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Perplexity on Tuesday rolled out an offering that runs the AI entirely on a local machine, and that, it said, will keep “private data local and escalating to the cloud only when a task needs it.”

The service, called simply Portable Computer, is a local version of Perplexity Computer that runs on the Nvidia DGX Spark with Qwen 3.8 27B or with PPLX 27B, a post-trained version of the Qwen model, Perplexity said, adding that a 30B open model is coming soon to the model picker. The orchestrator, planner, tool router, scheduler, durable task queue, and local search index all run on device.

Portable Computer requires Linux as its underlying OS, with Windows support “coming soon.”

The most critical benefits for enterprise IT are the Perplexity promise that data stays local, and that on-device work doesn’t consume token credits. Customers are only charged if the system is explicitly told to move compute to the cloud “for more advanced research and reasoning.”

Doing as much work as possible locally is becoming a trend, as users seek to lower token costs and minimize their need for increasingly expensive high-end AI systems.

“A user might want the confidential details of a term sheet to stay local, but escalate to the cloud to get current market comps or recent precedent deals,” the Perplexity announcement noted. “Portable Computer’s local orchestrator can escalate a task to the cloud for current information, browser use, connected apps, or one of 15+ frontier models for advanced reasoning. Through app connectors, Portable Computer works with Google Drive, Gmail, Slack, and GitHub.”

Aman Mahapatra, chief strategy officer for Tribeca Softtech, a New York City-based technology consulting firm, said that he liked the comprehensive capabilities included in the offering. 

“Running a model locally has been table stakes for two years,” Mahapatra said. “Running the entire agentic control plane locally means the decision about whether a task needs the cloud is itself made on device, by a model post-trained to keep work local and escalate when necessary.”

Hardware demands

However, some consultants and analysts questioned whether the economics, as well as the data and token control features, are truly ready for the enterprise at this point.

Nader Henein, a Gartner VP analyst, said that some of the announced Perplexity models can be run today on high-end laptops with off-the-shelf GPUs, “but until we see the price [of Portable Computer], it’s going to be hard to get excited about this.”

Flavio Villanustre, CISO for the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, also noted, “the hardware demands are quite steep, especially with the current hardware costs including RAM, GPU, and so forth. It needs at least a local GPU with 24GB of VRAM as a minimum.”

“Although it may help lower ongoing expenses, it does require an initial investment on this specialized hardware,” he said.

Concerns over control of cloud usage

But multiple consultants expressed concerns about the lack of details of how the local-versus-cloud decisions are enforced. For example, users might agree to a pop-up offering cloud compute reflexively, just as they simply agree to any software terms and conditions that pop up. Or an attacker could use prompt engineering or other tactics to place hidden commands that tell the system to move to the cloud without the user knowing. 

Justin Greis, CEO of consulting firm Acceligence, pointed out, “local-first should not be confused with local-only and that distinction is going to matter tremendously. Users routinely approve prompts they do not fully understand, and increasingly autonomous AI agents are operating across files, applications, connectors, and workflows that may be far more complicated than the user can see. The AI should be able to ask for permission, but the enterprise needs the ability to say, ‘You are not permitted to ask.’”

Mike Wilkes, enterprise CISO at Aikido Security, suggested that one way to prevent cloud usage would be for IT to lock down these systems so that they cannot have any external access, a technique that he doubted would be tolerated. 

“I would not expect either the agents or their users to be particularly happy if enterprises solve the security problem simply by denying network access. For many valuable use cases, connectivity is the point,” Wilkes said. “A proprietary trading firm, for example, may want confidential models and positions processed locally while still consuming current market data, SEC filings, news or research feeds.”

And, Mahapatra noted, although the built-in controls will not prevent unauthorized cloud escalation, “the reason is structural rather than a knock on Perplexity’s engineering. The gate is a permission prompt, which is consent, not control. It depends on a probabilistic model correctly classifying sensitive content and correctly scoping an escalation payload, and on a user judging a request they cannot fully inspect. Both fail adversarially.”

He pointed out that, with Gmail, Drive, Slack, and GitHub connectors on a device that also holds an authorized cloud path, “this is the same connector-plus-egress combination behind every Copilot exfiltration chain published this year. What would satisfy an enterprise security review is network-layer, not application-layer, and it does not exist in the product.”

