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Build your own low-level game engine in Metal! Metal is a unified application programming interface (API) for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. It’s unified because it applies to both 3D graphics and data-parallel computation paradigms. Metal is a low-level API because it provides programmers near-direct access to the GPU. Finally, Metal is a low-overhead API because it reduces the central processing unit (CPU) cost by multi-threading and pre-compiling of resources. But beyond the technical definition, Metal is the most appropriate way to use the GPU’s parallel processing power to visualize data or solve numerical challenges. It’s also tailored to…

Explore Mistral Large 3 in Azure—open-source, long-context, multimodal AI built for reliable enterprise workloads. Enterprises today are embracing open-weight models for their transparency, flexibility, and ability to run across a broad range of deployment architectures. As the number of open models grows, the bar for reliability, instruction-following quality, multimodal reasoning, and long-context performance continues to rise.  Today, we’re excited to announce that Mistral Large 3 is now available in Azure, bringing one of the strongest open-weight, Apache-licensed frontier models to the Microsoft Cloud.  Mistral Large 3 delivers frontier-class capabilities with open-source flexibility, making it a powerful option for organizations building production assistants, retrieval-augmented applications, agentic systems, and multimodal…

Eating your veggies has never been easier with countertop kitchen devices like Instant Pots. Even experts agree. Chef Vahista Ussery, a registered dietitian nutritionist and founder of the culinary education company To Taste, tells CNET that, compared to traditional stovetop steaming, Instant Pots offer a more set-it-and-forget-it approach. This makes them ideal for novice cooks or those who are multitasking in the kitchen. “Set it and forget it” also sounds wonderful for cooking after a long, busy day.But how exactly should you be steaming your vegetables in an Instant Pot, especially to ensure you’re not losing an abundance of nutrients in…

Scientists have unveiled a technique that uses ‘molecular antennas’ to direct electrical energy into insulating nanoparticles. This approach creates a new family of ultra-pure near-infrared LEDs that could be used in medical diagnostics, optical communication systems, and sensitive detectors. Researchers at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge have discovered how to drive electrical current into materials that normally do not conduct, a feat previously thought impossible under normal conditions. By attaching carefully chosen organic molecules that act like tiny antennas, they have built the first light-emitting diodes (LEDs) from insulating nanoparticles. Their work, reported in Nature, points toward a new…

Mastodon is a free, open-source social networking service that is decentralized and distributed. It was created in 2016 as an alternative to centralized social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. One of the key features of Mastodon is the use of the WebFinger protocol, which allows users to discover and access information about other users on the Mastodon network. WebFinger is a simple HTTP-based protocol that enables a user to discover information about other users or resources on the internet by using their email address or other identifying information. The WebFinger protocol is important for Mastodon because…

(As part of this series, join MIT Technology Review’s editor in chief, Mat Honan, and editor at large, David Rotman, for an exclusive conversation with Financial Times columnist Richard Waters on how AI is reshaping the global economy. Live on Tuesday, December 9 at 1:00 p.m. ET. This is a subscriber-only event and you can sign up here.) Will Douglas Heaven writes:  Every time I’m asked what’s coming next, I get a Luke Haines song stuck in my head: “Please don’t ask me about the future / I am not a fortune teller.” But here goes. What will things be…

Global talent models are being tested by a complex web of policy shifts and geopolitical volatility. Visa reforms, contractor reclassification, tariff disputes, and regional conflicts are redefining how and where organizations access talent. From tightening H-1B scrutiny in the United States to Brazil’s evolving labor rules and renewed trade tensions across major economies, disruption has become the backdrop of global workforce planning. The question for organizations is no longer whether uncertainty will persist but how prepared their talent management models are to absorb it. The new reality: Policy and geopolitical uncertainty Across geographies, governments are reshaping labor and trade frameworks…

In this article, you will learn practical prompt-engineering patterns that make large language models useful and reliable for time series analysis and forecasting. Topics we will cover include: How to frame temporal context and extract useful signals How to combine LLM reasoning with classical statistical models How to structure data and prompts for forecasting, anomalies, and domain constraints Without further delay, let’s begin. Prompt Engineering for Time Series AnalysisImage by Editor Introduction Strange as it may sound, large language models (LLMs) can be leveraged for data analysis tasks, including specific scenarios such as time series analysis. The key is to…

We are extending Azure public regions with options that adapt to our customers’ evolving business requirements without forcing trade-offs. Organizations running mission‑critical workloads operate under stricter standards because system failures can often affect people and business operations at scale. They must ensure control, resilience, and operational autonomy such that innovation does not compromise governance. They need agility that also maintains continuity and preserves standards compliance, so they can get the most out of AI, scalable compute, and advanced analytics on their terms. For example, manufacturing plants need assembly lines to continue to operate during network outages, and healthcare providers need…

The Amazon EMR runtime for Apache Spark is a performance-optimized runtime for Apache Spark that is 100% API compatible with open source Apache Spark. With Amazon EMR release 7.9.0, the EMR runtime for Apache Spark introduces significant performance improvements for encrypted workloads, supporting Spark version 3.5.5. For compliance and security requirements, many customers need to enable Apache Spark’s local storage encryption (spark.io.encryption.enabled = true) in addition to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) encryption (such as server-side encryption (SSE) or AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS)). This feature encrypts shuffle files, cached data, and other intermediate data written to local…