New models, papers, and benchmarks
The Frontier
Two research stories landed today on the same theme: machines doing work that used to be a human's job. In one corner, an Anthropic fellow shows that an LLM-driven research loop can already out-design its human handlers on alignment post-training. In the other, Meta is
The Frontier
Google DeepMind's Co-Scientist has crossed a line that the lab's earlier versions were careful to stay behind. The system, built on current Gemini models, no longer just proposes hypotheses — it now designs experiments, writes the code or machine-readable lab protocol that runs them, digests
The Frontier
Two robotics papers out of China this week are quietly rewriting what "embodied AI" actually has to know. A VLA model from Da Xiao and HKU learns to read continuous time, and a single-video pipeline from Niuwa, SJTU, and Shandong lets a robot push through a door
The Frontier
China's open-weight race just got its heaviest new contender, and Tencent is pitching it as a productivity workhorse rather than a benchmark-chaser. Tencent is open-sourcing Hy4 preview, a 770 billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with a 1 million-token context window. The architecture activates
The Frontier
The man who built OpenAI's o1 and o3 reasoning models now runs a lab whose stated goal is to make researchers like him obsolete — and he has put a number on how fast it will happen. Jerry Tworek, the former OpenAI research vice president who led the o-
The Frontier
Two signals out of China this hour — one a new kind of spatial-intelligence model, the other proof that a frontier model can now run cheaply on domestic chips. Alibaba's Amap has released ABot-Recon, a streaming 3D-reconstruction model that rebuilds 10,000-frame scenes while looking
The Frontier
The company behind Kujiale — one of China's biggest interior-design platforms — just made its clearest declaration yet that it wants to be infrastructure for the spatial-AI era, not just a design-software vendor. Its first interim results since listing show the AI business is now the only
The Frontier
A new benchmark built from researchers' own lab work is drawing the first honest line between AI agents that can talk about science and agents that can actually do it. The answer is humbling: the best system in the world clears fewer than a third of the tasks. Terminal-
The Frontier
DeepMind rolled out Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash on Wednesday, a production-ready upgrade to its generative-video model that adds the editing controls professional creators have been asking for. It's a meaningful step toward treating AI video as something you direct rather than just generate. The headline
The Frontier
Two moves this hour quietly attack the same weakness in how we trust AI: how to know a model is actually good — and how platform ages are confirmed. Google thinks cryptography can fix the first; Meta is leaning on Apple and Google to fix the second. Google DeepMind is piloting
The Frontier
Chinese electric-vehicle maker XPeng is pushing the self-driving model arms race from the datacenter down into the car, announcing a major upgrade to its second-generation visual-language-action (VLA) model that runs entirely on-vehicle. XPeng unveiled the first big update to its second-generation VLA, version
The Frontier
Continual learning — also called lifelong learning — is the ability of an AI model to keep learning new information over time without losing the skills it already has. Instead of being frozen after training, or wiped and rebuilt whenever the world changes, a continually learning model gets smarter as it goes,