Today in one line
Today: How the UK accidentally shackled itself to Mastercard · US and Indonesia finalise deal to cut tariffs to 19% · AI: Introducing OpenAI for India.
Top 10 — News
- How the UK accidentally shackled itself to Mastercard Instead of wresting power from a banking oligopoly, the UK’s payments regulator ended up strengthening a duopoly
- US and Indonesia finalise deal to cut tariffs to 19% Washington will set a 19% tariff on most Indonesian goods in exchange for lower trade barriers for US goods
- Can Europe survive without US defence? Surprisingly, the Baltic sea nations are showing the way | Elisabeth Braw Joint patrols are being mounted to protect undersea cables from Russian sabotage: localised cooperation is our best hope for now Elisabeth…
- Adapting Actively on the Fly: Relevance-Guided Online Meta-Learning with Latent Concepts for Geospatial Discovery arXiv:2602.17605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In many real-world settings, such as environmental monitoring, disaster response, or publ…
- Consistency diffusion language models: Up to 14x faster, no quality loss Article URL: https://www.together.ai/blog/consistency-diffusion-language-models Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083648…
- An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward Article URL: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-4/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4708314…
- Pi for Excel: AI sidebar add-in for Excel, powered by Pi Article URL: https://github.com/tmustier/pi-for-excel Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47082854 Points: 26 # Comments: 3
- Dear ChatGPT, please construct me an optimal portfolio AI is already smarter and more knowledgeable than all financial advisers
- OpenClaw and the privacy problem of agentic AI How can you be sure that personal digital agents will always be working in your best interests
- FirstFT: Investors pour record sums into European stocks
Also in today’s newsletter: Trump’s Iran warning and Amazon’s AI coding bot
AI tools & model updates
- Introducing OpenAI for India OpenAI for India expands AI access across the country—building local infrastructure, powering enterprises, and advancing workforce skills.
- anthropics/anthropic-sdk-typescript: bedrock-sdk: v0.26.4 Release update (see link for changelog).
- anthropics/anthropic-sdk-python: v0.83.0 Release update (see link for changelog).
- microsoft/semantic-kernel: vectordata-dotnet-10.0.0 Release update (see link for changelog).
- BerriAI/litellm: v1.81.9-stable.gemini.3.1-pro-patch Release update (see link for changelog).
- microsoft/onnxruntime: ONNX Runtime v1.24.2 Release update (see link for changelog).
- Google releases Gemini 3.1 Pro with improved reasoning capabilities With Gemini 3.1 Pro, Google wants to improve the core intelligence of its model family.
- Gemini 3.1 Pro: A smarter model for your most complex tasks 3.1 Pro is designed for tasks where a simple answer isn’t enough.
- langchain-ai/langchain: langchain-core==1.2.14 Release update (see link for changelog).
- run-llama/llama_index: v0.14.15
Release update (see link for changelog).
Full list — News (50)
Instead of wresting power from a banking oligopoly, the UK’s payments regulator ended up strengthening a duopoly
AI is already smarter and more knowledgeable than all financial advisers
How can you be sure that personal digital agents will always be working in your best interests
Also in today’s newsletter: Trump’s Iran warning and Amazon’s AI coding bot
Inflows on track for all-time high in February as global fund managers seek alternatives to expensive US tech shares
Envision founder Zhang Lei says renewables are essential to stop the technology driving up household bills
Analysts say the reclusive regime is in its strongest geopolitical and economic position in years
Finance minister’s request highlights power of benchmark providers and follows strong demand from foreign investors
US naval and aircraft build-up is reminiscent of the invasion of Iraq, experts say
Even in a competitive, performance-driven industry, female and minority managers are paid less and are more likely to be fired
Power supplier was bought for £2.3bn five years ago by TDR Capital and I Squared
Push to support chancellor’s ‘nation of investors’ plan divides financial services industry
The graduate earnings premium isn’t really measuring what most people think
Move by CMA CGM comes amid European efforts to support OneWeb as a rival to SpaceX’s satellite network
Comments late last year indicate challenges Farage faces in courting working-class voters
Data shows that our global financial system is plagued with serious but often ignored imbalances
Tech giant blames ‘user error, not AI error’ for incident in December involving its Kiro tool
Once instinctively hostile to corporate interests, the party is now working with the private sector to shore up the economy
Surrounded by jungle, a new hotel is the ideal base from which to explore the greener side of Singapore
LA fires one year later; interviews with Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, Greta Waller and Amanda Ross-Ho; artists against ICE.
