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How Sakana AI’s new evolutionary algorithm builds powerful AI models without expensive retraining

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now A new evolutionary technique from Japan-based AI lab Sakana AI enables developers to augment the capabilities of AI models without costly training and fine-tuning processes. The technique, called Model Merging of Natural Niches (M2N2), overcomes the limitations of other model merging methods and can even evolve new models entirely from scra

With new in-house models, Microsoft lays the groundwork for independence from OpenAI

Microsoft has introduced AI models that it trained internally and says it will begin using them in some products. This announcement may represent an effort to move away from dependence on OpenAI, despite Microsoft's substantial investment in that company. It comes more than a year after insider reports revealed that Microsoft was beginning work on its own foundational models. A post on the Microsoft AI blog describes two models. MAI-Voice-1 is a natural speech-generation model meant to deliver

If these iPhone 17 Air rumors are real, my old phone is about to be retired

The iPhone Plus model (pictured) may potentially be replaced by the iPhone Air/Slim. Kerry Wan/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways iPhone 17 Air may debut as Apple's thinnest phone ever. Single rear camera shows Apple's thinness trade-offs. Expected to debut on Sept. 9, 2025, priced around $900. Apple is rumored to be spicing things for this year's iPhone event. It could introduce an ultra-thin model for the 2025 iPhone lineup called the iPhone

OpenAI and Anthropic evaluated each others' models - which ones came out on top

Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Anthropic and OpenAI ran their own tests on each other's models. The two labs published findings in separate reports. The goal was to identify gaps in order to build better and safer models. The AI race is in full swing, and companies are sprinting to release the most cutting-edge products. Naturally, this has raised concerns about speed compromising proper safety evaluations. A first-of-

Nous Research drops Hermes 4 AI models that outperform ChatGPT without content restrictions

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now Nous Research, a secretive artificial intelligence startup that has emerged as a leading voice in the open-source AI movement, quietly released Hermes 4 on Monday, a family of large language models that the company claims can match the performance of leading proprietary systems while offering unprecedented user control and minimal content r

Forget data labeling: Tencent’s R-Zero shows how LLMs can train themselves

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now A new training framework developed by researchers at Tencent AI Lab and Washington University in St. Louis enables large language models (LLMs) to improve themselves without requiring any human-labeled data. The technique, called R-Zero, uses reinforcement learning to generate its own training data from scratch, addressing one of the main b

Microsoft AI launches its first in-house models

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Microsoft’s AI division announced its first homegrown AI models on Thursday: MAI-Voice-1 AI and MAI-1-preview. The company says its new MAI-Voice-1 speech model can generate a minute’s worth of audio in under one second on just one GPU, while MAI-1-preview “offe

Microsoft introduces a pair of in-house AI models

Microsoft is expanding its AI footprint with the release of two new models that its teams trained completely in-house. MAI-Voice-1 is the tech major's first natural speech generation model, while MAI-1-preview is text-based and is the company's first foundation model trained end-to-end. MAI-Voice-1 is currently being used in the Copilot Daily and Podcast features. Microsoft has made MAI-1-preview available for public tests on LMArena, and will begin previewing it in select Copilot situations in

OpenAI–Anthropic cross-tests expose jailbreak and misuse risks — what enterprises must add to GPT-5 evaluations

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now OpenAI and Anthropic may often pit their foundation models against each other, but the two companies came together to evaluate each other’s public models to test alignment. The companies said they believed that cross-evaluating accountability and safety would provide more transparency into what these powerful models could do, enabling ente

9 iPhone 17 Air rumors I'm tracking - and why Apple's ultra-thin model is set to kill the Plus

MacRumors / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways iPhone 17 Air may debut as Apple's thinnest phone ever. Single rear camera shows Apple's thinness trade-offs. Expected to debut on Sept. 9, 2025, priced around $900. Apple is rumored to be spicing things for this year's iPhone event. It could introduce an ultra-thin model for the 2025 iPhone lineup called the iPhone 17 Air. It's thought to be much slimmer than any iPhone so

Rendering a Game in Real-Time with AI

I made a game. It’s all in ASCII. I wondered if it would be possible to turn it into full motion graphics. In real time. With AI. Let me share how I did it. Let’s start with the game. Lately, I’ve been exploring just how far I can push old-school ASCII RPG style game frameworks. My latest one is called “Thunder Lizard,” which procedurally generates a prehistoric island populated with dinosaurs fighting for dominance as an active volcano threatens the whole island. You can go play it if you’d li

