matters

China has just regulated something that really matters: whether AI ends up being our friend or our girlfriend

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China has decided to put limits on a very specific type of AI: that designed to look like a person. Doubao (ByteDance) and Qwen (Alibaba) have announced that they will disable their custom AI agents before the regulations come into force imminently. Tencent had already done it with its Yuanbao model, but behind all these closures there is a much deeper idea. The blackout of anthropomorphic AI already has a date. Doubao has already warned its users that its personalized AI agents will stop working on July 15 due to “product adjustments” and that three months later they will not be able to access the stored conversations with said chatbots. With Qwen things will be even faster: the agents will disappear on July 10, and the rest of the functions will do so five days later. These measures are taken before the entry into force of the new Provisional Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic Interaction Services with AI, recently published by the Chinese government. In Xataka Millions of teenagers have turned AI into their go-to psychologist. It is an unprecedented challenge for medicine Conversational chatbots, yes… The interesting thing about the regulations is that they do not regulate generative AI in general. Leave assistants out to work, study, research or serve customers. What it regulates are the systems that “simulate personality traits, thought patterns and human communication styles to provide a sustained emotional interaction.” The problem therefore is not that AI can be more or less powerful, but that it comes to simulate the behavior of a person. …company chatbots no. The functions that disappear from these platforms are those that allowed a generalist chatbot to be turned into a fictional character, a friend or even a romantic partner. This personalization gave these AI agents a fixed personality, a memory and a characteristic conversational style that reinforced interaction with it. They were therefore not tools to replace the current search engine, but rather systems designed to trap the user in an increasingly personal and intimate relationship and conversation. Beware of emotional dependence. Here the Chinese regulation does not try to identify dangerous risks such as those traditionally discussed, for example, with the European Union regulation. Instead what it monitors are interactions in which there is an emotional dependencea potential addiction and even manipulation by these systems. In fact, these systems are prohibited from fostering emotional bonds that could lead to irrational decisions. All of this is stopped by regulations to avoid the potential deterioration of personal relationships. AI must analyze itself. According to the regulation, AI must intervene when it detects these types of situations. If a user shows too extreme emotions towards these chatbots or if it is perceived that there may be risks to their integrity, the AI ​​should encourage them to seek help or even activate certain emergency protocols. You should also warn if you see excessive usage and remind the user to rest after two hours of continuous talk. In a certain sense, these regulations are reminiscent of the “digital welfare” mechanisms that have been imposed on mobile apps that try to limit the use of social networks. In Xataka "As pathetic as it sounds, ChatGPT is my only friend": more and more people confess to having an AI as a friend Protection for vulnerable people. The measures pay special attention to underage users and also to older people. For example, these types of chatbots are prohibited from offering intimate virtual relationships, such as couples or artificial relatives, and they require parental consent. There is also an obligation to take precautions when the users are elderly, since this group is especially exposed to loneliness and a possible emotional dependence. AI should stay just that: be an AI. Although there have been advances in the psychological impact of these models in their relationship with people, this is probably the first major regulation that does not attempt to control how powerful AI models are, but rather how capable they are. to establish personal relationships with users. This discussion will probably end up reaching Europe and the US, and is a touchstone for a technology that has certainly been infiltrating the personal sphere for some time. Image | Andy Kelly In Xataka |Telling the AI ​​what worries you was only the first step: there are already bots that pose as registered psychiatrists (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news China has just regulated something that really matters: whether AI ends up being our friend or our girlfriend was originally published in Xataka by Javier Pastor .

Europe has realized that nothing matters in technological sovereignty if it does not spend money on something crucial: defending its submarine cables

