma primeira camada de triagem que economiza tempo precioso da equipe. Algumas aplicações práticas que recomendo testar: Transcrição e resumo automático de reuniões com ferramentas como Otter.ai ou Fireflies Geração de documentação técnica a partir de comentários de código Automação de respostas em suporte de primeiro nível via chatbots treinados com a base de conhecimento da empresa O segredo está em tratar a IA como copiloto, nunca como piloto automático. A revisão humana continua indispensável, especialmente em contextos críticos. Saúde, finanças e decisões do dia a dia A IA também opera nos bastidores de decisões que afetam diretamente nossa qualidade de vida. No setor de saúde, algoritmos de visão computacional já auxiliam radiologistas na detecção pr

Three AI stories landed this week that all poke at the same nerve: the images, video, and films we actually look at are getting an AI layer — and the line between "real" and "AI-made" keeps thinning. Quick rundown in the short, then my take below: 1. ChatGPT will start showing real, licensed photos — not AI fakes. OpenAI signed a multi-year display deal with Getty Images, so licensed photography shows up inside ChatGPT's search and discovery. It's display-only — the photos aren't used to train models. The twist I can't get over: AI image generation had nearly wiped Getty out (stock down ~55% on the year), and this one deal sent the shares up ~145%. The thing AI almost broke got rescued by AI. 2. ByteDance — yes, TikTok's parent — teased Seedance 2.5: a full 30-second video generated in a single shot, no stitching, up to 50 reference inputs, 4K. Most tools still cap out around 5–10 seconds, so "30s native, one pass" is a real jump in how usable the output is. Public launch is early July. 3. Google DeepMind is partnering with A24 on AI filmmaking — a ~$75M, non-exclusive deal to co-build Veo-powered tools. Notably Google gets no access to A24's film library or data. A prestige studio building with AI in the open makes the whole "AI in Hollywood" debate a lot less hypothetical. As someone building a daily AI-news pipeline on the side, the Getty one is the story I keep chewing on. So much of the "AI vs creators" fight has been framed as scrape-or-die. A display-licensing deal is a third option — pay to show the real thing, instead of generating a confident fake or quietly training on someone's work. I don't know if it scales, but it's the first move in a while that didn't feel zero-sum. The Seedance + A24 pair points the other way though: generation is getting longer, more controllable, and is walking straight into real production. So we get both at once — more verified real media and more convincing synthetic media, in the same week. Curious where other builders land:

Right out of the box, the new Google Home Speaker passed a couple of important tests. Even with the volume at 100 percent and music blaring out of the speaker, it quickly ducked the audio and listened every time I said "Hey, Google." In fact, in two days of testing, the speaker's three microphones haven't […]

AI has made it easier to produce working software. That part is real. It can write code, draft documents, research a topic, scaffold a prototype, and debug a problem faster than most teams can finish writing a decent ticket. But faster building doesn't automatically mean better product decisions. That's the part I keep coming back to. For decades, software teams optimized around delivery. Requirements, design, development, QA, release. Waterfall softened into Agile. Agile grew into DevOps. The practices changed, but the assumption underneath stayed pretty stable: building software is expensive, so plan carefully before you start. That made sense because, for a long time, it was true. Now that assumption is breaking. AI is doing to software what calculators did to accounting. It isn't eliminating the job. It's moving the job up a level. The syntax, boilerplate, first draft, and some of the debugging are getting offloaded. The work doesn't disappear. The bottleneck moves. Learning is still expensive Here's what didn't get cheaper: understanding what people actually need getting stakeholders aligned deciding what evidence would change your mind putting something real in front of users reading the signal without fooling yourself The old question was: Can we build it fast enough? The new question is: Do we understand the problem well enough? That sounds like a small shift, but it changes the work. It changes what strong engineers spend time on. It changes what product people need from engineering. It changes how teams should define "done." If the code ships but nobody learns anything, did the team actually move forward? Sometimes yes. Often no. Users don't know until they can touch it People are not great at specifying requirements up front. Not because they're difficult. Because they're human. Most of us don't know how we feel about something until we can react to a version of it. A mockup. A prototype. A rough slice. A real workflow with sharp edges. So the fastest pat

