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Mistral has a new AI model. The good news is that it is absolutely European; the bad one, which is absolutely mediocre

May 4, 2026 by usatoday24

The French startup Mistral has just launched Mistral Medium 3.5an open-weight AI model that is the great European exponent in an industry absolutely dominated by China—which competes directly with this type of projects—and by the US. And if this is the best they can do, it seems Europe has a problem. Mediocre. This is a “dense” model with 128 billion parameters and a context window of 256,000 tokens. While models with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture only activate a subset of the total parameters to achieve enviable efficiency and capacity, Mistral activates them all. That makes it much less efficient, but theoretically it should make its performance promising. And that’s the problem. Which it is not. Benchmarks. Pedro Domingos, professor of deep learning at the University of Washington, he expressed it very well: “Mainstream AI companies brag about how their model is much better in benchmarks. Soo Mistral brags about how their model is much worse.” It is true that the models with which it is compared are larger in total number of parameters, but as we will see later, even taking that into account, they are cheaper and theoretically more efficient thanks to the use of that MoE architecture in many of them. The model, however, unifies the previous catalog and follows the market trend of being able to establish the desired level of reasoning (reasoning_effort) as a parameter. Bad results. And he is somewhat right: Mistral does not seem to have problems showing the results of various benchmarks in which it performs poorly, but it also performs poorly with models that are by no means the most recent or powerful on the market. Thus, it is compared with Claude Sonnet 4.5/4.6, with Kimi K2.5, with GLM-5.1 or with Qwen 3.5 397B. In almost all cases (except GLM 5.1) there are already more recent and powerful versions of all of them. Not so far from local models. In fact Medium 3.5 scored 77.6% in SWE-Bench Verified, a programming test in which Qwen3.6-27b It reaches 72.4% with a fundamental difference: you can run it “for free” (with the appropriate hardware, and you paying the electricity bill) with a relatively affordable machine. More expensive (and somewhat more restrictive). If we use it via API, Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.5 per million output tokens. GLM-5.1 costs 1.4/4.4 respectively, and Kimi K2.5 costs 0.5/2.8 respectively. Its recent successor, Kimi K2.6, costs 0.95/4, and it is significantly better than Mistral being cheaper. There is a curious fact: Mistral uses a “modified MIT license” instead of the traditional Apache 2.0, and indicates that this model can be used commercially or non-commercially except for “high-income” companies. Chasing Anthropic. In addition to the model itself, the company has presented the so-called remote scheduling agents using Mistral Vibe CLI to, for example, send pull requests to GitHub in an automated way. It also has the so-called “Work Mode” in LeChat, allowing multi-step tasks to be managed autonomously. These are tools clearly intended to strengthen Mistral’s role as a base for scheduling agents, which is the path that has worked fantastically for Anthropic. Your advantage: being European. The only great strength of this model is that it has been developed by a European startup, and that gives it clear visibility at a time when many EU countries they talk about digital sovereignty. It is the only Western model that seems to want to compete with China in the field of open weight models, which is good news, but the truth is that in terms of performance it does not seem that the Mistral Medium 3.5 is going to perform competitively. The geopolitical security network. That, together with the fact that it costs more than its competitors, makes the decision to use it difficult unless for those who prioritize clearly that European origin. That is Mistral’s ace in the hole, and they are taking advantage of perfectly. The company has recently obtained financing to create data centers in Europe, and is nourished and fed by this new obsession with minimize dependency of North American Big Tech. In Xataka | The CEO of Mistral sends a message to Europe: the end of being the technological vassal of the United States

