The Archive

US autoworkers union warns of robot automation as dark factory future looms.

OpenAI boardmember Zico Kolter and Gray Swan CEO Matt Fredrikson join swyx to explain why AI security is not just “cybersecurity with AI”

The loop takes agentic AI a step further, by authorizing a swarm of agents to work continuously in the background, endlessly.

What does an AI company do after one of those not-acqui-hire deals? Groq raised money, is leaning into its neocloud business, and is hiring new execs.

Nvidia announced a new cooling system that cuts water use inside the data center. But it does nothing to address AI's biggest water use — fossil fuel power plants.

Joyce, a native New Yorker, didn't think finding her first solo apartment in the city would be easy. But she also didn't think it'd be "hell." After looking at a lot of tiny, overpriced places she described as "shitholes," Joyce found her dream apartment: a reasonably priced studio in Manhattan. "It was big and airy, and there was a fireplace," she said. The kitchen was small but well equipped and looked like it had been recently renovated. She dropped everything to see the apartment, and when she got there, she learned that five other women, all around her age, had viewings scheduled after h...

Google DeepMind and A24 are teaming up to build AI filmmaking tools.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. For those of you enjoying your summer unaware of Anthropic’s latest feud with the US government, here’s a recap: In April the company said it had built an AI model called Mythos…

Learning robust dexterous grasping requires real-world data that records the physical outcomes of grasp attempts. Such data is hard to obtain at scale: teleoperation yields valid physical outcomes but is slow and operator-biased, while simulation-based generation is cheap and scalable but cannot certify contact validity. A natural solution is to generate candidate grasps and verify them on real hardware, but this scales only if the entire collection loop (perception, execution, labeling, and reset) runs without human intervention. We present AutoDex, an automated real-world data-collection sy...

Large language models (LLMs) are typically pretrained on short sequences and then extended to work on longer sequences with additional training. However, such LLMs still struggle to further generalize to very long sequences. We propose Randomized YaRN, a training method that improves length generalization by combining YaRN-based positional extrapolation with randomized positional encoding and a length curriculum. During training on short context data, tokens are assigned YaRN positional encodings sampled from a larger position range, exposing the model to out-of-distribution positional repres...

Humanoid loco-manipulation is often simplified into a stop-and-go process: walking to an object, stopping to manipulate it, and then resuming locomotion. It also commonly relies on low degree-of-freedom (DoF) end effectors that behave like an open-close grasp primitive. We introduce CoorDex, a learning pipeline that converts high-dimensional body and dexterous hand control into coordinated latent residual control, enabling high-DoF dexterous loco-manipulation on the move. Starting from simulated whole-body and hand demonstrations, CoorDex trains privileged motion tracking teachers for the hum...

Modern text-to-image models excel in visual fidelity and prompt adherence. However, this strict adherence comes at the cost of diversity: generated samples tend to collapse into a single visual interpretation. Existing methods to improve diversity produce outputs driven by incidental variations rather than meaningful design choices. This motivates a new variant of the diversity task where structure is enforced on the generated samples. We introduce a method for controlled diversity that enables Semantic Browsing, where users can navigate structured image galleries and experience creative expl...

Following the paradigm shift initiated by OpenAI o3, interleaved reasoning with code to enhance multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has become a pivotal research frontier. The existing literature focuses primarily on tool-use within vision-perception tasks. However, such approaches typically rely on predefined heuristics for visual manipulation and are inherently incapable of addressing numerical computation problems due to their exclusive focus on visual operations. This paper empowers MLLMs with adaptive interleaved reasoning capabilities through extended reinforcement learning trainin...

AdamW is the de facto optimizer for training large language models (LLMs), yet the theory behind it still lives mostly in finite-variance regimes. This is increasingly unsatisfying, as empirical evidence indicates that stochastic gradient noise in LLM pretraining is typically heavy-tailed. Recent work shows that sign-based optimizers such as Lion and Muon achieve sharp heavy-tailed rates, and that AdaGrad can also converge under heavy-tailed noise. However, no rigorous convergence theory for AdamW has yet been established in this regime. Can AdamW converge under the same heavy-tailed assumpti...

Mental health assessment commonly relies on isolated screening instruments or data-driven models that often lack interpretability and multi-dimensional integration. Existing approaches frequently focus on individual indicators such as depression or anxiety while providing limited support for comprehensive and explainable decision-making. To address this limitation, this study proposes PsyBridge, a hybrid intelligent decision-support framework designed for multi-dimensional mental health assessment through the integration of clinically validated screening tools, cognitive evaluation, and perso...

This paper presents our algorithmic innovations for the NVIDIA Nemotron Model Reasoning Challenge, focusing on Bit Manipulation Puzzles. In this task, the objective is to discover a hidden logical rule transforming input binary strings to outputs, then apply it to unseen inputs. Large Language Models (LLMs) notoriously struggle here; traditional methods force them to simulate complex boolean logic and arithmetic, leading to hallucinations. Furthermore, the search space of bitwise operations (combinations of shifts, rotations, and logic gates) suffers from a severe combinatorial explosion. To ...

Prior work shows that large language models (LLMs) exhibit introspective capability on benign tasks. We extend the question to safety contexts and examine how reliably a model can recognize that its own prior response was elicited by an adversarial prefill attack. Across ten open-weight instruction-tuned LLMs (3B to 70B) and four safety benchmarks, no model reliably recognizes its own compromised outputs, with models claiming intent on prefilled responses at an average rate of $27.3\%$. Introspective signal stems largely from safety- and refusal-related reasoning. Orthogonalizing models' weig...