TL;DR: An API gateway manages HTTP traffic between services — auth, routing, rate limiting, load balancing for REST and gRPC. An AI gateway manages LLM workloads — token-based rate limiting, model routing, cost attribution, semantic caching, guardrails. Use an API gateway for your microservices. Use an AI gateway for your LLM traffic. Most production teams eventually need both, sitting at different layers. This post walks through exactly where each one fits. When we started adding LLM features to our platform, we already had Kong running for our microservices. The instinct was natural: route the LLM traffic through Kong too. Same auth, same rate limiting, same observability stack. One gateway to rule them all. It worked — for about six months, and only in the sense that requests got through. What it didn't give us was anything useful for actually managing AI workloads. We had no idea what each team was spending on tokens. We had no way to set a budget cap that would fire before the bill arrived. Our rate limits were based on requests per minute, which meant a single request with a 50k token prompt counted the same as one with a 200 token prompt. And when OpenAI had a partial outage, Kong had no concept of "try Anthropic instead" — we just served errors. None of that is a criticism of Kong. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem was us expecting an API gateway to handle a fundamentally different category of infrastructure problem. Here's the precise distinction, and why it matters architecturally. What an API gateway actually does An API gateway is a reverse proxy that sits between client applications and backend services. It handles the cross-cutting concerns of service-to-service HTTP communication: authentication, authorization, rate limiting, load balancing, SSL termination, request transformation, and routing based on URL paths or headers. A typical request flow through an API gateway: Client sends a request to the gateway endpoint Gateway ve

The US government is reportedly asking Meta to share its AI models for review, in the midst of growing security and safety concerns over the technology.

The biggest Switch 2 exclusives so far have largely been about scale. Mario Kart World introduced a wide open continent to race across, Donkey Kong Bananza let you smash basically everything around you, and Pokopia brought an expansive Minecraft-style creative experience to the Pokémon universe. Star Fox is different. A remake of a Nintendo 64 […]

Naomi Saphra discusses 5 rules governing language model behavior, breaking down why LLMs act like populations rather than individuals. She explains how tokenization creates strange semantic blind spots and highlights the mechanics of sycophancy, showing how models leverage subtle data associations to match user biases and demographics - even guessing political views based on favorite sports teams. By Naomi Saphra

At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis. Details : The _index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it is inside a comment, it does not affect JavaScript execution. The runtime skips it. The real malware begins after the comment with a try{eval(…)} wrapper around a large character-code array and a ROT-style substitution function. This header appears designed for AI-mediated analysis, not for Node, Bun, or Python. It attempts to derail scanners or analyst copilots that feed the beginning of a file to a language model without clearly isolating the content as untrusted data. In weak pipelines, this can cause refusal behavior, prompt confusion, context pollution, or premature classification before the scanner reaches the actual malware...