guide them to the exit one by one… with a surprise

May 4, 2026 by usatoday24

In the late 80s, during the call “tanker war”the United States even escorted civilian ships in the Persian Gulf under flags changed in a hurryin an operation so delicate that any error could have triggered a direct conflict between powers. Even so, the simple transit of each ship became an almost surgical operation. A blocked strait that paralyzes half the planet. Since the start of the war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz has become a critical bottleneck for the global economy. It is estimated that at this time there are around of 1,000 ships who remain trapped since the beginning of the conflict and about 20,000 sailors They remain on board with increasingly limited supplies. Not only that. The blockade imposed by Iran after the outbreak of war with the United States and Israel has reduced traffic at minimum levels and has stressed energy markets. The situation is such that analysts warn of a possible breaking point if the situation continues, since a fifth of the world’s oil normally circulates through this route. The US plan. In this scenario, Washington has launched the so-called as “Project Freedom” with an idea as direct as it is risky. Free trapped ships guiding them one by one outside the strait, yes, through coordination between countries, insurers and logistics operators. However, after the announcement it was learned that the key to the plan is what it does not include and that has become its great “surprise”: in reality there will be no naval escorts traditional boats accompanying each ship, according to Washington officials. Although the United States deploy destroyersaircraft and thousands of troops in the region, traffic will rely more on traffic management and indirect deterrence than on direct armed protection. Diplomacy, threats and an extremely fragile balance. The movement also occurs in parallel to indirect negotiations between Washington and Tehran. The messages at the moment are rather mixed, combining diplomatic optimism on the one hand… with strong warnings from both sides on the other. On one side, the United States insists that it will respond forcefully to any interference in the process. Iran, for its part, has just made it clear through its news agencies that any foreign military presence in the strait will be considered a direct threatso the United States “plan” threatens not to occur. A military deployment present but contained. There is no doubt, despite the absence of escorts direct, the environment remains heavily militarized. The United States maintains a wide presence with aircraft carriers, aircraft and unmanned platforms ready to act if the situation escalates. At the same time, naval mines have been detected and specific attacks against ships in the area. In other words, in the current scenario, transit has become an operation of calculated risk where coordination replaces direct protection. The real pulse: control, pressure and global economy. Beyond the movement of ships, what is at stake is the control of one of the most important energy arteries of the world. Iran uses the blockade as a pressure tool in the midst of negotiations, while the United States tries to unblock the situation in its own way and with one caveat: without legitimizing that control. The result is an intermediate solution that summarizes well the tension of the moment: intervene just enough so that the boats leave without causing an escalation that blows everything up into the air. Image | Iranian Media In Xataka | After gasoline, the war in Iran is about to skyrocket the price of something just as painful: your Zara clothes In Xataka | Iran has pulled out a “trick” to sell to China while avoiding the US: turning the ocean into its secret gas station

BlackBerry seemed dead and buried. You have no idea how important it still is (but not for your mobile)

