Author: Frank Salvato

Discord has halted a limited test of age verification powered by Persona in the United Kingdom following widespread user backlash and privacy concerns, even as it plans to roll out a global system requiring facial scans or government ID submissions for access to age-restricted content beginning in March 2026. Critics accused Discord of undermining user privacy by partnering with Persona, a third-party age verification service whose exposed frontend code raised alarms about extensive data checks. Discord said the UK Persona trial has concluded and user data collected during the test was deleted, but the broader controversy underscores mounting skepticism around…

OpenAI’s highly publicized Stargate project, a proposed $500 billion AI data center buildout announced at the White House with partners Oracle and SoftBank, is facing serious execution challenges, including stalled planning, partner disagreements, and scaled-back plans that have forced OpenAI to pursue individual deals outside the joint venture and reconsider its computing strategy, disappointing early expectations for rapid build-out. Sources reporting on the initiative note that leadership disputes over roles and responsibilities, combined with the high capital cost and logistical hurdles of hardware deployment, have left the project struggling to actually deliver on its ambitious goals and lacking completed data…

The Large Hadron Collider is heading into its third long shutdown as engineers and scientists prepare a sweeping series of upgrades designed to transform it into the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, a more powerful machine capable of generating significantly more particle collisions and data than ever before. After years of operation that confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson and deepened understanding of fundamental physics, the collider will now undergo extensive improvements to its magnets, detectors, and supporting infrastructure. The goal is to dramatically increase luminosity—effectively multiplying the number of collisions—so researchers can probe rare particle interactions that were previously…

Panasonic has entered into a partnership with Skyworth to revive and expand its television business in the United States and Europe, marking a strategic shift aimed at restoring competitiveness in markets long dominated by South Korean and Chinese manufacturers. Under the agreement, Skyworth will handle manufacturing and certain operational components of Panasonic-branded televisions, while Panasonic will retain oversight of product planning, brand management, and quality standards. The move reflects mounting cost pressures, global supply chain realities, and intensifying price competition in the TV sector. Panasonic, once a dominant force in premium plasma and LCD displays, has struggled to maintain scale…

A new flashpoint has emerged in the escalating global AI race as Anthropic signals concern that its Claude models may have been indirectly leveraged through “distillation” techniques by Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, highlighting growing tensions over intellectual property, model training transparency, and the enforcement limits of export controls. Distillation, a process in which smaller models learn from the outputs of larger, more advanced systems, has become a powerful shortcut in AI development. Anthropic’s position reflects broader unease among U.S. AI leaders that advanced American models could be functionally replicated abroad without direct access to proprietary weights, potentially undermining both commercial…

Stellantis is confronting a growing crisis after taking a massive financial hit tied to its electric vehicle strategy, recording a roughly $26 billion-plus writedown as sales of EVs slow and demand shifts, with the automaker scaling back EV projects, realigning product plans toward customer preferences and internal combustion engines, and even exploring exiting battery partnerships as legacy brands grapple with over-optimistic forecasts and regulatory changes that have cooled the EV boom and exposed strategic missteps. Sources https://www.theverge.com/transportation/881987/stellantis-crisis-ev-loss-sales-regulationshttps://www.stellantis.com/en/news/press-releases/2026/february/stellantis-resets-its-business-to-meet-customer-preferences-and-to-support-profitable-growthhttps://www.reuters.com/business/automaker-stellantis-books-222-bln-euro-writedowns-h2-2025-ev-pullback-2026-02-06https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/stellantis-seeks-exit-battery-venture-samsung-ev-losses/https://www.wardsauto.com/news/stellantis-takes-26b-write-down-over-evs-sells-stake-in-battery-jv-for-1/811777/ Key Takeaways • Stellantis has booked more than $26 billion in charges tied to electric vehicle investment writedowns and strategy resets after anticipated…

Despite significant advances in artificial intelligence over recent years, major models still struggle to reliably read, parse, and extract structured information from PDFs, a format central to enterprise and government document workflows; the inherent design of PDFs, inconsistent layouts, and limitations in current optical character recognition and AI extraction tools lead to parsing errors, hallucinations, and unusable outputs, prompting specialized solutions and highlighting a critical real-world blind spot in AI capabilities. Sources https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/882891/ai-pdf-parsing-failurehttps://www.themeridiem.com/ai/2026/2/23/ai-hits-a-wall-why-millions-of-pdfs-remain-unsearchablehttps://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/ai-s-dirty-secret-it-still-can-t-read-pdfs-properly Key Takeaways • Advanced AI systems still fail basic PDF parsing due to format complexity and OCR limitations.• These failures slow adoption of AI in enterprise, government,…

Finnish startup Donut Lab’s much-hyped solid-state battery, which claims 400 Wh/kg energy density, up to 100,000 charge-discharge cycles and full charging in under ten minutes, has delivered its first independent performance results showing blisteringly fast charge speeds in early testing by VTT, charging from 0-80 percent in as little as about 4.5 minutes or around 9.5 minutes in more conservative trials, while retaining near-full capacity, though skepticism remains about whether the underlying technology is truly a next-generation solid-state cell or something else entirely, and many in the battery industry are questioning the physics behind Donut Lab’s specs and the lack…

Intel is reportedly preparing to abandon its recent hybrid processor architecture that split chips into high-powered “Performance” cores and lower-energy “Efficiency” cores, signaling a return to a unified core design in future generations. According to multiple reports, the company is reassessing the P-core and E-core strategy introduced with Alder Lake, which was marketed as a breakthrough in balancing power and performance but has drawn criticism for software scheduling complications and inconsistent real-world gains. Intel’s potential shift would streamline chip design, simplify optimization for developers, and reduce the complexity that emerged from coordinating two fundamentally different core types on the same…

Tech companies are increasingly making their robots look and act more approachable — adding emotive features like expressive eyes, softer shapes, and human-like cues — as a way to overcome public unease and ramp up acceptance of robots in everyday life, with developers arguing that approachable designs help people feel more comfortable interacting with machines and could spur broader adoption of automation in homes and workplaces. Sources such as a recent Semafor report highlight companies like Apptronik and Fourier intentionally steering away from cold, industrial aesthetics toward warm, expressive humanoid robots, emphasizing that if people fear robots they’re unlikely to…