New models, papers, and benchmarks
The Frontier
Beijing's frontier labs get most of the attention, but the most instructive Chinese AI release this week came from a university project with a student-sized budget and an agent-sized workforce. Seven PhD students at Beijing's Zhongguancun Academy trained a 7B-parameter language model from
The Frontier
Three things landed on our desks this afternoon: an independent benchmark pass on Abu Dhabi's fully open model fleet, a security write-up on how far you can push an AI that reads your support inbox, and a paper arguing that judge panels are less reliable than their
The Frontier
A math preprint that should not have landed this week, a leak about who actually reads your ChatGPT conversations, and OpenAI admitting its chip design ran on models nobody outside can use. Two Oak Park High School students, with a UCLA postdoc as mentor, have posted a 75-page arXiv
The Frontier
While Washington spends its fourth day arguing about who gets to referee frontier labs, Beijing kept doing what it does: publishing specs. Two landed this morning — a world-first standard for brain-computer-interface devices, and a pair of AI systems pointed at mineral exploration. China's drug-and-
The Frontier
The AI-to-energy story in the West is about how much power the models need. In China it is about who sells the grid a forecast — and Ant Group's enterprise arm just pushed the horizon out to six weeks. Ant Digital Technology (蚂蚁数科) used the Bund Summit
The Frontier
Three papers this morning, one argument between them: the interesting frontier in agents is no longer peak capability but the cost, plumbing, and audit trail of getting work actually done. Occamy-1.0, released by Alibaba International's Accio team under Apache-2.0, is a 35B-total, 3B-
The Frontier
The model isn't out and there's no paper yet — but Zhipu's latest funding announcement just put the company's next technical bet in writing, and it's the most explicit commitment to recursive self-improvement any frontier lab has made in a
The Frontier
A paper out of AllSpark Research claims the strongest open-weight deep-research agents in their size classes, and the authors' most interesting admission is not a benchmark number: it is that half the story belongs to the harness wrapped around the model. AllSpark released Iris-mini and Iris-
The Frontier
A pair of Andon Labs evaluations puts GPT-6 Astra in a new light: not as a chatbot or coding partner, but as an autonomous agent that spends money, negotiates deals, and writes code to fly hardware. The numbers show both how far frontier models have come and how far
The Frontier
Two stories this morning about who gets to decide what an AI system does next: a training pipeline that took the idea step away from Alibaba's engineers, and a lab chief telling the world's two presidents what to agree on. A model with 8 billion parameters
The Frontier
The cheapest way to get frontier-level math reasoning just got a working open-source demo: teach a 4B model to admit when it's stuck. PyroMind Dynamics says its PyroDash method lets a Qwen3.5-4B model solve hard reasoning benchmarks at near-frontier accuracy while paying roughly
The Frontier
One of China's biggest AI labs says the frontier after code is the wet lab — and it shipped a robot-running world model to make the case. Wenbow Zhou, director and chief scientist of the Shanghai AI Laboratory, used the main forum of the 2026 Pujiang Innovation Forum