Microsoft and startup Ghost are introducing expensive new computers built to run AI models locally, reflecting a growing push to make AI work less dependent on cloud services. Microsoft has opened preorders for its Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a compact developer system priced at $5,999 and scheduled to ship in November. The device uses …
AWS has released Strands Decider 2B, a free open-source model designed to help AI agents make quick, limited decisions before they use tools or take actions. Carl Franzen reports for VentureBeat that the model is part of Strands Labs, AWS’s experimental project for agent development. Unlike a general chatbot, Strands Decider 2B does not write …
Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, an open-weight language model designed for German and English work in regulated organizations. The company positions the model for public administration, industry, aerospace, banks, and other users that want to operate AI systems on their own infrastructure. Kolibri uses a mixture-of-experts architecture. It contains 78.1 billion parameters in total, but …
Fireworks AI has introduced Ember-1, a specialized reasoning model designed to deliver results comparable to Kimi K3 while using substantially fewer tokens. Fireworks AI announces in an official blog post that Ember-1 cuts token use by about 40 percent overall, a reduction aimed at lowering the cost of coding and agent-based AI workflows. Reasoning models …
Cloudflare has introduced Clef and Clef-flash, two open-weight AI models designed to make fast, structured decisions inside automated workflows. The company positions them as alternatives to Typesafe AI’s Jev, a decision model built to answer bounded questions such as yes or no, multiple choice, and ranked options. The models are available through Cloudflare Workers AI …
Xiaomi has released two open-weight, multimodal AI models that it says bring advanced agent capabilities to developers at far lower prices than many proprietary alternatives. The new MiMo-V2.6-Pro and MiMo-V2.6-Flash models can process text, images, audio, and video, support a context window of up to one million tokens, and are designed for work that requires …
Alibaba’s Qwen has released Qwen-Image-2.1, an open-weight image-generation and editing model with a 7 billion parameter visual component. Qwen announces in an official blog post that the model combines text-to-image generation, image editing, and native transparency support in one system. The release targets a growing demand for image models that can do more than create …
Apple’s latest desktop lineup draws a sharper line between affordable local AI work and maximum performance. The Mac Studio with M5 Ultra offers up to 512GB of unified memory for running very large AI models on a desk. The smaller Mac mini with M6 delivers strong everyday performance, but its memory ceiling makes it a …
Nvidia’s RTX Spark chip is arriving in laptops and compact desktop PCs designed to run AI models directly on the device. The systems, unveiled by Nvidia partners at IFA in Berlin, target users who want to use AI agents and other demanding tools without sending sensitive data to cloud services. Luke Larsen reports for WIRED …
Qwen3.8 27B can handle everyday local AI tasks such as document classification, feed summaries, and long discussion recaps, according to benchmarks from a Mac Studio. However, its new architecture currently produces text much more slowly than its predecessor on Apple hardware. Hemant Kumar writes for TerminalBytes that the 27.3-billion-parameter model generated an average of 14 …