Maia comes equipped with over 100 billion transistors, delivering over 10 petaflops in 4-bit precision and approximately 5 petaflops of 8-bit performance — a substantial increase over its predecessor.

Cutting out the middle man?

Eight LinkedIn Learning courses to build AI skills in 2026, from generative AI and ethics to agents, productivity, presentations, and engineering.

The post 8 Best LinkedIn AI Courses and Certifications to Take in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Few believe Meta will abandon VR entirely, but many see an unmistakable pivot as resources move toward AI systems and devices such as smart glasses.

The post Meta’s Reality Labs Cuts Add to Fears of ‘VR Winter’ appeared first on TechRepublic.

Eight LinkedIn Learning courses to build AI skills in 2026, from generative AI and ethics to agents, productivity, presentations, and engineering.

The post 8 Best LinkedIn AI Courses and Certifications to Take in 2026 appeared first on TechRepublic.

Few believe Meta will abandon VR entirely, but many see an unmistakable pivot as resources move toward AI systems and devices such as smart glasses.

The post Meta’s Reality Labs Cuts Add to Fears of ‘VR Winter’ appeared first on TechRepublic.

Cisco 2026 Data and Privacy Benchmark Study shares insights into how privacy unlocks competitive advantage for business growth and builds trust in AI era.

Understanding how threat hunting differs from reactive security provides a deeper understanding of the role, while hinting at how it will evolve in the future.

The post Cyber Insights 2026: Threat Hunting in an Age of Automation and AI appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Over the past years, the author of the cURL project, [Daniel Stenberg], has repeatedly complained about the increasingly poor quality of bug reports filed due to LLM chatbot-induced confabulations, also known as ‘AI slop’. This has now led the project to suspend its bug bounty program starting February 1, 2026.

Examples of such slop are provided by [Daniel] in a GitHub gist, which covers a wide range of very intimidating-looking vulnerabilities and seemingly clear exploits. Except that none of them are vulnerabilities when actually examined by a knowledgeable developer. Each is a lengthy word salad that an LLM churned out in seconds, yet which takes a human significantly longer to parse before dealing with the typical diatribe from the submitter.

Although there are undoubtedly still valid reports coming in, the truth of the matter is that the ease with which bogus reports can be generated by anyone who has access to an LLM chatbot and some spare time has completely flooded the bug bounty system and is overwhelming the very human developers who have to dig through the proverbial midden to find that one diamond ring.

We have mentioned before how troubled bounty programs are for open source, and how projects like Mesa have already had to fight off AI slop incidents from people with zero understanding of software development.

A flood of slop has arrived in science, and everyone has to get less lazy. But does 2026 feel like a time when anyone, anywhere, is getting less lazy?

If you’re reading this, you probably have some fondness for human-crafted language. After all, you’ve taken the time to navigate to Hackaday and read this, rather than ask your favoured LLM to trawl the web and summarize what it finds for you. Perhaps you have no such pro-biological bias, and you just don’t know how to set up the stochastic parrot feed. If that’s the case, buckle up, because [Rafael Ben-Ari] has an article on how you can replace us with a suite of LLM agents.

He actually has two: a tech news feed, focused on the AI industry, and a retrocomputing paper based on SimCity 2000’s internal newspaper. Everything in both those papers is AI-generated; specifically, he’s using opencode to manage a whole dogpen of AI agents that serve as both reporters and editors, each in their own little sandbox.

Using opencode like this lets him vary the model by agent, potentially handing some tasks to small, locally-run models to save tokens for the more computationally-intensive tasks. It also allows each task to be assigned to a different model if so desired. With the right prompting, you could produce a niche publication with exactly the topics that interest you, and none of the ones that don’t.  In theory, you could take this toolkit — the implementation of which [Rafael] has shared on GitHub — to replace your daily dose of Hackaday, but we really hope you don’t. We’d miss you.

That’s news covered, and we’ve already seen the weather reported by “AI”— now we just need an automatically-written sports section and some AI-generated funny papers.  That’d be the whole newspaper. If only you could trust it.

