Research
Support networks aim to help kids through the polycrisis
Sometime in the late 2000s, Pim Sullivan-Tailyour was sitting in the back of a car, headed toward her great-grandmother’s tiny town in the south of Thailand. She watched big mount…
Auditing Preference Biases and Fine-Tuning Language Models with Direct Preference Optimization on Anthropic HH-RLHF Using TRL and LoRA
This tutorial provides an end-to-end workflow for fine-tuning language models using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We demonstrate how to audit the Anthropic HH-RLHF dataset…
The Download: AI’s self-improvement problem, and what’s driving the heat
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. AI’s recursive self-improvement might not…
Child-monitoring apps might need a reboot
Pam Wisniewski’s digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she’d been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the …
NVIDIA Releases TensorRT Model Connect in Public Preview: Hugging Face Checkpoint to Native C++ Inference in Two Commands
NVIDIA has released TensorRT Model Connect (TRTMC) in public preview, an Apache-2.0 project that takes a supported Hugging Face or local checkpoint to end-to-end TensorRT inferenc…
Meet SAM (Sovereign Agent Mesh): A Zero-Config, Zero-Trust P2P Network for AI Agents
Google has open-sourced SAM (Sovereign Agent Mesh) under Apache-2.0 — and it has nothing to do with Segment Anything. SAM is a zero-config, zero-trust P2P overlay that lets autono…
The Download: how people really use AI, and Flock’s design choices
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. We still don’t know how people are really…
Cartesia Ships Sonic-3.6: A Streaming TTS Model That Now Leads Both Artificial Analysis Speech Arenas
Cartesia has released Sonic-3.6, a streaming text-to-speech model built on state space models rather than transformers. It now ranks #1 on both Artificial Analysis speech leaderbo…
The role of the astronaut is in flux
When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassin…
Nous Research Ships Bot Mode for Hermes Agent, Turning Agent Profiles Into a Roster of Named Bots
Nous Research has shipped Bot Mode for Hermes Agent, its MIT-licensed open source agent. Bot Mode replaces the single-agent session list with a roster of named bots. Each bot is a…
ByteDance Seed and Tsinghua AIR Introduces CUDA Agent: A Large-Scale Agentic RL System for CUDA Kernel Generation
ByteDance Seed and Tsinghua AIR have released CUDA Agent, an agentic reinforcement learning system that trains a large language model to write GPU kernels that beat a compiler. Th…
MiniMax Releases MiniMax-Music3: An Open-Weights Music Model Generating Complete Five-Minute Songs From Lyrics and a Structured Caption
MiniMax released MiniMax-Music3, an open-weights text-to-music model. Given lyrics with section tags and a structured caption, it generates a complete song of up to five minutes i…
Developing an End-to-End Document Intelligence Pipeline with docTR for OCR, Layout Analysis, KIE, Benchmarking, and Searchable PDFs
Develop a complete document intelligence pipeline with docTR, integrating OCR, layout analysis, and KIE for production-oriented extraction and searchable PDF creation. The post De…
The Download: dead robot friends and the “censorship-industrial complex”
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. What happens when a kid’s robot best frie…
DeepSeek AI Releases DeepSeek Harness in Developer Preview: An MIT-Licensed Agent Harness Where Everything is a Plugin
DeepSeek Harness v0.1 is an MIT-licensed agent harness where every capability is a Cordis plugin. Four runtime modes, append-only session logs, and provider-agnostic model routing…
How much hydrogen awaits us underground?
In the 1990s, Barbara Sherwood Lollar descended into the Kidd Creek mine in northern Ontario, which cuts more than three kilometers into the ancient root of North America. There h…
Fine-Tuning Tool-Calling LLMs: A Complete Guide Using XYZ-Aquila-SFT and Qwen3
Implement an end-to-end fine-tuning pipeline for tool-calling language models. This tutorial covers parsing trajectories, structured tool-call extraction, Qwen-compatible ChatML r…
The Download: Flock’s new rules, cloning’s future, and children’s cells
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Flock is tightening its rules in response…
Cloning could be used to save species—or make human “organ sacks”
This week I spoke to scientists who have found a way to turn male mouse embryos female. They’ve developed a CRISPR-based approach to essentially cut out the Y chromosome. It allow…
Job titles of the future: Space travel agent
Roman Chiporukha has long turned wild travel dreams into reality. Over two decades as co-owner of the luxury lifestyle firm Roman & Erica, he has orchestrated everything from the …
This scientist is helping build a missing map of childhood
In 2017, Deanne Taylor attended a presentation at the University of Pennsylvania, just a short walk from her office. A researcher was there to unveil the Human Cell Atlas, an ambi…
Z.ai Ships GLM-5.3 Without Retraining the Base Model: Better at Complex Coding and Long-Horizon Tasks
Z.ai released GLM-5.3 on August 14, 2026. The model reuses the 743B GLM-5.2 base unchanged. Every reported gain comes from scaled post-training: more long-horizon task environment…
Meet Needle 2: An Open 45M-Parameter Tool-Calling Model That Ships as a 14MB Binary and Runs a Full Session in 28MB of RAM
Cactus Compute released Needle 2, an open 45M-parameter model for tool calling, device use, and structured extraction. The full model is a single 14MB binary that runs a session i…
Create a Reasoning-Focused LLM: A Practical Guide to Streaming, Curating, and Fine-Tuning the SupraLabs Reasoning Corpus
This tutorial provides a complete workflow for building a compact, reasoning-focused language model. By streaming the SupraLabs reasoning corpus from Hugging Face, we apply qualit…