May 4, 2026 by usatoday24

Let’s take a little trip back in time. It’s 2014 and we’re in Silicon Valley. An executive named John Wall, president of QNXa division of Blackberry, has just arrived in the world’s technology mecca, fresh from Waterloo, in Ontario (Canada). He goes to a meeting with managers from Audi, one of his company’s best clients. The automotive firm has just announced the arrival of Android Auto to its cars. Meanwhile, Apple he doesn’t stop signing QNX engineers to create their own operating system for cars. Blackerry’s shortcomings continue to grow: after losing in mobile phones, it now also had a really bad time in the infotainment systems business. And then, something happened. A beer. The beer of the resurrection. Audi’s head of engineering went to have a beer with him and confessed that Audi was going to use Google’s infotainment systems. However, he told him, his next generation of cars would still need safety features that didn’t exist yet. So Wall came up with an idea. Instead of trying to control the car’s screen, I would try to conquer the software that is the backbone of that entire experience. “The circumstances that caused us to lose infotainment caused the company to pivot in the right direction, whether we knew it or not at the time,” counted Wall. The truth is that they did not have many alternatives, especially after experiencing one of the most famous boom and bust phenomena in the technology industry. From everything to (almost) nothing. In 2008 BlackBerry I was on top of the world. Its market capitalization at that time reached $83 billion, but from then on it plummeted mainly due to the iPhone. Today its capitalization round the 3,000 million dollars, but the surprise is that its great treasure is an almost mythical software that has turned out to be a success in the automotive world. Its name: QNX. How BlackBerry ended up making car software. In 2010 Research In Motion (RIM)—BlackBerry’s former official name— acquired QNX. This real-time operating system that appeared in the mid-1980s and in the 2000s completely changed its focus to target the automotive industry. When RIM bought it, it tried to take advantage of it for its own operating system, blackberry 10but we already know how that ended. QNX’s other big business. The curious thing is that while the company was sinking in the mobile market, QNX engineers who had not moved to the smartphone team continued working on car software. John Wall, president of QNX, has been with the company since graduating in the early ’90s, and in an interview in The Wall Street Journal he recalled how “no one paid attention to us.” That was precisely what changed the course of the company. A crucial operating system. QNX is the operating system that operates collision alerts, blind spot notifications, adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection or lane correction systems. Not only in cars, be careful: also on motorcycles. It is invisible to the user, who never sees the QNX logo, but certainly sees that everything works. Wall compared his engineers to plumbers and electricians: “What makes QNX virtually irreplaceable is its reputation for never failing.” In Fortune a user commented years earlier how “the only way to make this software fail is to shoot a bullet at the computer running it.” A flourishing business. For years QNX was an overlooked division within an ailing company, but today it accounts for about half of BlackBerry’s total revenue. The software that failed on mobile phones and tablets has ended up being almost the only business that matters for the company, but it has not been limited to cars. QNX is integrated into surgical robots and dozens of medical devices in hospitals around the world. It is also used in industrial plants and automation systems that depend on the security and reliability that QNX provides. It is not without problemsof course, but its software is still key in many critical systems. Prize for being late. BlackBerry was late to the smartphone revolution and lost. It was also late to try to conquer the infotainment segment in the automobile industry and lost. But upon losing that second battle, it adapted and managed to reconvert its operating system into something for which it was precisely designed: a real-time operating system that does not fail and whose latency and response time was (and is) extraordinary. If QNX had continued trying to compete with CarPlay or Android Auto it would probably have disappeared completely, but now it is an absolute benchmark in a niche where its reliability is much more valuable than the flashy new features that infotainment systems usually sell. Today its systems are installed in more than 275 million vehicles. BlackBerry is doing well. BlackBerry shares are up 50% in the latest financial results, and the company has four consecutive quarters in profits. That has caused BlackBerry CEO John Giamatteo to declare that his company “is now a growth story.” These data must be taken with caution, because BlackBerry is very far from where it was almost two decades ago, but the path this company has taken seems the right one. We may not see it compete in the mobility arena anymore, but it has become a fundamental element of an automobile industry that is only doing one thing: growing. In Xataka | There are still those who insist on resurrecting the keyboard and the jack: this is the mobile phone that brings them back with the scent of BlackBerry

Apple is clear that the memory crisis is about to hit harder. No more cushioning the blow