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There is a type of technological infrastructure that is invisible, but that has become essential in recent years: submarine cables. Conflicts like those of the Red Sea either the ukrainian war have shown that the seabed is a new battlefield. Damaging submarine cables havoc can be wreaked, and the European Union has just outlined its plan to strengthen the security and resilience of these cables. The goal? Track and stop threats in real time, but also repair underwater cables that enemies have attacked as soon as possible. Plan of action. In recent months, Europe has been weaving a plan to protect its submarine cables. These cables carry most of the world’s Internet traffic (an estimated 99%), but also other essential goods such as energy, vital when we want to tackle offshore energy. Hence the importance and, obviously, why the attacks also focus on them. Only in the first months of 2025 were more than a dozen submarine cables cut which seem few, but it really is something that can wreak havoc. And, therefore, Europe started to define an Action Plan with four main categories of action: Prevention: carry out risk assessments coordinated by countries and prioritize the financing of “smart” cables with redundancy. Detection: improve the monitoring capabilities of sea basins such as the Mediterranean or the Baltic to obtain a situation picture in real time. Response and recovery: strengthening rapid repair capacity and improving EU crisis protocols to act in a coordinated manner when a cable is damaged. Deterrence: use diplomacy and ultimately sanctions to respond to hostile acts. With global partners, promote a pact to encourage “cable diplomacy.” Repair of a cable Quick response. But of course, if deterrence does not work, we must act, and more recently, the European Commission has announced the steps to reinforce that strategy that aims to ensure that a damaged submarine cable causes as few headaches as possible. With an allocation of 40 million euros, the Commission seeks to guarantee a rapid and effective response to disturbances of submarine cables in emergency situations through adaptable modules. These modules, like repair kits, will be strategically positioned in various sea basins so that, in the event of a cable break, the ships repairing the cables will have quick access to these modules. It is one more step in a strategy that already had a first pilot call for 20 million euros a few months ago and whose objective was to finance modules in the Baltic Sea. Booster. Another measure will be the installation of the first two regional cable centers. In the Baltic, a Regional Center will be opened that will be responsible for strengthening surveillance and response mechanisms. The idea is that, with an allocation of 2.5 million euros, the information exchange platform and the capacity to both detect and prevent threats to maritime infrastructure will be improved. Finland will be the coordinator of the center together with Denmark, Germany, Estonia, Latvia and Sweden. On the other hand, in the Mediterranean, another center will be supported with 3.3 million euros. The task will be to make decisions, exchange information in real time and the same as in the Baltic: anomaly detection and coordinated response to incidents. Italy will be the coordinator together with Greece, Cyprus and Malta. With the first regional cable centers, Europe moves towards enhanced capabilities, strengthening our ability to detect threats, act faster and respond together – Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice President for Technological Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Next steps. In the end, these two strategies are part of a much larger plan in which they had already been assigned 595 million euros to 74 continental connectivity projects. In February of this year, the Commission also advertisement a package of some 347 million euros exclusively for submarine cable projects (construction, monitoring and repair), which shows that it is a strategic, basic infrastructure that fits in with the technological sovereignty plan that Europe is pursuing after seeing associations with allied countries weakened in recent years. Image | What’s Inside? In Xataka | A third of the world’s population cannot read this: the UN reveals that 2.9 billion people have never accessed the internet