It would need a mandatory egress proxy, DLP inspection on every escalation payload, deterministic classification rules that block defined data categories regardless of the model’s judgment, and immutable logging of what left the device, he said. “Sandboxed execution addresses code isolation and does nothing for data egress governance.”

His question to Perplexity is whether an enterprise administrator can define escalation policy centrally in a way the local model cannot override, and produce a full audit log of what crossed the boundary. “If escalation is governed by user consent and model judgment, this is a consumer product with a strong privacy story rather than an enterprise product with a compliance story,” he said, adding, “Whoever ships centrally managed escalation policy with enforceable egress inspection and tamper-evident audit will own the regulated-industry local AI market.”

Perplexity responds

In response to a request for an interview, Perplexity Communication Manager Beejoli Shah instead provided an emailed statement pushing back on the idea that data could travel to the cloud without deliberate permission. She wrote, “content in a local document can’t authorize an escalation by itself, nor can it override product controls. Escalation to the cloud requires explicit per-action approval in addition to toggling the app out of default local-only mode.”

Shah said such a data migration can only happen if the user has already toggled “allow advisor escalation” to “on” in app settings. “When that isn’t toggled on, no work can proceed to the cloud,” she said, pointing out that the product enforces restrictions on what local data and outbound actions are available to the agent.

She added that the user must also review a request in-app to send a piece of the task to the cloud, and that, she said, as illustrated in the introductory video, the request pop-up is the same size as prompt input. Furthermore, she said, “Escalation is only allowed once, not across the remainder of the task, or in future sessions.”

These lab-grown balls of brain tissue could help researchers study a host of disorders that emerge as the brain ages.

Five years is an eternity for brain organoids. Also called mini brains, these blobs of tissue have taken neuroscience by storm for their ability to capture the intricacies of developing brains.

Organoids begin life as a collection of stem cells. Within weeks, they spontaneously produce a range of brain cells. Neurons form circuits that spark with electrical activity. Gene expression resembles that of early fetal brains. Some organoids learn to control small, isolated muscles. Others link to spinal cord organoids and process pain signals.

Over time, they grow more sophisticated in both structure and function—eerily similar to near-term fetuses—prompting bioethicists to ask if they could one day become conscious.

But time isn’t on their side. Most mini brains survive only a few months before their sensitive neurons start to wither. Circuits break down, structures collapse, and eventually the organoids die. As a result, they can model only the early stages of human brain development, leaving what happens during the later months of pregnancy and after birth largely mysterious.

These periods are especially relevant to schizophrenia, epilepsy, severe autism, and a host of other disorders. Scientists have studied late-stage development using donated tissue, but samples are scarce and raise ethical concerns.

A team led by Harvard’s Paola Arlotta is now pushing the boundaries with organoids. Last week, they described a method that kept mini brains alive for over five years—the longest yet—and tracked their development throughout. Despite growing outside the body, the organoids matured on a timetable similar to normal brains. Genetic activity in the oldest ones resembled that of a typical 4-year-old.

The findings were originally reported in a preprint and have now been peer-reviewed and published in Nature.

The developmental lockstep surprised the team. Cells from older organoids, when mixed with younger ones, continued maturing on schedule, suggesting they carried an internal developmental clock that keeps track of their progress.

“The brain doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It’s an organ of incredible complexity that interacts with so many other systems,” study author Irene Faravelli said in a press release. “It was not a given at all that our simplified model would match natural development in this many ways.”

Brain, Interrupted

Because mini brains generate nearly the full range of human brain cells, they’re promising models for the study of early brain development. But early versions survived only a few weeks. Without blood supply, cells at their centers starved and died.

Through trial and error, researchers learned to coax them into increasingly sophisticated structures that included layers resembling the cortex and had integrated blood vessels. This vastly extended their lifespan.

In 2021, a study kept mini brains alive for up to two years, capturing cortical development from pregnancy to roughly a year after birth. Four years later, Arlotta’s team announced a way to extend organoid lives to a staggering seven years. Roughly the size of a pea, each nugget was packed with some two million healthy neurons and other brain cells.

Following these organoids for years offers an unprecedented window into how the brain grows and wires itself—and how genetic changes early on might contribute to diseases later in life.

Our brains take roughly two decades to mature. Throughout this period, neurons constantly rewire their connections. Scientists have long known that conditions such as schizophrenia and some forms of epilepsy first emerge during adolescence. Because mini brains can be grown from a person’s skin cells and retain genetic mutations associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, they offer a way to probe how, and when, neural wiring goes awry.