May 4, 2026 by usatoday24

With the launch of iPhone 17e and of macbook neoit seemed that Apple was one of the few untouchable companies due to the component crisis that we are experiencing. Although prices increased in the United States, they remained the same in Spain and the MacBook neo was launched at a price to eat the market. The problem is that time has shown that not even Apple is untouchable. And Tim Cook affirms that the worst is yet to come. The Mac Mini. This was, along with the MacBook neo, one of the best options when buying a computer. Not from Apple: in general. An interesting price for a team with enormous potential in a very small size. It had one drawback: it started with 256 GB of storage for a price of 719 euros, but it was interesting because using Thunderbolt you could expand with external SSDs. Now, that basic option does not exist. Apple has deleted the ‘cheap’ Mac Mini and now we can only buy the device with 512 GB base at a price of 969 euros. This is a mandatory price increase that suggests that the 256 GB option was the best-seller and Apple ran out of stock. Cushioning the blow. This price increase occurred hours after Tim Cook, in a call to investors to present quarterly results, will aim that the company has had the best starter of the year in its history, with 17% year-on-year. How well the iPhone is working in China, the services and equipment like those mentioned Mac Mini and MacBook neo have contributed to this. However, he left another message: the global chip crisis is about to hit the ship much harder. In the earnings presentation, he noted that things will get considerably worse due to “significantly higher memory costs” in the coming quarters. The rest of the industry has already been experiencing that blow, but Cook detailed that, so far, Apple has been partially protected and isolated because it has been selling inventory accumulated in advance. The problem is that, as reserves have been depleted, they have had to resort to the only two options: eliminate the best-selling options (we just saw this with the Mac Mini, but We saw it recently with the Mac Studio) and raise prices. Curves are coming. The current CEO pointed out that Apple is considering a range of options to manage this impact, although he has not given more details. Really, there aren’t that many: price increases in basic equipment, configurations with less RAM and less storage, eliminating options that, for the user, are still an increase and something that is more complicated: taking the hit. What is clear, as we read on CNBC, is that Apple expects that this increase in costs will have “a growing impact on our business”, leaving a message to John Ternus who will become CEO of Apple next September 1: “we have the right leader to take on the role.” The truth is that Ternus is going to arrive at a sweet time for Applebut in one where the industry is on fire. The 256 GB version is over. Now starts at 512 GB for 969 euros Tsunami. This time we focus on Apple, although Cook has not really said anything that any other executive from the main technology companies would not have commented before. With SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron turning to the NAND chip market for data centers, the consumer market has been left to its own devices and the consequence is what we are now seeing with Apple. As we say, the company has dodged the first blow because they had accumulated stock, but now the hard part will come for users. From Samsung, in the also recent presentation of results, already they warned that there will be “significant shortages” in products that need these types of chips and that they expect the situation to continue until at least 2027. It is an ambitious estimate, since SK Hynix believes that things will return to normal in 2030 and Nvidia is even more pessimistic. If you need something…Buy now. It is the best warning because things do not look like they are going to improve. If you think you are going to need a device, you better buy it as soon as possible because the price will continue to rise or, simply, that device will stop selling. The mobile industry has been warning for weeks that prices are going to rise, the same thing happens with computers and even with hard drives with which you can make a NAS. And a personal example: when the crisis was beginning to be critical, at the end of January of this year, I bought a 2 TB T7 SSD from Samsung for 160 euros. Today, that same one is for about 229 euros, which is not even close to its fair price. And how says Samsung itself, things are going to get worse. Images | Xataka In Xataka | There is a company that has grown 3,000% in the stock market, even beating the performance of Nvidia: Sandisk

Back Market makes it a little easier for us to renew tablets

May 4, 2026 by usatoday24

Apple devices are by far the hardest to find at a good discount. For this reason, any way we can get an iPhone or iPad at a good price is always welcome. One of the stores that makes this easier for us is Back Marketwhich has a very large catalog of refurbished devices. The best? That now all their iPads will have an extra 5% discount. We will tell you more about this promo. The price could vary. We earn commission from these links A promo that will only be available from May 4 to 10 Let’s go in parts. This new promo is as simple to explain as it seems: from May 4 to 10 we will have an additional 5% discount when purchasing an iPad at Back Market. The only requirement we have to access this promo is that we do a purchase of more than 100 eurossomething we are going to do with almost any Apple tablet we buy. And beyond the price, what do Back Market iPads offer? The entire catalog of this store is made up of refurbished devices, but with 24 months warranty. In addition, we will have a 30-day free trial in which we can see what the device offers and, if it does not convince us, return it. All without forgetting that shipping is free and that we can even finance our purchases. Let’s take as an example the iPad Air with M2 chip launched in 2024. This, in ‘Excellent’ condition and in its 11-inch version with 128 GB it is available right now for 443 euros. If we wait for the promo to start, then we can get it for 420.85 euros. It is a very interesting option if you are looking for an iPad Air at the best price and you don’t mind not having a more modern version. It’s just an example, but the same applies to the rest of the iPads you have in Back Market. You just have to access to the section of these tablets in the store and choose the one that best suits you. The good thing is that you have models of all kinds: from the latest iPad 11 even a 2022 iPad Pro. Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | Pedro AznarApple In Xataka | Best iPhones. Which one to buy and recommended models based on budget, tastes and quality-price In Xataka | Best tablets. Which one to buy and 8 recommended models for all pockets and needs

