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
AMD plans to open an AI research centre in South Korea by the end of this year and hire several hundred researchers. The centre would make Korea a base for global AI research and bring AMD chips together with locally developed AI processors.
Read the report & discussion ↗OpenAI Watch
Common Sense Media says tests of ChatGPT’s teen experience found gaps in crisis referrals and parental alerts, prompting the group to urge OpenAI to keep teenagers off the service. OpenAI disputes the evaluation, and says some of the behaviour identified was intentional rather than a failure of its…
Watch Desk
Ivo has launched Sage, an open model tailored to contract work, built with River AI on DeepSeek V4 Flash. The pitch is that specialist training can make a smaller, cheaper model useful for legal teams, though the performance figures come from Ivo, not an independent evaluation.
Anthropic Watch
A small video studio says Claude Opus 5.5’s advantage in making animated videos is its visual planning, rather than its ability to write the code that renders them. In the studio’s workflow, Opus designed the sequence and GPT 6.1 handled the coding, a division of labour that produced…
Watch Desk
System76’s COSMIC desktop project now bars contributors from submitting AI-generated code, documentation, comments or descriptions, while a GNOME developer argues the project should accept AI-generated bug reports. The split puts a practical question to open-source teams: where should AI assistance stop, and where might it help developers find…
Watch Desk
Big tech firms have borrowed around $500 billion since January to fund AI chips, servers and data centres, as US government bond yields climb above 5.30%. Yahoo Finance reports that analysts see AI borrowing as one pressure on markets, alongside inflation and other forces.
Meta AI Watch
Meta has open-sourced Rebalancer, a C++ assignment solver with a Python interface, after using it internally for more than nine years. The useful twist is its scale: MarkTechPost reports that Meta solves about 40 million assignment problems a day with it, including infrastructure-allocation tasks.
Google DeepMind Watch
Google DeepMind has announced Gemini 4 Argon, a model aimed at long software-engineering jobs and other demanding professional work. Its standout offer is the ability to generate up to one million output tokens in a single response, but access is still restricted and Google’s benchmark results remain company-run…
Powerful Medical Watch
Sant’Andrea University Hospital in Rome has embedded Powerful Medical’s AI ECG analysis into its emergency heart-attack pathway, automatically notifying cardiology when a recording is flagged as high risk. Powerful Medical says clinicians opened those reports in a median of under 17 seconds after the alert: the notable development…
Watch Desk
Monash University has joined Project Tapestry, a global AI collaboration focused on building models while members retain control of their data and computing infrastructure. The project says its Monash-BharatGen team has already trained a shared model across Australian and Indian sovereign computing systems, keeping training data within each…
Watch Desk
GitHub is rebuilding its Git infrastructure to handle the heavy, concurrent reads and writes associated with AI-driven software agents. Its internal benchmarks show up to 35 times higher write throughput, a potentially important change for teams running development work at agent scale.
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic’s reported $518 billion in computing commitments sharpens a practical question for businesses: are they ready to put AI systems to work, and to take responsibility when they go wrong? An Observer analysis argues that enterprise controls may lag behind the infrastructure and growth ambitions described in Anthropic’s…
OpenAI Watch
OpenAI says it is publishing a broad set of mathematical results produced by an internal frontier model, alongside material intended to help researchers examine and check the work. The release includes formalised proofs in Lean and details about how the results were obtained, making this more than a…
Meta AI Watch
Meta has opened Muse Gadgets, a project for developers to connect its personal AI agent to home-built hardware. The useful shift is from an assistant that lives in an app to one that could reach buttons, screens and sensors around the home.
Unsloth Watch
Unsloth’s v0.1.903-beta release brings a browser panel, a suite of audio tools and several training and inference speed-ups to its AI workspace. For people running models locally, the practical draw is a broader set of things to do in one place, alongside changes that could make some workloads…
Watch Desk
Startup Conway Research has launched an invite-only beta of Underdog, an AI assistant that runs on users’ computers and plans to earn money from purchases rather than advertising. It pairs a privacy-first pitch with a distinctly practical question: what will users let an assistant do when it can…
Watch Desk
MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers’ latest survey compares more than 120 commercial AI accelerators, up from 57 in its first paper. The work gives buyers and researchers a way to compare performance, power and different hardware designs in a fast-growing market.
Anthropic Watch
Anthropic is expanding access to its most capable AI models for selected cybersecurity organisations, including teams permitted to conduct high-risk offensive testing. The move brings more testing of AI’s cyber capabilities into a US-government partnership, while keeping access restricted and reviewed.
Watch Desk
Mark Zuckerberg says Meta’s Llama 4 setback was partly an organisational mistake: he built its team on a model suited to large-scale product work, rather than the smaller, closely connected group he believes language-model research needs. His account points to a consequential shift in how Meta is organising…