But timing matters. The question is, how faithfully does a growing blob in a dish follow the developmental journey of a human brain?

Time Stamp

To answer that question, the team grew 34 organoids and tracked them at regular intervals. They collected data every three to six months for the first 18 months, then annually until the organoids were over five years old.

Crucial to the brain blobs’ longevity was switching the growth medium—a nutrient- and protein-rich slurry—halfway through development. The new recipe kept neurons alive longer, giving them time to support increasingly complex activity.

The team then tracked changes in gene activity and epigenetic markers (chemical tags that control which genes are turned on or off). They then compared the findings with data from younger organoids—ranging from 15 days to six months old—and donated human tissue.

The developmental timeline was surprisingly similar to that of a human brain. Young organoids showed gene activity resembling the first trimester; by three to six months, they looked more like second-trimester brains. After a year, their gene activity profiles resembled those of newborns. By the end of the experiment, they most closely matched a typical 4-year-old.

The team also tested them with epigenetic methods used to gauge biological age as opposed to calendar years. The organoids gained and shed epigenetic markers in patterns that broadly tracked those seen in natural brain development.

The organoids seemed to retain a “sense” of time. The team mixed cells from year-old organoids with those from 15-day-old organoids. Both followed their usual trajectory: The younger cells developed into early-stage neurons. But the older ones skipped those stages and rapidly produced more mature neurons often requiring months to grow.

“I like to think of this as a sort of ‘warping of developmental time’ indicating that the organoid cells record and recall the time they have already spent in culture,” said Arlotta.

In other words, the cells seem to carry an internal developmental clock, which could be especially useful for studying disorders with symptoms emerging long after the early stages of development.

To be clear, though, a mini brain resembling a 4-year-old’s brain at the molecular level doesn’t mean it has the same wiring or computational capabilities. Gene activity only captures part of a brain’s development; real brains are shaped by experiences and interactions with the rest of the body. Without input, mini brains can only offer a molecular blueprint of brain development, not its entire rich tapestry.

Still, long-living organoids are a breakthrough. Researchers could freeze cells from organoids at different developmental stages and later thaw them for experiments. This could speed up discoveries because scientists wouldn’t have to grow new organoids from scratch for each new study. Think of it as a save point in video games.

The team plans to grow long-lived organoids from people with schizophrenia or epilepsy and use them to study disease progression and screen drugs. Keeping ethics in mind, they’re also considering exposing mini brains to sensory stimuli such as sight, sound, or touch.

“There is still much to learn about how the embryo naturally builds a progressively more complex and mature brain,” Arlotta said. “Applying these lessons to organoids will allow us to model unexplored events of human brain maturation that occur after birth.”

The post Mini Brains Grown for Five Years Matured Like Human Brains appeared first on SingularityHub.

A newly uncovered phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform called AnonyMousKIT automates the retrieval of codes used to unlock stolen Apple devices and disable the Activation Lock feature. [...]

AI has already begun to impact the job market and primarily affects young people early in their careers, according to a recent study by researchers at Stanford University. The researchers analyzed anonymized salary data from the HR platform ADP and compared occupations that are affected by AI to varying degrees to develop their findings, Ars Technica reported.

Among people aged 22 to 25, employment in the occupations most exposed to AI is now 19% lower than in positions less exposed to AI. Last year, the difference was 13%.

When looking at the labor market more broadly, the differences are significantly smaller. Older and more experienced workers have not been affected in the same way. According to the researchers, this is primarily because fewer young people are being hired in AI-exposed occupations, rather than existing employees being laid off.

The decline among young people is also most evident in occupations where AI can be used to replace specific tasks. In cases where AI is used instead to complement employees’ work, the picture is significantly more mixed.

Apple představil čipy M6 a M5 Ultra, Mac mini s M6 nebo M5 Pro a Mac Studio s M5 Max nebo M5 Ultra. Fedora Asahi Remix zatím podporuje jenom M1 a M2.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced fresh sanctions on Iranian cyber actors as part of what it called an "unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign" against the nation and its enablers. "We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime

The U.S. Department of the Treasury has announced fresh sanctions on Iranian cyber actors as part of what it called an "unprecedented, whole-of-government, economic campaign" against the nation and its enablers. "We are launching an economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

Call of Duty dávno překročilo hranice běžné herní série. Každý nový díl je událostí, ať už jej hráči milují, nebo nenávidí. Modern Warfare 4 je navíc pokračováním jedné z nejúspěšnějších podznaček, takže očekávání jsou obrovská.

