Microsoft Phi-4 is a Small Language Model Specialized for Complex Math Reasoning
Phi-4 is 14B parameter model from Microsoft Research that aims to improve the state of the art for math reasoning. Previously available on Azure AI Foundry, Phi-4 has recently become available on Hugging Face under the MIT license. By Sergio De Simone
Google Vertex AI Provides RAG Engine for Large Language Model Grounding
Vertex AI RAG Engine is a managed orchestration service aimed to make it easier to connect large language models (LLMs) to external data sources to be more up-to-date, generate more relevant responses, and hallucinate less. By Sergio De Simone
Android Studio Ladybug Update Adds Gemini Support, New Debugging Features, and More
In its recent update to Android Studio Ladybug (2024.2.2), Google has added new Gemini Code Transforms to modify, refactor, or create code, debugging and testing tools, and developer experience improvements. Additionally, the IDE adopts the latest Inte...
Hugging Face Smolagents is a Simple Library to Build LLM-Powered Agents
Smolagents is a library created at Hugging Face to build agents based on large language models (LLMs). Hugging Faces says its new library aims to be simple and LLM-agnostic. It supports secure "agents that write their actions in code" and is integrated...
How Meta Ported Million Lines of Android Code from Java to Kotlin
In order to maximize the benefits brought by Kotlin in terms of productivity and safety, Meta engineers have been hard at work to translate their 10 million line Android codebase from Java into Kotlin. One year into this process, they have ported appro...
Swift Testing is a New Framework from Apple to Modernize Testing for Swift across Platforms
While XCTest remains the preferred way to create tests in Xcode, the new Swift Testing framework attempts to introduce an expressive and intuitive API for the definition of tests that applies to all platforms where Swift is supported. The framework als...
Android 15 Beta 4 Now Available for Developers to Bring their Apps Up to Date
Google released the last scheduled Android 15 beta, which brings stable developer APIs and allows developers to update their apps and publish them on Google Play before non-beta users get access to the official Android version. By Sergio De Simone
Rust 1.80 Adds Support for Lazy Statics, Extends Ranges in Patterns, and More
Rust 1.80 stabilizes LazyCell and LazyLock, two new types that can be used to delay initialization of data until the first time they are accessed. It also brings support for exclusive ranges as well as a couple of related lint warnings. Additionally, i...
Gen AI Increases Workloads and Decreases Productivity, Upwork Study Finds
A controversial survey by Upwork Research Institute found that while 96% of C-suite leaders expect the use of generative AI tools to increase overall productivity levels, 77% of surveyed employees say they have actually decreased their productivity. In...
Podman 5 Improves Performance and Stability on Mac and Windows Through Partial Rewrite
The latest release of container management tool Podman brings a complete rewrite of the podman machine command to improve hypervisor support on macOS and Windows. Additionally, it now supports OCI artifacts in manifest files, adopts Pasta by default fo...