more hectares, more kilos and more uncertainty

May 4, 2026 by usatoday24

Extremadura has just started the campaign for one of the crops in which it stands out not only nationally but also internationally. European scale: tobacco. In recent days, the seedlings have begun to leave the nurseries towards the regions where around 98% of all ‘tobacco made in Spain’ production is concentrated. The news is interesting not only because of what it means for regions such as Campo Arañielo, La Vera, Alagón, Talayuela or Navalmoral de la Mata, where tobacco farmers work. This year the sector is grabbing attention also due to the context, marked by two apparently contradictory factors: uncertainty and the increase in both cultivated hectares and contracted merchandise. Is it going to be cultivated more? That’s how it is. Coinciding with the start of the Extremaduran campaign, the National Federation of Tobacco Growers confirmed A few days ago, the Efe Agro agency reported that 6,496 hectares will be planted this year, almost 7% more than last year. The figure is still very far from the cultivated area at the beginning of the last decade, when in Spain the 10,000 hectaresbut maintains the growth trend of recent years. In fact, it exceeds the data from 2022, 2023 and 2024 registered by the Government. While waiting for the final balance of 2025, last year the sector spoke of an area of 6,400 ha throughout the country. The cultivated land is not the only thing that increases. There are signs that also indicate an increase in the amount of tobacco reserved by operators in the sector. The Interprofessional Tobacco Organization of Spain (Oitab) has increased its hiring in Extremadura to 23.69 million kilos, about 723,600 kilos more than in 2025. The public firm Cetarsa will also buy 5% more than last season, which is equivalent to 16.65 million kilos. Additionally, Deltafina will buy 3.62 million and Mella 3.41. Is this good news for the sector? The director of Oitab defends that the increase is “very positive” and recalls that the sector has been growing for five years. However, it is not all good news for Extremaduran farmers, who this campaign will be forced to deal with a scenario marked by uncertainty. The hangover from the Iran war will force them to deal with the rising fuel price and of fertilizersbut above all they are focused on something else: the yield of the harvest. As they explain farmers to The Newspapercultivating more hectares does not necessarily mean that you will earn more money. In fact, 7% more planted area does not guarantee that they will harvest 7% more tobacco. In March Asaja I already warned of the consequences that restrictions on certain phytosanitary products will have. Specifically, the organism critical two measures: the veto of Dichloroprene 1.3 and the restrictions on Metam Sodium. Is it that important? Dionisio Sánchez, manager of the Agrarian Transformation Society (SAT) Asociación Agrupación TAB, the largest producer cooperative, he complained recently in The Newspaper that the sector does not have the same resources as other years to treat the fields, and warned of the consequences of these restrictions: “We do not have means of production.” “Yields are going to decrease, many farmers have put in more hectares to see if they can get the same kilos,” insisted. Added to this factor is another that also explains the increase in cultivated area: the gradual loss of attractiveness of corn has led some farmers to abandon the cereal and switch to tobacco. The group is also not entirely satisfied with the prices of the companies that work with their crops. For example, although Cetarsa will slightly increase the money it pays for each kilo of tobacco, there are those in the sector who believe that it is not enough. Especially since the calculations were made before the war in Iran affected the prices of two key inputs for farmers (both those dedicated to tobacco in Extremadura and the rest): diesel fuel and fertilizer. This change of scenery is probably kept in mind. in junewhen the contracted volumes are reviewed. Is it just agriculture? No. As the sector frequently insists, the tobacco industry has an economic and social dimension that goes beyond the cultivated plots. Fernando Vaquero, director of Oitab, remembers for example that in Extremadura alone there are around 20,000 families that depend on the crop. Last year AFI and the Tobacco Table published a study that estimates that the sector generates 69 million of euros of added value in Extremadura and support some 1,050 direct jobs. How does it affect the population? If the data were not important in itself, there is another factor to take into account: a good part of this economic pulse beats in rural areas, which demonstrates for the sector its value when establishing “productive fabric and local employment.” If the focus is expanded and goes beyond agriculture, AFI calculates that tobacco will leave Extremadura 126 million. To this impact we should add the one it leaves in Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha or Extremadura (where there are also plantations) and the Canary Islands, Cantabria and Madrid, which also benefit from the industry’s production chain. Perhaps to support this activity, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Sustainable Development of Extremadura recently announced that it would allocate five million euros to help Integrated Tobacco Production to 500 farmers. Is everything positive for the sector? No. Even though the cultivated area grows this year in Extremadura, the ministry’s data show that Spain continues to dedicate much less land to the tobacco used in 2014. Production is also clearly lower. It is not something that happens only in our country. The EU recognize that cultivation has been progressively decreasing in recent decades, and in a clear way as well: from 400,000 t at the beginning of the 90s it went to 140,000 t in 2018, a year in which the cultivated area at the community level was around 66,000 ha, half that of 2001. This trend coincides with a clear decrease in tobacco consumption worldwide, largely … Read more