Choosing your 5 daily fruits and vegetables also matters

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We have all heard the importance of taking 5 pieces of fruit and/or vegetables up to date to keep our health in shape. Not all of us do it as regularly as we should, but we know the recommendation. What is not so well known is that, in reality, a random selection of 5 fruits or vegetables is not the best way to achieve those desired health standards. At least, that is the conclusion he has reached with your investigations Professor of Nutrition at the University of Reading Gunther Kuhnle. The case of flavanols. If it is recommended to take 5 pieces of fruit or vegetables a day, it is because they are foods that contain a large amount of bioactives. That is, substances that exert a biological effect on our body that contributes to improving our health. There are many bioactives, but, without a doubt, one of the most important in the plant world are flavanols. For this reason, Kuhnle’s team carried out a study aimed at checking whether we normally consume an adequate amount of flavanols and, if positive, if it can be correlated with the consumption of 5 pieces of fruit or vegetables a day. The recommended amount of flavanols to experience their positive effects on health is 500 milligrams daily. In the study it was seen that, indeed, it is something that can be managed with a normal diet. It is not necessary to resort to supplements or anything like that. However, it was also concluded that very few people actually reach that level of consumption. Even if they religiously eat their 5 pieces of fruit and/or vegetables. Neither surveys nor diaries. Diet studies are often conducted by asking participants to keep a food diary. On other occasions, they are surveyed about their eating habits. However, these types of methods are not the most reliable, since we do not always remember everything we have eaten. For this reason, these scientists chose to analyze urine in search of markers that indicate the bioactives that have been absorbed by the body from the diet. The study involved 30,000 people who had provided their urine samples for studies carried out in the United Kingdom and the United States. Amazing results. In this study it was seen that less than 1 in 5 participants reached the dose of 500 milligrams per day of flavanols. Even if they ate the recommended amount of vegetables. They also noted that the results were quite different in the two participating countries. In the United States, if they followed the 5-piece recommendation, 20% reached 500 mg of flavanols. In the United Kingdom, only 10% of those who followed the recommendations reached it. However, very curiously, there were many who did reach the recommended dose without taking the 5 pieces of fruits and/or vegetables a day. The key is in the tea. Tea is one of the foods richest in flavanols.. In countries like the United States, tea consumption can be related to leading a healthy life and, therefore, eating a lot of fruits and vegetables. However, in the United Kingdom it is more of a cultural thing. For this reason, many people who do not actually eat the recommended amount of vegetables do reach 500 mg of flavanols per day. Consumption of green tea is a great option Not everything is going to be infusions. After this study, Kuhnle concludes that “a random selection of 5 fruits and vegetables each day is unlikely to provide significant amounts of bioactives.” Therefore, he recommends choosing them wisely. In the case of flavanols, there are vegetables such as carrots, cauliflower or cucumbers, which have very little. However, cherries, berries, grapes and apples are very rich in these compounds. So is cocoa. You don’t have to get obsessed either.. Eating 5 pieces of vegetables a day is better than not eating fruit or vegetables. With that we are already helping our health. What this scientist proposes is, once this is achieved, go one step further and inform ourselves about the nutritional content of the vegetables we are eating. Carrots do not have flavanols, but they are very rich in carotenoids, which are also very necessary for health. The ideal is to look for a good contribution of the greatest amount of bioactives. a good example. To optimize the benefits, you can combine berries such as blueberries with artichoke, kale, carrot and pomegranate. Thus, flavanols are obtained, but also other polyphenols (flavanols are flavonoids and flavonoids are polyphenols), vitamin C, carotenoids, folate, calcium, potassium or fiber. Granda’s ellagitanninsfor example, are very interesting polyphenols due to their benefits related to intestinal health. On the other hand, although it is important to make it clear that all fruits and vegetables are healthy (as long as they are edible), it is true that there are some that are somewhat nutritionally poorer. This is, for example, the case of lettuce or cucumber. They also provide some benefits, but we should not focus all our vegetable contributions to the diet on them. In short, if you can, try to choose your five pieces of fruit and vegetables wisely. And if you top it off with tea, all the better. The five pieces are indicative. In fact, there are several studies that They aim more accurately at a consumption of 400 grams of fruits and vegetables per day. The five pieces is an indicative calculation so that we can do accounting without the need for a scale. Be that as it may, the important thing, more than the numbers, is that we have a balanced diet, with the greatest possible amount of nutrients. And of course, for that, information is power. Image | Julia Zolotova (Unsplash) | Magnificent In Xataka | We are heading towards the most expensive chocolate in history: how the cocoa crisis is going to skyrocket its price

Spain produces so much solar energy that it is the envy of Europe. And even so, 70% of what you consume matters

