Technology

In building LLM applications, enterprises often have to create very long system prompts to adjust the model’s behavior for their applications. These prompts contain company knowledge, preferences, and application-specific instructions. At enterprise scale, these contexts can push inference latency past acceptable thresholds and drive per-query costs up significantly.  On-Policy Context Distillation (OPCD), a new training…

The all-lowercase public letter to staff elaborates on why Dorsey slashed headcount at the fintech company by thousands—to embrace AI. On Thursday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey announced that his fintech company, which owns Square and Cash App, would be laying off a whopping 40% of its workforce, slashing over 4,000 jobs.  

Anthropic has reached a stalemate with the United States Department of War over the military’s request for unrestricted access to the AI company’s technology. But as the Pentagon’s Friday afternoon deadline for Anthropic’s compliance approaches, over 300 Google employees and over 60 OpenAI employees have signed an open letter urging the leaders of their companies…

Samsung’s Unpacked event midweek revealed three new phones and two sets of earbuds, but the real standout, as usual, is the Galaxy S26 Ultra. This year, the Ultra actually features a bit of genuine tech innovation — and no, we don’t mean it folds. Let’s talk about its new Privacy Display. This isn’t a shimmery,…

Since I saw the TCL X11L SQD-Mini LED TV at a pre-CES event in December, I’ve been eager to get a close look at it in my living room. At first glance, the TV impressed me enough that I named it the best TV of CES 2026. From the moment I completed Google TV setup…

ServiceNow is handling 90% of its own employee IT requests autonomously, resolving cases 99% faster than human agents. On Thursday it announced the product technology it wants to use to do the same for everyone else. Organizations have spent three years running pilots that stall when AI gets to the execution layer. The agent can…

Simple rituals can strengthen workplace culture—no mandatory fun needed. Early in my career, a colleague and I made a shared commitment one summer to eat healthier. Salads. Smoothies. The full routine. Like many well-intentioned plans, our discipline began to fade after a few weeks. Eventually, we introduced what we jokingly called Grease Wednesdays, a weekly…

Plaid, a company that connects financial applications to users’ bank accounts, enabling payments and data verification, has allowed employees to sell some of their shares at an $8 billion valuation, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The valuation represents a 31% increase from the $6.1 billion valuation the 13-year-old company achieved in April of…

Despite an ultimatum from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Anthropic said that it can’t “in good conscience” comply with a Pentagon edict to remove guardrails on its AI, CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a blog post. The Department of Defense had threatened to cancel a $200 million contract and label Anthropic a “supply chain risk” if…

The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder value with a clear path to regulatory approval. However, we’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid. We believe we would have been…