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Transformer-based large language models are relatively easy to understand. You break language down into a finite set of “tokens” (words or sub-word components), then train a neural network on millions of token sequences so it can predict the next token based on all the previous ones. Despite some clever tricks (mainly about how the model processes the previous tokens in the sequence), the core mechanism is relatively simple.

It’s harder to build the same kind of intuition about diffusion models (in part because the papers are much harder to read). But diffusion models are almost as big a part of the AI revolution as transformers. High-quality image generation has driven a lot of user interest in AI, particularly ChatGPT’s recent upgraded image generation.

Even if you don’t care much about images, there are also some fairly capable text-based diffusion models – not yet competitive with frontier transformer models, but it’s certainly possible that we’d someday see a diffusion language model that’s state-of-the-art in its niche.

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Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo: Will this be Open Source? · Issue #1 · microsoft/WSL.

That means that the code that powers WSL is now available on GitHub at Microsoft/WSL and open sourced to the community! You can download WSL and build it from source, add new fixes and features and participate in WSL’s active development.

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The signature feature of HIBP is that big search box on the front page, and now, it’s even better – it has confetti! As Charlotte and I have travelled and spent time with so many different users of the service around the world, a theme has emerged over and over again: HIBP is a bit playful. It’s not a scary place emblazoned with hoodies, padlock icons, and fearmongering about “the dark web”. Instead, we aim to be more consumable to the masses and provide factual, actionable information without the hyperbole. Confetti guns (yes, there are several, and they’re animated) lighten the mood a bit.

There was a very brief moment where we considered a more light-hearted treatment on this page as well, but somehow a bit of sad trombone really didn’t seem appropriate, so we deferred to a more demure response. But now it’s on a timeline you can scroll through in reverse chronological order, with each breach summarising what happened. And if you want more info, we have an all-new page I’ll talk about in a moment.

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• The Crucial T710 sets a new standard with unparalleled Gen5 performance for pro gamers and creators.  
• The Crucial X10 portable SSD combines sleek style, functional durability and storage options up to 8TB. 

TAIPEI, May 20, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today at Computex 2025,Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU) expanded its leadership in consumer storage by unveiling its latest high-performance SSDs — the Crucial T710 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD and the Crucial X10 Portable SSD. Forged from years of dedicated research and development, these next-gen SSDs redefine performance standards across the board by pushing the limits of speed, capacity and durability — powering your world at full speed. 

“Our fastest Gen5 drive yet, the Crucial T710 SSD turbocharges gaming and creative applications,” said Dinesh Bahal, corporate vice president and general manager of Micron’s Commercial Products Group. “Meanwhile, our X10 portable drive is a powerhouse, effortlessly handling massive backups, games and photo libraries — no matter where life takes you or what it throws your way. These innovations from Crucial underscore our relentless effort to exceed our customers’ storage needs.” 

Crucial T710: Blazing fast Gen5 speed for gaming and AI 

Leveraging cutting-edge NVMe technology and Micron’s G9 NAND, the Crucial T710 delivers unmatched Gen5 performance for pro-level gaming, creative applications and data-intensive tasks like AI. Boasting our best Gen5 speeds to date, it features up to:   

• 14,900 megabytes per second (MB/s) sequential read speeds  
• 13,800 MB/s sequential write speeds
• 2.2 million random read speeds
• 2.3 million random write speeds 

The T710 delivers up to 67% more IOPs per watt than previous-generation Gen5 drives, running faster and cooler and making it ideal for PCs, laptops and workstations. The optional integrated heatsink ensures the T710 stays cool under pressure and capacity options up to 4TB means users have the storage space they need for their most demanding projects.   

The increasing demands of AI applications require robust hardware for optimal performance. With its dramatically increased energy efficiency and decreased latency, the Crucial T710 is perfect for enabling real-time local data processing on AI PCs, with the speed to load a large language model from SSD to memory in under one second.