Rendering an ASCII game in real-time with AI (100ms latency)

I made a game. It’s all in ASCII. I wondered if it would be possible to turn it into full motion graphics. In real time. With AI. Let me share how I did it. Let’s start with the game. Lately, I’ve been exploring just how far I can push old-school ASCII RPG style game frameworks. My latest one is called “Thunder Lizard,” which procedurally generates a prehistoric island populated with dinosaurs fighting for dominance as an active volcano threatens the whole island. You can go play it if you’d li

OpenAI and Anthropic conducted safety evaluations of each other's AI systems

Most of the time, AI companies are locked in a race to the top, treating each other as rivals and competitors. Today, OpenAI and Anthropic revealed that they agreed to evaluate the alignment of each other's publicly available systems and shared the results of their analyses. The full reports get pretty technical, but are worth a read for anyone who's following the nuts and bolts of AI development. A broad summary showed some flaws with each company's offerings, as well as revealing pointers for

OpenAI co-founder calls for AI labs to safety-test rival models

OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the world’s leading AI labs, briefly opened up their closely guarded AI models to allow for joint safety testing — a rare cross-lab collaboration at a time of fierce competition. The effort aimed to surface blind spots in each company’s internal evaluations and demonstrate how leading AI companies can work together on safety and alignment work in the future. In an interview with TechCrunch, OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba said this kind of collaboration is increa

SpaCy: Industrial-Strength Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Python

spaCy: Industrial-strength NLP spaCy is a library for advanced Natural Language Processing in Python and Cython. It's built on the very latest research, and was designed from day one to be used in real products. spaCy comes with pretrained pipelines and currently supports tokenization and training for 70+ languages. It features state-of-the-art speed and neural network models for tagging, parsing, named entity recognition, text classification and more, multi-task learning with pretrained trans

Apple study shows LLMs also benefit from the oldest productivity trick in the book

In a new study co-authored by Apple researchers, an open-source large language model (LLM) saw big performance improvements after being told to check its own work by using one simple productivity trick. Here are the details. A bit of context After an LLM is trained, its quality is usually refined further through a post-training step known as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). With RLHF, every time a model gives an answer, human labelers can either give it a thumbs up, which re

Something Extremely Scary Happens When Advanced AI Tries to Give Medical Advice to Real World Patients

Image by Getty / Futurism Developments Last week, Google AI pioneer Jad Tarifi sparked controversy when he told Business Insider that it no longer makes sense to get a medical degree — since, in his telling, artificial intelligence will render such an education obsolete by the time you're a practicing doctor. Companies have long touted the tech as a way to free up the time of overworked doctors and even aid them in specialized skills, including scanning medical imagery for tumors. Hospitals ha

The Hidden Ingredients Behind AI’s Creativity

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. We were once promised self-driving cars and robot maids. Instead, we’ve seen the rise of artificial intelligence systems that can beat us in chess, analyze huge reams of text, and compose sonnets. This has been one of the great surprises of the modern era: physical tasks that are easy for humans turn out to be very difficult for robots, while algorithms are increasingly able to mimic our intellect. Another surprise that has long p

ThinkMesh: A Python lib for parallel thinking in LLMs

ThinkMesh ThinkMesh is a python library for running diverse reasoning paths in parallel, scoring them with internal confidence signals, reallocates compute to promising branches, and fuses outcomes with verifiers and reducers. It works with offline Hugging Face Transformers and vLLM/TGI, and with hosted APIs. Note: This is still in it's early development phase and breaking changes can sometimes occur Highlights Parallel reasoning with DeepConf‑style confidence gating and budget reallocation

AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem

Published: Aug 13, 2025 | at 11:00 AM We’ve reached an inflection point in AI development. The scaling laws that once promised ever-more-capable models are showing diminishing returns. GPT-5, Claude, and Gemini represent remarkable achievements, but they’re hitting asymptotes that brute-force scaling can’t solve. The path to artificial general intelligence isn’t through training ever-larger language models—it’s through building engineered systems that combine models, memory, context, and determ

