The "Cars and Coffee" gathering returns to the First United National Bank parking lot in Fryburg on Saturday, September 5, offering a free, casual morning meet-and-greet for local car enthusiasts. The post ‘Cars and Coffee’ Returns to Fryburg on Saturday, September 5 appeared first on exploreVenango .
Bloom Energy is surging while its closest fuel cell peers barely budge, and the reason behind the split reveals something important about where AI power demand is actually landing.
Hurricane Lowell, a powerful Category 4 storm, is threatening Hawaii with life-threatening winds and surf, prompting urgent warnings and preparations across the islands.
Ohio State starts their 137th season in college football but this will be the first time they play Ball State
George Bagnoli and Chrissy Dillo from cinema camp landing to talk about their upcoming showings.
ASM International NV (OTCMKTS:ASMIY – Get Free Report) shares gapped down before the market opened on Thursday . The stock had previously closed at $924.25, but opened at $895.2464. ASM International shares last traded at $898.33, with a volume of 908 shares trading hands. Analysts Set New Price Targets Several research firms have recently issued [...]
Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. Ltd. (NASDAQ:HQ – Get Free Report) gapped down prior to trading on Thursday . The stock had previously closed at $17.50, but opened at $17.06. Horizon Quantum Computing Pte. shares last traded at $16.3560, with a volume of 30,485 shares trading hands. Analysts Set New Price Targets Several equities analysts recently [...]
VersaBank (NASDAQ:VBNK – Get Free Report) shares saw unusually-strong trading volume on Thursday . 127,686 shares were traded during mid-day trading, an increase of 60% from the previous session’s volume of 79,895 shares.The stock last traded at $19.2090 and had previously closed at $19.28. Analyst Ratings Changes A number of equities research analysts recently weighed [...]
Shares of ENGIE – Sponsored ADR (OTCMKTS:ENGIY – Get Free Report) gapped down prior to trading on Thursday . The stock had previously closed at $28.20, but opened at $27.35. ENGIE shares last traded at $27.35, with a volume of 17,699 shares traded. Analysts Set New Price Targets ENGIY has been the subject of several [...]
Authorities on Wednesday arrested an 18-year-old Kent man in connection with the Chelan Hills wildfire that ignited July 4 in Central Washington, killing one person and burning about 15 square miles.
A vehicle caught fire and spread to the nearby house off Anderson Lane Wednesday night.
Shares of Brambles Ltd. (OTCMKTS:BXBLY – Get Free Report) gapped down prior to trading on Thursday . The stock had previously closed at $27.56, but opened at $26.76. Brambles shares last traded at $27.6850, with a volume of 66,175 shares traded. Analyst Ratings Changes Several equities analysts have recently commented on the company. UBS Group [...]
Vallourec SA (OTCMKTS:VLOWY – Get Free Report)’s share price gapped down prior to trading on Thursday . The stock had previously closed at $4.41, but opened at $4.2876. Vallourec shares last traded at $4.4150, with a volume of 7,319 shares changing hands. Vallourec Price Performance The company has a quick ratio of 1.37, a current [...]
Teradyne, Inc. (NASDAQ:TER – Get Free Report)’s stock price gapped down before the market opened on Thursday . The stock had previously closed at $341.62, but opened at $332.86. Teradyne shares last traded at $327.1540, with a volume of 171,237 shares trading hands. Wall Street Analysts Forecast Growth TER has been the topic of several [...]
Three people were arrested after investigators said an undercover operation at a Miami clothing store uncovered the sale of counterfeit Amiri merchandise and controlled substances....
Here’s a look back at the Chicago White Sox’s promising 1994 season, from before it began to picking up the pieces during a disappointing post-strike return for the team in 1995.
College football fans could have a new folk hero Saturday afternoon.
Jack Dace is eager to make up for lost time as the promising apprentice won on his third ride back from a horrific fall in the summer, which left him... Read More
ChatGPT, Claude and Grok faced widespread outages, with thousands of users reporting access and response issues. Anthropic confirmed it had identified the cause of Claude's errors but did not disclose the specific technical reason.
Seven top prize lottery tickets were sold in the same day from the same shop in Maryland, lottery officials said.
