InfoWorld

Microsoft and Google are joining a project to create an open specification for exchanging semantic models across data, analytics, and AI platforms. The project already has the backing of over 60 companies including Databricks, Informatica, Mistral AI, Nvidia, Oracle, Salesforce, and Snowflake. Their support for Ossie makes it a little more likely that future analytics platforms will be interopera…

Google has unveiled a new frontier AI model after months of delay. Gemini 4 Argon is designed to handle complex, long-horizon workloads spanning software engineering, enterprise knowledge work such as legal and financial analysis, and cybersecurity. But only a few organizations can get their hands on it for now. Argon is “rolling out to a set of trusted cyber defenders through our Fairwind Progra…

After many years of watching how Microsoft develops platforms and rolls out technologies to external users, one thing is clear: anything that is important to Microsoft internally quickly becomes important to anyone building on top of Windows or Azure. The transition from internal to external tooling invariably takes the form of new features in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code . Often these ca…

In most companies, the struggle to answer a new question fast has nothing to do with a lack of data. The problem is a lack of semantics. Or to put it another way, a lack of agreement about what the data means . Suppose a CFO wants to generate a new report on revenue by customer segment. It sounds simple, but in practice, for the employees tasked with executing the CFO’s directive, it means a mult…

OpenAI says true agentic AI has finally arrived, pushing beyond the trivial capabilities of early-stage virtual assistants. This week at OpenAI Dev Day , the company introduced Dots, which CEO Sam Altman described as “remarkably capable, always-on” agents powered by GPT‑6 Astra. Dots have their own cloud computer, can be accessed in ChatGPT, Slack, or Teams, and plug into more than 4,000 apps bas…

As enterprises increasingly turn to coding agents for building applications, Stack Overflow has added new capabilities to Stack Internal, its enterprise-focused platform for centralizing proprietary technical knowledge, to help development teams turn organizational knowledge into trusted, actionable context that these agents can understand and use. Stack Internal now evaluates knowledge based on …

True to its name, AI-model-training tool Unsloth would do more work than it was asked to when developers checked out a model: It would also allow arbitrary code to execute on their machines. Pillar Security found that simply selecting a model in Unsloth Studio caused the application to download and execute Python code from the model repository. This could potentially allow attackers to use a spec…

My mom used to say that Hodges’s law was “Junk expands to fill the space allotted for it.” We lived in three houses over the years, each one bigger than the previous house as our family grew, and each house became just as full of junk as the one before it. My mom was echoing C. Northcote Parkinson , whose famous law said the same about work—that it expands to fill the time given to get it done. I…

Testing deterministic systems is relatively straightforward. Create an assertion that the system should pass, and automate validating it against a series of input-to-output data patterns. When new test patterns are needed, use observability sources to extract them from actual usage data or to create synthetic test data . But testing AI models and agents with nondeterministic outputs doesn’t align…

When HTTP 200 means nothing An AI assistant can return a response in under a second, maintain 99.9% availability and still give customers a fabricated answer. Traditional dashboards will show green because the request completed successfully. The user, however, received a semantic failure: a response that is syntactically valid but factually wrong, unsafe, biased or irrelevant. That is why AI-nati…

Meta is once again repositioning itself to target the enterprise market. This week, the company announced the Meta Enterprise Platform , which it says will evolve its AI stack into products and services that enterprises can deploy into operations, rather than just using them for advertising and social media campaigns. While the company provided few details about the offering, Meta CEO Mark Zucker…

Manus’s relationship with Meta? It’s complicated. Just months after they called off their merger, they find themselves competing in the market for agentic AI platforms. Awkward! The company has just released a rebuilt version of its AI agent platform: “Manus 2.0 is not a version update. It’s a new architecture, new products, and new capabilities,” the company said in a blog post . The release is …

OpenAI has scrapped the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing found the model did not meet the company’s safety and alignment standards. GPT-6.1 Astra was being developed as a more autonomous model capable of handling complex tasks with less human assistance, and was expected to be integrated into ChatGPT and Codex. But internal testing found that it could evade oversigh…

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has agreed to buy World Labs, a developer of AI “world models” that incorporate knowledge of the physical world, to extend the AI ecosystem around its hardware to encompass areas such as robotics, simulation and physical AI. Historically, AMD was seen as the cheaper alternative to Intel in the CPU market, but according to Gartner Director Analyst Shrish Pant , that po…

I’ve covered cloud computing for a long time, and one of the most persistent myths I encounter is that public clouds exist above the laws of physics that govern everything else in technology. The events coming out of the Middle East should put that myth to rest for good. Reuters reported this week that Amazon Web Services says it cannot restore access to its cloud region in Bahrain and to one of …