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In June, when the sun hits hardest, the Spanish electricity grid registers demand peaks greater than 36,800 MW that renewables comfortably cover. We are, in electricity generation, the envy of Europe. And yet, at this very moment, 70% of the energy our economy consumes comes from abroad. That is the Spanish paradox in a single sentence: a country that exudes sun and wind but is still 70% dependent on the outside world. This contradiction, which in normal times would be just another energetic debate, has become an open wound since The Third Gulf War closed the Strait of Hormuzthe artery through which approximately a fifth of the world’s oil and gas transited. Is the second major energy shock in just four years and, according to the International Energy Agency, the largest in the history of the oil market. We have the best sun in Europe. And we continue to pay for the war. The report From Fossil Shock to Energy Sovereigntyprepared by the Renovables Foundation and the Meridian Institute, explains why. And the answer is uncomfortable: it is not that we lack resources. It’s just that we are ignoring them. The underlying problem. Here is the key that many overlook. Electricity consumption in Spain represents only 22% of the country’s total energy demand. The rest—78%—is covered by burning things: petroleum products (54%) and fossil gas (16%). It doesn’t matter how many solar panels we put on the roofs if cars continue to pump gasoline, boilers continue to burn gas and factories continue to throw away fossils. We are a country that has learned to produce clean electricity extraordinarily well. And then he uses it for a minimal fraction of what he needs. The three “black holes”. The study identifies three sectors where this disconnection between what we produce and what we consume is most flagrant: Mobility: the biggest hole. Transportation consumes 43% of final energy and accounts for 33% of emissions. The sector is responsible for 71.1% of the final consumption of petroleum products in Spainwith diesel as the undisputed king. By the end of 2025, the share of purely electric cars in sales was 8.85%. Of the total fleet in circulation, only 0.8% is electric. The rest continues to fill the tank. Homes: heating from the last century. Domestic consumption accounts for 30% of final energy use. Only 24% of the heating in our homes is electric; the rest continue to burn mainly fossil fuels. Gas boilers continue to be the majority in Spain while in the Nordic countries they are already history. We are the country in Europe with the most hours of sunshine and one of the countries that installs the least aerothermal energy. The industry: the silent hole. It represents the remaining 27% of final energy use. Its level of electrification has been stuck at around 35% for years, which means that almost two-thirds of the energy that drives our factories is still fossil fuel. It is the least visible sector in public debate and, possibly, the most difficult to transform. Also the one that needs the most time to do it: that is why it is urgent to start now. The Scandinavian mirror (with nuances). Norway leads the way: by the end of 2025, almost 98% of its new passenger cars sold were pure electric. They have more than 600 heat pumps for every 1,000 homes. Spain is located below 90 aerothermal units per 1,000 homes. The difference is more than 6 to 1. In the sunniest country in continental Europe. It is worth being honest: Norway finances its transition precisely with the income from the oil it exports. Spain does not have that cushion. But that does not invalidate the direction, but rather forces us to look for our own mechanisms—tax incentives, collective purchasing, European funds—to follow the same path. So why are we going so slow? The obstacles are real: the entry price of electric vehicles remains high for the average Spanish income, the charging infrastructure unfolds very unevenly throughout the territory, and the housing stock—with many old and poorly insulated buildings—cannot always accommodate a heat pump without major work. Naming these obstacles is not an excuse. It is the condition to overcome them. What it costs us every year to do nothing. If Spain matched the Norwegian pace for a single year—registering some 950,000 electric cars and installing 820,000 heat pumps—the immediate savings in fossil fuel imports would be between 1,300 and 1,700 million euros. With 100% electrification of mobility sustained for a decade, the reduction would reach 36% in oil and gas imports: 16.4 billion euros per year that would no longer go abroad. To understand the scale: Spain has strategic reserves for about 92 days of consumption regardless of a single barrel. Three months of autonomy in the face of a crisis that is already lasting longer. Every year that we do not electrify is one more year of fragility that we consciously choose. And the European irony completes the picture: the EU allocates nearly 88 billion euros annually to subsidize fossil fuels for transport, heating and industry. According to the Meridian Institute, this money would be enough to install more than 10.2 million heat pumps or finance 2.5 million electric cars annually across the continent. Europe has been paying for decades to remain vulnerable. Same trap, different provider. Four years ago we learned the hard way about the danger of depending on Russian gas and we exchanged it for liquefied gas ships from the United States and Qatar. Today we discovered that we have only replaced one vulnerability with another. As long as we need to burn gas to turn on the light, our pockets will continue to be hostage to geopolitics. The name of the country that supplies does not matter. In storage, the gap is also striking. Germany and Italy lead European battery deployment, with 6.6 GWh and 4.9 GWh installed by 2025 respectively. Achieving that capacity would allow Spain to eliminate between 5% and 10% … Read more

the fine print matters as much as the price

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If you were thinking about signing up for PlayStation Plusit may be worth checking the calendar. Sony has announced a price rise for its subscription service, which offers monthly games, online multiplayer and other benefits to users of its consoles. The change comes into effect tomorrow, Tuesday, May 20, although with an important nuance: it will not affect all users equally. The announcement has come through a message posted on X. The Japanese company has indicated that the increase responds to current “market conditions” and that the new rates will start at 10.99 dollars, 9.99 euros and 7.99 pounds for one-month subscriptions, and at 27.99 dollars, 27.99 euros and 21.99 pounds for three-month subscriptions. Click to see the original publication in X The immediate question is which markets exactly this rise will reach. At the moment, Sony has not published a official list of countries not one entry in the PlayStation blog with more details. We only have that message, quite brief, for reference. Sony explains that the new PlayStation Plus prices will only apply to new subscribers in “select regions.” It also adds the following: “This price change does not apply to current subscribers (except in Türkiye and India) unless the existing subscription changes or expires.” The statement leaves some unknowns open. The expression “prices will start at” presumably points to the plan essentialthe entry level of the service. In Spain, this modality currently costs 8.99 euros per month and 24.99 euros if contracted for three months. If the increase is finally applied to the Spanish market, the change would mean paying 1 euro more in the monthly plan and 3 euros more in the quarterly plan. What we still don’t know is what will happen with the other levels of the service. PlayStation Plus Extra and PlayStation Plus Premium are the most expensive modalities and include additional benefits, such as Ubisoft+ Classics, a broader catalog of games, classics and title trials, depending on the contracted plan. For now, Sony has not given details about possible changes to these subscriptions. We’ve contacted Sony for more information about the extent of the upload and will update this article if we hear back. Images | sony In Xataka | Pluto is in Sagittarius and that can only mean one thing: the third trailer for ‘GTA VI’ will be out on May 14