Manufacturing 60 machines a year may not seem like much. In practice, those of the European ASML are setting the pace of AI

May 4, 2026 by usatoday24

Sixty machines a year sounds like a lot when we talk about artificial intelligence. We are used to huge numbers: data centers, billions of dollars and increasingly ambitious models. But AI also depends on things that are much more physical and difficult to scale. And that’s where ASMLa European company that manufactures lithography equipment to produce advanced chips, becomes a difficult piece to avoid. This year it will manufacture at least 60 machines. And they will be indispensable. To get an idea of scale, artificial intelligence does not rely solely on better models. Just a few days ago, Reuters pointed out that Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet plan to allocate more than $600 billion in capital spending in 2026 to expand their AI infrastructure. These players need semiconductor manufacturers, who need advanced technology to produce the chips that will equip their customers’ future data centers. Here ASML appears in all its dimension. The Dutch company does not manufacture the chips that will end up in data centers, but it does manufacture the machines that allow the most advanced ones to be produced at scale. For now, because China is accelerating this raceis the only global supplier of this equipment, known as extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. This position explains why a company based in Veldhoven has become such a relevant piece for a career that is usually viewed from Silicon Valley or Taiwan, but that also has a decisive role in Europe. The European manufacturer that sets the pace for AI The striking thing is that the great jump translates into a very specific figure. The data comes to us from the last presentation of the firm’s financial results, specifically those of the first fiscal quarter of 2026. Roger Dassen, VP and CFO of ASML, pointed out that they plan to manufacture at least 60 standard EUV machines in 2026. That is 36% more than those sold in 2025. In other words: in an industry that is measured in gigantic investments, significantly increasing production means moving to dozens of machines, not hundreds or thousands. By 2027, the firm hopes to reach at least 80 units. TWINSCAN EXE:5000 Manufacturing more units is not as simple as expanding an assembly line. ASML’s most advanced lithography equipment has a size comparable to that of a medium bus and they are among the most complex devices ever created. They are huge systems, extremely precise and assembled for months in clean roomswith purified air to avoid any contamination. The reason is simple: in this process, a single dust particle can disrupt production. That’s why scaling doesn’t just depend on having more orders on the table. There is a part of this history that remains outside the ASML factories, but that weighs almost as much as its own production. Their customers also need to build clean rooms to install the machines they purchase, a task that requires specialized labor, electrical connections, technical expertise and abundant available power. It is a basic condition for these dozens of pieces of equipment to later translate into more real manufacturing capacity. In other words: the machine matters, but the place prepared to receive it and put it to work also matters. Then there’s everything that happens before one of those systems leaves the Dutch company. Their equipment is built with components from more than 5,000 suppliersso increasing the pace requires that entire network to move forward at once. If one of those links does not arrive, the whole may suffer. And talent adds another difficulty: in the south of the Netherlands, many technical profiles are already in the company or in your supply chain. That’s why Veldhoven’s signature searches for candidates at Dutch and foreign universitieswithout weakening the partners you need to grow. That is the reverse of a figure that, in isolation, may seem small. Sixty machines don’t sound like much in an industry that talks about gigantic models, data centers and huge budgets. But what we have seen is that each of these units is part of a physical, technical and human chain that is much more difficult to accelerate than it seems. This boom is precisely what has helped consolidate ASML as the European company with the highest stock market valueahead of names like LVMH either Hermes. AI is also at play here on the Old Continent. Images | ASML (1, 2) In Xataka | ASML has the most in-demand and advanced lithography machines in the world. And now also, his Lego set

