The Gilbane Advisor

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Gilbane Advisor 7-30-25 — Neurosymbolic AI, on-device models, chat lies

July 30, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Melanie Mitchell, Gary Marcus, and Cobus Greyling.

Additional reading comes from Michael Andrews, Robert Dennyson, Sainath Palla, and Eugene Yemelyanau & Jake Grice.

News comes from DeepL, Bloomreach & Snowflake, TileDB, and BrowserStack.

Reminder: We don’t usually publish in August. We’ll resume our regular schedule, such as it is, in September.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

How o3 and Grok 4 accidentally vindicated Neurosymbolic AI

Gary Marcus …

“This essay explains what neurosymbolic AI is, why you should believe it, how deep learning advocates long fought against it, and how in 2025, OpenAI and xAI have accidentally vindicated it … And it is about why, in 2025, neurosymbolic AI has emerged as the team to beat.”

Those familiar with the long and often heated debates between advocates of neural network and symbol-manipulation approaches to AI may want to skip or scan the first half or so, but Marcus makes a good case for the combo. (19 min)

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/how-o3-and-grok-4-accidentally-vindicated

Apple foundation models — data sourcing & human oversight in building models

Cobus Greyling shares some rare encouraging news for Apple AI. In particular, Apple’s on-device model (AFM) at approximately 3 billion parameters (~3B), fares well in a benchmark comparison with similar on-device size models from Qwen and Google Gemma. (6 min)

https://cobusgreyling.medium.com/apple-foundation-models-data-sourcing-human-oversight-in-building-models-459de8e0cdcc

Why AI chatbots lie to us

Melanie Mitchell explains in plain language why we should not be surprised that AI chatbots are prone to deceive us, and why caution is called for. A good article for a broad audience. (8 min)

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea3922

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Content technology news

DeepL expands real-time voice translation capabilities

DeepL Voice updates include expanded language support and advanced meeting productivity features, with Zoom Meetings integration coming soon.
https://www.deepl.com/en/products/voice

Bloomreach and Snowflake partner

Connecting the Snowflake AI Data Cloud with Bloomreach’s Autonomous Marketing, businesses can centralize and activate data across marketing channels.
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-and-snowflake-partner-to-unify-customer-data-and-ai-driven-activation-helping-marketers-personalize-the-entire-customer-journey/

TileDB announces partnership with Databricks to harness multimodal data

The partnership provides for the integration of complex scientific data from TileDB, with Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and analytics workflows.
https://www.tiledb.com

BrowserStack launches Accessibility Design Toolkit

Figma plugin powered by BrowserStack’s Spectra Rule Engine, prevents up to 40% of accessibility issues before development even begins.
https://www.browserstack.com/accessibility-design-toolkit

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

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DeepL expands real-time voice translation capabilities

July 23, 2025 /

DeepL, a global Language AI company, announced several updates to its live speech translation solution, DeepL Voice, including expanded language support and advanced meeting productivity features, with Zoom Meetings integration coming soon.

DeepL Voice provides multilingual speech translation in real time, both virtually and in person. DeepL Voice for Meetings provides translated captions during virtual meetings, while DeepL Voice for Conversations offers instant speech translation on mobile for dynamic face-to-face interactions. Updates include:

  • Expanded language coverage: DeepL Voice now supports spoken input in three additional languages – Mandarin Chinese, Ukrainian, and Romanian – adding to its existing lineup (English, German, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, Dutch, French, Turkish, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Italian). Translated captions are available in 35 languages supported by DeepL Translator, with new additions Vietnamese and Hebrew.
  • Enhanced meeting productivity features: Full transcripts and translations from meetings to streamline notes, minutes and follow-up tasks can be downloaded with dedicated admin controls to maintain enterprise-level security and compliance.

DeepL Voice for Meetings will soon be available for Zoom Meetings, expanding beyond its existing Microsoft Teams integration to make multilingual communication accessible on the virtual meeting platform. For in-person interactions, DeepL Voice for Conversations continues to be available on iOS and Android.

https://www.deepl.com/en/products/voice

Bloomreach and Snowflake partner

July 22, 2025 /

Bloomreach, a platform for personalization, today announced a new partnership with the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, empowering businesses to activate enterprise-grade data infrastructures across marketing channels. With Bloomreach and Snowflake, businesses can combine customer engagement with maximum personalization, connecting customer data stored in Snowflake with Bloomreach’s AI-powered marketing solutions. This partnership ensures marketers can activate their Snowflake data instantly and intelligently through Bloomreach.

