Open source devs are fighting AI crawlers with cleverness and vengeance

AI web-crawling bots are the cockroaches of the internet, many software developers believe. Some devs have started fighting back in ingenuous, often humorous ways. While any website might be targeted by bad crawler behavior — sometimes taking down the site — open source developers are “disproportionately” impacted, writes Niccolò Venerandi, developer of a Linux desktop…

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Researchers open source Sky-T1, a ‘reasoning’ AI model that can be trained for less than $450

So-called reasoning AI models are becoming easier — and cheaper — to develop. On Friday, NovaSky, a team of researchers based out of UC Berkeley’s Sky Computing Lab, released Sky-T1-32B-Preview, a reasoning model that’s competitive with an earlier version of OpenAI’s o1 on a number of key benchmarks. Sky-T1 appears to be the first truly…

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Sequoia backs Pydantic to expand beyond its open source data-validation framework

A U.K.-based, open-source startup is launching its first commercial product with the backing of one of Silicon Valley’s most renowned venture capital firms. Pydantic on Monday launched an observability platform called Logfire, five months after trialing it in open beta, and announced $12.5 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia. However, the company is…

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