AI
Artificial intelligence: LLMs, agents, diffusion, vision, NLP and the latest from top labs.
565 published articles
AI Detection Tools
A $2 million book deal collapsed on an AI accusation
Publishers and schools are acting on AI detector flags in ways that end careers: a $2 million book deal dropped, suspensions, lawsuits. The tools' own makers admit they are not accurate enough to act on. Welcome to the era of distrust.
2026-08-16
AI Agents · Open Source
DeepSeek ships an agent harness where even the model is a plugin
DeepSeek released DeepSeek Harness, an open-source agent runtime where models, tools, sandboxes, and the UI are all Cordis plugins. Append-only session logs and a two-tool minimal mode point to a quieter ambition: auditable, reproducible agent runs.
2026-08-16
Google's workhorse model, bigger in the 3.7 update
Gemini 3.7 Flash halves its price, then makes the case for it
Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash ships at half the intro price of 3.6 Flash while claiming gains on coding, web development, and knowledge-work benchmarks. The release lands three weeks after the previous Flash, and comes with a new price-performance argument for agent builders.
2026-08-16
Open Source AI: Alibaba Opens the Max Tier
Qwen 3.8-Max: Alibaba's most powerful model is now free to download
Alibaba is open-sourcing Qwen 3.8-Max, its most capable model ever: a 2.4T-parameter MoE that beats GPT-5.6 Sol on SWE-bench Pro, PaperBench, and IFBench. We break down the benchmark caveats and what a 95B-active open flagship means for developers.
2026-08-16
Agentic coding & prompt bloat
Catastrophic remembering: why CLAUDE.md files grow 226% and never shrink
An arXiv study of 1,867 repositories finds agentic coding instruction files like CLAUDE.md triple in size over their lifetime, because deleting a line risks regressions once its rationale is lost. The authors name it catastrophic remembering and show documenting the reasoning cuts excess instructions by 99.3%.
2026-08-15
AI Research
Stop copy-pasting skills: SkillZip's evaluation-free fix for bloated agents
Self-evolving agents append fixes until the same rule appears across several branches. SkillZip compresses their skills without evaluation rollouts, by finding the shortest faithful structural explanation. One-shot and Zip-on-Write modes, and what the abstract leaves unproven.
2026-08-15
Multimodal / Open Source
Qwen plugin pack gives your coding agent eyes, hands, and video memory
Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-MM-Plugins, an Apache-2.0 toolkit that gives coding agents native multimodal skills: dynamic-resolution image and video reading, OCR, grounding, ASR, long-video memory, video generation, and thin-client control of Blender and FreeCAD. One script installs it across Claude Code, Codex, Qoder, OpenClaw, Qwen Code, and Gemini CLI.
2026-08-15
AI Agents
When agent skills backfire, SkillProx prunes them like gradient descent
Skills were supposed to make agents smarter, but every fix they accumulate can make them dumber. SkillProx runs a proximal-gradient-inspired forward-backward loop that diagnoses, rolls back, and deletes. Result: a 3.0 point average accuracy gain over the strongest gradient-based baseline.
2026-08-14
AI Agents
Grok Bot goes after the last 10% of work most AI leaves undone
Grok Bot, xAI's new agent product, runs on its own cloud computer, signs into the tools you already use, learns workflows by watching you do them once, and finishes jobs end to end. The pitch behind it: most AI stops at 90% done.
2026-08-14
AI Economics
Alibaba's $18 plan runs Qwen and DeepSeek inside Claude Code
Alibaba Cloud's Token Plan Individual bundles Qwen and third-party models such as DeepSeek into a single credit pool, from $6 a month, usable inside Claude Code and Cursor. The company claims roughly 40% savings over pay-as-you-go, but the plan only works from Singapore and only inside approved tools.
2026-08-14
AI Models | NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
Why Nemotron 3.5 Lightning bets most agent steps don't need a big model
Nvidia's new open model runs locally with 3B active parameters and a 1M-token context, built for agents that stay running. Nvidia claims up to 4x throughput and 30% faster task completion than comparable open models.
2026-08-14
Video AI research
How Context-Matched Distillation stops video teachers from seeing the future
Video distillation has long trained causal students against teachers that score whole clips with future knowledge. CMD replaces that scoring with a causal teacher, adds prefix-scored targets, and reports state-of-the-art results among autoregressive methods.
2026-08-14