InfoWorld

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 …

We keep asking whether AI can make developers more productive, but that’s the wrong question. We should instead be asking what happens when it does. All those productivity gains can be for good, of course, but they could also be for ill. Simon Willison made this clear in a recent post. “The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering e…

Nvidia on Monday rolled out an agentic governance system called the Open Agent Safety Platform that combines software with out-of-band DPU-based silicon in a reference system design that it says will secure agents “from testing to deployment.” But while the Nvidia design’s silicon-based component provides some cybersecurity advantages, analysts argued that it cannot help with the vast majority of…

OpenAI has paused training, evaluation, and inference involving tool use for its most-capable AI models after an agent bypassed network restrictions to communicate with an external chatbot during reinforcement-learning training of an internal research model. “Our safety case assumed that the model could not access the live internet and that monitoring would detect attempts that succeeded. The inc…

The move from proof of concept or prototype to production is a common stumbling block for AI projects , and one that database services provider pgEdge is keen to help enterprises overcome. AI applications often start with developers reaching for Postgres because it gives them a database that can handle an application’s operational data while supporting AI-related capabilities such as vector searc…

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Was Mark Twain thinking of software development when he wrote those words? Software progresses in various ways. Mainly, we make a deliberate effort to improve things, and take up opportunities when they present themselves. Sometimes, we tackle a challenge for its own sake, like climbing the …

Generative AI pilots often look successful. Teams collect positive feedback, the tool sees steady usage, and the organization expects a fast path to scale. ROI discussions start with time saved and end with a request for more use cases. That pattern leads to disappointment when production costs and adoption realities appear. I treat ROI for generative AI as a measurement problem with clear bounda…