Experiences of an synthetic intelligence arms race are all over the place—even on this very publication. However what if that framing is basically harmful? That’s Verity Harding’s conceit. Between 2016 and 2020, Harding spent her days briefing politicians throughout the globe, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron, on advances in AI. As the top of…
SpaceXAI just released Grok 4.5. The company calls it its smartest model to date. It targets coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work. SpaceXAI says Grok 4.5 was trained alongside Cursor, an AI coding editor. TL;DR Grok 4.5 targets coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work, trained alongside Cursor. In SpaceXAI’s own chart, Fable (max) leads all…
Truecaller has opened a public combat with India’s telecom regulator over guidelines governing caller ID apps, saying the nation’s anti-spam framework is making it tougher to guard shoppers from undesirable calls in its greatest market. On Wednesday, CEO Rishit Jhunjhunwala (pictured above) took to X to publicly problem the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI),…
Ant Group’s Robbyant has released LingBot-VLA 2.0, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model for robots. The release includes a technical report, an Apache-2.0 codebase, and a 6B checkpoint. The research team targets a well-known gap: VLA models often work in labs but stumble in deployment. LingBot-VLA 2.0 advances the prior version…
These days, the frontier AI labs are all racing to build self-improving models. Some believe it’s the surest route to superintelligence—as AI improves itself in a mind-melting loop, the thinking goes, it will eventually surpass human comprehension (and perhaps even control). That’s all well and good, but I have a newsletter to produce. I wondered…
A judge has approved a $1.5 million penalty levied against Elon Musk that will settle a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit despite having “significant misgivings” about it. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan noted that her court would accept the settlement, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, which cited her court opinion. Sooknanan’s approval settles a lawsuit filed by…
Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Mohamed Salah have spent the past two decades defining one of soccer’s greatest eras. Now, as the 2026 FIFA World Cup marks Ronaldo’s final appearance at the tournament and another defining moment in the careers of Messi and Salah, they’re also preparing for life beyond the pitch. Before Messi’s Argentina…
Netflix’s engineering team published a method for handling wide partitions in Apache Cassandra. The research work targets Netflix’s TimeSeries Abstraction, a platform for temporal event data. TL;DR Dynamic partitioning splits wide Cassandra partitions per TimeSeries ID, asynchronously and transparently, with no application changes. Detection runs on the read path via byte counting and a Kafka…
Google’s SynthID system has been used to debunk a high-profile AI-generated hoax image, in a rare but significant win for the system. Earlier this week, a picture circulated online that seemed to show Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell covered in tubes in a hospital bed in a state of extreme distress. The image was shared widely…
SpaceXAI has released its latest model, Grok 4.5 — the first since the company went public several weeks ago. In a blog post published Wednesday, SpaceXAI characterized its new release as a workhorse that can tackle all of the typical tasks that the AI industry has sought to automate: coding and app-building, office and clerical…