Why I Stopped Picking AI Models by Hype and Started Picking by Speed Three months ago I almost lost a $14,000 retainer because my chatbot felt sluggish. The client didn't say "your TTFT is too high." They said "it feels dumb." That's freelancer code for "users are bouncing and I'm about to find someone else." I rebuilt that bot in a weekend using a model I'd never even heard of six weeks earlier, dropped average response time from 1.4 seconds to under 300ms, and the client renewed for another six months. That single pivot paid for my rent. So I went down a rabbit hole. I ran the same speed test on every model I could get my hands on through Global API's unified endpoint. Fifteen models. Same prompt. Same regions. Ten iterations each. I'm writing this up because if you're billing by the hour or running a side hustle on a shoestring, speed isn't a vanity metric — it's a profit metric. Let me show you what I found. The Setup (How I Actually Ran the Tests) I'm not a researcher with a rack of GPUs. I'm a guy with a M2 MacBook, a $19/mo Hetzner box, and a stopwatch in the form of Python's time.perf_counter() . Here's how I kept it honest. Date window: All tests run on May 20, 2026 Regions tested: US East (Ohio) and Asia (Singapore) Prompt used: "Explain recursion in 200 words" — boring on purpose, because boring prompts are where most apps actually live Output length: Roughly 150 tokens per run Iterations: 10 runs per model per region, average recorded Streaming: Yes, SSE throughout Endpoint: Global API at https://global-apis.com/v1 I measured two things: TTFT (time to first token — the lag before the user sees anything move) and sustained tokens per second (how fast the words actually arrive after that). Both matter. TTFT is the "is this thing broken?" feeling. Tokens per second is the "is this thing fast?" feeling. Here's the script I used, stripped down to the essentials: import time import requests from statistics import mean API_KEY = " your-global-api-key " BASE_URL

Building point-in-time correct, production-grade feature pipelines — from raw Kafka events to online feature serving in milliseconds, using Spark Structured Streaming and the Databricks Feature Store. Table of Contents The Feature Engineering Problem Architecture Overview Feature Store Concepts: ERD Environment Setup Streaming Feature Pipeline Point-in-Time Correct Training Dataset Generation Writing Features to the Online Store Serving Features at Inference Time Feature Table Reference References The Feature Engineering Problem Feature engineering is where most ML projects silently fail in production. Not because the model is wrong — but because the features the model sees at training time are different from the features it sees at inference time . This is called training-serving skew , and it's the #1 silent killer of ML systems. Three specific failure modes cause it: Online/offline inconsistency — the batch pipeline that computes training features uses different logic than the real-time service that computes inference features Data leakage — training features accidentally include information from the future (e.g. joining on a label that was created after the event) Feature staleness — a model trained on 30-day rolling averages is served features that are 6 hours stale because the pipeline backfills are slow The Databricks Feature Store — now part of Unity Catalog as Feature Engineering in Unity Catalog — solves all three by: Storing feature computation logic alongside the data (no drift between training and serving) Enforcing point-in-time lookups during training dataset creation Providing a unified API for both batch offline reads and low-latency online reads Architecture Overview Feature Store Concepts: ERD Understanding the data model behind the Feature Store is essential for designing correct pipelines. Here's how the entities relate: The critical relationship: a Model Version is bound to a Training Set , which records exactly which feature tables and which p

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard for connecting AI apps to tools and data sources. A useful way to think about it is as a USB-C port for AI: one standard interface that lets different models plug into different capabilities without custom glue code for every integration. In this project, we combine MCP, Spring AI, and Google Gemini to build a chat app that can answer weather questions using real tools instead of hallucinating. The system has three parts: MCP tool server - a Spring Boot service that exposes weather and geocoding tools AI chat agent - a Spring Boot service that uses Spring AI + Gemini and calls MCP tools when needed React chat UI - a lightweight frontend for sending messages and rendering replies The result is a small but realistic architecture you can extend into a production assistant. Architecture User (Browser:3000) | POST /api/chat v AI Agent (Spring:7171) -- MCP / Streamable HTTP --> MCP Server (Spring:7170) | | | Google Gemini | Bright Sky API (weather) | | OpenStreetMap Nominatim (geocoding) v v Chat response Tool execution The full source code is available on GitHub . 1. The MCP Tool Server The tool server is a Spring Boot application that exposes MCP tools through Spring AI's annotation scanner. It runs on port 7170 and uses Streamable HTTP for transport. Dependencies <dependency> <groupId> org.springframework.ai </groupId> <artifactId> spring-ai-starter-mcp-server-webmvc </artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId> org.springframework.boot </groupId> <artifactId> spring-boot-starter-web </artifactId> </dependency> Defining tools With Spring AI, a tool is just a Spring bean method annotated with @McpTool : @Component public class WeatherTool { private final WeatherToolService weatherToolService ; public WeatherTool ( WeatherToolService weatherToolService ) { this . weatherToolService = weatherToolService ; } @McpTool ( name = "get_current_weather" , description = "Get current weather by dwd_station_id or by lat/lon" ) p

