economy Marubeni sold its oil and gas stake in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, known as ‘Big Foot.’ This decision is based on the strategic backdrop of asset replacement outlined in the medium-term management strategy “GC2027” and the construction of a natural gas value chain with an eye toward a decarbonized society. Full details of oil […]
IT On July 8, 2026, OpenAI officially announced its next-generation voice model, “GPT-Live-1,” marking the start of its global rollout. With the advent of this model, which adopts a “full dual approach” that enables natural dialogue with humans, AI is evolving from a mere information search tool into an autonomous partner that completes real-world tasks. Adoption […]
Civil engineering On July 8, 2026, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism announced that a total of 36 projects had been selected as the FY2026 ‘Model Projects for Vacant House Countermeasures.’ This project aims to directly support highly modeled initiatives by private businesses and NPOs to address Japan’s increasingly serious vacant house problem, and to […]
economy On July 8, 2026, U.S. Central Command launched additional attacks on Iran in retaliation for attacks on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and President Trump effectively declared the end of the ceasefire. Behind this is the renewed intense armed clashes over freedom of passage at a key international crude oil transportation hub. Retaliation […]
economy Yaskawa Electric has fully launched its state-of-the-art ‘Robot Factory No. 5’ in Kitakyushu City. We have built a system where robots equipped with “physical AI,” which autonomously make judgments and move, can autonomously produce AI robots, tackling the challenges of severe labor shortages and increasing complexity on production sites. Next-generation production base for autonomously assembling […]
economy On July 6, 2026, the Japan Federation of Food Service Associations (Shokudanren) issued an urgent warning to member stores following the bankruptcy of the major payment processing company Zentoshin, demanding immediate suspension of terminal usage and aggregation of unpaid sales amounts. The largest bankruptcy of the year, with total liabilities of about 125.9 billion yen, […]
IT A new KV cache compression technology, “ReFreeKV,” has been announced. This technology overcomes the challenge of setting thresholds for data dependence that traditional methods face, enabling adaptive memory consumption according to input content while maintaining inference accuracy equivalent to full cache. The “KV Cache” Barrier Hindering LLM Inference When large language models (LLMs) generate text […]
IT On July 7, 2026, Anthropic announced that it will significantly expand the scope of its support program for open source software (OSS) developers, called “Claude for Open Source.” With this initiative, certified developers can use the company’s top-tier subscription plan, Claude Max 20x, free for six months. Gratitude to the developer community and the highest […]
Civil engineering Shimizu Corporation has developed a new panel refrigerated warehouse system that significantly reduces construction and maintenance costs while improving storage efficiency. The background is the rapid spread of food e-commerce driving growing demand, combined with aging facilities and environmental regulations compounding the logistics industry’s “2026 problem.” Overview of the new system and the start of […]
IT GitHub in the US has made the desktop app version of “GitHub Copilot” available to all user groups, including the free plan. Behind this is the strategic aim to secure control over developer infrastructure as autonomous development by AI agents becomes widespread. All plans for the GitHub Copilot app are now available. On July 7, […]