publishing matters more than research

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During last March ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning), the academic conference dedicated to machine learning (machine learning) oldest in the world, rejected 497 scientific articles at once after detecting that 506 reviewers had resorted to the artificial intelligence (AI) to write your evaluations. They had violated a rule which they themselves had agreed to respect. This conference is organized by the International Machine Learning Society (IMLS), a non-profit organization, and has been held annually since 1980. Every year, researchers working in the field of AI submit their scientific papers in late January or early February to ICML. Those papers They are reviewed by a committee made up of other researchers in this field with the purpose of evaluating them and publishing them if they finally pass a thorough review that normally lasts several months. Decisions to accept or reject articles are usually communicated to authors during the month of May, and the ICML conference is usually held in July. Publish in ICML, NeurIPS (Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems) or ICLR (International Conference on Learning Representations) is equivalent to what in other disciplines it would be to publish in the scientific journals Nature or Science. But ICML has a serious problem: its authority is being questioned in r/MachineLearninga Reddit community specialized in machine learning which has more than 2.5 million subscribers. A perversion where reviewers don’t have time to review Before moving forward, it is worth stopping at a very important milestone: the number of scientific articles received by ICML is growing overwhelmingly year after year. In 2023 it received 6,538 papersand in 2024 no less than 9,653 articles, which represents a growth of 48%. The root of the problem lies in the fact that the number of qualified reviewers is not increasing with the same rhythm as the number of scientific articles that need to be evaluated. As I mentioned a few lines above, ICML rules establish that reviewers cannot lightly resort to AI to carry out their evaluations because this procedure can introduce bias. In fact, a study carried out on ICLR 2024 has revealed that scientific articles evaluated with AI models They tend to receive higher scores than those reviewed with the conventional procedure. This is the problem. For the 2026 edition, ICML offered evaluators to choose between two policies: one that prohibited the use of AI and another that allowed it, but with conditions. Only those who chose the first option and failed to comply were sanctioned. Of the 506 offenders, only 398 were reciprocal evaluators who had submitted a ‘paper’ However, there is one relevant fact that is worth not overlooking: the 497 scientific articles that were rejected in March of this year were reviewed by offending reciprocal evaluators. This simply means that they are researchers who simultaneously act as authors and reviewers, so their scientific article was penalized due to their violation of the ICML rules of conduct. Of the 506 offenders, only 398 were reciprocal evaluators who had submitted a paper. Interestingly, the detection system that ICML has used consists of hiding specific instructions within the PDFs of articles pending review. Those instructions are invisible to a human reader, but any AI model processing the document interprets them and includes specific, trackable phrases in the evaluation. ICML has not used generic AI detectors. Of course, each case detected was manually verified to verify that a violation had actually been committed when preparing the evaluation. What is happening reflects an unappealable reality: the review system has failed and needs to be rebuilt. The reviewers can’t cope. Neither those of ICML, nor those of NeurIPS, nor those of ICLR. The number of qualified reviewers should grow at the same rate that the number of scientific articles that need to be evaluated, and it is not happening. Furthermore, this scenario has introduced another problem: acceptance or rejection decisions have acquired a random aspect that threatens the consistency and reliability of the evaluations. It is still not entirely clear what path should be followed to resolve this problem beyond the need to increase the number of qualified evaluators. One option is to improve the transparency of the review process publishing all evaluations. Even those of rejected articles. The evaluation process could also be transformed into a two-way procedure in which authors also evaluate the quality of the reviews they receive. In this way, the evaluators will have a history that will prove their good work. We will see what strategy the conferences finally implement. In 2027 we will clear up doubts. Image | Charlesdeluvio (Unsplash) More information | ICML In Xataka | With DeepSeek V4, China has gained more than just an AI model: it has unlocked the potential of its domestic chips

Kimi Code does 75% of what Claude Code does at 20% of its price. The question is whether that 25% that is missing is the one that matters.