Story via reddit.

Brazilian researchers developed an AI system that analyzes WhatsApp audio messages to identify depression, showing high accuracy and potential for low-cost, real-world mental health screening.

The post Your WhatsApp voice notes could help screen for early signs of depression appeared first on Digital Trends.

Mercor’s APEX-Agents benchmark finds top AI models score under 25% accuracy on realistic consulting, legal, and finance tasks.

The post New study shows AI isn’t ready for office work appeared first on Digital Trends.

Leidos is a prolific government contractor with a "strong relationship with DHS."

It's not perfect, but it's one tool to help users spot AI manipulation.

A Google study finds advanced AI models mimic collective human intelligence by using internal debates and diverse reasoning paths, reshaping how future AI systems may be designed.

The post Google Research suggests AI models like DeepSeek exhibit collective intelligence patterns appeared first on Digital Trends.

Federal employees received high marks for their work. At the same time, the public also wants more from them, and federal agencies more broadly, especially around technology.

These are among the top findings of a survey of a thousand likely voters from last August by the Center for Accountability, Modernization and Innovation (CAMI).

Stan Soloway, the chairman of the board for CAMI, said the findings demonstrate at least two significant issues for federal executives to consider.

“It very clear to us from the survey was that public actually has faith, to a certain extent, in public employees. The public also fully recognizes that the system itself is not serving them well,” Soloway said on Ask the CIO. “We found well over half of the folks that were surveyed said that they didn’t believe that government services are efficient. We found just under half of respondents had a favorable impression of government workers. And I think this is very much I respect my local civil servant because I know what they do, but I have a lot of skepticism about government writ large.”

CAMI, a non-partisan think tank, found that when it comes to government workers:

• 47% favorable vs 38% unfavorable toward government workers (+9% net)
• Self-identified very conservative voters showed strong support (+30% net)
• African Americans showed the highest favorability (+31% net)
• Self-identified independents are the exception, showing negative views (-14% net)

At the same time, when it comes to government services, CAMI found 54% of the respondents believe agencies aren’t as efficient or as timely as they should be.

John Faso, a former Republican congressman from New York and a senior advisor for CAMI, said the call for more efficiencies and timeliness from citizens echoes a long-time goal of bringing federal agencies closer to the private sector.

“People, and we see this in the survey, look at what government provides and how they provide it, and then to what they’re maybe accustomed to in private sector economy,” Faso said. “Amazon is a prime example. You can sit home and order something, a food product, an item of clothing or something else you want for your house or your family, and oftentimes it’s there within a day or two. People are accustomed to getting that kind of service. People have an expectation that the government can do that. I think government is lagging, obviously, but it’s catching up, and it needs to catch up fast.”

Faso said it’s clear that a solid percentage of the reason for why the government is inefficient comes back to Congress. But at the same time, the CAMI survey demonstrated that there are things federal executives could do to address many of these long-standing challenges.

CAMI says respondents supported several changes to improve timely and efficient delivery of benefits:

• 40% preferred hiring more government workers
• 34% preferred partnering with outside organizations
• Those self-identified as very liberal voters strongly favored more workers (+32% net)
• Those identified as somewhat conservative voters prefer outside partnerships (-20% net)
• Older voters (55+) preferred outside partnerships

“Whether it’s the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Medicaid and Medicare, the feds set all the rules for the administration and governance of the programs. So the first question you have to ask is, what is the federal role?” Soloway said. “Even though we have now shifted administrative responsibility for many programs to the states and to some cases, the counties, and reduced by 50% the financial support for administration of these programs, while the states have a lot to figure out and are somewhat panicked about it, because it’s a huge lift. The feds can’t just walk away. This is where we have issues of policy changes that are needed at the federal level, which we can talk about some of the ones that are desperately needed to give the states kind of the flexibility to innovate.”

Soloway added this also means agencies have to break down long-established siloes both around data and processes.