The Baltimore Ravens announced they have signed CB Ladarius Webb Jr. and OL Chuma Edoga to the practice squad. The Ravens released C Nick Dawkins and CB Amani Oruwariye from the practice squad in corresponding moves.
"General Hospital" veteran Genie Francis is to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Daytime Emmys ceremony in Hollywood.
A filmmaker explores racial justice in his hometown as he returns to his conservative father.
This 2006 Mercedes-Benz SL500 is finished in Mars Red over Stone leather and is powered by a 5.0-liter V8 linked to a seven-speed automatic transmission. Feautres include the Trim Package, a power-folding hardtop, bi-xenon headlights, 18" Avior wheels, heated seats, a Bose sound system, automatic climate control, and COMAND with navigation. The seller purchased the car in 2023 and has since added approximately 3k of the 45k indicated miles. This R230 is now offered with a battery tender, service records, a car cover, a clean Carfax report, and an Illinois title.
On Wednesday, September 2, Karoline Leavitt's personal Press Secretary account, which included her photo in the profile and her name, was changed to White House Press Office
Rail connectivity between Mumbai and the Konkan region received a significant boost on Thursday with the inauguration of a new daily train service between Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) and Sawantwadi Road. Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, and Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, along with other dignitaries, ...
Meta’s newest AI model Muse Spark 1.3, unveiled yesterday , is faster and more performant on third-party benchmarks than its predecessor — with a caveat. "Muse Spark 1.3 is rolling out today with frontier performance almost too cheap to meter," Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on X, calling it Meta’s “biggest jump” yet in coding and agentic work. There is substance behind both parts of that claim. Muse Spark 1.3 makes significant gains over last month’s 1.2 release , particularly on long-running agent tasks. The version developers can access now is also one of the strongest price-performance offerings near the top of independent model rankings. Meta’s strongest Muse Spark 1.3 benchmark results come from its max reasoning configuration. Meta says that version is still completing additional safety testing and will arrive “shortly”; the third-party benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis says it evaluated max in a limited partner preview, and currently lists no API provider at all for the configuration. The version broadly rolling out this week through its Muse Code harness and the Meta Model API uses Meta’s previously available reasoning settings, including xhigh. That makes the more relevant enterprise question not whether Muse Spark 1.3 can reach frontier territory, but how close the model companies can actually deploy today gets — and at what real cost. The shipping model is very good, but not the benchmark leader Meta does disclose results for both configurations in its underlying evaluation report, so this is not a case of the company hiding the deployable model. But its launch materials prominently showcase the max variant, and some of the largest scores belong to that configuration. For example, Meta reports GDPval-AA v2 scores of 1,754 Elo for max versus 1,709 for xhigh, OSWorld 2.0 scores of 66.9 versus 57.2, and JobBench scores of 64.9 versus 61.2. On some tests the distinction is negligible or reversed: DeepSearchQA is tied at 89.4, while xhigh scores 89.2 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 versus max at 88.8. Artificial Analysis scores Muse Spark 1.3 max at 62 on its Intelligence Index and the shipping xhigh version at 61. The latter ties GPT-5.6 Sol max, Grok 4.6 high and Claude Opus 5 high. But Anthropic still occupies the top of the leaderboard: Claude Fable 5.1 reaches 66 at max and 65 at xhigh, while Claude Opus 5 reaches 63 at max and xhigh. In other words, Muse Spark 1.3 xhigh is legitimately in the frontier cluster, but it is not the model currently setting the frontier. That is still a substantial change from Muse Spark 1.2. VentureBeat’s coverage of last month’s launch found Meta fielding a credible coding challenger that nevertheless generally trailed Anthropic’s best model. Muse Spark 1.2 scored 82.9% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 versus Opus 5’s 86.7%, and also finished behind Opus on the other main coding comparisons Meta