Crucial X10: Fast and tough portable storage to expand your digital life  

Crucial’s latest portable drive, the X10, delivers read speeds of up to 2,100 MB/s, twice as fast as its predecessor. The X10 is designed for users who need a fast, reliable and durable solution to back up and store their most important photos, games, movies, documents and more. With 4TB, 6TB and 8TB versions available, the Crucial X10 allows users to store massive amounts of data, including up to 500,000 4K photos, 114 games or 2.6 million MP3 files.   

With its sleek, matte blue design, the X10 is perfect for content creators, gamers, photography hobbyists and mainstream consumers who require high-speed data transfer and ample storage capacity. Its durable design is IP65 dust- and water-resistant and drop-resistant up to 9.8 feet, making it a vault for your data — secure, portable and always ready.    

The T710 uses Silicon Motion’s SM2508 controller, while the X10 uses the SM2322 controller.

“To meet the evolving demands of next-generation AI PCs, we’ve engineered our industry-leading SM2508 controller to deliver game-changing Gen5 performance combined with significant power savings compared to competitors,” said Nelson Duann, senior vice president of Silicon Motion’s Client & Automotive Storage Business. “Our close technical collaboration with Micron to turbocharge the Crucial T710 will transform the latest notebooks with extreme Gen5 performance that meets the needs of intensive applications like AI, gaming and beyond.”  

Availability: The Crucial X10 is now available for purchase through etailers, retailers and global channel partners, while T710 will be available starting in July 2025.

Additional Resources:

• Crucial X10 web page
• Crucial T710 web page

About Micron Technology, Inc.  

Micron Technology, Inc. is an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions, transforming how the world uses information to enrich life for all. With a relentless focus on our customers, technology leadership, and manufacturing and operational excellence, Micron delivers a rich portfolio of high-performance DRAM, NAND, and NOR memory and storage products through our Micron^® and Crucial^® brands. Every day, the innovations that our people create fuel the data economy, enabling advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and compute-intensive applications that unleash opportunities — from the data center to the intelligent edge and across the client and mobile user experience. To learn more about Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), visit micron.com.  

© 2025 Micron Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Information, products, and/or specifications are subject to change without notice. Micron, the Micron logo, and all other Micron trademarks are the property of Micron Technology, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.  

The ASUS ProArt A16 stands out as the most premium pick, with a black aluminum body, “stealth” hinge that bring the top half of the laptop nearly flush with the bottom and a smudge-resistant finish that should hopefully avoid fingerprints. Inside, ASUS is offering an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX processor and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Laptop GPU, both of which qualify the new ProArt as a Copilot+ PC. That means you’ll get access to Windows’ growing list of AI features, and ASUS is also including to apps — StoryCube and MuseTree — that can run generative AI models entirely locally. All packed into a laptop that’s around half-an-inch thick and has a 16-inch 4K OLED.

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Cooler Master is making a big splash at Computex 2025 with its “One Cooler Master—Where Cooling Drives the Future” showcase, held at its headquarters in Taipei. The company is showing off how it’s bringing together its enterprise-level engineering and consumer-focused design into a single, streamlined approach. The idea is simple: take the cutting-edge solutions developed for demanding industries like finance and AI and turn them into powerful, customizable gear for gamers, creators, and everyday builders. CEO Jimmy Sha says it best—this structure allows ideas and tech to flow in both directions, ensuring innovation benefits everyone.

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PCIe Gen 5 SSDs are still a luxury more than an actual necessity, but it’s good to see that they’re becoming more commonplace and, therefore, have started to go down in price compared to the first batch. Crucial just launched some of the best ones we’ve seen yet, in case you’re hunting down options for your next gaming PC.

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Spotify is continuing to add more ways for listeners to directly make purchases within its iOS app. Following on the streaming service’s changes to make purchasing subscriptions easier earlier this month, there’s now an an option for users to buy audiobooks in Spotify.

