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04 Aug 2026 5:32am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: The cost of producing new results on ten longstanding mathematical problems just fell to $2,000, according to OpenAI, which says its Astra model generated machine-checkable proofs for questions that had resisted human progress for decades. OpenAI published the work on August 1 and used it to give its next major model family a name: Astra. The results run across group theory, high-dimensional geometry, coding theory, quantum complexity, lattice cryptography and extremal combinatorics. They arrived as a 249-page manuscript collection and, alongside it, something the field has not seen attached to an AI claim before at this scale: a machine-checkable certificate for every single result. The problems were not textbook exercises dressed up as discoveries. Each had been open for at least ten years, most of them far longer, and several sit at the center of their subfields: - A construction establishing the existence of non-sofic groups, a question that has occupied group theorists for years. - A disproof of Connes's rigidity conjecture, a long-standing problem in the theory of von Neumann algebras. - An improvement to the general upper bound on sphere-packing density in high dimensions, a bound that had stood since 1978. - Three problems come from the catalogue of open questions left behind by Paul Erdos. The announcement follows another result from May, when OpenAI used a similar reasoning model to produce an original mathematical proof disproving a famous unsolved conjecture in geometry, which was first posed by Paul Erdos in 1946.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

04 Aug 2026 3:30am GMT

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04 Aug 2026 1:22am GMT

FFmpeg 9.0 arrives with animated WebP support, Vulkan acceleration for APV, ProRes RAW VideoToolbox decoding, and new GPU-powered filters.

03 Aug 2026 11:55pm GMT

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03 Aug 2026 11:44pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico's largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a "lockdown" browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June. It was a disaster. When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so. The story was even worse at the highest of the high end. Between 2021 and 2025, 0.9 percent of test takers scored 110 or more; this year, 5.5 percent did so. The surge in top scores led to accusations of widespread cheating, and UNAM appointed a commission of experts to investigate the situation. The group was given the unwieldy name "la Comision Tecnica de Personas Expertas para la Revision del Proceso de Seleccion de Ingreso a Licenciatura para el Circlo Escolar 2026-2027/1," and it has just submitted its recommendations. The commission believes that the best path forward, given all the concerns, is to administer a "control exam" -- that is, applicants will have to sit for another test, and they will do so in person. This control exam will apply not only to those who secured a spot at UNAM based on this year's test but also to everyone who would have been admitted based on minimum successful scores in their program of study since 2021. About 58,000 people could be affected, and places at UNAM will now depend on the results of the new test. (Details on the control exam should appear soon; classes are currently scheduled to begin on August 10, so everything will have to move quickly unless the school decides to delay classes.) According to Gaceta UNAM, the school's official news publication, the university rector has apologized to honest applicants, since they will now have to prepare for and take the test again despite doing nothing wrong. Still, the control exam is "necessary to give certainty and guarantee equity in access," the rector added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Aug 2026 11:00pm GMT

$100 million deal gives 50,000 Ukrainian drones US-developed AI capabilities.

03 Aug 2026 10:11pm GMT

Apple says its lower-cost MacBook Neo is beginning to displace Windows laptops and Chromebooks in K-12 schools, with several districts purchasing thousands of units. According to the company's latest earnings call, nearly half of the large MacBook Neo purchases made by U.S. educational institutions last quarter reportedly replaced competing platforms. 9to5Mac reports: Apple's commentary highlighted some large district deployments moving to Neo Pinellas County Schools, one of the largest districts in Florida, which is moving its 25k students off Windows and onto MacBook Neo across its 18 high schools. In Washington, Peninsula School District 401 moved over its 8,000 students from Chromebooks to MacBook Neo. Midwest City-Del City School District in Oklahoma purchased more than 6,000 MacBook Neos to become an all-Apple district for students.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Aug 2026 10:00pm GMT

Rhythmbox 3.5 music player debuts with a new default playback backend, improved lyrics support, podcast upgrades, and a gPodder.net plugin.

03 Aug 2026 8:26pm GMT

Also: Cyborg diving suits for cockroaches, why sleepy sperm whales blow bubbles, Betelgeuse's companion star.

03 Aug 2026 8:13pm GMT

The orbiting observatory in minifigure scale.

03 Aug 2026 7:21pm GMT

NVIDIA releases its 610.57 New Feature Branch driver for Linux, delivering fixes for Vulkan, kernel module builds, displays, and stability.

03 Aug 2026 2:26pm GMT