New models, papers, and benchmarks
The Frontier
Xiaomi finished the training run it put on a livestream: MiMo-V2.6 is now three shipped models, and two of them came out with their weights released the same day. Xiaomi officially released the MiMo-V2.6 series on Monday and open-sourced the weights of MiMo-V2.6-
The Frontier
A developer spent six weeks logging everything Claude Code sent and received. The result is the most detailed measurement yet of what frontier models actually deliver to paying users — and it does not match the benchmarks. Fable 5's median invocation carried 123 thinking tokens, and 39.2 percent
The Frontier
xAI's latest flagship landed this morning with the price left untouched, and New York turned its AI safety law into an operational deadline with dates attached. SpaceXAI released Grok 4.7 today, priced identically to Grok 4.6 at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million
The Frontier
Two Bristol philosophers argue the medical AI field is optimizing the wrong thing about black boxes. Pharma ran into the same wall decades ago and built a process that works without ever explaining the mechanism. Emanuele Ratti and Lena Zuchowski, both at the University of Bristol, argue in a paper
The Frontier
Two benchmark results and one hype check to start the week: a Chinese database outfit took the top of a Berkeley-run data-agent leaderboard on a Chinese model, a frontier model reportedly broke a century-old naval cipher, and the robot industry's own trade body published the
The Frontier
For as long as large language models have existed, one rule has been treated as structural rather than optional: predict the next token, and let structure emerge from the statistics. A technical report posted to arXiv on September 9 breaks that rule at a scale where earlier attempts fell apart
The Frontier
The decision-model category Jev created a week ago now has a full open implementation, a cost figure that undercuts every "frontier model" story this month — and a benchmark table that still puts Jev on top. Jared Palmer ported Kev, his open decision-model family, onto Qwen3.5
The Frontier
Multimodal AI is a model that handles more than one kind of input — text, images, audio, video — inside the same system, rather than one model per sense stitched together. "Modality" is just the academic word for a channel of information. Text is a modality. A photograph is a
The Frontier
Two open-source releases today point the same direction: the interesting work is no longer in the model itself, but in the scaffolding around it. A Tsinghua-led team published the layer that sits between a frontier model and a robot's motors — and a leaderboard to show it
The Frontier
Tencent's Hunyuan Speech team and five university labs want voice agents to stop taking turns. Their answer splits the talking from the thinking. Gander runs two models instead of one: a 9B "cerebellum" that handles real-time listening and speech, and a larger "brain"
The Frontier
A paper from KAIST AI and Google DeepMind argues the model already knows which part of its context matters — and a community fork just put that claim into llama.cpp. An off-the-shelf model can be prompted to declare, inside its own chain of thought, which slice of its
The Frontier
Qwen cut its image model down to a size consumer cards can hold and gave it something no other open generator ships natively: an alpha channel. In Washington, the Congressional Black Caucus says the votes are there for AI guardrails. Alibaba's Qwen team open-sourced Qwen-Image-2.