compulsive internet use

May 3, 2026 by usatoday24

For decades, the image of teenage rebellion has been linked to the bottle, secret tobacco or the first joint you take. However, young Spaniards are currently greatly reducing the consumption of these productsalthough to replace it they are choosing to have a quite compulsive addiction to the internet or to the scroll infinite in some applications like, for example, TikTok. The decline of alcohol and tobacco. The data that gives us joy regarding the most harmful consumption among our young people comes from the survey STUDIES 2025 prepared by the Ministry of Health through the National Plan on Drugs. Here you can see how, while in 1994 81.4% of young people between 14 and 18 years old admitted to having tried alcohol on some occasion, now in 2025 this figure has fallen to 73.9%, with consumption in the last 30 days standing at 51.8% of cases. If we focus on both alcohol and cannabis, we also observe all-time lows in consumption in the age group between 14 and 18 years. Although the current problem is focused on flavored vapers or electronic cigarettes, which do have a large presence in this age group compared to the attempts made to regulate it. The new drug. If we were left with only this half of the photograph, we might think that today’s teenagers are simply the healthiest in history. But here the same Ministry of Health, via another report of research, points to the relationship between young people and technology, which explains, in part, why they spend less time on the street drinking bottles or trying tobacco. In this way, there are several important data here: 19.4% of students aged 14 to 18 have problematic use of the Internet. 15.3% show clear signs of problems with social networks, trapped in addictive design mechanics, which is what we know as doomscrolling. 5.2% present symptoms compatible with video game addiction, something that has also been motivated by the famous ‘loot boxes’ that promote addiction to games of chance, since if they are looking for a specific aesthetic change, they must be lucky to find it in a virtual box or envelope. We have a great challenge. What these reports tell us is nothing more than that the problem that we suffered in our youth has mutated and has been updated to something much more modern and difficult to detect. Before, the smell of tobacco was a clear sign that something was happening, but today a teenager may be developing a severe addiction locked in his room, while his parents think he is just “on his cell phone.” This has meant that public policies are now focused on this type of addiction, also with some measures that are already being heard, such as the veto on access to social networks. to minors under 16 years of age in our country to control these addictive practices that the applications try to reinforce. In Xataka | Snapchat has almost 1 billion users and invented the king format of the Internet. He still doesn’t know how to make money with it

Someone has created an AI that knows nothing about what happened after 1930, and it has more use than it seems

May 3, 2026 by usatoday24

One of the problems with language models is that there is a cut-off date in the training data, that is, the model does not know current events that go beyond that date. Rapier In certain sectors it can be a serious problemis precisely the objective of Talkie-1930, a language model trained solely on texts from before 1930. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to talk to someone from the past, there’s an AI for that. A vintage language model. This is how These LLMs have been baptized who are trained with historical content. Talkie-1930 is a model with 13 billion parameters that does not have access to modern information nor can it consult the Internet, but has only been trained with books, newspapers and other texts from before 1930. To explore the model, the researchers had Claude converse with the model, evaluating his responses. The model showed great knowledge of the world, with many historical details of the time, and a great ability to imitate the style of Victorian authors such as Dickens, although somewhat limited in more satirical formats. More than a cultural experiment. Talkie is the closest thing to talking to someone educated in the early 20th century. This turns the model into a window that allows us to explore the mentality and culture of a past time and learn how society, politics or daily life were described back then. But beyond curiosity, Talkie-1930 also functions as a “control subject” to better study the functioning of AI and achieve important advances. Predicting the future. By being “frozen” in 1930, Talkie makes it possible to better measure how far a model can extrapolate and predict the future from historical patterns alone, without cheating with later data. To test this anticipatory capacity, the researchers showed up to 5,000 descriptions of subsequent historical events, taken from the “On this day” section of the New York Times, and measured the model’s degree of surprise. The result was that the model showed more surprise in the decades after the data cutoff, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, but then its degree of surprise stabilized. According to the researchers, this suggests that predictive performance improves as the time horizon becomes longer, but they point out that it will be necessary to train older models to be able to measure it well. Invention. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, raised a very interesting question at a conference recently: if an AI with a limit of knowledge until 1911 could reach the theory of relativity that Einstein discovered in 1915. In this sense, models like Talkie-1930 are a very interesting tool to observe its ability to generate new ideas that can lead to discoveries. No pollution. Is one of the problems that the models have trained with large corpuses of current data, in which the evaluation data itself usually also sneaks in and ends up causing their capabilities to be overestimated. With vintage models there is no contamination and that allows you to carry out very specific experiments, such as seeing if you are able to learn to program without having any prior computer knowledge. Talkie-1930 is open source and is available on Github. Image | Xataka In Xataka | A macro experiment has tried to find out if we differentiate real images from those generated by AI. The answer is not optimistic