The Complete Guide to OpenAI-Compatible APIs for Chinese LLMs One of the smartest decisions OpenAI made was making their API the de facto standard for LLM interaction. The openai Python package, the ChatCompletion interface, and the message format have become the HTTP of AI — nearly every major model provider now supports some form of OpenAI compatibility. This means you can swap models without changing your code. Here's how to use that to access China's best LLMs. The OpenAI SDK Pattern If you've used OpenAI's API, you already know the pattern: from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI ( api_key = " sk-... " ) response = client . chat . completions . create ( model = " gpt-4o " , messages = [{ " role " : " user " , " content " : " Hello! " }] ) To access Chinese models through an OpenAI-compatible gateway, you change exactly two things : client = OpenAI ( base_url = " https://api.tokenmaster.com/v1 " , # ← Changed api_key = " tm-... " # ← Changed ) Everything else stays the same. The same SDK, the same method calls, the same message format. What This Unlocks By switching to an OpenAI-compatible gateway for Chinese models, you gain access to: Model Family Top Models Competitive Advantage OpenAI-Compatible DeepSeek V4-Pro, V4 Flash, Coder Coding, math, reasoning ✅ Qwen (Alibaba) 3.7-Max, 3.5-Flash Long context (256K), multilingual ✅ GLM (ZhipuAI) 4.5, 4-Flash Reasoning, structured output ✅ Baichuan Baichuan 4 Chinese content generation ✅ All accessible through the same SDK, the same API key, the same base URL. Migration Guide Step 1: Get Your Gateway Key Sign up at an OpenAI-compatible gateway for Chinese models. Most offer free trial credits: # I use TokenMaster # Sign up at https://api.tokenmaster.com # Get your API key from the dashboard Step 2: Update Your Client Instantiation Python: # Before: OpenAI only import os from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI ( api_key = os . getenv ( " OPENAI_API_KEY " )) # After: Multi-model access TM_KEY = os . getenv ( " TOKENM

TL;DR An AI gateway is a middleware layer between your application code and your LLM providers - it centralises routing, auth, rate limiting, cost tracking, and guardrails in one place You probably don't think you need one until something specific breaks: a runaway cost spike, a failed model causing silent errors, a security audit you can't pass We went from scattered SDKs and shared API keys to a gateway-first setup over about three months - this post covers what changed and what we'd do differently Six months ago we had what I'd describe as a functional mess. We were running three LLM providers - OpenAI for our customer-facing chat, Anthropic for internal document summarisation, and a self-hosted Llama model for batch classification jobs. Each had its own SDK. Each had its own API key, living in .env files on whoever's machine had last run that service. Each had its own rate limiting logic, copy-pasted between services with slight variations. It worked, in the way that things work when nobody has had a bad enough incident yet. The incident arrived on a Tuesday. A background job that was supposed to run once a week got accidentally scheduled to run every minute. It was calling GPT-4o. We noticed when the Slack alert fired at 2am about an unusual credit card charge. By the time someone killed the job, we'd burned through $340 in about four hours. The API key had no spending limit. There was no alerting on token usage. The job had no rate limiting. All three of those gaps were things we knew about and hadn't prioritised. That week, we started properly looking at AI gateways. What an AI gateway actually is? The simplest definition: an AI gateway is a middleware layer that sits between your application code and your LLM providers. All your LLM requests go through it, and it handles the cross-cutting concerns that you'd otherwise have to re-implement in every service: routing, authentication, rate limiting, cost tracking, caching, fallbacks, guardrails. The analogy that