Techmeme: A look at seven rebuttals to Apple's paper on limitations of Large Reasoning Models, and why none make a compelling case (Gary Marcus/Marcus on AI)

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A look at seven rebuttals to Apple's paper on limitations of Large Reasoning Models, and why none make a compelling case — Also: another paper that seals the deal — The Apple paper on limitations in the “reasoning” of Large Reasoning Models, which raised challenges for the latest scaling hypothesis, has clearly touched a nerve.

More: Apple Machine Learning …, VentureBeat, 9to5Mac, and arXiv.org e-Print archive

Bluesky: @onisillos and @its-tom-williams. X: @garymarcus

Wall Street Journal:

How Chinese AI companies bypass US chip restrictions by transporting hard drives with AI training data to Malaysian data centers housing advanced Nvidia chips — Engineers carry data to countries where Nvidia chips are available, frustrating Washington's aims

More: Tom's Hardware. Mastodon: @remixtures@tldr.nettime.org. Forums: r/technology and Slashdot

Aarian Marshall / Wired:

Waymo temporarily limits service in SF, Austin, and Atlanta, and stops service in LA, as US cities prepare for protests against federal immigration policies — A week after five robot cars were burned in Los Angeles, the Google sister company isn't taking risks.

More: PCMag, San Francisco Chronicle, and Texas Public Radio

Forums: r/waymo and r/sanfrancisco

Salt Lake Tribune:

Salt Lake City, which faces a staffing shortfall, plans to implement AI-assisted 911 call triaging to handle ~30% of about 450K non-emergency calls per year — Move to artificial intelligence for some nonemergency calls is expected to help human responders focus on the urgent ones.

Mastodon: @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

Reuters:

Sources: Google, Scale AI's largest customer, plans to cut ties with the company after the Meta deal; Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI also plan to step back — Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google, the largest customer of Scale AI, plans to cut ties with Scale after news broke that rival Meta (META.O) …

Kate Clark / Bloomberg:

Source: Accel, which owns 18.5% of Scale AI after investing a total of ~$350M, expects to gain over $2.5B from Meta's $14.3B investment in the startup

More: Benzinga, Scale AI, TechCrunch, Accel, Verdict, and MarketWatch

X: @accel, @daniel_levine, @everettrandle, and @garrytan

Ira Boudway / Bloomberg:

A profile of Chess.com, which has popularized online chess among pro athletes, as CEO Erik Allebest says the site has over $100M in annual revenue and 35M MAUs — Social media is a minefield for pro sports players. But online chess offers rankings, instant analysis, wholesome interactions and few trolls.

Chris Metinko / Axios:

Horizon3.ai, whose AI-based penetration testing platform NodeZero helps find and exploit attack paths in production systems, raised a $100M Series D led by NEA — Autonomous security startup Horizon3.ai locked up a $100 million Series D led by NEA, co-founder and CEO Snehal Antani tells Axios Pro.

More: Business Wire, VC News Daily, FinSMEs, FinTech Global, The Stack, and SiliconANGLE

LinkedIn: Horizon3.ai and Ilya Kirnos

Samantha Stokes / Business Insider:

A look at 10 AI agent startups from YC's first-ever spring Demo Day; the batch included 144 companies, 70 of which focused on agentic AI — - Y Combinator's spring 2025 batch featured 70 startups focused on agentic AI. — The intensive, three-month accelerator program invests $500,000 in each selected startup.

More: Forbes and TechCrunch. Forums: Hacker News

Austin Carr / Bloomberg:

As the world moves toward digital artificiality, Airbnb's redesign and Apple's Liquid Glass UI bring back skeuomorphism and dimensionality to digital interfaces — From Airbnb's new app icons to Apple's “Liquid Glass” design, skeuomorphism is back and everything in the digital world has dimensionality again.

Threads: @asallen. X: @austincarr, @asallen, and @austincarr. Forums: r/technology

Rachyl Jones / Semafor:

AIM Intelligent Machines, which retrofits heavy construction equipment to operate autonomously, raised $50M from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and others — THE SCOOP — Tech startup AIM Intelligent Machines, which retrofits heavy construction equipment to operate autonomously …

More: AIM Intelligent Machines, GeekWire, Seattle Business Journal, and 425 Business

X: @scale_earth and @khoslaventures. LinkedIn: AIM

Sean Michael Kerner / Network World:

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium, whose members include AMD, Cisco, HPE, and Intel, publishes its 1.0 specification for enhancing Ethernet standards for AI and HPC — The UEC 1.0 specification includes a modern RDMA approach, new transport protocols, and congestion control mechanisms designed for AI and HPC requirements.

More: SemiAnalysis, Tom's Hardware, Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Phoronix, Ultra Ethernet Consortium, and Ultra Ethernet Consortium. X: @techjournalist

Josh Sisco / Bloomberg:

Sources: the US DOJ is reviewing whether Google's planned $32B acquisition of cybersecurity company Wiz would illegally limit competition in the market — Justice Department antitrust enforcers are reviewing whether Google's planned $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity company Wiz Inc …

More: Reuters and Cryptopolitan

Matt O'Brien / Associated Press:

Harvard releases Institutional Books 1.0, a dataset for AI researchers with 242B tokens, from 394M scanned pages and 983K public domain books in 254 languages — Everything ever said on the internet was just the start of teaching artificial intelligence about humanity.

More: Institutional Books on Hugging Face, Institutional Data Initiative, Institutional Data Initiative, Institutional Books on Hugging Face, Institutional Books on Hugging Face, and Institutional Data Initiative on GitHub

Bluesky: @jmberger.com and @tedunderwood.me. X: @instdin

LinkedIn: Matt O'Brien and Institutional Data Initiative …

Dominic-Madori Davis / TechCrunch:

Canary, which offers hotel guest management tools, raised an $80M Series D led by Brighton Park Capital, valuing the company at about $600M — Canary, the hotel guest management platform, announced Thursday the raise of an $80 million Series D in a round led by Brighton Park Capital.

More: The American Bazaar, Canary Technologies, Hotel Dive, FinSMEs, and Hospitality Net. X: @dflieb

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