the secret is in the hidden map of the nose

May 3, 2026 by usatoday24

We have known for decades how what we see, what we hear and what we touch works. Science has been mapping these senses for a century, so that each sensory signal has a known direction, a path traced from the organ to the brain. A couple of examples: this retinal map either east of the cochlea. There was one pending subject: smell. Not because no one had looked for it but because the olfactory system has enormous complexity: more than a thousand different types of receptors and twenty million neurons in the nose of a mouse. A biological chaos that a Harvard research team has managed to draw a map. What the map says. The scientific team has discovered that olfactory neurons are not distributed randomly in the nasal cavity, but rather form a spatial code based on overlapping stripes organized by the type of receptor and distributed from the upper to the lower part of the nose. This pattern is practically identical in all the animals studied, so it is a conserved and reproducible biological architecture. The most surprising thing is that this banding arrangement is a mirror of the map of the olfactory bulb in the brain. That is, there is topographic continuity: the position of a neuron in the nose determines exactly which area of the brain it will send its signal to. This means that the brain “reads” odors based in part on the geographic location of the cell that detected the molecule. havard Why is it important. Because it is the missing piece to understand neuroplasticity and the regeneration of smell. In practice, because the loss of smell currently lacks effective treatments: by knowing the original design of the system, researchers can now understand why connections fail after trauma or a viral infection, something that revealed COVID-19. If the architecture of the system is not understood, regeneration goes blindly. As Sandeep Robert Datta, a neurobiologist at Harvard’s Blavatnik Institute and principal investigator of the paper, points out, without understanding this map, attempts to develop new treatments are doomed to failure. Context. Mammalian olfaction is a complex system. In the case of the mouse, it has 20 million olfactory neuronseach expressing one of more than a thousand different receptor types. To get an idea, human color vision is only supported by three types of photoreceptors. This complexity meant that for decades science tended to associate the distribution of receptors randomly. Linda Buck and Richard Axel discover olfactory receptors in 1991 it earned them the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2004but that told us what detected the odors, not where or how they were organized. The good news is that with the advances in molecular biology today it is possible to analyze individual cells in their original position using techniques such as spatial transcriptomics. How have they done it. The Harvard team analyzed approximately 5.5 million neurons from more than 300 mice by combining two techniques: single-cell sequencing to know which receptor each neuron expresses and spatial transcriptomics to know exactly where it is located in the tissue. The study also identified the mechanism that builds that map: retinoic acid. By manipulating the chemical gradients of retinoic acid during embryonic development, they observed that the stripes of these receptors shifted, confirming that this acid functions as a kind of molecular GPS that tells each neuron where to position itself and which receptor to express. Yes, but. The first major limitation of the study is evident: it was done in mice, so as the research team itself acknowledges, they still do not know if the same organization applies to humans. Although the olfactory system of mammals is mostly conserved, humans have significantly fewer functional receptors (approximately 350 compared to more than 1,000 in the mouse) and a different nasal anatomy, so the existence of these stripes in humans still needs to be validated experimentally. Furthermore, although the map explains the wherestill does not fully explain the because of that specific order. We do not know if the stripes are grouped by the chemical structure of the odors or by their biological relevance, for example the smell of food versus odors of danger. Resolving what logic obeys that order is the next big challenge. In Xataka | We have been wondering for decades why Neanderthals became extinct. So we’re studying your nose In Xataka | Nasal strips are back in fashion in sports. Science has already passed judgment on them Cover | Angela Roma and Data Lab

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