** Za posledních 14 let se ne vždy všechno vydařilo podle plánu ** Vzpomínáme na průšvihy značek i systémů ** A zmíníme i telefon, který se nechtěně stal velmi populárním

Za posledních 14 let se ne vždy všechno vydařilo podle plánu • Vzpomínáme na průšvihy značek i systémů • A zmíníme i telefon, který se nechtěně stal velmi populárním

Apple představil nové Macy mini a Macy Studio. • Vypadají stejně jako předchůdci, ale jsou výkonnější a dražší. • Poprvé v nich vidíme čipy Apple M6 a M5 Ultra.

In late July, Oracle released a mammoth security patch dump with 1,449 patches, in a perhaps unprecedented bad day for database admins. None of them, it turns out, would have prevented the credential theft on an Oracle database server described by security platform Huntress. “Even if it had been fully patched, everything working, it still would have happened,” said Craig Savage, cybersecurity lead at Oracle third-party support vendor Spinnaker Support, referring to the attack. In July, Huntress was alerted to credential theft activity, according to a post from the security company. The attack involved a "simple" SQL injection exploiting an unnamed organization's public-facing web app. Although SQL injections have a long history and are easy to avoid with good info-sec housekeeping, what happened next was more unusual. “After gaining initial access, the threat actor dropped a post-exploitation toolkit (called khunt) via a Java Source within an Oracle database, which is a novel aspect of this attack,” Huntress said. Because a code-object can be loaded directly in Oracle's database engine, the malicious actors were able to upload their toolkit directly into the database. “This is a technique that's previously been discussed and described over the years, including via a technique described as oraexec – however, the use of the technique in the wild has rarely been documented,” Huntress said. Oracle's database has an embedded Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and users can take Java source code and store it as a database object. “This is what attackers did during this incident: they fed CREATE JAVA SOURCE commands to the Oracle database from [Java implementation] Tomcat, through the [database] connection, and the Java source code contained within was then compiled directly inside the database as a stored schema object,” the vendor said. Speaking to The Register, Savage said: “Oracle has its own JDK. You are able to build and run Oracle Java programs within the database. It should never be something a web server can do. In fact, in a production Oracle environment, it should be locked down. It should only be re-enabled during a development or maintenance window, for example. It was poorly configured, poorly secured, but it wasn't an Oracle breach.” The ability to run Java in the database should be limited to only the DBA user, Savage argued, and users should disable the ability to compile code on a production server. “If they’d done that, it would have downloaded that Java code, and JDK would not have been configured to compile it,” he said. Savage said cybercriminals were seeking to exploit this kind of functionality more commonly, rather than simply looking to find and use vulnerabilities. “We're starting to see more and more of this: these cybercrime gangs now know about these products. They don't just know how to break them. They also know what legitimate functionality they could potentially use if it's been turned on, and that's what we saw here. That's the wake-up call. Oracle published something like 1450-ish patches. Organizations are totally focused on patch, patch, patch, but you still need to do the basics,” he said. ®

A large distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack has disrupted Norway's shared government digital infrastructure since Monday, affecting services used by the public sector. [...]

Česká republika by v budoucnu měla mít poměrně silného hráče v datových centrech pro umělou inteligenci • . • Pražský podnikatel v oboru má v plánu v rámci Evropy postavit až osm takových objektů, počítá s celkovým výkonem 800 megawattů. • Investice mají dosáhnout 3,6 miliardy eur, skoro 90 miliard ...

Perhaps it is appropriate that the last few days of Tim Cook’s leadership at Apple is marked by the return of Mac manufacturing to America in the form of the new Mac mini, which the company has promised it will assemble in the US this year. The company on Tuesday also introduced new Mac Studio models.

It’s a perfect footnote to illustrate the tremendous work Cook has done to balance sometimes opposing forces both within and outside the company. In this instance, it mirrors his difficult diplomacy to try to get Apple one the right side of the Trump Administration. 

US officials have long wanted Apple to bring all of its product manufacturing back home. The company, in turn, has had to argue and cajole and show that this is simply not possible — because even if you built new factories today, you would not have sufficiently skilled employees to work in them tomorrow.