Washington will set a 19% tariff on most Indonesian goods in exchange for lower trade barriers for US goods
The entertainment giant's revenue surged last year as 159 million fans attended its concerts.
The agency released a critical report that puts the Starliner incident at same mistake level assigned to the fatal Columbia and Challenger…
Joint patrols are being mounted to protect undersea cables from Russian sabotage: localised cooperation is our best hope for now Elisabeth…
arXiv:2602.17605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In many real-world settings, such as environmental monitoring, disaster response, or publ…
arXiv:2602.17005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fictional character representations reflect social norms and biases.
arXiv:2602.17314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open datasets play a crucial role in three research domains that intersect data science and…
arXiv:2602.17483v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), and conversational agents based on them, are exposed to per…
Article URL: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3ew5jlqz87o Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083735 Points: 8 # Comment…
arXiv:2602.16890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The introduction of generative artificial intelligence applications to the public has led t…
arXiv:2602.16894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In response to the exponential growth in the use of artificial intelligence and machine lea…
arXiv:2602.16921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Capture the Flag (CTF) competitions are powerful pedagogical tools for addressing the globa…
arXiv:2602.16949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Through widespread use in formative assessment and self-directed learning, educational AI s…
arXiv:2602.16987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities advance rapidly, frontier models increasingly…
arXiv:2602.17280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We bring to light how some asylum seekers and refugees arriving in the UK experience border…
arXiv:2602.17290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anemia is a prevalent hematological disorder that requires frequent hemoglobin monitoring f…
arXiv:2602.17293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence systems increasingly generate text intended to provide social and e…
arXiv:2602.17357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper argues that existing global AI safety frameworks exhibit contextual blindness to…
arXiv:2602.17383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative thinking about the capabilities and implications of artificial intelligence (AI…
arXiv:2602.17433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as sources of historical information, mo…
arXiv:2602.17221v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI is reshaping knowledge work, yet existing research focuses predominantly on…
arXiv:2602.17542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grained skill representations, commonly referred to as knowledge components (KCs), a…
arXiv:2510.12915v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As the world becomes increasingly saturated with AI-generated content, disinformation,…
arXiv:2510.15297v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce VERA-MH (Validation of Ethical and Responsible AI in Mental Health), an au…
arXiv:2602.13415v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We executed 24,000 search queries in 243 countries, generating 2.8 million AI and tradi…
Article URL: https://www.together.ai/blog/consistency-diffusion-language-models Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083648…
Article URL: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-4/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4708314…
Article URL: https://github.com/tmustier/pi-for-excel Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47082854 Points: 26 # Comments: 3
Article URL: https://sour.coffee/2026/02/20/an-arm-homelab-server-or-a-minisforum-ms-r1-review/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/…
Article URL: https://gist.github.com/interpiduser5/547d8a7baec436f24b7cce89dd4ae1ea Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4708…
Full list — AI tools & model updates (30)
NVIDIA flagship data center GPUs in the NVIDIA Ampere, NVIDIA Hopper, and NVIDIA Blackwell families all feature non-uniform memory access (…
OpenAI for India expands AI access across the country—building local infrastructure, powering enterprises, and advancing workforce skills.
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
You can now deploy AWS IAM Identity Center in 38 AWS Regions, including Asia Pacific (New Zealand).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Starting today, Amazon EC2 G7e instances accelerated by NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs are now available in Asia Pacific…
Release update (see link for changelog).
Gemini 3.1 Pro The first in the Gemini 3.1 series, priced the same as Gemini 3 Pro ($2/million input, $12/million output under 200,000 toke…
With Gemini 3.1 Pro, Google wants to improve the core intelligence of its model family.
3.1 Pro is designed for tasks where a simple answer isn’t enough.
Release update (see link for changelog).
OpenAI and crypto investment firm Paradigm have built EVMbench, a benchmark that measures how well AI agents can find, fix, and exploit sec…
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Starting today, Amazon EC2 M8i-flex instances are now available in Asia Pacific (Malaysia, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt) and…
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Release update (see link for changelog).
Google Deepmind's new Lyria 3 model creates 30-second tracks with vocals, lyrics, and cover art from a simple text prompt or uploaded media.