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A few days ago, the Chinese company Moonshot AI launched Kimi K2.6its new LLM that competes with the Gemini, GPT and Claude model families and is also especially competitive in price. Weeks earlier, it had launched Kimi Code, a programming AI agent that in turn competes with Gemini Cli, Codex and Claude Code. The question is obvious: can the Kimi Code/Kimi K2.6 pairing really compete with the fashionable pairing, Claude Code/Opus 4.7? The answer is complicated. A great model (but not perfect). Kimi K2.6 is an open weights model with one trillion parameters in total (an American trillion), of which 32 billion parameters are active and which uses the well-known Mixture-of-Experts architecture. In it launch article Its performance is shown compared to that of GPT-5.4 and Opus 4.6 and the truth is that its numbers in these synthetic tests seem really excellent: Here Kimi K2.6 is compared to GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. Source: Moonshot AI. Up to 8 times cheaper than Opus 4.6. Has subscription plans Claude Pro or ChatGPT Plus style, but it can also be used via API. The price in that case is $0.60 per million input tokens (0.16 if cached) and $4 per million output tokens. Claude Opus 4.6 costs $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens, or up to eight times more. Claude Opus 4.7 It has the same price and is theoretically better in performance, but when Kimi K2.6 was announced this version had not yet appeared (nor GPT-5.5). The magic of the swarm of AI agents. Claude Code works sequentially. Analyze the problem, execute a step, check the result and decide how to proceed. In Kimi Code a different approach is used: a “master agent” divides or decomposes the task we ask of it into independent subtasks and from that division launches up to 300 “subagents” that run in parallel and are capable of coordinating up to 4,000 steps simultaneously. Are many working at the same time better than one? It is the so-called “swarm of agents” of Kimi K2.6 that is used to the fullest in Kimi Code and that we can also activate in its free version on its official website. In Kimi K2.5 up to 100 subagents and 1,500 steps could be launched, so the jump is significant. In internal tests, Moonshot showed how these swarms managed, for example, to “refactor” an open source financial engine, working 13 hours straight and making more than 1,000 tool calls with a 185% improvement in average performance. Of course, these were internal tests. Beyond benchmarks. Kilo.ai is a company that develops tools like Kilo Code or Kilo CLI—programming agents similar to Kimi Code—and its engineers wanted evaluate the performance of both combinations. They gave Claude Opus 4.7 and Kimi K2.6 the same 1,042-line prompt to create FlowGraph, a workflow orchestration API with directed graph validation or real-time event streaming. Both models ran on Kilo CLI because what they wanted to compare were the models without further ado. Kimi was cheaper, but he also failed more. Claude Opus 4.7 finished in 20 minutes and the final cost was $3.56. Kimi K2.6 took longer, partly because server availability was limited (the model had just been launched), but it cost $0.67. Five times less. Kimi K2.6 did it well at a ridiculous price. Claude did much better, but it also cost five times as much. Kimi did 75% of what Claude did at 19% of the cost. The problem is that both believed they had done everything right and did not detect if they had made mistakes. Further analysis revealed that Claude had committed one and that Kimi had committed six of varying importance. According to Kilo.ai analysts, the final score for both was 91 points out of 100 for Opus 4.7 and 68 points out of 100 for Kimi. Two ways to see the glass. That score seems to make it clear that Kimi is simply cheaper because he did a worse job. But Kilo engineers had another way of looking at it. They have been comparing open weight models of Chinese companies for some time and have noticed how the gap with the “frontier” models of Anthropic or OpenAI is becoming less and less pronounced. “With a price of $0.67 and a thorough review, Kimi K2.6 is now a viable option. With a price of $3.56 and fewer fixes needed, Claude Opus 4.7 is the safer option. The choice between the two options depends on the analysis. A year ago, this choice was practically non-existent at this level of complexity.” Review is mandatory. Or what is the same: if after the work of Kimi K2.6 one carried out a more in-depth review and correction, it is likely that all these errors would be detected and corrected, but if we had to trust both models and we could only execute “one pass” of AI execution, Opus 4.7 would win the game. The key is that: one should not trust the code of any model right away, and it is advisable to always review that code. The geopolitical factor. Kimi and Kimi Code come from China, and the startup Moonshot AI has financial backing from Alibaba. The code that is processed in these models passes through their servers, something that for an individual developer may be irrelevant. However, for a company with sensitive proprietary code, contracts that must comply with certain European or American regulations and projects in regulated sectors, this can be a significant obstacle. Kimi Code mitigates this problem by offering the possibility of running the model locally thanks to its open weights, but that requires very powerful machines and eliminates part of the cost advantage. What Kimi Code has that Claude Code doesn’t. The clearest difference between both programming AI agents is parallelism. As we said, the ability to launch up to 300 subagents to work simultaneously attacking the same problem at the same time is remarkable. For analysis of large repositories or generation … Read more