presented. With 1.3, Meta is no longer merely showing up in that contest. On several coding and agentic evaluations, it is trading wins with OpenAI and Anthropic. Meta says the underlying model has also become easier to operate. Muse Spark 1.3 is trained to maintain multiple workflows in a long thread, gather context with tools, detect gaps in its own plans, ask users for clarification when necessary and confirm before consequential actions. In Meta engineers’ internal comparisons, it used roughly 20% fewer tool calls and 25% fewer tokens than 1.2 during coding work. For enterprises paying for thousands or millions of agent loops, those behavioral improvements could matter more than another leaderboard point. ‘Almost too cheap to meter’ does not mean Meta cut its prices Muse Spark 1.3 did not receive an API price cut. Meta kept Standard pricing exactly where it was for Muse Spark 1.2: $1.25 per million input tokens, $4.25 per million output tokens and $0.15 per million cached input tokens. Model Input ($/1M) Output ($/1M) Total ($/1M) Source Muse Spark 1.2 / 1.3 Contributor $0.10 $0.20 $0.30 Meta MiMo-V2.5 Flash $0.10 $0.30 $0.40 Xiaomi DeepSeek-V4-Flash — off-peak $0.22 $0.66 $0.88 DeepSeek GPT-5.6 Luna $0.20 $1.20 $1.40 OpenAI MiniMax-M3 $0.30 $1.20 $1.50 MiniMax LongCat-2.0 — limited-time promo $0.30 $1.20 $1.50 LongCat DeepSeek-V4-Flash — peak hours $0.44 $1.32 $1.76 DeepSeek MiMo-V2.5 $0.40 $2.00 $2.40 Xiaomi DeepSeek-V4-Pro — off-peak $0.66 $1.98 $2.64 DeepSeek LongCat-2.0 — standard $0.75 $2.95 $3.70 LongCat MiMo-V2.5 Pro (≤256K) $1.00 $3.00 $4.00 Xiaomi Gemini 3.7 Flash — through Dec. 31, 2026 $0.75 $3.75 $4.50 Google Gemini 3.8 Flash — through Dec. 31, 2026 $0.75 $3.75 $4.50 Google DeepSeek-V4-Pro — peak hours $1.32 $3.96 $5.28 DeepSeek Muse Spark 1.1 / 1.2 / 1.3 $1.25 $4.25 $5.50 Meta GLM-5.3 $1.40 $4.40 $5.80 Z.AI Grok 4.6 — <200K prompt tokens $2.00 $6.00 $8.00 xAI MiMo-V2.5 Pro (>256K) $2.00 $6.00 $8.00 Xiaomi Qwen3.8-Max $2.00 $6.00 $8.00 QwenCloud Gemini 3.7 Flash — starting Jan. 1, 2027 $1.50 $7.50 $9.00 Google Gemini 3.8 Flash — starting Jan. 1, 2027 $1.50 $7.50 $9.00 Google GPT-5.6 Terra $2.00 $12.00 $14.00 OpenAI Grok 4.6 — ≥200K prompt tokens $4.00 $12.00 $16.00 xAI GPT-5.4 $2.50 $15.00 $17.50 OpenAI Kimi K3 $3.00 $15.00 $18.00 Moonshot AI Claude Opus 5 $5.00 $25.00 $30.00 Anthropic Sakana Fugu Ultra (≤272K) $5.00 $30.00 $35.00 Sakana AI GPT-5.6 Sol — Standard mode $5.00 $30.00 $35.00 OpenAI Claude Fable 5 / Claude Mythos 5 $10.00 $50.00 $60.00 Anthropic Claude Fable 5.1 / Claude Mythos 5.1 $10.00 $50.00 $60.00 Anthropic GPT-5.6 Sol — Fast mode $10.00 $60.00 $70.00 OpenAI That makes Zuckerberg’s “almost too cheap to meter” line less a statement about lower token prices than about what Meta believes developers can accomplish with those tokens. Artificial Analysis offers evidence for that argument, but also a complication. It measures Muse Spark 1.3 xhigh at 235.2 output tokens per second and estimates a cost of $0.55 per Intelligence Index task. At 61 on the Intelligence Index, that gives it the lowest cost per task of any currently measured model at that intelligence level. Muse Spark 1.2 cost only $0.40 per Artificial Analysis task, while scoring 57. Despite unchanged per-token pricing, the independent benchmark’s cost of completing an average task therefore increased generation-over-generation. Artificial Analysis attributes the increase primarily to heavier input-token consumption on agentic evaluations. That does not directly contradict Meta’s claim of 25% lower token use: Meta is describing comparisons in its own coding workflows, while Artificial Analysis is measuring a broader suite of reasoning and agentic tasks. But it illustrates why “cheap” becomes slippery once models operate as agents. Token rates, reasoning effort, number of turns, tool calls and retries all contribute to the actual cost of finishing work. Meta also retains its unusually cheap Contributor tier — $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output tokens — in exchange for permission to use prompts and completions for training. As VentureBeat noted with Muse Spark 1.2, that may be attractive for prototyping but creates a materially different data-governance calculation for enterprises working with proprietary code or sensitive internal information. Wang’s ‘Gemini who?’ lands on an unusually close comparison Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang was considerably less qualified in celebrating the release. After Artificial Analysis posted its Muse Spark results, Wang reposted them on X, adding : “i really hate to say it, but... gemini who? 