[AINews] not much happened today

a quiet day

Quoting Kimi K3

LLM cliché highlighter

Spot birds not golf

[AINews] Kimi K3 2.8T-A50B: the largest open model ever released; Opus 4.8-class at Sonnet 5 pricing

a great week for open models continues.

Firefox in WebAssembly

Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark

Quoting Thibault Sottiaux

Inkling: Our open-weights model

Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii)

🔬 The Lab of the Future Should Feel Like a Data Center — Andy Beam & Rafa Gómez-Bombarelli, Lila Sciences

Lila is betting that science, not the internet, is the last untapped source of training data. We went to find out what that actually looks like in a room full of robots.

Quoting Linus Torvalds

[AINews] Thinky's Inkling: 975B-A41B multimodal, new best American Apache 2.0 open model (with Inkling-Small, 276B-A12B)

Thinky's first full LLM release is a banger and bonus: it's open weights!

Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)

xai-org/grok-build, now open source

How I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets

[AINews] not much happened today

a continuation: Codex adding 1M users a day now.

5 Trends That Defined AI Engineering at World’s Fair 2026

At this year's AIE World’s Fair, AI engineering entered a new phase: building systems around agents, rather than just building with agents.

Quoting GitHub Changelog

simonw/pedalican

lobste.rs is now running on SQLite

Quoting Armin Ronacher

datasette 1.0a37

[AINews] Codex usage up >10x in 6 months to 7M users, +1M in the past ~day; did Codex overtake Claude Code??

a quiet day lets us fact check some numbers against the sound of silence of Claude Code reporting...

Using uvx in GitHub Actions in a cache-friendly way

DOOMQL

datasette code-frequency chart on GitHub

Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI)

shot-scraper 1.11

Fable gets another bump

sqlite-utils 4.1.1

6 months to live for open models

The most serious test to date of open source AI’s viability is happening right now.

sqlite-utils 4.1

[AINews] not much happened today

a quiet day after a week of nonstop model releases

[AINews] OpenAI launches GPT 5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna, Codex becomes ChatGPT superapp

A big day for OpenAI.

[AINews] SpaceXAI launches Grok 4.5, first Opus-class model post Cursor acquisition

SpaceXAI continues to move faster than any other frontier lab on earth.

Why AI Infrastructure must evolve for Agent Experience — Akshat Bubna, Modal CTO

2 years after our first coverage, we return with Modal's other cofounder to explore why Agent Experience is working now, and everything they have learned building the new agent cloud.

[AINews] Lilian Weng summarizes 35 papers on Harness Engineering for RSI

a quiet day lets us read some condensed insight

[AINews] The Field Guide to Fable

a quiet day lets us digest the world's most significant model launch... to date.

Import AI 464: Fables writes GPU kernels; AI automation; and analog computation

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Fable writes a decent GPU kernel, hinting at broader AI R&

AIEWF Daily Dispatch: The great loops debate and the state of AI engineering

The AI Engineer World’s Fair ended with a debate about loops, a report on the state of AI engineering, and closing keynotes focused on what to build next.

Vercel's Andrew Qu on why agents are a new kind of software

The Vercel Chief of Software explains how its agent framework, eve, was created — and why skills, sandboxes and agent-readable websites now matter.

The website of the future may assemble itself for every visitor

Adobe is experimenting with “agentic sites” that generate pages around an individual user’s intent. At AIEWF, we talked to Carlos Sanchez about the Web's future.

Skill engineering and the case against one-shot AI design

Paul Bakaus talks to us about Impeccable, human judgment in a 'loopmaxxing' era, and why agents still need people to steer them.

[AINews] not much happened today

another quiet day.

AIEWF Daily Dispatch: Autoresearch and the tension between AI and human agency

The software factory vision met resistance today from speakers defending human understanding and control.

Autoresearch: The feedback loop behind self-improving agents

Introspection co-founder Roland Gavrilescu explains autoresearch, agent “recipes,” self-improving loops, and why humans remain central to the software factory.

Import AI 463: Self-improving robots; a 10k Chinese GPU cluster; and an elegiac essay for the human era

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now NVIDIA sets up a crude self-improvement loop for real worl

Latest open artifacts (#22): Zyphra, Cohere, and Poolside are expanding the breadth of the ecosystem

An assessment of the open ecosystem and the motivations behind releasing models

GLM-5.2 is the step change for open agents

A capability threshold I've been carefully monitoring.

