Meta Platforms Inc. ’s rollout of new display-equipped Ray-Ban smart glasses in the European Union has been hampered by battery and artificial intelligence regulations in addition to supply constraints. The social networking giant wants to launch the product in the EU but has been unable to secure enough supply, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. Other factors in the delayed EU...
Meta Platforms Inc. ’s rollout of new display-equipped Ray-Ban smart glasses in the European Union has been hampered by battery and artificial intelligence regulations in addition to supply constraints. The social networking giant wants to launch the product in the EU but has been unable to secure enough supply, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. Other factors in the delayed EU launch include local regulations governing AI features and batteries, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. For now, the product is only available in the US. Under EU rules, devices sold in the region will be required to include removable batteries by 2027, complicating matters for device makers looking to cram in as many features and electronics. Building in removable battery doors takes up extra space, potentially reducing the amount of battery life or forcing other compromises. Read More: Meta’s $799 Display Glasses Give a Glimpse of the Future: Review Meta is in discussions with the EU about the battery law and is seeking a carve-out for smart glasses developed both by it and other companies, the person added. The issue came to light this week when Andrew Puzder , the US ambassador to the European Union, said at an event that the glasses won’t be available in the region. “Where is the one place in the world that you can’t sell these glasses? The European Union. Why? Because the battery isn’t removable,” he said. A spokesperson for EssilorLuxottica SA , Meta’s partner and the owner of the Ray-Ban brand, declined to comment. A Meta representative pointed to a blog post from January, when the company said the Display glasses had extremely limited inventory. At that time, Meta held off on an expansion into the UK, France, Italy and Canada and said it would focus on filling US orders. But Meta also objects to the EU battery rule, saying it will hurt wearable devices, including glasses, watches, earbuds and pins. EU regulations will r...
(RTTNews) - The Singapore stock market on Tuesday ended the three-day losing streak in which it had dropped more than 150 points or 3.2 percent. The Straits Times Index now rests just above the 4,860-point plateau although it's likely to open under water on Wednesday.
(RTTNews) - The Singapore stock market on Tuesday ended the three-day losing streak in which it had dropped more than 150 points or 3.2 percent. The Straits Times Index now rests just above the 4,860-point plateau although it's likely to open under water on Wednesday.
Standard RAG pipelines break when enterprises try to use them for long-term, multi-session LLM agent deployments. This is a critical limitation as demand for persistent AI assistants grows. xMemory , a new technique developed by researchers at King’s College London and The Alan Turing Institute, solves this by organizing conversations into a searchable hierarchy of semantic themes. Experiments sho...
Standard RAG pipelines break when enterprises try to use them for long-term, multi-session LLM agent deployments. This is a critical limitation as demand for persistent AI assistants grows. xMemory , a new technique developed by researchers at King’s College London and The Alan Turing Institute, solves this by organizing conversations into a searchable hierarchy of semantic themes. Experiments show that xMemory improves answer quality and long-range reasoning across various LLMs while cutting inference costs. According to the researchers, it drops token usage from over 9,000 to roughly 4,700 tokens per query compared to existing systems on some tasks. For real-world enterprise applications like personalized AI assistants and multi-session decision support tools, this means organizations can deploy more reliable, context-aware agents capable of maintaining coherent long-term memory without blowing up computational expenses. RAG wasn't built for this In many enterprise LLM applications, a critical expectation is that these systems will maintain coherence and personalization across long, multi-session interactions. To support this long-term reasoning, one common approach is to use standard RAG: store past dialogues and events, retrieve a fixed number of top matches based on embedding similarity, and concatenate them into a context window to generate answers. However, traditional RAG is built for large databases where the retrieved documents are highly diverse. The main challenge is filtering out entirely irrelevant information. An AI agent's memory, by contrast, is a bounded and continuous stream of conversation, meaning the stored data chunks are highly correlated and frequently contain near-duplicates. To understand why simply increasing the context window doesn’t work, consider how standard RAG handles a concept like citrus fruit. Imagine a user has had many conversations saying things like “I love oranges,” “I like mandarins,” and separately, other conversations ab...