We have been obsessed with measuring deep sleep with a watch for years. Science says what matters is dreaming vividly

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The reality is that waking up feeling like you’ve fallen asleep like a dormouse is one of the greatest pleasures in life, since it makes you start the day in a very different way. Until now, sleep science has told us that to achieve that feeling of rest we had to maximize deep sleepbut now the rarity and the intensity of dreams They are also gaining a starring role here. A new study. A recent published research in the prestigious magazine PLOS Biology by an Italian team has revealed that vivid and immersive dreams are directly related to a greater subjective sense of deep sleep. And most fascinating: this occurs even when the brain’s electrical activity tells us that we are in a phase of light sleep. How they have done it. To reach this conclusion, the researchers did not settle for morning surveys, but rather They took 44 adults healthy people to a sleep laboratory for four consecutive nights. Here they simply had to be connected to a high-density electroencephalogram to monitor their brain activity in real time. The methodology used was quite methodical, since all of them were awakened repeatedly, reaching the figure of 1,900 awakenings in total throughout the entire study. But they were not waking them up at any time, but rather sleep phase N2 which is what belongs to non-REM sleep and is what is considered relatively light sleep, where the biological need to sleep usually decreases as the night progresses. But the important thing is that, after each awakening, the participants had to describe their previous mental experiences and rate, from 1 to 10, how deep they felt their sleep had been just before opening their eyes. The result. By crossing the data from the dream stories with the EEG activity and the subjective perception of the participants, the scientists found a pattern that indicated that when the participants reported vivid, strange dreams, with high emotional intensity or very visually rich, they reported having been immersed in a very deep sleep. In contrast, if the mental activity before waking up was abstract, vague, or the participants had “meta-awareness,” which is thinking about real problems or being aware that they were sleeping, they felt that their sleep had been very superficial. A change. In this way, this sensation of dreamlike depth challenged the electroencephalograms themselves. And the fact is that, although the EEG showed that the participant’s brain activity was dangerously close to wakefulness, if he was immersed in an intense dream plot, his brain interpreted that he was resting peacefully. Memory doesn’t matter. One of the most interesting details of the study points to a situation that can be frustrating: waking up knowing that you had an incredible dream, but unable to remember the entire plot. Here the scientific study demonstrates that narrative memory is not necessary for rest, since the participants continued to rate their sleep as deep and restorative despite not remembering it. In this way, the simple fact that the brain has been “disconnected” from the physical environment and immersed in its own virtual world seems to be enough to preserve the subjective perception of rest. What does it mean? This discovery opens the door to new treatments for sleep disorders, since, in the case of insomnia, the problem could not only be in the clinical architecture of sleep, but in an alteration of dream activity or a lack of mental disconnection from the environment. And this is precisely where science has to begin to investigate. Images | iam_os In Xataka | Waking up at 3 in the morning is totally normal: sleeping straight through is a modern invention, not an evolution