Import AI 462: Superpersuasion; self-sustaining AI; paths to ASI

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now AI can decisively out-persuade humans:…“AI systems were re

Banning Open Source AI Would Be A Mistake

This post was originally an op-ed co-authored with Kevin Xu of Interconnected for a general, non-technical audience.

State of the blog, mid-2026

About 3 years since I started writing weekly.

Frontier post-training recipe review with Finbarr Timbers

"Interview" #18

Import AI 461: “Alignment is not on track”; FrontierCode; and synthetic research interns

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now AI researchers launch new safety startup because “alignmen

Welcome to the AGI era of AI governance

It's a one-way door and we weren't ready for it.

Claude Fable 5 and new AI safety fables

One step further into the power politics of frontier AI systems.

Import AI 460: Reward hacking society, RSI data from Anthropic; and RL-based quadcopter racing

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Society can be reward-hacked, just like cyber environments

Farewell Ai2

This was my last week at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), where I got the great privilege to work on the Olmo models, to grow, to learn, and to have broad lasting impacts.

Import AI 459: AI oversight is difficult; scaling laws for protein folding models; and pricing the extinction risk of AI systems

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now The AI economy in the US is growing at 2,000% a year:…The

Open and closed models are on different exponentials

Where marginally higher intelligence drives value, and where it doesn't.

Some ideas for what comes next, May 2026

Gemini Flash 3.5, Mythos, open-closed balance, America's open-source surge, emerging power struggles and more.

Import AI 458: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity story

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. This issue consists of a lengthy essay based on a speech I recently gave

Import AI 457: AI stuxnet; cursed Muon optimizer; and positive alignment

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Stuxnet before Stuxnet:…Fast16 bugs software likely used i

Latest open artifacts (#21): Open model bonanza! Gemma 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.6, MiMo 2.5, GLM-5.1 & others. On CAISI's V4 assessment.

An eventful month with one flagship release after another

How open model ecosystems compound

Further reflections on China's high-participation, open-first AI ecosystem.

Import AI 456: RSI and economic growth; radical optionality for AI regulation; and a neural computer

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Regulate? Don’t regulate. There’s a third way: Radical Opt

Notes from inside China's AI labs

Lessons from my trip to talk to most of the leading AI labs in China.

The distillation panic

‘Distillation attacks’ is a horrible term for what is happening right now.

Import AI 455: Automating AI Research

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now AI systems are about to start building themselves. What does that mean?

Reading today's open-closed performance gap

The complex factors that determine the single evaluation number so many focus on. Plus, how this changes in the future.

My bets on open models, mid-2026

What I expect to come next and why, focused on the open-closed gap.

What I’ve been building: ATOM Report, post-training course, finishing my book, and ongoing research

What I've been up to!

The inevitable need for an open model consortium

And yes, I hate consortia too.

Claude Mythos and misguided open-weight fearmongering

Another dance around fears of open-source.

After Orthogonality: Virtue-Ethical Agency and AI Alignment

Preface This essay argues that rational people don’t have goals, and that rational AIs shouldn’t have goals. Human actions are rational not because we direct them at some final ‘goals,’ but because we align actions to practices[1]: networks

AGI Is Not Multimodal

"In projecting language back as the model for thought, we lose sight of the tacit embodied understanding that undergirds our intelligence." –Terry Winograd The recent successes of generative AI models have convinced some that AGI is imminen

Shape, Symmetries, and Structure: The Changing Role of Mathematics in Machine Learning Research

What is the Role of Mathematics in Modern Machine Learning? The past decade has witnessed a shift in how progress is made in machine learning. Research involving carefully designed and mathematically principled architectures result in only

What's Missing From LLM Chatbots: A Sense of Purpose

LLM-based chatbots’ capabilities have been advancing every month. These improvements are mostly measured by benchmarks like MMLU, HumanEval, and MATH (e.g. sonnet 3.5, gpt-4o). However, as these measures get more and more saturated, is user

We Need Positive Visions for AI Grounded in Wellbeing

Introduction Imagine yourself a decade ago, jumping directly into the present shock of conversing naturally with an encyclopedic AI that crafts images, writes code, and debates philosophy. Won’t this technology almost certainly transform so