😱💨” The shade was particularly pointed because Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash on the same day, pitching it at almost exactly the same class of workload: long-horizon software engineering, autonomous agents and multi-step professional reasoning. Google calls 3.8 its best reasoning and coding Flash model yet and says it is the company’s third Flash release in six weeks. Independent numbers give Wang something to work with, though hardly a knockout. Artificial Analysis gives Muse Spark 1.3 xhigh a 61 Intelligence Index score at $0.55 per task, compared with 59 and $0.58 for Gemini 3.8 Flash at high reasoning. Meta therefore edges Google on both intelligence and task cost at those particular settings. Google wins decisively on throughput. Artificial Analysis measures Gemini 3.8 Flash high at about 305 output tokens per second, versus 235 for Muse Spark — roughly 30% faster. Gemini also has the lower raw API sticker price for now: Google is charging an introductory $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens, compared with Meta’s $1.25 and $4.25. That promotional Google pricing expires December 31, after which it rises to $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. The result is a useful snapshot of how tight frontier-model economics have become. Meta currently wins this independent comparison by two Intelligence Index points and three cents per benchmark task; Google offers substantially higher output throughput and cheaper raw tokens during its launch promotion. Wang’s “gemini who?” is fun executive trash talk. For an enterprise architect, the answer is closer to: Gemini is the faster option; Muse is currently the slightly stronger high-effort agent by this independent measure. Meta's evolving open weights stance The more consequential issue for some developers may have little to do with today’s benchmark race. When Meta launched Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2 in August, VentureBeat noted how dramatically the company had moved away from the open-weight strategy that made Llama ubiquitous. Muse Code and Spark 1.2 were proprietary, API-served products — a striking posture for the company that had spent years arguing that open AI was the path forward. Five days later, Meta changed course again. On August 10, it released the 30-billion-parameter Muse Glimmer under an Apache 2.0 license . Zuckerberg also said: “In the coming weeks, we are also going to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2.” Reuters separately reported Meta’s plan to release the Spark 1.2 weights. Now, Meta has instead shipped Muse Spark 1.3 as another proprietary model. That does not yet amount to a broken promise — “coming weeks” can reasonably describe a period longer than three weeks. But today’s announcement makes the roadmap less clear rather than more. Meta’s new post no longer says Muse Spark 1.2. It says its roadmap includes “the Muse Spark open weights release”, without identifying a version, release date, model size or license. Zuckerberg likewise said on X that “Muse Spark open weights releases” are coming soon. For teams that standardized on Llama because downloadable weights meant self-hosting, customization and control over inference economics, that ambiguity may matter more than whether Spark gained another point on a composite benchmark. Muse Spark 1.3 shows that Meta can now iterate proprietary frontier models at extraordinary speed. The shipping xhigh configuration is fast, competitively priced and much closer to the top of independent rankings than its predecessors. The max preview shows Meta can push the family a little further when allowed to spend more reasoning compute. The next test is different: whether Meta can convert that pace into a roadmap enterprises can actually plan around — including making its best capabilities broadly deployable and delivering the open-weight Spark model it has already said is coming.
From TLC's Waterfalls to Natalie Imbruglia's Torn, the songs that still sound like the '90s no matter when you hear them
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To the editor: Rhode Island is up against real challenges, and in Bristol we are seeing them firsthand. Our coastline is changing. Technology is upending the way people work. Meeting this moment
Vance says some AI uses carry "spiritual dark energy" and warns against replacing human relationships with technology.