From the archive
AI models are the systems behind chatbots, coding assistants and tools that work with text, images, audio and video. Follow new language model releases, open-weight models, local AI and benchmark results. Our coverage looks at capabilities, context limits, access, pricing and evaluation methods so you can compare the evidence behind a launch, not just the claims in its announcement.
Lead story
Microsoft is previewing an Integrated Security Operations Centre in Defender, a security platform designed to let people and AI agents detect, investigate and disrupt attacks from one shared foundation. The important change is architectural: Microsoft is joining security signals, context and protective controls so agents can act across…
Read the report & discussion ↗Watch Desk
Xiaomi has released MiMo-V2.6, an open-weight AI family that combines frontier-level benchmark claims with unusually detailed training disclosures. The practical significance is not just another leaderboard result: developers can inspect the weights, training framework and more than 7,000 task environments under an MIT licence.
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft is urging teams to treat AI models, inference endpoints and retrieval pipelines as live dependencies in resilience planning, not invisible extras. Its new Azure guidance argues that a system is not resilient merely because the diagram shows three zones and a failover arrow. Someone has to prove…
Watch Desk
Andrew Dai, a former Google Brain and DeepMind researcher and co-founder of Elorian, argues that frontier AI remains unreliable at detailed visual tasks such as counting objects, tracking robot actions and interpreting complex designs. The practical point is less glamorous than another benchmark victory: systems that recognise a…
llama.cpp Watch
llama.cpp 0.5.0 is out with support for three new model families, a substantial ggml refresh and a long list of fixes across local inference, multimodal inputs and serving. The practical change is breadth: more models and messier real-world workloads now have a route through the same open-source stack,…
Microsoft AI Watch
Microsoft has announced a new 12-inch Surface Pro, a 13-inch Surface Laptop and an AI-powered Surface Mouse, with the PCs using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 Plus processors to run more AI work locally. The practical pitch is less cloud dependence, lower latency and potentially better privacy, rather than another…
AMD Watch
AMD has filled in much of the picture around its Zen 6-based EPYC Venice server processors, including a 256-core flagship, faster memory and a direct performance challenge to NVIDIA’s Vera CPUs. The important point is not one spectacular benchmark, but a broader platform aimed at general-purpose computing, HPC…
NVIDIA Watch
NVIDIA’s Accelerated Quantum Research Center in Boston is due to receive IonQ’s Superion 256 in 2027, placing a 256-qubit quantum processor directly alongside an NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system. The significance is practical rather than purely numerical: the companies are building a testbed for hybrid quantum-classical computing, where quantum…
AWS AI Watch
AWS has published a practical guide to running the open-source, terminal-native OpenCode coding agent with open-weight models through Amazon Bedrock. The useful bit is not another model launch, but a workable setup for developers who want local file and shell access while keeping inference inside their AWS environment.
AMD Watch
Viridien says it is using AMD CPUs and GPUs to extend its production-scale high-performance computing operation from energy-sector geoscience into materials discovery, molecular modelling and drug development. The important detail is practical rather than glossy: the company says its systems run more than one million HPC workloads a…
MIT CSAIL Watch
MIT has appointed computer scientist and Two Sigma co-founder David Siegel as its next Innovation Fellow, giving him a year to explore how artificial intelligence can accelerate scientific discovery. The appointment matters because it places a technologist with experience in research, finance and AI infrastructure inside the university…
MLCommons Watch
MLCommons has joined a €16.9 million European research project to develop generative AI that models disease mechanisms, with the organisation responsible for building the benchmarks that may decide whether the system deserves anyone’s trust. AIRIS brings together 21 partners from Europe, Canada and the US for a four-year…
Watch Desk
Scale Labs and Reflection have released SWE-Bench Pro V2, a tougher and more tightly controlled benchmark for AI software-engineering agents. It covers 642 tasks across 11 repositories, including a new 51-task Hard split, and is designed to make claims about coding ability harder to inflate with leaky tests,…
Watch Desk
Radical Numerics is building large AI models for biology while warning that the same systems that expand scientific capability could also widen the biosecurity threat. The company’s co-founder and chief executive, Eric Nguyen, made the case in an interview with Latent Space, arguing that defensive capabilities must keep…
Watch Desk
US Central Command has changed how it vets targets after a deadly school strike in Iran, with new open-source data feeds intended to track civilian movement more closely. Bloomberg reports that the command has also upgraded Palantir’s Maven system, putting the machinery of AI-assisted targeting under a sharper…
