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Russia is making a serious push to reclaim its place in the space race, with plans to quadruple annual production of its Angara rockets within the next decade. The catch is that internal documents reveal the program leans on Chinese hardware for critical components, raising real questions about how independent that ambition actually is.
Shifting to the skies closer to home, the Pentagon has signed a contract worth up to five hundred million dollars with defense firm CACI to expand deployment of its SkyValor counter-drone system across military operations. The technology demonstrated it could detect and defeat drones beyond visual range during testing, and the Defense Department is clearly betting that unmanned threats are only going to grow.
And in a story that makes you rethink what a computer even needs to be, a developer has managed to run a language model locally on a ten dollar microcontroller, generating text at nearly ten tokens per second using just five hundred twelve kilobytes of RAM. It is a small model, but the implications for offline, low-cost AI at the edge are anything but small.
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