Denmark’s left-wing bloc headed by Social Democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen won Tuesday’s general election but failed to secure a majority, as the Social Democrats posted their weakest showing in more than 120 years. With all votes counted, the left-wing bloc was credited with 84 seats in the 179-seat parliament and the right with 77. The centrist Moderate party, headed by foreign minist...
Denmark’s left-wing bloc headed by Social Democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen won Tuesday’s general election but failed to secure a majority, as the Social Democrats posted their weakest showing in more than 120 years. With all votes counted, the left-wing bloc was credited with 84 seats in the 179-seat parliament and the right with 77. The centrist Moderate party, headed by foreign minister and former prime minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, became kingmaker with 14 seats, and thorny...
Hundreds of service stations across Australia have reported fuel shortfalls, as the war in the Middle East disrupts global supplies. At least 600 retail sites across the country have run out of at least one type of fuel, Energy Minister Chris Bowen told parliament on Tuesday. The shortages were mainly concentrated in the two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria, where it affected abo...
Hundreds of service stations across Australia have reported fuel shortfalls, as the war in the Middle East disrupts global supplies. At least 600 retail sites across the country have run out of at least one type of fuel, Energy Minister Chris Bowen told parliament on Tuesday. The shortages were mainly concentrated in the two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria, where it affected about 10% of total outlets. The near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz since the US and Israel first attacked Iran at the end of last month has cut off about a fifth of the world’s oil, tightening fuel supplies and sending prices soaring. With limited domestic refining capacity, Australia imports more than two-thirds of its gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. Its biggest supplier, South Korea, has already said it will cap some exports . On Tuesday, the government said it would lower diesel standards for the next six months to bolster domestic supplies, widening the range of prospective suppliers to include the US, Canada and Europe. Australia had 38 days of gasoline and 30 days of diesel left in reserves last week, after tapping stockpiles to meet surging demand . Prices of gasoline and diesel have both jumped , according to Australian Institute of Petroleum data, adding to economic pressures. Australia’s central bank last week raised its key interest rate for a second straight meeting amid efforts to tackle stubborn inflation. On Wednesday, Australia introduced legislation that will allow its antitrust watchdog to double penalties for false or misleading conduct and cartel behavior to a maximum of A$100 million ($70 million) per offense. The government had already increased penalties to a maximum of A$50 million — five times higher than what they were — amid reports that prices at the pump had outpaced gains in international benchmarks during the initial period of the Iran conflict.
Yuan bond issuance by foreign borrowers has surged in mainland China this month, eclipsing the momentum of such fundraising offshore and highlighting the appeal of a vast local market less affected by the Iran war. So-called panda bonds issued by overseas entities in China’s onshore market have more than tripled on year to 27.8 billion yuan ($4 billion) in March, set for a record for the month, da...
Yuan bond issuance by foreign borrowers has surged in mainland China this month, eclipsing the momentum of such fundraising offshore and highlighting the appeal of a vast local market less affected by the Iran war. So-called panda bonds issued by overseas entities in China’s onshore market have more than tripled on year to 27.8 billion yuan ($4 billion) in March, set for a record for the month, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The sales boom contrasts with the much slower growth seen in the larger offshore yuan debt market, where issuance plans have been disrupted worldwide since the Middle East conflict began. The divergence is a reminder of the Chinese onshore bond market’s relative immunity at times of external uncertainties, when overseas financing using the country’s currency is heavily influenced by global conditions. “Offshore markets are flexible but far more exposed to global shocks, while the panda bond market has proved itself to be a stable and resilient channel, an advantage the latest conflict has underscored,” said Lei Wang, head of research at S&P Global (China) Ratings. “That makes it an increasingly important consideration for global issuers in addition to the cheaper funding costs.” High-profile panda bond issuers this month included first timer BNP Paribas SA and repeat borrower United Overseas Bank Ltd. , each raising five billion yuan last week. “The onshore yuan market benefits from a larger and more established domestic investor base, which can provide deeper liquidity even during periods of global volatility, such as the current situation in the Middle East,” said Chin Chin Koh, UOB’s head of group central treasury, research and customer advocacy. Chinese financial institutions bought 78% of UOB’s latest panda note, up from 38% in 2019 and 65% in 2024 when the bank sold its debut and second yuan bonds in China, Koh said, adding that such domestic investors usually provide stickier demand and more stable liquidity. Yuan Funding Hits Record $2...