New models, papers, and benchmarks
The Frontier
Two releases worth your attention today, and they pull in opposite directions: one makes a 27B model fit where it never fit before, the other shows the numbers we use to rank models are softer than advertised. PrismML shipped Ternary Bonsai 2 27B, a compressed build of Qwen3.8-27B
The Frontier
OpenRouter's newest stealth model has no name, no model card, and no published benchmark table — only a free week, a 262K context window, and a lot of curious developers. A model nobody will put a name to burned roughly 2 billion tokens in its first day on OpenRouter,
The Frontier
Two stories this hour about machines doing human work in public, and one of them came with a scoreboard. An AI system won the seasonal Metaculus Cup on September 5 — the first time a bot has taken the top spot in the forecasting tournament that humans have owned since it
The Frontier
A benchmark run that ended like a bad Tuesday for a human player, and a Chinese lab betting its enterprise pitch on compliance plumbing rather than a better model. Vals AI stopped its Minecraft run for GPT-6 Astra after 141 hours — six blaze rods, three ender pearls, a semi-
The Frontier
An autonomous-driving company answers the long-tail problem with compute, while the agent layer gets a gate that rules before the action runs and communications teams get a way to watch what AI says about them. Zelos, the Suzhou RoboVan maker founded by ex-Baidu autonomous-driving engineers, says
The Frontier
A Chinese startup put a video model on the global boards at the top on release day. Separately, the US chip buildout is running straight into the thing money cannot buy fast enough: technicians. HiDream.ai released HiDream-O1-Video-1.0 (HD-V1) on September 15, and it landed
The Frontier
A German army dispatch from 1941 sat unread in the archive for 83 years, its 82 letters only solvable if someone recovered the machine settings behind it. This week the settings surfaced — and the interesting part is how the work was checked. A researcher-led investigation using GPT-6 Astra
The Frontier
Two things happened to Chinese robotics in the same two weeks: the body makers shipped model after model, and the funding data caught up with why. Three Chinese robot makers released five embodied-AI foundation models in eight days this month — Unitree, AgiBot and Noetix — a pace that says the
The Frontier
An independent researcher says he built the thing TypeSafe raised $40 million for, in March 2025, and posted the paper, the weights and the dataset. The receipts are the story. Nandakishor M, who says he now runs a small AI company called Convai Innovations, published a reinforcement-learning model that
The Frontier
Xiaomi's MiMo team has done something no Western lab has: opened the training run itself, not just the weights. The dashboard updates from the trainer's own logs. Xiaomi is streaming the reinforcement-learning run behind MiMo-V2.6 Flash and Pro on a public dashboard — reward
The Frontier
ARC Prize has concluded its flagship exam is no longer hard enough, and the next version will stop asking models to solve puzzles and start asking them to invent things. Also today: a UC Berkeley and Arena study measures how much of a coding agent's bill comes from
The Frontier
An Apple study measures what value training does to a model's personality, Beijing issues containment rules for AI agents, and a Chinese world-model startup closes in on a $1.4 billion valuation. Apple researchers fine-tuned eight open-weight models on 15 individual values — curiosity, empathy, honesty