InfoWorld

Databricks and Snowflake are at it again, and the battleground is now SQL-based document parsing. In an intensifying race to dominate enterprise AI workloads with agent-driven automation, Databricks has added SQL-based AI parsing capabilities to its Agent Bricks framework, just days after Snowflake introduced a similar ability inside its Intelligence platform. The new abilities from Snowflake and…

OpenAI has introduced GPT-5.1, an update to its GPT-5 model, aiming to deliver faster responses, improved reasoning, and more flexible conversational controls as the company works to refine its ChatGPT experience for both consumer and enterprise users. The release includes new Instant and Thinking variants designed to offer more adaptive reasoning and a broader range of personalization options, t…

You can think of a Java stream as a pipeline through which data flows. Instead of manually writing loops and conditionals to process a list, you tell Java what should happen to each element, and the Java Stream API takes care of how it happens internally. A Java stream doesn’t hold data. Instead, it operates on an existing data source such as a List , Set , Map , or array. The stream applies a se…

In January 2025, OpenAI released Operator , the first large-scale agent powered by a computer-use model to control its own browser. The demo was impressive: an AI moving the mouse, clicking buttons, and performing actions like a human would. It was received as a major step toward general-purpose autonomy. But just eight months later, in August, OpenAI quietly discontinued Operator and rolled it i…

The move to building and training AI models at scale has had interesting second-order effects; one of the most important is improving how we run and manage massively distributed computing applications. AI training and inferencing both require huge distributed applications to build and refine the models that are at the heart of modern machine learning systems . As Brendan Burns, Microsoft CVP Azur…

Red Hat OpenShift 4.20 , the latest version of Red Hat’s Kubernetes -based hybrid cloud application platform, is now available. The Red Hat OpenShift 4.20 release features capabilities for accelerating AI workloads and strengthening security, according to Red Hat. Introduced November 11, OpenShift 4.20 can be accessed from the Red Hat OpenShift product page . For AI, new capabilities are designed…

Visual Studio 2026, the latest version of Microsoft’s signature IDE, is now generally available. Touted as an “AI-native intelligent development environment,” the IDE also features faster startup and improved user experience. Announced November 11 , the update can be downloaded from the Visual Studio homepage . Visual Studio 2026 uses AI intelligence for such things as complex debugging, performa…

A malicious npm package named “@acitons/artifact” was found impersonating the legitimate “@actions/artifact” module, directly targeting the CI/CD pipelines within GitHub Actions workflows. According to Veracode findings, the package was uploaded on November 7 and was designed to trigger during the build process of GitHub-owned repositories. Once executed inside a CI/CD runner, the payload capture…

Meta researchers have unveiled a new reinforcement learning framework called SPICE (Self-Play in Corpus Environments) that enables large language models (LLMs) to improve their reasoning skills without human supervision. Developed with the National University of Singapore, SPICE trains a single model to act both as a Challenger, which generates complex, document-based problems, and a Reasoner, wh…

Node.js is a popular and versatile cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment. Node was the first runtime to allow developers to run JavaScript outside the browser, opening a new world of possibilities in server-side JavaScript . Its ease of use, massive ecosystem and performance characteristics have continued to secure its place as one of the most important technologies of the modern web. Any…

When the Mojo language first appeared, it was promoted as being the best of two worlds, bringing the ease of use and clear syntax of Python , along with the speed and memory safety of Rust . For some time, the only way to evaluate those claims was using an online notebook environment that ran Mojo code on remote servers. More recently, the Mojo compiler has been released as a standalone download …

The economics of the software development business have always been kind of weird. Some things with software scale spectacularly, and some things scale very poorly. Pricing is always a challenge; it’s hard to know when it is right. Even what, exactly, is being sold has always puzzled the best thinkers in the software business. And of course, open-source software throws a monkey wrench into the wh…

Snowflake has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire San Francisco-headquartered startup Datometry, for an undisclosed sum, to bolster SnowConvert AI, one of its existing set of migration tools. SnowConvert AI , which is powered by Snowflake’s Cortex AI Agents , is a free product that was introduced earlier this year to help enterprises reduce the complexity and time required to migrate t…

Microsoft has released .NET 10, a major update of its software development platform. .NET 10 features a range of improvements including enhancements for AI, new cryptography APIs, runtime improvements, and the C# 14 language with field-backed properties. .NET 10 is being touted by Microsoft as the most performant release of .NET yet, with improvements across the runtime, workloads, and languages.…

For decades, the database has been the silent partner of commerce—a trusted, passive ledger. It was the system of record, the immutable vault that ensured every action had an equal, auditable reaction. This model underwrote the entire global economy. But that era of predictable, human-initiated transactions is over. We are entering the agentic era. A new class of autonomous agents —systems that p…