A new Ornn Data paper argues that NVIDIA's older Ampere-generation GPUs, particularly the A100, remain economically useful far longer than assumed because open-weight models can be run cheaply on them. The analysis found that self-hosted open-weight models like gpt-oss-120b produce output more cheaply on A100 chips than on newer H100 hardware, and that A100 rental prices have stayed unusually stable over a five-year contract period compared to Hopper and Blackwell chips.
data.ornn.com
· 2026-09-22
Nothing has opened its Android 17-based OS 5.0 beta to three more devices: the Phone 4a, Phone 3a Pro, and Phone 3a. The update brings a visual overhaul with a new Geist typeface, redesigned Settings and Camera apps, split notification panels, transparent widgets, and more customization options. Users have only one week to enroll before the beta window closes, after which they must wait for the stable release expected in early November.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-22
Xiaomi has released MiMo-V2.6 Pro and a lighter Flash variant as open-weight omnimodal AI models handling text, images, video and code. The company says Pro tops open-source rankings on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, trailing only closed models like Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and it showcased a feature called Vibe World that turns prompts into interactive 3D games, Blender assets or robotic arm controls.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-22
MiMo-V2.6-Pro is a new open-weight AI model supporting text, image, speech, and video inputs with a 1M-token context window, scoring 46 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index versus a median of 18 among comparable models. It runs at 125 tokens per second, priced at $0.43 per million input tokens and $0.87 per million output tokens, with a total evaluation cost of $206.66.
artificialanalysis.ai
· 2026-09-22
A preprint led by Lisa Matthias at Humboldt University of Berlin tracked 440 academic journals that began as diamond open-access, meaning free for both authors and readers, but later shifted to charging fees between 2009 and 2026. Most of these titles, 369, moved to gold open access with article-processing charges, 52 adopted hybrid models, and 19 became fully paywalled, with fees ranging from $8 to $5,300 depending on publisher type.
nature.com
· 2026-09-22
As KDE nears its 30th anniversary, contributor Kevin Ottens published community data showing developer participation has climbed back to around 140 people on average, up from a low of about 110 in 2017. Commit activity has also surged, with 2023 setting an all-time weekly record, and the KDE Plasma desktop project nearly doubling its average team size following the 2020 move to GitLab.
tech.slashdot.org
· 2026-09-21
A university research lab is publishing a week-long series of open-source releases instead of a traditional paper, arguing that AI agents have made individual research projects fast and cheap, which undermines the value of isolated publications. The author challenges both student pessimism about job prospects and PhD students' rush to join frontier AI labs, claiming academia is positioned for a resurgence precisely because of its resource constraints.
timdettmers.com
· 2026-09-21
X announced it will now notify users when their posts or accounts have had visibility limited because the company complied with a government's legal demand. This builds on the 'Under the Hood' transparency feature launched in August, letting users with at least 10 monthly posts download a data file showing labels, downranking, and which country requested the restriction.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-21
A study examined how assigning different weights to training sequences affects loss reduction in language models of varying sizes, using both proprietary and open-weight models. It found that the relationship between sequence weight and learning is not linear across scale: small models learn general patterns regardless of weighting, medium-scale models learn patterns roughly proportional to their assigned weights, and large models again learn broadly regardless of weighting.
blog.janestreet.com
· 2026-09-21
A developer's Open Headunit app, priced under $4 on Google Play or free via GitHub, lets an aging Android tablet impersonate an Android Auto head unit, giving cars without built-in support a large touchscreen for navigation, calls and media. Testing found the setup imperfect but functional as a way to repurpose tablets that can no longer run modern apps well.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-21
GDQuest, a game development education group, has published a free tutorial teaching newcomers how to write their first shader in the Godot 4 engine. The lesson is part of the organization's broader library of open-source learning resources for game developers.
gdquest.com
· 2026-09-21
Heretic is a new tool designed to remove safety restrictions and refusal behaviors from language models, allowing them to follow user instructions without the typical content filters. It targets the alignment layers that model developers add to prevent certain outputs, effectively 'uncensoring' these systems for users who run them.
heretic-project.org
· 2026-09-21
GoKawiil