That reality has guided Apple in its approach to investing in US manufacturing. The company seeks to develop the most high-tech manufacturing in the US, while leaving more general product assembly elsewhere. This changes with the Mac mini, which is now the company’s flagship “Made in USA” product with final assembly in the US, replacing the now-discontinued Mac Pro. (Some components are made outside the US, but assembly has been promised at Houston.)

You should see this as a continuation of the company’s $600 billion investment in US manufacturing, which most recently saw Cook and US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tour Apple/Foxconn’s Houston facility, where manufacturing will take place. It’s not the only hardware the company makes in the US; it also manufactures its Private Cloud Compute AI servers there. Both production lines are significant.

What to expect from the Mac mini

“Mac mini has always been our most versatile Mac. Whether it’s being used as a home computer, powering a professional studio, or as an always-on agentic device, it’s the little Mac that can do it all,” Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, said in a statement.

The all-new Mac mini features M6 and M5 Pro configurations that the company says provide a massive leap in AI performance (up to four times faster than before).  Storage and graphics are twice as fast, while the processor delivers 40% better performance than the one it replaces. Configurations ramp up to an 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU.

These things are fast. That’s significant given the growing number of people using one or more of these Macs to drive on-premises AI clusters. The new models are available now to order for delivery Sept. 22.

Both Mac mini models include Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, as well as upgraded 2.5Gb Ethernet, with a 10Gb option available. With industry-leading performance per watt, these new Macs are fast, quiet, and cheaper to run, even at peak workloads.

They offer two USB-C port that support USB 3, a headphone jack, three Thunderbolt 4 ports on Mac mini with M6, and three Thunderbolt 5 ports on Mac mini with M5 Pro, along with HDMI and Ethernet. (You can cluster multiple Mac minis using Thunderbolt to create AI machines.)

It is also appropriate to point to the environmental credentials of these Macs, given Apple’s plan to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint by 2030. The Macs are made with 50% recycled material overall, including 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosure and 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets. All the energy used to make these Macs is sourced from renewable energy, Apple claims. 

Here are the mini details:

Mac mini M6, from $899

• A 12-core CPU with the world’s fastest single-threaded performance, so everything feels extra snappy and responsive.
• A 12-core GPU, includes Neural Accelerators in each core for the first time on a mini, resulting in up to 4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics than the mini with M4.
• A new dual 16-core Neural Engine that delivers up to twice the performance of the previous generation.
• 16GB of standard unified memory configurable up to 32GB, as well as higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s.

Mac mini with M5 Pro, from $1,699

• Up to an 18-core CPU with remarkable multithreaded performance.
• A 20-core GPU with enhanced shader core and third-generation ray tracing and Neural Accelerators in each GPU core.
• Up to 64GB of unified memory with 307GB/s of memory bandwidth.

What about the Mac Studio?

Apple also introduced new Mac Studio configurations equipped with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, designed to handle the most demanding workflows. Available for pre-order now these, too, will ship Sept. 22.

The company promises up 4.3x faster AI performance, up to 2x faster storage, up to 1.8x faster graphics, and up to 1.3x faster CPU speed, along with higher memory bandwidth .“Mac Studio is the ultimate desktop for on-device AI and the world’s most demanding pro workflows, relied on by users for its tremendous performance and extensive pro connectivity, all in a quiet, compact design that sits right on your desk — and today, we’re pushing the boundaries even further,” said Srouji.

Mac Studio with M5 Max features an 18-core CPU, an up-to-40-core GPU with Neural Accelerators built into each core, and up to 128GB of unified memory. Prices start at $2,499.

The M5 Ultra variant scales up to a 36-core CPU, up to an 80-core GPU, and a possible 512GB of unified memory, enabling users to run enormous LLMs entirely on device. You also get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 and Thunderbolt 5, which enables multiple Mac Studio systems to be clustered for the most powerful possible on-prem AI deployments. Pricing starts at $5,499.

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Healthcare and services provider Nutex is investigating a data breach incident where an unauthorized third party exfiltrated information from company servers. [...]

Pokud byste chtěli sledovat pohyb sousedky za zdí panelového bytu, vystačíte si s malým modulem mikrovlnného radaru za pár stovek z Aliexpressu. Fanoušky americké NBA naopak odkážu na západní výspu Floridy. V tamních lesích nedaleko hranic s Alabamou totiž stojí nejsilnější a nejmohutnější ...