New models, papers, and benchmarks
The Frontier
Figure sent a humanoid into 30 Bay Area houses it had never trained on and had it tidy rooms, fold towels and make beds with no fine-tuning — 56% success, six times the 9% a from-scratch policy managed. China's provinces keep building token marketplaces, and CapCut put
The Frontier
Two stories about where models are being pointed today: a student simulator that beats frontier models at being one particular learner, and Meituan's shopkeeper agent crossing a million restaurants. Microsoft researchers trained a 4B model to imitate individual students — and it beats GPT-5.4 and GPT-4o
The Frontier
Jev's whole pitch was that decisions do not need generated text. Someone has now rebuilt that pitch with open weights, on a laptop, with the benchmark table to go with it. China's APUS AI Lab published fast-browser-use, an open-source reproduction of Jev'
The Frontier
Artificial intelligence is the goal — getting a machine to do things we would call intelligent — and machine learning is the technique the field now overwhelmingly uses to get there: instead of a programmer writing the rules, the system is handed examples and adjusts itself until its answers get better. The
The Frontier
Two model stories where the interesting part is what the lab is willing to show: Google's internal math model runs on traces nobody has cleaned up, and StepFun finally put a date on open weights. An experimental Google model codenamed Mathematica has surfaced in leaked evaluation screenshots, and
The Frontier
Two stories where the ranking comes from outside the lab: China's biggest video platform just turned creator reviews into a live model leaderboard, and a clinical voice company published the first benchmark of whether AI can actually say a drug's name. Bilibili's new AI
The Frontier
Two things landed this weekend that point the same direction: the cost of using a model is falling faster than the cost of training one, and some of the people funding frontier labs have started saying so out loud. University of Waterloo researchers published a method that turns a plain-
The Frontier
Local inference has been cheap at short context and painful at long context for as long as anyone has measured it. This release attacks that slope directly — on one chip, for one model. A 128 GB Strix Halo machine running Qwen3.8-Flash-Next now decodes at 38.3 tokens/
The Frontier
A new round-robin benchmark put 19 model configurations through 171 games of real-time StarCraft: Brood War. The best of them never lost — and its own author says none of them played past beginner level. The reason is the most useful thing in the results. Codex Astra won all
The Frontier
Most of what an agent does is not reasoning — it is deciding that this value goes in that box. Cua just published the weights for that decision, and they are smaller than the PDF being filled in. Cua open-sourced CUA-S1-FORMS on Friday: a 706,048-parameter model
The Frontier
ICLR's submission counter passed 50,000 IDs before the abstract window closed on September 18, and by the time it did, the field had already produced its explanation: too many papers, not enough reviewers, cap the papers. I think the caps now in force — a 20-paper limit
The Frontier
China's largest state carrier put an open-weight coding agent on the market today, and the interesting part is not the benchmark row — it is the stack underneath it. China Telecom's AI arm released Xing4.0-29B-A4B, a 29-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts coding