2026-07-18

a great week for open models continues.

Human cognition does not separate understanding and generation. A teacher at a whiteboard speaks and draws together, each modality reshapes the other. In this paper, we bring this coupled loop to artificial systems. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) are ideally suited to this task, yet existing samplers either decode text and image interleavedly or independently update them in parallel branches that share only previous-step history, but not the other modality's latest decisions within the same step

Building interactive worlds that respond coherently to player actions has long been a shared goal of computer graphics, games, and artificial intelligence. Recent video generative models provide a data-driven route toward this goal by predicting future observations conditioned on user actions, and are increasingly regarded as potential next-generation game engines. Realizing a genuinely interactive game world, however, requires interaction outcomes that follow rules over evolving game conditions

The world's first open 3T-class model Discussion | Link

OpenAI trained GPT-Red, an internal-only attacker model, using self-play reinforcement learning against a population of defender LLMs. It beat human red-teamers 84% to 13% on a replicated indirect prompt injection arena, found a novel "Fake Chain-of-Thought" attack class, and cut GPT-5.6 Sol's failures 6x on OpenAI's hardest direct injection benchmark. OpenAI concedes it still struggles with multi-turn and image-based attacks. The post OpenAI Details GPT-Red: An Internal Automated Red-Teaming Mo

Tool: Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii) After building the Mermaid to ASCII tool based on Grok Build's Rust code I learned that there's an older, more fully-featured Go library called AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii that implements a similar pattern, so I had Claude Fable 5 compile that one to WebAssembly as well so I could compare the two. This one includes support for colors! Test:::good / Test --> Deploy:::warn / Deploy --> Rollback:::bad / classDef good color:#3fb950 / classDef warn color:#

It would open up a completely new business for the Facebook and Instagram maker.

Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it’s not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI’s chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI’s response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn’t be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO […]

Zyphra released ZUNA1.1 on July 16, 2026, under the Apache 2.0 license. The 380M masked diffusion autoencoder reconstructs, denoises, and upsamples scalp-EEG across arbitrary channel layouts. It accepts variable-length inputs from 0.5 to 30 seconds, against ZUNA1's fixed five seconds. Reported NMSE holds or improves while the input range widens. The post Zyphra Releases ZUNA1.1: An Apache 2.0 EEG Foundation Model With Variable-Length Inputs From 0.5 To 30 Seconds appeared first on MarkTechPost .

I've written Mojibake because I don't like the other Unicode libraries for Unicode support. It consists of only two amalgamation files: mojibake.h and mojibake.c. I've added all the most important Unicode algorithms, such as normalization, case conversion, segmentation, bidirectional text, collation, confusable, and others. I regularly test it in these OSes: Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Windows 11. You can find a WASM demo on that site of all the public API functions and the docum

Apple is suing OpenAI. The complaint is readable and intense, as these things often are, though many experts seem to think many of the allegations are just the ways things are done. So what does Apple really want here, and why is it picking such a public fight with OpenAI? On this episode of The […]

Prosecutors accused 21-year-old student Zyaire Wilkins of publishing on Steam several fake video games that contained malware, infecting thousands of victims, and stealing crypto from some of them.

Patreon is strengthening its defenses against AI scraping by working with Cloudflare to block bots that train AI models on creators’ content without permission. The move marks a shift away from relying on websites using robots.txt alone to actively block unauthorized AI training.

Federal authorities have arrested a Florida man suspected of stealing at least $220,000 in crypto through malware-infected Steam games, as reported earlier by local news outlet Local10. In the complaint, officials accuse 21-year-old Zyaire Wilkins and co-conspirators of launching eight malware-embedded games from around May 2024 to February 2026, allowing them to infect about 8,000 […]

Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, introduces a practical AI scorecard to measure ROI through useful work, cost per successful task, dependability, and return on compute.

