The Archive

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Learn how startups use GPT-5.6 to build faster, more cost-efficient AI agents with smarter model selection and new Responses API capabilities.

Preview Ultrafast, a new OpenAI API service tier that runs GPT-5.6 Sol up to 14× faster. Powered by Cerebras, it delivers up to 750 output tokens per second.

OpenAI appoints Dali Rajic as Chief Revenue Officer to lead its global revenue organization and help businesses realize the full value of AI.

When we set out to talk to kids about artificial intelligence, we thought we knew what we’d hear. We expected some to tell us they were using it to cheat a little, the way Millennials and Gen Xers opened up CliffsNotes or programmed formulas into their TI-82s, and others to share inspiring ways they were…

Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a1 Performance boost for DuckDB exports and CSV imports, see here .

AI teammate category just had its most significant new entrant yet

DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter) The latest DeepSeek Pro model is now available, via API only. I had to link to OpenRouter because DeepSeek don't have any obvious announcement page for their new model. I haven't been able to confirm if they plan to release the open weights, but given the weights are available for both April's deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Pro and July's deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 it seems likely. Interestingly I got very different looking pelicans for the three different reasoning levels of low, medium, and high. I've not noticed this kind of difference from any other m...

Is Anthropic's new watermarking system a travesty? Some have taken to social media to complain that it is.

“ShieldFont” aims to poison AI training data without making pages unreadable for people.

The data was scraped and exfiltrated from 2,500 users of a compromised AI package.

Streaming platform says user-generated content "may be used for future Gen AI model improvements."

"If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in," Twitch CPO Mike Minton said on a livestream responding to user feedback. "That's honestly the answer."

Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a0 I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like. This morning (literally a shower project) I tasked Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with building a prototype: Do a research spike to see what it would take to build a library with the same core API as SQLite-utils - in particular the insert and upsert and insert_all and upsert_all and create and update methods, and the table introspection stuff - but backed by SQLalchemy so it works for multiple database engines Test against PostgreSQL and SQLite and ...

Alibaba released the open weights for Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B (Qwen3.8-Max), its largest open-weight model, bringing near-frontier capabilities to the open... Alibaba released the open weights for Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B (Qwen3.8-Max), its largest open-weight model, bringing near-frontier capabilities to the open ecosystem. It has 2.4T total parameters with 95B activated per token. It has 2.4T total parameters with 95B activated per token. It’s a fine-grained mixture of experts (MoE) architecture with a hybrid of full and linear attention, a context window of… Source

Cognition may be looking to raise another mega round just a few months after raising $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation.

Creative agents still lack an effective way to learn from high-quality human films, limiting their ability to produce cinematic-grade videos. A key challenge is the absence of a structured video representation that is both faithful to film content and directly usable for agentic reasoning and manipulation. To address the challenge, we propose the Agentic Video Auto-Encoder (AVA-Encoder), a framework for learning agent-native video representations via agentic auto-encoding. AVA-Encoder transforms a video into a knowledge graph (KG) representation and then reconstructs it back into video. Its h...

Aerial vision-language navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to integrate visual evidence over time, plan future actions, and determine when it has reached a navigation goal under partial observability. Although recent VLA models offer a promising perception-to-action paradigm, adapting them to aerial navigation remains challenging due to limited historical context, short planning horizons, and unreliable implicit termination. To address these challenges, we propose DreamFly, a diffusion-based aerial VLN framework built on Dream-VLA. DreamFly introduces a causally aligned historical mem...

Recent work on distillation transfers the capabilities of large models to smaller ones often by updating the latter's parameters, through teacher forcing, on-policy distillation, and related training-time methods. In this paper, we ask whether such transfer can instead occur at test time. We study strong-to-weak scaffolding: whether a stronger builder model can construct inference-time harnesses that help a weaker target model solve tasks more reliably without any parameter updates. Using four representative Theory-of-Mind benchmarks, each builder model uses 5% of the data as a validation set...