lose the market that matters

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Anthropic has closed a financing round of 30,000 million dollars that doubles its valuation to 380,000 millionjust four months after being valued at 183,000 million. The operation is led by the Singapore sovereign fund GIC and Coatue, with participation from NVIDIA and Microsoft. Bang. The company has already raised more than $57 billion since its founding in 2021. OpenAI continues to have the leadership in valuation with half a billion after its last round of 40 billion at the end of last year, but now it faces a threat that is growing faster than expected. Between the lines. The numbers explain an uncomfortable paradox for OpenAI: ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion queries daily and takes the consumer market by storm… …but Anthropic controls 32% of the LLM business market according to Menlo Ventures, compared to 25% for OpenAI. And in programming, the distance is even greater: 42% versus 21%. OpenAI has seen its enterprise share fall from 50% in 2023 to 25% todayjust when this segment is emerging as the most profitable and predictable. If the consumer chatbot doesn’t turn out to be the winning horse in this race, Sam Altman has a big problem. The contrast. Sarah Friar, chief financial officer of OpenAI, acknowledged in Davos that they have gone from 70/30 consumer-business to 60/40, with the expectation of reaching 50/50 this year. The transcript of the interview CNBC Bring all the details. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, boasts of maintaining an 80/20 business-consumer ratio from the beginning. Anthropic reports recurring revenues of more than 14 billion, with growth multiplying tenfold annually for three years. And customers spending more than $100,000 annually have increased sevenfold in 12 months. Yes, but. Neither of them is profitable yet: Anthropic projected gross margins of 40% by 2025, but lowered his expectations by 10 points due to inference costs 23% higher than expected. The servers rented from Google and Amazon weigh more than calculated. OpenAI faces the same problem as both turn to the market every few months to fund the next phase. That is why both are considering IPOs between this year and next. Unexpected twist. The launch of Claude Code in December has accelerated enterprise adoption in a way that perhaps no one anticipated. The tool has not only doubled users in a month, but has consolidated the perception of Claude as “the serious option” for companies compared to ChatGPT. If companies value something, even more than the end consumer, it is stability and predictability. And Anthropic has been able to capitalize on that demand. Missing? Temporal context: By the time Apple reached a valuation of 380 billion, it had already been in existence for almost four decades. He sold Macs, he sold iPods, he sold iPads. It was already going for the iPhone 5s and its annual profit was 50 billion dollars. Anthropic reaches the same figure without being profitable, compressing decades of value creation into just a few quarters. It is not necessarily wrong, especially with the recent good dynamics of Claude’s company, but it remains to be seen if these models can sustain those explosive revenues and convert them into profits before the market loses patience. In Xataka | Featured image | OpenAI, Anthropic

Science has been measuring whether size matters for years. A study with 3D simulation has the most complete answer

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It is probably one of the most recurring questions in the history of humanity and, yet, one of the ones that accumulates the most myths per square meter. Leaving aside popular culture and internet forums, scientific literature has been trying for years to quantify what is true about the importance penis size. Science to the rescue. A published study This year, PLOS Biology wanted to resolve a question that has undoubtedly generated many jokes and also some complexes in the male sex. And the truth is that the short answer to this question is that size does matterbut perhaps not for the reasons most men believe. The signal theory. Until now, many studies were based on simple surveys to answer this question. However, this study has gone one step further by using 343 3D figures to evaluate the response of more than 800 participants. The goal was to understand penis size not only as a reproductive tool, but as an evolutionary signaling trait. The results. In the investigationfemale participants rated men as more attractive, which combined three factors: greater height, a “V” shaped torso (wide shoulders and narrow hips) and a larger penis. But there is a very important nuance. Attraction doesn’t follow a line of “the more the merrier” ad infinitum. The study in this case detected diminishing returns, since after a certain size, attractiveness does not increase proportionally, but rather there is a ceiling. Competence. But men also went through this study to evaluate the size of other men. In this case, it was highlighted that they perceived those with larger genitals as more competitive rivals and with greater fighting capacity. This suggests that, evolutionarily, the size could have served as both sexual ornament and a signal of status or threat towards other males, similar to the antlers of a deer. What they prefer. If we move away from evolutionary theory and go to stated preference, the baseline study remains the one published by N. Prause in PLOS One in 2015. This work is key because it differentiated, for the first time with rigor, between the type of relationship sought. In this case, using 3D models on heterosexual women, a preference was specifically shown for a slightly larger size, averaging about 16.3 cm in length in an erect state and 12.7 cm in circumference. But in the case of stable couples, the preference dropped slightly to 16 cm and 12.2 cm in circumference. The key reading. The first point to note is that circumference matters more than length in visual choice. The second is that these measures are only “slightly” above the population average. A mechanical reality. This is where science busts most porn myths. A narrative review published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in 2023 analyzed the existing literature To answer the million-dollar question: does a larger penis give more pleasure? The answer is a very nuanced ‘it depends’. Science points out in this case that there are few high-quality studies that manage to directly link size with the organism, and the results are heterogeneous. But if we draw a clear conclusion, the truth is that the quality of the relationship such as trust or communication correlates more strongly with sexual satisfaction than the size of the penis. Male anxiety. If female preferences are moderate and satisfaction depends more on technique than size, why is there still so much anxiety among society? The studies in this case They point out that there is a great disconnection between reality and male perception, since approximately 38% of men report some degree of dissatisfaction with their penis. However, the vast majority of couples have a positive view of their partners’ genitals. Images | Deon Black In Xataka | Desire in times of stress and screens: this is how the era of programmed sex was born

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