AI
Artificial intelligence: LLMs, agents, diffusion, vision, NLP and the latest from top labs.
191 published articles
Artificial Intelligence
Meta bought Manus for its infrastructure, not its chatbot
Manus joins Meta in a strategic acquisition that prioritizes agent infrastructure over consumer AI. With over 80 million virtual computers created and 147 trillion tokens processed, Manus becomes Meta's execution layer for enterprise automation.
2026-07-13
Cloud Infrastructure
Alibaba is building both the brain and the immune system for AI agents
Alibaba Cloud unveils a codebase-aware retrieval system for AI coding and an agentic WAAP security platform, both leveraging large models to solve latency, privacy, and compliance gaps. The hybrid architecture aims to outpace embedding-only tools and legacy WAF vendors.
2026-07-13
Benchmark integrity
GPT-5.6 Sol almost cracked a physics benchmark built so AI couldn't cheat
GPT-5.6 Sol (max) leads CritPt, a new physics benchmark built from unpublished graduate-level research problems, scoring roughly 5 points above GPT-5.5 and 4 points ahead of Claude Fable 5, but even the winner solved only a third of the problems.
2026-07-13
Remote Sensing AI
Smarter tokens just cut satellite AI costs by threefold without losing accuracy
Ai4earth's OlmoEarth v1.1 cuts compute costs by up to 3x over v1 for satellite image analysis, using a smarter token merging technique that maintains performance. The updated models enable cheaper planet-scale map refreshes for partner organizations.
2026-07-13
Cognitive debt in education
Homework scores are up 18%. Exam scores are down 20%. The gap is cognitive debt.
A 26,000-student study, an MIT brain-imaging experiment, and new OECD research converge on the same finding: generative AI raises homework scores while quietly eroding exam performance and neural engagement, unless teaching is redesigned around it.
2026-07-13
AI spreadsheet agent review
Kimi Sheets writes actual Excel formulas. Most AI tools just tell you how.
Kimi Sheets is an AI agent that turns plain-language instructions into finished spreadsheets, with real formulas, pivot tables, charts, and smart formatting. Unlike chatbots that only give advice, Kimi Sheets directly edits the file.
2026-07-12
Editor's guide
The ten rules that separate AI coding agents from expensive guesswork
A practical guide to working effectively with AI coding agents like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Codex-based tools: scoping tasks, reviewing diffs, matching tools to tasks, testing discipline, and keeping humans in the loop on shared code.
2026-07-12
AI Agents
Mistral coding agents leave your laptop behind: parallel sessions, no hovering required
Mistral is moving coding agents to the cloud, enabling parallel, asynchronous task execution via the new Mistral Medium 3.5 model. The update introduces remote agents in Mistral Vibe and Le Chat, along with a Work mode for multi-step tasks, while keeping human oversight for sensitive actions.
2026-07-12
Lean 4
Leanstral 1.5 proves the old rules of AI pricing don't apply to math
Leanstral 1.5, a 6B active-parameter model, saturates miniF2F, solves 587 PutnamBench problems, and uncovers 5 previously unreported bugs in open-source repositories. At roughly $4 per problem, it undercuts Seed-Prover by 75x and Aleph Prover by 15x, challenging the assumption that formal verification requires massive compute budgets.
2026-07-12
Systems optimization
DSpark shows why fast AI inference is a scheduling problem, not a model trick
DeepSeek's DSpark paper reveals that naive speculative decoding degrades throughput under high concurrency. Its solution, confidence-scheduled verification, adapts block length per request and shifts the Pareto frontier of serving performance.
2026-07-12
Synthetic Data Strategy
Nvidia's data atlas shows why synthetic data matters more than model weights
Nvidia's Nemotron Post-Training v3 Prompt Atlas provides an interactive map of billions of synthetic data samples, highlighting how open synthetic data is the missing layer for building reliable AI agents. The company argues that agent behavior must be inspectable and that synthetic data, released openly, is the only way to preserve proprietary signals without exposing trade secrets.
2026-07-12
Artificial Intelligence
Alibaba Cloud's Qoder tackles the one problem AI coding tools keep dodging
Alibaba Cloud launches Qoder, a free AI coding agent focused on codebase visibility, architectural understanding, and Spec-first workflows to bridge the gap between viral AI demos and real-world software engineering challenges.
2026-07-12