The Trump administration, for example, has prioritized data sharing across the government, especially to combat concerns around fraud. The Office of Management and Budget said in July it was supercharging the Do Not Pay list by removing the barriers to governmentwide data sharing.

Soloway said this is a prime example of where the private sector has figured out how to get different parts of their organization to talk to each other and where the government is lagging.

“What is the federal role in helping to break down the silos and integrate applications, and to the certain extent help with the administration of programs with like beneficiaries? The data is pretty clear that there’s a lot of commonality across multiple programs, and when you think about the number of different departments and the bureaucracy that actually control those programs, there’s got to be leadership at the federal level, both on technology and to expand process transformation, otherwise you’re not going to solve the problem,” he said. “The second thing is when we talk about issues like program integrity, there are ways you can combat fraud and also protect the beneficiaries. But too often, the conversations are either/or any effort to combat fraud is seen as an effort to take eligible people off the rolls. Every effort to protect eligible people on the rolls is seen as just feeding into that so that’s where the federal leadership, and some of that is in technology, some of it’s in policy. Some of it’s going to be in resources, because it requires investments in technology across the board, state and federal.”

Respondents say technology can play a bigger role in improving the delivery of federal services.

CAMI says respondents offered strong support for using AI to improve government service delivery:

• 48% support vs 29% oppose using AI tools (net +19%)
• Self-identified republicans show stronger support than democrats (+36% vs +7% net)
• Men are significantly more supportive than women (+35% vs +3% net)
• Support is strongest among middle-aged voters (30-44: +40% net)

Soloway said CAMI is sharing its survey findings with both Congress and the executive branch.

“We’re trying to get the conversations going and get the information to the right people. When we do that, we find, by and large, on both sides, there’s a lot of support to do stuff. The question is going to really be, where’s the leadership going to come from that will have the enough credibility on both sides to push this ball forward?” Soloway said.

Faso added state governments also must play a big role in improving program delivery.

“You have cost sharing between the federal and state governments, and you have cost sharing in terms of the administrative burden to implement these programs. I think a lot of governors, frankly, are now really looking at themselves and saying, ‘How am I going to implement this?’” he said. “How do I collaborate with the federal government to make sure that we’re all enrolling in the same direction in terms of implementing these requirements.”

The post AI can improve federal service delivery, citizen survey says first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Jan. 20–23 recap: Code went corporeal as Big Tech bet on bodies, and your weekend chores suddenly look negotiable.

The post Daily Tech Insider Spotlights the Week Silicon Sprouted Legs and Lanyards appeared first on TechRepublic.

LLMs have their limits.

Accreditation: Training Certificate for 1 CPE*

AI tools promise faster threat detection, reduced analyst workload and greater resilience, but government agencies often lack clear frameworks for setting objectives or assessing impact.

In this webinar, government and industry experts explore how federal organizations can establish mission-aligned goals for AI systems, measure REAL cybersecurity outcomes and track effectiveness over time.

Learning objectives:

• Identifying needs and setting goals to make sure mission outcomes are driving AI efforts
• Measuring and understanding progress and performance of AI-oriented goals
• Linking the building blocks and best practices of successful programs that enable ROI

Complimentary Registration
Please register using the form on this page. Participants can earn 1 CPE credit in Information Technology. To receive CPE credit you must arrive on time and participate in the attendance surveys throughout the webinar. In accordance with the standards of the National Registry of CPE Sponsors, 50 minutes equals 1 CPE. For more information regarding complaint and program cancellation policies, please contact FederalNewsNetwork.com at (202) 895-5023. Due to this program being offered free of charge, there will be no refunds issued.

Additional Information
Prerequisites and Advance Preparation: Basic experience in federal IT recommended, but not required.
Program Level: Beginner
Delivery Method: Group Internet-Based Training

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The post Billington CyberSecurity Cyber and AI Outlook Series Episode 5: ROI for AI: Setting Goals and Tracking Outcomes first appeared on Federal News Network.

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