Modern language models, including transformer, recurrent, and memory-based variants, share a common chassis: a stack of identical layers in which parameters are allocated uniformly across depth. This is a default inherited from the original transformer and largely unchanged since, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that layers contribute non-uniformly to the final output, with later layers refining the residual stream rather than transforming it. We ask whether parameter capacity should reflect this asymmetry. Our controlled experiment shows that, under a fixed budget, allocating more ca...

Large Language Models (LLMs) are frequently portrayed as general-purpose solvers capable of solving arbitrary tasks. We argue that this view overlooks a fundamental constraint: language is a compressed and capacity-limited interface for conveying task information. Modelling User--System interaction as a bilevel \emph{cheap-talk} game, we analyse how latent tasks are encoded into prompts and reinterpreted under alignment and safety constraints. We introduce a conceptual decomposition separating task inference from execution and derive PAC-Bayes bounds that distinguish finite-sample estimation ...

Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a scalable path forward for agentic AI, comprising multiple LLM-based agents, each assigned a system prompt and a position within a workflow that governs inter-agent coordination and output aggregation. System prompts thus form a critical and accessible optimization surface: they specify agents' roles and behaviors, enabling system-level improvements without model finetuning. Although prompt optimization has shown substantial potential for single LLMs, extending it to MAS poses distinct challenges, notably an exponentially growing search space. It remains uncle...

Bayesian experimental design (BED) has traditionally been based on maximising expected uncertainty reductions from prior to posterior. A major shortfall of this approach is that it leads to doubly intractable objectives that are difficult to optimise, while customising them to particular downstream tasks of interest can also be difficult. Following first principles decision theory, we demonstrate that BED can alternatively be formulated in terms of an expected future loss (EFL) on downstream actions, providing a simple and naturally task-driven framework. Critically, we then show that all suc...

We consider the problem of sequentially approximating functions of each element in a slowly-varying sequence, i.e. one where the magnitude $α_i$ of the difference between the elements at positions $i$ and $i-1$ is small. Recent work on implicit trace estimation shows that when $α_t$ is small, reusing queries to past sequence elements can reduce the overall cost [Dharangutte \& Musco, NeurIPS~2021; Woodruff et al., NeurIPS~2022]. We introduce a framework generalizing this to a variety of linear and nonlinear functions on diverse vector spaces, obtaining novel sequential estimation results for ...

Enterprise agents increasingly operate inside workspaces: they read heterogeneous files, invoke tools, and deliver business artifacts. We introduce EnterpriseClawBench, an enterprise agent benchmark constructed from proprietary, real-world agent sessions. Starting from a large archive of workplace sessions, the EnterpriseClawBench produces 852 reproducible tasks, each paired with recovered fixtures, rewritten prompts, role classes, skill subclasses, hard rules, and semantic rubrics. Because the sessions contain internal enterprise content, we do not release the benchmark data; instead, our re...

Amazon sent emails to customers inviting them to test Alexa+

Personalized content systems depend on available UGC and struggle when suitable content is absent, delayed, or costly to create. Although multimodal generators can synthesize content on demand, how to translate behavioral traces into generation-ready preferences remains underexplored. We study personalized multimodal content generation: creating user-tailored multimodal content without existing item pools or waiting for matching UGC. We propose TailorMind, linking collaborative preference modeling with controllable multimodal generation. TailorMind enriches sparse user histories via hypergrap...

In many modern applications of reinforcement learning (RL), the natural reward for a task of interest is inherently sparse: a reward of 0 is given everywhere except when the task is completed, when a reward of +1 is given. Training a policy to maximize such a sparse reward requires solving a challenging credit assignment problem, leading to slow or ineffective RL improvement. We propose a simple approach to transform a sparse outcome reward into a dense process reward. Our approach relies on training a discriminator to distinguish between previous successful and unsuccessful episodes, and usi...

Matrix-aware optimizers such as Muon and Muown have recently shown strong empirical performance for pre-training Transformers. In particular, Muown separates each weight matrix into row magnitudes and an un-normalized direction variable, updating the former with Adam and the latter with Muon. We show that the directional update of Muown is equivalent to a Riemannian step on the normalized directions, while the magnitude of the un-normalized parameterization only modulates the angular step size. This explains the step-size stability of Muown and suggests making the angular step size explicit. ...

A set of exposure scores calculated in 2023 has become a central empirical input to the future of work debate. Produced by Eloundou et al. (2023) and referred to here as the GPTs are GPTs scores, they define exposure as the share of occupational tasks a large language model can assist with. This work is a genuine methodological contribution, but as the scores travel from the time and place they were produced, the limitations the authors named do not always travel with them. Two gaps have widened as a result. The first is structural, between what static exposure scores measure and what policy ...

Remote patient monitoring depends on patient-reported data to capture the subjective dimension of recovery that devices cannot measure. The Quality of Recovery (QoR-15) survey is the gold-standard instrument for this purpose. It was designed and validated for occasional in-hospital assessment, yet remote monitoring now administers it to patients daily. In our own post-surgical deployment, only 55% of patients submitted the survey more than 14 days of 30 monitoring days. We developed QoR-compact, a five-item daily input for the RPM prediction pathway. Setting a deployment-driven target of one-...

Diffusion models are known to exploit unknown low-dimensional structure to accelerate sampling. However, existing convergence theory under low-dimensional data structure has largely focused on update rules with narrowly prescribed coefficient choices. This raises a fundamental question: is adaptation to low-dimensional structure sensitive to the precise choice of update coefficients? In this paper, we show that such adaptation is a robust property of diffusion models. For a broad class of update coefficients, we prove that $\widetilde{O}(k/\varepsilon)$ iterations suffice to generate an $\var...