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The Elgato Stream Deck is expanding into a hardware-agnostic platform. On Monday, the company unveiled a software version of the programmable shortcut device. Also on tap are a module for integration in third-party products and DIY projects, an Ethernet dock and an updated Stream Deck MK.2 with scissor-switch keys.

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New Orleans’ police force secretly used constant facial recognition to seek out suspects for two years. An investigation by The Washington Post discovered that the city’s police department was using facial recognition technology on a privately owned camera network to continually look for suspects. This application seems to violate a city ordinance passed in 2022 that required facial recognition only be used by the NOLA police to search for specific suspects of violent crimes and then to provide details about the scans’ use to the city council. However, WaPo found that officers did not reveal their reliance on the technology in the paperwork for several arrests where facial recognition was used, and none of those cases were included in mandatory city council reports.

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Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike any other server CPU. It only has eight cores, but runs them at a very high 5.5 GHz and feeds them with 360 MB of on-chip cache. IBM also includes a DPU for accelerating IO, along with an on-board AI accelerator. Telum II is implemented on Samsung’s leading edge 5 nm process node.

Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: mainframe with a unique caching strategy

That’s a graphical environment via X11 with real window management and compositing, Firefox comfortably playing YouTube (including working audio), and a status bar with system stats. It launches in less than a second and feels snappy.

Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android

The latest generation of Motorola Razr smartphones was slated to go on sale last week beginning May 15, but availability has been delayed for purchases through select carriers. 9to5Google reported that the launch was delayed to May 22 for Verizon, Straight Talk, Total Wireless and Visible. We’ve reached out to Motorola for additional comment on the situation.

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SAG-AFTRA, the labor union representing performers in film, television and interactive media, has submitted an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) filing against Epic Games for using an AI-generated version of Darth Vader’s voice in the current season of Fortnite. Disney and Epic first announced on May 16 that Fortnite would feature a take on the character using an AI-generated version of James Earl Jones’ voice.

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Thrasher is coming to flat screens, with a launch on Steam and Steam Deck scheduled for later in 2025. The new platform releases follow the VR game’s debut last summer on the Meta Quest and Apple Vision Pro. Devs Brian Gibson and Mike Mandel, collaborating under the moniker Puddle, announced the new hardware additions in a fittingly surreal trailer today.

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Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo: Will this be Open Source? · Issue #1 · microsoft/WSL.

Microsoft releases WSL as open source, announces CLI text editor to replace the MS-DOS Editor

Late last week, tech news headlines were generated by a curious Qualcomm/NUVIA job advertisement. The presence of Xbox-related activities—at the US firm’s Redmond, Washington office—has set off watchdog alarm bells. Microsoft’s HQ is also located in this Seattle Metropolitan Area business hub. The job description outlined a sales director position—including interesting tidbits: “support sell-in activities for the next generation of Surface and Xbox products built on Snapdragon solutions” and “help define the next generation Surface and Xbox portfolios.” Older leaks have suggested Microsoft’s weighing up of ARM64 processor architecture, with next-gen Xbox designs in mind. Since the publication of widespread reportage, Qualcomm has edited out any mention of Xbox from the offending job ad. Given the latest evidence, fresh speculation has emerged from online media outlets. In theory, the company’s hardware engineers could be formulating a next-gen Arm-based handheld—not directly related to “Project Kennan.”

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At COMPUTEX 2025, In Win Development Inc. (InWin), renowned for its brand philosophy of ‘Contemporary and Innovative’ and a recipient of numerous international design awards, showcased its innovative special edition ChronoMancy chassis and its advanced L11 liquid cooling rack system assembly capabilities for AI datacenters.

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Razer is back with a refresh of the Blade 14 laptop and it’s the thinnest 14-inch model in the company’s history. It measures just 15.7mm at its slimmest point and weighs just over three pounds. This makes it an ideal computer for on-the-go gaming.

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If you want a capable Socket AM5 motherboard and have a $200 budget, some features inevitably get culled, so the question is whether what’s left is enough for your average PC user. Thankfully, you won’t find much better than the Steel Legend in terms of balancing price and features.

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