Safe offline RL typically assumes access to dense per-step cost annotations, but in practice supervisors provide only trajectory-level stop-feedback: a binary signal at the first unsafe transition, with no per-step attribution. We frame this as a temporal credit assignment problem and propose the Redistribution-based Cost Inference (RCI) framework, which converts sparse stop-feedback into dense per-step costs via return decomposition, then trains a constrained offline policy on the augmented dataset. We show that return-equivalent redistribution preserves the feasible policy set and the optim...

At Ai4, three of the world's most respected AI experts—Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ng—debated regulation, open-source access, and how America can compete as China advances in Asia.

Dynamic Master Logic (DML) provides a hierarchical framework for representing system behavior by linking functional objectives to underlying structural elements. However, DML construction typically relies on expert interpretation of technical documentation, limiting scalability for complex systems. This study presents a framework for automated construction of DML models from system descriptions and their representation as Knowledge Graphs (KG-DML), using Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Large Language Models as enabling tools. Building on prior work with small-scale systems, the framework e...

We present a formal process to enable non-experts to instantiate and iterate on human-aligned reward functions, i.e. reward functions that adhere to a given preference ordering over trajectories. Given a task described in natural language, our process produces a linear reward function in three steps: distill the task's objectives into a set of fundamental objectives and derive measurable outcome variables that capture those fundamental objectives, select a causally representative subset of outcome variables as the reward terms, and fit weights to those reward terms via preference elicitation....

Class activation mapping (CAM) is one of the most widely used visual explanation families in explainable artificial intelligence. Its purpose is intuitive: it converts internal model evidence into a heatmap that highlights the image regions, convolutional channels, tokens, or patches that support a target class or concept. Since the first CAM formulation in 2016, the field has moved far beyond global-average-pooled CNN classifiers. CAM-style methods now include gradient-based post-hoc explanations, gradient-free score and ablation methods, high-resolution upscaling, weakly supervised localiza...

Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation from investors like SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Alitmeter Capital.

Modern black-box Image-to-Video (I2V) models offer powerful capabilities in automated content creation, yet their lack of fine-grained control and reliability presents significant challenges in professional workflows. Their inherent stochasticity causes minor variations in textual prompts or hyperparameters to yield drastically different outputs often necessitating inefficient, brute-force trial-and-error processes. To address these limitations, we introduce the ``Agentic Self-Improvement" framework, which reframes video synthesis into a closed-loop, goal-directed optimization. Our framework ...

Twitch users can now opt out of allowing their content to be used to train Amazon's generative AI models. Opting out means that "your streams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel" won't be used in "future training" of an Amazon AI model "whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video," according to a Twitch support page. Other "AI-supported" features like captions and safety tools will still function if you opt-out of generative AI training. However, if you participate in a chat on another person's stream, "their opt-out preferences gover...

Large language models can extract richer signals from financial news than fixed sentiment lexicons, and recent work has explored feeding such signals into portfolio construction. We study an uncertainty-aware construction that feeds model-predicted risk -- decomposed into aleatoric and epistemic components -- directly into the covariance matrix of portfolio allocators, rather than treating portfolio risk as fixed or adjusting only expected returns. We evaluate the pipeline on Russell 2000 equities under three stock-selection regimes: a pure-alpha trigger that isolates abnormal stock moves not...

Agents deployed in enterprise settings must reason across structured APIs and document collections, yet existing benchmarks evaluate these capabilities in isolation. We introduce VAKRA (e\textbf{V}aluating \textbf{A}PI and \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{R}etrieval \textbf{A}gents), a benchmark of over $8{,}000$ executable APIs across $62$ domains with tasks spanning three settings of increasing difficulty: diverse API interaction styles, multi-hop reasoning over structured APIs, and multi-source reasoning with natural-language tool-use policy constraints. Correctness is verified by re-executing p...