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French dev aims to solve bots' blindness so they can understand GUIs

Most LLMs are great at answering prompts, but fall short when it comes to navigating around the desktop in Windows or Linux. French AI model dev H unveiled a pair of computer use models on Monday aimed at handling graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Throughout computing history, computer use largely falls into three categories: command line interfaces (CLIs), application programming interfaces (APIs), and GUIs. AI agents can easily plug into the first two, but navigating desktop environments and applications that often prioritize form before function remains an ongoing challenge. H's Holo 4 family of models aims to address this challenge by enabling relatively small but capable models to tackle all three computer use scenarios including pointing, clicking, scrolling, and typing their way through graphical interfaces originally meant for us meatbags. Fine tuned using supervised training and reinforcement learning, Holo 4 is built atop Alibaba's Qwen 3.8 27B and Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B models. And by optimizing for CLIs, APIs, and GUIs, H claims that its models achieve far greater versatility than pure computer use models might otherwise. Alongside Holo 4, H has also updated its Holotron model, which is based on Nvidia's Nemotron 3, with similar capabilities. In one example, the company showed Holo 4 27B taking advantage of FreeCAD's macro function to programmatically design a 3D model of the Eiffel Tower rather than manually building it using primitives like cubes. In another demo, H did the opposite using extruded shapes to recreate the company's logo, showing the model's flexibility. As with any model dev's benchmarks, take these claims with a grain of salt, but if H is to be believed, Holo 4 outperforms significantly larger frontier models from the likes of OpenAI, while using a fraction of the parameters. Curiously, this doesn't mean that they're cheaper. In fact, while the company shows higher scores, in many cases the models end up costing more per task. Given what we know about Qwen 3.8 27B, this is likely due to Holo 4 using substantially more "thinking" tokens in order to arrive at a final result relative to something like GPT 6 Luna, which doesn't perform as well in the OSWorld 2.0 benchmark, but costs substantially less. Having said that, the open weights models' diminutive size means that researchers, AI enthusiasts, and enterprises should be able to run them on relatively modest hardware. A 24 GB Nvidia RTX 3090 should be more than capable of running these models at 4-bit precision. H clearly expects users to do just that since alongside BF16, FP8, and NVFP4 weights, it's also made a Llama.cpp (and by extension LM Studio and Ollama)-friendly GGUF version of the model available for download on Hugging Face. The model dev says that it also plans to release DSpark draft weights in order to speed up inference using a technique called speculative decoding. We've explored this performance-enhancing inference tech in the past, but in a nutshell it uses a small model to guess the outputs of a larger model. When it works, users experience a speedup in token processing and generation and, when it doesn't, it falls back to the base model ensuring no loss in output quality. However, the models aren't worth much without a harness. H has developed several agentic harnesses including its open source HAI-Agents harness, which is available for download on its GitHub. However, in theory the models should work with third-party computer use harnesses. H isn't the only model dev focused on computer use applications. At AWS' Re:Invent conference last year, the company announced its own set of computer-use models. Meanwhile, the big three American model labs, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, are also investing in this capability, perhaps because escaping their sandbox sometimes requires pushing a button. ®

The Guardian

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Belgium v France, Northern Ireland v Hungary and more: Nations League – live

⚽ Updates from 7.45pm (BST) kick-offs across Europe
⚽ Get in touch: email Michael about the action

Belgium make two changes from the side that beat Italy. Club Brugge’s Joaquin Seys, heavily linked with Manchester United in the summer, comes in for Brighton’s Maxim De Cuyper, at left-back. Chelsea’s injury-prone gem Romeo Lavia replaces Rangers’ Nicolas Raskin.

The only outfield player to survive from France’s win over Turkey is Maxence Lacroix. Nine changes!. We’re not sure whether that is because of injury or fatigue, or whether that is because Zidane had a withering asssessment of Friday’s win, but it is a much-changed XI for Les Bleus.

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Volkskrant.nl biedt het laatste nieuws, opinie en achtergronden

Haaretz: Britse en Amerikaanse Jood mogen niet naar Israël verhuizen, mogelijk vanwege hun pro-Palestijns activisme

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Ruzie binnen links blok in Zweden, rechts krijgt nu de kans om nieuwe regering te vormen

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164 arrestaties en 27 gewonden bij scholierenprotesten Frankrijk

PARIJS (ANP/AFP) - De autoriteiten hebben maandag 164 arrestaties verricht bij demonstraties door scholieren op middelbare scholen in Frankrijk. De demonstraties vonden plaats op 180 scholen. Hierbij raakten twaalf leden van de veiligheidsdiensten, twaalf scholieren en drie schoolmedewerkers gewond.

Sinds vorige week blokkeren scholieren hun middelbare scholen en houden ze er demonstraties. Dit doen ze om te protesteren tegen overvolle klassen, een tekort aan docenten en een zware werkdruk. De beweging begon in de regio Parijs. Bij de protesten werd vuurwerk naar de politie gegooid en vandalisme gemeld. Deze maandag verspreidden de protesten zich naar andere regio's in Frankrijk.

"Het ging niet om het stellen van eisen, het was echt geweld in zijn puurste vorm", zei minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Laurent Nunez over de protesten. De vakbond voor middelbare scholieren heeft opgeroepen tot een landelijke blokkade van middelbare scholen dinsdag.


Rijnmond - Nieuws

Het laatste nieuws van vandaag over Rotterdam, Feyenoord, het verkeer en het weer in de regio Rijnmond

Tien jaar na aanslag waren Wim en Gabriëlla eindelijk terug in Nice: ‘Een nieuw positief hoofdstuk’

Ruim tien jaar geleden waren Wim en Gabriëlla Groenendijk uit Rhoon aanwezig in Nice ten tijde van een terroristische aanslag. Afgelopen zaterdag was het stel voor het eerst terug in de Franse stad; speciaal om een ultramarathon van vijftig kilometer te lopen. “We kunnen het nu beter afsluiten.”

ZoekZoek. Man slaat popcornsmijter vol op z'n bek

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Het irritantste wat je kan overkomen in de bioscoop is dat je 's winter naast Erben Wennemars zit. Maar daarna is het irritantste dat een of ander rotjoch (of natuurlijk een of andere rotmeid) popcorn naar je smijt terwijl je gewoon lekker wil genieten van 3 uur The Odyssey met je eigen popcorn. Kun je een popcorngevecht starten of 'IK HOEF GEEN POPCORN' roepen. Maar in Nederland lossen we dat tegenwoordig op door iemand vol op z'n bek te slaan. Want dat heeft de premier zelf gezegd, en zijn adjudant vond dat prima. De spelbrekers van de politie zijn hier alleen op tegen en daarom wordt bovenstaande popcornsmijterrammer gezocht. Daarom toch: ZoekZoek.