The Archive

Inside xAI: Building Grok Imagine in 3 Months, Videogen vs World Models, and why Grok Imagine is so underrated. For the first time, we do a deep dive with the guy who led it!

Reinforcement learning (RL) improves large language model (LLM) agents by teaching them which actions lead to high rewards, but provides little supervision on what those actions do to the environment. World modeling (WM) can fill this gap, yet existing approaches often require separate simulators, extra training stages, or additional inference-time computation. We observe that on-policy RL rollouts already contain the needed signal: each transition pairs an action with its resulting next observation. Based on this observation, we propose PaW, a Policy and World modeling co-training framework ...

Protein language models (PLMs) are passive oracles: they generate sequences in a single forward pass with no mechanism to consult external biophysical feedback or redirect generation when a candidate violates thermodynamic or structural constraints. We introduce AgentPLM, which addresses this by equipping a pre-trained PLM with i) Reasoning-Augmented Decoding (RAD), which interleaves autoregressive generation with tool calls (ESMFold, FoldX, AutoDock Vina), and ii) Contrastive Agent Policy Optimisation (CAPO), a trajectory-level extension of direct preference optimisation that trains the poli...

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have found success parsing neural representations into interpretable concepts, providing a basis for understanding and control. However, what exactly SAEs extract, and, correspondingly, the scientific conclusions we can draw from them, are not obvious. Empirically, the proof is in the pudding: SAEs learn interpretable features. Theoretically, we lack a clear account of what properties a 'concept' must satisfy for an SAE to extract it. There has been extensive identifiability work studying the conditions under which sparse coding recovers ground-truth features; howev...

Progress in tabular machine learning has largely focused on increasingly sophisticated model architectures. At the same time, feature engineering remains a critical yet underexplored component of real-world modeling pipelines that is entirely absent from modern benchmarks, which creates an unquantified evaluation gap. In this work, we introduce TabPrep, a lightweight preprocessing pipeline composed of feature generators that are carefully designed to target three specific structural data patterns. We show that many widely used model classes exhibit predictable blind spots to these patterns an...

In this study, a generalized operator-based mathematical conflict framework is presented to explicitly represent structural discrepancies between raw data and contextual data. The proposed structure treats conflict as a local, directional, and context-sensitive quantity, integrating components such as weighting, scale behavior, and output mapping under a unified abstract operator. Without being reduced to a specific learning algorithm or optimization method, the framework is defined as a general structure adaptable to different classes of problems. While existing approaches typically treat co...

Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo launches 'no AI' web extensions for Chrome and Firefox users.

Microsoft is heading to San Francisco this week in a bid to win back developers at its Build conference. I've been attending Build since the days when Microsoft called it the Professional Developers Conference, and I can't remember a more pivotal moment. As Microsoft continues to reshuffle its entire business around AI, it's moving Build into a smaller, more intimate venue. Trust in Windows and GitHub is at an all-time low, and this is Microsoft's chance to reconnect with developers and outline the future. Sources tell me that we'll hear about new AI models in Windows, a new reasoning model f...

Today I’m talking with Harvey Mason Jr., who is CEO of the Recording Academy — that’s the outfit that puts on the Grammy Awards. I last talked to Harvey in 2024, when it was obvious that generative AI would upend the music industry, but still not exactly clear how that would happen. Well, it’s been 18 months since that conversation, and you’re going to hear Harvey say that AI is now “omnipresent” in music production. And Harvey knows what he’s talking about — he is himself a legendary producer who’s worked with everyone from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé. Harvey has said that every session he’s be...

The popular fitness-tracking platform, Strava, is restricting access to its API as part of efforts to clamp down on AI scraping, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Developers who want to build an app using Strava's data now need to pay for a flat $11.99 / month subscription. In an update on its developer hub, Strava blames the change on "zero-code AI tools" that allow users to quickly create apps that "hammer" APIs. "We have felt this firsthand - developer applications to our program are up 448% year-to-date, API intermediaries have violated policy terms, and scraping attempts have degraded p...

Crescent Island is an air-cooled chip that uses LPDDR5 memory.

Do you feel as though you are living in a revolution?

OpenAI breaks ground on a 1GW data center project in Michigan as part of Stargate, building AI infrastructure to expand access, create jobs, and support communities.

I tried to explain OpenAI’s solution more clearly than OpenAI did.

YouTubers are ruling the box office, and it shouldn't be a surprise: succeeding on YouTube is a much higher bar than the gates that currently govern Hollywood.

OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now generally available on AWS, giving enterprises a new path to build with OpenAI through the AWS environments, controls, and procurement workflows they already use. Customers can get started with OpenAI on AWS and move faster from evaluation to production.

Developing autonomous vehicle (AV) policies requires bridging an important gap between training and deployment. Vision-language-action (VLA) models that can... Developing autonomous vehicle (AV) policies requires bridging an important gap between training and deployment. Vision-language-action (VLA) models that can reason over more complex driving scenes and produce richer intermediate reasoning are predominantly trained in open-loop, where model outputs are directly compared to ground-truth behaviors without considering their effect on the environment. Source

I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month The model releases were a little disappointing Conferences and podcasts I launched Datasette Agent and made a lot of progress on Datasette What I'm using, May 2026 edition Miscellaneous extras Here's a copy of the April newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy! Tags: newsletter

Physical AI systems must understand the real world before they can act within it. Robots, autonomous vehicles, and smart spaces need to understand what's... Physical AI systems must understand the real world before they can act within it. Robots, autonomous vehicles, and smart spaces need to understand what’s happening in their world, predict what’s likely to happen next, and generate actions for specific environments, embodiments, and tasks. NVIDIA Cosmos 3 is a frontier foundation model for physical AI that combines physical reasoning… Source

The AI era is driving a new class of infrastructure: AI factories that transform data into intelligence for autonomous AI agents operating at unprecedented... The AI era is driving a new class of infrastructure: AI factories that transform data into intelligence for autonomous AI agents operating at unprecedented scale. Powered by accelerated computing, AI factories enable enterprises to train, fine-tune, and deploy AI with greater speed and efficiency. This new class of infrastructure also introduces a fundamentally new attack surface spanning… Source

Each wave of AI has created a new scaling law. Pretraining scaled intelligence through larger datasets, more parameters, and massively parallel GPU systems.... Each wave of AI has created a new scaling law. Pretraining scaled intelligence through larger datasets, more parameters, and massively parallel GPU systems. Post-training scaled usefulness through instruction tuning, and re-balancing GPUs for generative inference. Test-time scaling improved reasoning by giving models more generated tokens for thinking. Now, agentic AI and reinforcement… Source

AI is now essential infrastructure, powered by AI factories that generate intelligence in the form of tokens. As demand grows, these factories must scale... AI is now essential infrastructure, powered by AI factories that generate intelligence in the form of tokens. As demand grows, these factories must scale faster, operate more efficiently, and lower the cost of intelligence across the five-layer stack: energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. NVIDIA DSX platform provides the complete playbook for designing, simulating, building… Source

Sovereign AI is driving a shift toward secure, locally tailored solutions, redefining global AI innovation and control.

Discover how different AI solutions help enhance customer interactions by improving personalization, automation, and proactive services.

Generative AI is making waves throughout the world, but how does it work and how can you benefit from it? Learn more in this informative article.

An embedding model takes raw input data and converts it into numerical representations or "embeddings." These capture relationships and patterns in data.

Explore the top 10 generative AI use cases in business. Explore real examples and our starter guides for building with enterprise-ready AI.

Release: datasette 1.0a32 A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was experimenting with Service Workers yesterday. Tags: datasette , annotated-release-notes