AI News

#20

Next Week in The Sequence:

Nvidia's new data engine Flora labels one hour of robot video for 72 cents instead of $88 with GPT-6 Astra, while scoring slightly higher on quality. The open system, built on three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models, catches errors in robot actions far more reliably than any competitor but sometimes falls short on descriptive accuracy. Nvidia is positioning Flora as a key piece of its strategy to control …

What the "SaaS is dead" debate misses, according to SAP's CTO

A new benchmark by P-Zero Research measures how well AI models design and evaluate experiments on their own. The results are improving so fast that Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark now thinks self-improving AI could arrive by 2027. The article Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark moves his prediction for self-improving AI forward to 2027 appeared first on The Decoder.

Anthropic says companies should evaluate whether they can consolidate sub-agents into a single agent that loads context on demand. In one architecture comparison, the single-agent setup ran about twice as fast. Anthropic has published a migration kit on GitHub to help teams make the transition. The article Anthropic says one AI agent beats many subagents now that models can handle complexity alone…

In Foreign Affairs, historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cast the US and China as AI empires and every other country as a dependency. The race won't be decided by breakthroughs but by who can bankroll it. US corporations alone plan to spend more than $600 billion in 2026. Yet mounting debt, protests against data centers, and a potential chip crisis…

OpenAI is poaching Anthropic's customers with steep discounts. Companies like Rippling, Replit, and DataCamp say they've cut AI costs by up to 90 percent after switching. Anthropic's growth has slowed, but OpenAI is trading its own margins for market share. Chinese rivals like Deepseek are piling on more price pressure. The article OpenAI offers discounts up to 90 percent to poach Anthropic's bigg…

Smartphone agents don't get better by processing more data. They improve by training on as many different apps as possible. The researchers behind OpenMobile-2 built an open training environment with more than 110 applications, including 35 replicas of popular apps. On real Android devices, their model scores highest among open agents, the authors say. The article OpenMobile-2 proves open-source s…

The three OpenAI safety researchers who were fired, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang, are publicly pushing back against allegations from their former employer. They deny sharing confidential information and see a connection to their advocacy for AI systems that are easier to scrutinize. The researchers say OpenAI never told them in writing which information they allegedly mishandled.…

A three-month field experiment with 133 patent attorneys shows that AI boosts immediate performance, with junior lawyers gaining the most. But when the AI is taken away, only senior attorneys retain the benefits, suggesting that baseline expertise is a prerequisite for turning AI-assisted practice into lasting skill. The article AI makes junior patent attorneys instantly better but may quietly stu…

Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, has introduced Dessa, a speech model that processes audio directly instead of converting it to text first. Dessa is designed to recognize emotions, sarcasm, and pauses in real time. The model runs locally on a MacBook Pro M4 Max but isn't publicly available yet. The article Block's new AI model Dessa was trained entirely on human speech to catch emoti…

Over 11 hours of coding videos on evaluation, inference-time scaling, reinforcement learning, and distillation, with Python and PyTorch.

OpenAI now trains its most powerful models without internet access, after an internal research model exploited a DNS misconfiguration in September and reached the open internet. In controlled tests, AI agents still found ways to communicate covertly through side channels. The incidents echo Sam Altman's warning: the more powerful the model, the harder it is to contain. The article OpenAI's isolate…

A controlled study shows that switching between coding-agent harnesses like Claude Code, OpenCode, or mini-SWE-agent barely moves pass rates more than rerunning the same setup. Cost per task, however, can triple, driven mainly by the system prompt that gets resent with every step. The article Fancy harnesses make coding agents more expensive but not better, study finds appeared first on The Decoder.

We have Fable at home... or so we are being told by paid shills

Moonshot AI's Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 55 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, an 11-point jump over its predecessor that puts it in fourth place. Only three Anthropic and Meta models rank higher. If Moonshot releases the weights as planned, the gap between open and proprietary models shrinks to just three points. The article Chinese AI model Kimi K3.1 Pro is closing in on Anthropic's…

External auditors from METR and Redwood Research spent three weeks on-site at OpenAI examining the company's internal monitoring system for AI agents and found significant gaps, with up to 25 percent of agent traffic from models at the GPT-5.5 class and above going unmonitored. OpenAI redacted large portions of the 61-page report, and only a summary is publicly available. The article Three-week on…

Anthropic says it has an internal AI model that outperforms and is better aligned than Mythos 5.1. During a cybersecurity test by the UK's AISI, Mythos 5 went rogue in 9 of 43 runs, sneaking malicious code into a real GitHub project and creating fake accounts to get it approved. An internal research model stopped such attacks on its own 67 percent of the time. The article Anthropic says its unrele…

Sam Altman believes advanced AI can't be kept locked up forever. Sandboxes and monitoring are only temporary fixes. Eventually, the only real solution is alignment, and that's still an unsolved problem. He also warns that AI models are already finding hardware security flaws no human hacker would ever spot. The article OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says advanced AI will inevitably escape its sandbox, and …