Evaluating LLMs for my personal use case

Most models are excellent, so cost and latency dominate. It’s great that AI can win maths Olympiads, but that’s not what I’m doing. I mostly ask basic Rust, Python, Linux and life questions. So I did my own evaluation. I gathered 130 real prompts from my bash history (I use command line tool llm). I had Qwen3 235B Thinking and Gemini 2.5 Pro group them into categories. They both chose very similar ones, broadly (with examples): Programming - “Write a bash script to ..” Sysadmin - “With curl

OpenCUA’s open source computer-use agents rival proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now A new framework from researchers at The University of Hong Kong (HKU) and collaborating institutions provides an open source foundation for creating robust AI agents that can operate computers. The framework, called OpenCUA, includes the tools, data, and recipes for scaling the development of computer-use agents (CUAs). Models trained usin

MCP-Universe benchmark shows GPT-5 fails more than half of real-world orchestration tasks

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now The adoption of interoperability standards, such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), can provide enterprises with insights into how agents and models function outside their walled confines. However, many benchmarks fail to capture real-life interactions with MCP. Salesforce AI Research developed a new open-source benchmark it calls MCP-Un

Apple considers Google Gemini to power next-gen Siri, internal AI ‘bake-off’ underway

Apple seems open to anything and everything when it comes to delivering the next generation of Siri. After reports that it could be powered by OpenAI or Anthropic, Google has entered the conversation. Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg that Google, which offers a ChatGPT competitor called Gemini, is actually training a model that could run on Apple’s servers to power the new Siri experience: The iPhone maker recently approached Alphabet Inc.’s Google to explore building a custom AI model that w

GPT-5 usage limitations: what are they, how does this compare to GPT-4 family?

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority GPT-5 arrived a few weeks ago, though its rollout hasn’t been entirely smooth. While the model shows plenty of promise, its debut also meant the abrupt removal of every other GPT model from ChatGPT’s user-facing UI. Since then, some old models have returned, and there have been a few other changes to the way the system works. Furthermore, many of the initial GPT-5 usage limits have been temporarily enhanced since launch. Let’s dive in and take a closer look

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s rBio uses virtual cells to train AI, bypassing lab work

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced Thursday the launch of rBio, the first artificial intelligence model trained to reason about cellular biology using virtual simulations rather than requiring expensive laboratory experiments — a breakthrough that could dramatically accelerate biomedical research and drug discovery. The reasoning mod

Microsoft AI chief says it’s ‘dangerous’ to study AI consciousness

AI models can respond to text, audio, and video in ways that sometimes fool people into thinking a human is behind the keyboard, but that doesn’t exactly make them conscious. It’s not like ChatGPT experiences sadness doing my tax return… right? Well, a growing number of AI researchers at labs like Anthropic are asking when — if ever — might AI models develop subjective experiences similar to living beings, and if they do, what rights should they have? The debate over whether AI models could on

ChatGPT-5 Lets You Choose Your AI Model. These Are Your Options

The biggest pushback after OpenAI announced its new GPT-5 model for ChatGPT came from devotees of older models who felt the new generative AI chatbot lacked the panache of its predecessors. Now you have more choices of pre-GPT-5 models (although you'll have to hunt for some of them) and better control over which components of GPT-5 handle your questions. OpenAI is still sorting through a somewhat rocky launch of GPT-5, led by complaints about the lack of model choices. The model has been antic

Coris (YC S22) Is Hiring

AI Engineer Location: SF Bay Area ( 4+ days in office ) Experience Level: 3–5+ years Stack: Python, PyTorch, ML, LLMs, Django Type: Full-time 🧠 About Coris Coris is building the AI-first trust layer for global commerce. We partner with leading platforms, marketplaces, payment providers, and banks to transform how small business onboarding, monitoring, and lifecycle decisions are made - using AI on the ground to drive faster, smarter actions with less friction. One of our customers describ

Deals: 32GB/1TB M4 MacBook Air, 48GB MacBook Pro $300 off, M3 iPad Air $360 off, more

Your 9to5Toys Lunch Break deals are now ready to go starting off with $200 discounts on upgraded M4 MacBook Air machines – this includes 1TB models and the 15-inch with 32GB of RAM. Next up we are featuring a $300 price drop on the most affordable M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 48GB of RAM and a giant limited-time deal on the 1TB 11-inch M3 iPad Air Wi-Fi + Cell variant at $360 off the list price courtesy of Amazon. Those offers join ongoing deals on M4 Mac mini from $499, AirPods 4, and more. Scope it