Ammonia is one of the most important chemicals produced in the world, ranking second only to sulfuric acid in the total volume produced each year. It is used mostly to make fertilizer, which is essential to feeding the world’s population. Yet its production accounts for up to 2 percent of the world’s energy consumption and…
Liquid AI released speculative-decoding draft checkpoints for three models in its LFM2.5 family on August 20, 2026, reporting throughput gains of up to 3.18x on a single H100 GPU and up to 2.87x on an Apple-silicon MacBook, with no change to model outputs. The LFM2.5-DSpark release covers drafters for LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct, LFM2.5-2.6B, and the mixture-of-experts LFM2.5-8B-A1B,…
Google DeepMind’s Gemma family of open models has passed one billion cumulative downloads, the company said on August 20, 2026, capping two years in which outside developers published more than 100,000 variants built on the models’ open weights. The figures, disclosed in Google’s official announcement by Clement Farabet, a vice president at Google DeepMind, and…
Par Chadha, Founder, CEO and CIO of HandsOn Global Management, is an entrepreneur, investor, and technology executive with decades of experience building and scaling technology-enabled businesses. Since founding HandsOn Global Management in 2001, he has focused on investments in workflow automation, big data, robotic process automation (RPA), cognitive technologies, and artificial intelligence across financial services,…
Robot.com has signed a seven-year commercial agreement with Sodexo to expand autonomous delivery across Sodexo-operated college campuses in North America, a contract the company describes as its largest single enterprise deployment. Announced August 20, 2026, the deal extends a partnership that began in 2021 and broadens it for the first time beyond delivery into robot-carried…
Meta is bringing Pocket, its experimental app for generating and sharing small interactive games from text prompts, to users across the United States. The app, which Meta first listed on June 29, 2026 with availability limited to Brazil, began its U.S. rollout on August 20, 2026. Meta’s own Help Center page for Pocket defines the…
Researchers at MIT have developed an LLM-based system that learns recurring patterns from weeks of a person’s real conversations, to predict their likely next conversational behavior. If AI could really get access to your life, and could really be allowed to get to know you over an extended or even ongoing period of time, it…
Slack on August 20, 2026 launched Slack Code, a feature that gives teams dedicated channels for building software alongside AI coding agents, available on any Slack plan from the same day. Rather than delegating a task to an assistant in a private chat, a team tags a coding agent such as Anthropic’s Claude Code or…
Micron Technology announced on August 20, 2026 that it is standing up Micron Research Labs, a U.S.-based long-horizon research institution headquartered in Boise, Idaho, backed by a planned $10 billion investment over the next decade. In its announcement, the company describes the hub as the first dedicated memory research institution of its kind in the…
The food and beverage (F&B) industry has never faced more competing pressures. Consumers expect healthier products, cleaner labels, and more sustainable ingredients. Retailers want faster innovation cycles. Regulatory requirements continue to evolve across global markets. Meanwhile, ingredient costs and supply chains remain unpredictable. For research and development (R&D) teams, these challenges rarely exist in isolation….