Bloomreach’s native Snowflake integration is already available to businesses. It securely syncs customer attributes, event data, and product catalogs from Snowflake into Bloomreach. Businesses unlock the full value of their customer data, breaking down silos between storage and activation, and enabling personalization powered by AI.

Additionally, this integration enables marketing teams to:

  • Power Loomi AI agents in Bloomreach with enriched customer and product intelligence
  • Automate campaign triggers based on Snowflake events
  • Deliver timely personalization with fresh data and hyper-relevant insights
  • Safeguard sensitive data through selective import capabilities, transferring only the specific data required for a given use case

https://www.bloomreach.com/en/news/2025/bloomreach-and-snowflake-partner-to-unify-customer-data-and-ai-driven-activation-helping-marketers-personalize-the-entire-customer-journey/

BrowserStack launches Accessibility Design Toolkit

July 22, 2025 /

BrowserStack, a software testing platform, announced the launch of its Accessibility Design Toolkit, a Figma plugin that helps design teams build accessible products right from the design stage.

BrowserStack’s collaboration with WebAIM on the 2025 WebAIM Million report reveals the scope of the problem: 94.8% of one million analyzed homepages had at least one WCAG failure, with color contrast and missing alt text issues ranking among the top two—both preventable during design.

With over 8,800 ADA lawsuits filed in 2024 and the European Accessibility Act, teams are under pressure to meet standards, yet most still address these issues after launch, when fixes become harder and more expensive.

With BrowserStack’s Spectra Rule Engine, the Accessibility Design Toolkit helps shift accessibility left and enables design teams to:

  • Scan Figma design files for color contrast, touch target size, spacing issues, and more
  • Auto-detect UI components, validate against WCAG standards, and auto-annotate with ARIA roles
  • Get AI-powered suggestions to add alt text, fix heading structure, and improve keyboard focus order
  • Generate developer-ready handoffs with built-in accessibility specs and clear annotations

The Accessibility Design Toolkit is a part of BrowserStack’s all-in-one accessibility suite and is available to all Figma users, integrating into existing workflows.

https://www.browserstack.com/accessibility-design-toolkit

TileDB announces partnership with Databricks to harness multimodal data

July 22, 2025 /

TileDB, a multimodal database company, and Databricks, a Data and AI company, announced a strategic partnership to eliminate data silos preventing healthcare and life sciences organizations from fully leveraging AI-driven drug discovery and clinical insights.

The partnership addresses the challenge of integrating complex scientific data that TileDB supports, including multiomics, medical imaging, and clinical records with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Databricks’ analytics workflows — enabling the development of AI agents that can analyze all data types without requiring costly data migration or transformation.

TileDB addresses offers a sophisticated, omnimodal data management platform, which takes the notion of multimodality beyond text, video, audio, and images, and adds scientific modalities using multi-dimensional arrays. Scientific modalities are ever-evolving, and the omnimodal philosophy can support whatever is the most relevant and important data today. The TileDB – Databricks partnership establishes a bi-directional bridge between specialized data storage and powerful compute capabilities, underpinned by Databricks’ unified data governance model.

The integration is available now in private preview with select customers, and enables data stored in TileDB’s high-performance array database to run on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, and vice versa. Additional features will be rolled out in the second half of this year.

https://www.tiledb.com

Gilbane Advisor 7-9-25 — Unified Data Architecture KG, modern DBs

July 9, 2025 /

This week we feature articles from Alex Hutter, Alexandre Bertails, Claire Wang, Haoyuan He, Kishore Banala, Peter Royal & Shervin Afshar, and Max Ganz II.

Additional reading comes from José Parra-Moyano, Patrick Reinmoeller & Karl Schmedders, Paolo Perrone, Umesh Bhatt, and Jim Clyde Monge.

News comes from Cloudflare, Grammarly & Superhuman, Syncro Soft, and RWS & Papercut.

Our summer schedule is quickly approaching. There will be one additional newsletter in July, and we’ll resume our regular schedule, such as it is, in September.

All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index

Opinion / Analysis

Model once, represent everywhere: UDA (Unified Data Architecture) at Netflix

A team from Netflix generously describes how they are tackling their data integration challenges. The case study addresses issues that stymie many modern data management efforts. It is a bit technical, but easily worth the effort.

