
Smaller, faster models could let companies run AI assistants on their own hardware without relying on cloud providers.
LFM2.5-2.6B is a small artificial intelligence model designed to run agents directly on local devices like laptops and phones rather than relying on cloud computing. The model supports tool calling and multi-step workflows while using minimal memory and processing power, which allows developers to keep user data private on devices and avoid costs associated with cloud inference. According to benchmark testing, it performs competitively on tasks like tool use and instruction following despite being smaller than comparable models, though larger models maintain an advantage on coding tasks. The model was trained using specialized techniques including supervised fine-tuning, teacher specialization, multi-domain distillation, and reinforcement learning within agent environments to improve its ability to work with different tools and multi-turn interactions.

Long-running agents accumulate state that no transcript captures. A coding agent at step 10 holds edited files, a running dev server, installed packages, and a warm prompt cache. When it misreads a traceback and rewrites a file that was already correct, neither available recovery path is cheap: patching forward grows the context and the token bill, and restarting from step one re-pays every model and tool call while reproducing nothing exactly, because runs are non-deterministic. Jumping back t

New AI toolbars and prompts are showing up in Google Docs and Gmail. If you don’t want Gemini’s help in writing documents and emails, here’s how to turn that stuff off.

In October 2025, a storm brewed over the Caribbean Sea. Weather models differed on its trajectory. Would it remain weak and end up in Haiti, or would it intensify and head to Jamaica? Artificial intelligence model WeatherNext, developed by Google’s DeepMind and Google Research, went with the latter. Five days before landfall, it predicted with 80 percent confidence that the storm system would hit Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane. Hurricane Melissa was catastrophic, causing flooding and landslid
Want to go deeper than the news? Explore live, cohort-based AI courses taught by practitioners.
Browse AI courses on Maven