“This post introduces the foundations of UDA as a knowledge graph, connecting domain models to data containers through mappings, and grounded in an in-house metamodel, or model of models, called Upper. Upper defines the language for domain modeling in UDA and enables projections that automatically generate schemas and pipelines across systems.” (15 min)

https://netflixtechblog.com/uda-unified-data-architecture-6a6aee261d8d

The different flavors modern databases come in

The actual title of the paper is Introduction to the fundamentals of Amazon Redshift, by Max Ganz. I chose the title above because even if you have no interest in Redshift, you’ll likely want to read this piece. As Tim Bray says, it “has one of the best explanations I’ve ever read of the different flavors modern databases come in”. Long but easy read. (44 min)

https://www.redshift-observatory.ch/white_papers/downloads/introduction_to_the_fundamentals_of_amazon_redshift.html

More Reading

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Content technology news

Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers accessing content by default

Websites choose if they want AI crawlers to access their content, and decide how AI companies can use it – AI companies can state their crawlers purpose.
https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2025/cloudflare-just-changed-how-ai-crawlers-scrape-the-internet-at-large/

Syncro Soft releases Oxygen AI Positron Assistant 6.0

The Oxygen AI Positron Service brings model updates, subscription management for teams, allowing centralized purchase or renewal, and requires AI Positron add-ons version 4 or newer.
https://www.oxygenxml.com/ai_positron/whats_new.html

Grammarly to acquire Superhuman

The acquisition accelerates Grammarly’s evolution into an AI productivity platform for apps and agents, positioning email as a critical communication surface.
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/company/grammarly-to-acquire-superhuman/ ■ https://superhuman.com

RWS acquires Papercup’s IP

Papercup’s technology combines voice synthesis, unique AI voices and editorial tools for human language specialists to fine-tune the output.
https://www.rws.com/about/news/2025/rws-acquires-papercups-ip/ ■ https://www.papercup.com

All content technology news

The Gilbane Advisor is authored by Frank Gilbane and is ad-free, cost-free, and curated for content, computing, data, web, and digital experience technology and information professionals. We publish recommended articles and content technology news most Wednesdays. We do not sell or share personal data.

Subscribe | View online | Editorial policy | Privacy policy | Contact

Syncro Soft releases Oxygen AI Positron Assistant 6.0

July 3, 2025 /

All Oxygen AI Positron Assistant 6.0 distributions now feature the advanced GPT-4.1 OpenAI model as default. All AI action prompts have improved quality, consistency, and reuse. The users of the Enterprise distribution get new connectors for Google Gemini and Vertex AI, as well as enhanced Microsoft Azure OpenAI integration and simplified configuration.

Oxygen AI Positron Assistant brings automatic validation and correction of AI-generated content, and smarter document context expansion for the AI Positron Fix action. User preferences and rules can be saved as persistent memories. AI context can be supplemented with additional files automatically, or by manually attaching files to conversations, and prompts can be entered using voice input. AI actions can be invoked directly from chat, the Improve Readability action supports audience level customization, and AI development actions are available for more document types.

Oxygen AI Positron Assistant for Eclipse now works with a broader range of editors (Java, Python, C/C++, Perl, and plain text). It offers a dedicated framework for developing custom AI actions, DITA documentation draft generation from configuration files, and AI-enabled templates for rapid creation of XSLT, XSD, Schematron, JSON Schema, and DTD files. Installation and updates are streamlined with the Eclipse update site support.

https://www.oxygenxml.com/ai_positron/whats_new.html

Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers accessing content by default

July 1, 2025 /

Cloudflare, Inc. a connectivity cloud company, announced it is now the first Internet infrastructure provider to block AI crawlers accessing content without permission or compensation, by default. Starting today, website owners can choose if they want AI crawlers to access their content, and decide how AI companies can use it. AI companies can also now clearly state their purpose – if their crawlers are used for training, inference, or search – to help website owners decide which crawlers to allow. Cloudflare’s new default setting is a step toward a more sustainable future for both content creators and AI innovators.

AI companies will now be required to obtain explicit permission from a website before scraping. Upon sign-up with Cloudflare, every new domain will now be asked if they want to allow AI crawlers, giving customers the choice upfront to explicitly allow or deny AI crawlers access. This significant shift means that every new domain starts with the default of control, and eliminates the need for webpage owners to manually configure their settings to opt out. Customers can easily check their settings and enable crawling at any time if they want their content to be freely accessed.

https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2025/cloudflare-just-changed-how-ai-crawlers-scrape-the-internet-at-large

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