Some of you might remember that I posted some time ago about the GGML-ported asset production pipeline . A key elelent of that was the TRELLIS.2 port that performs image-to-3D generation. Well, I'm happy to report that after a grueling debugging session (thanks to ) I've managed to fix quite a few bugs and the asset quality is now on par with the reference. This means that top open source 3D generation quality is now available to everyone with a good enough GPU (or for people patient enough to g

Firefox in WebAssembly This is absurdly cool: Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly such that the whole browser runs in another browser. Here's my blog, running in Firefox, running in WebAssembly, running in Chrome: They chose Firefox/Gecko because it has strong single-process support. The project used an estimated $25,000 worth of Claude Opus and Fable tokens, but took advantage of a Claude Max subscription plan so cost much less in actual dollars. The demo funnels all traffic over a WebSocket

I just saw that these had dropped. Still very much early days, but nice to see a new locally runnable foundation model, along with a couple of thinking preview versions. Anyone taken a look at this yet? Am intrigued to see how it holds up compared to Qwen 3.6 and Gemma 4 (my current stack)

I'm curious on everyone's real world experience for this model in real codebases / tasks. Does K3 really exceed 5.5 and Opus 4.8 on your coding tasks or not really? Is it benchmaxxed or is just that good of a model? Curious on everyone's use cases and thoughts, please be detailed (what codebase, what lang, around what area and etc, how K3 does vs Opus 4.8 and 5.5)

So I know this is going to incur the wrath of the Qwen cult but after a month of using 27b q8_0 as my primary coding agent in 6+ agent coding workflow with GPT-5.5 as the orchestrator, I got very frustrated with the amount of back and forth I was doing just to always end up in the same place without a resolution to a simple bug. Out of desperation and lack of progress on a medium complexity project, I switched to Gemma4-31b q8 as the main coding agent and 27b as the QA and Reviewer agents, 35b a

Databricks has remade its image into an AI company and has published research on the cost savings of open weight AI models for coding.

The NHTSA recently called for autonomous vehicle companies to improve how cars respond in emergency situations.

TikTok is starting to test an opt-in tool that scans for AI likenesses and lets creators report them to the company, as spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra. The tool is initially being tested with "some" US creators, TikTok US spokesperson Zachary Kizer tells The Verge. YouTube has been working on a similar tool […]

Is there something I can actually help you with today? — Kimi K3 , after refusing to leak its system prompt Tags: kimi , ai-personality , generative-ai , ai , llms

Reinforcement learning has become a standard post-training recipe for large language models, but dense full-parameter updates create two deployment-relevant bottlenecks: suppressed reasoning performance, often reflected by premature saturation of test-time scaling, and interference when consolidating multiple capabilities through multi-domain training or model merging. We show that the reasoning-effective component of these updates is largely concentrated in the base model's spectral space, moti

This has to be a bug. My usual monthly S3 bill is only $2–3. Has anyone else received a strange billing estimate today?

Hi HN, I am co-founder of Kickstage, a software company specializing in solutions for the electrical industry and lately grid operators. We are hiring engineers from different backgrounds, a lot of them software developers with limited experience in the sectors. Deep domain knowledge is key in our industry however, so we are constantly teaching the basics of power flow analysis, active vs reactive power, transmission line properties etc. With Jupyter notebooks and the Python console only, that's

We present Wan-Streamer v0.3, which reframes our native-streaming interaction model under a single organizing view: a video is a world plus an event stream. The world is the persistent context in which a video unfolds, including the environment, scene, subjects, ambient acoustic conditions, voice characteristics, and other relatively stable conditions. The event stream is everything that changes over time within that world, including scene or environmental changes, subject behavior, speech, and

Today I accidentally became the maintainer of software that was already almost three decades old: reviving a 1990s Java utility to keep the last PAD submitter alive in 2026. I was looking for a way to submit my AI app RiverScript to old desktop software directories and ended up digging through the long-forgotten world of PAD files. There was one problem. The only batch submission tool I could find was a Java application that first appeared in the late 1990s. The last release was in 2017. It was

The City Attorney’s Office sent the tech giants cease-and-desist letters this week telling them to stop profiting from 13 “face-swap” apps that are overwhelmingly used to target women and girls.

Official estimates Google and Apple likely made millions in nudify app fees.

In letters sent to Apple and Google, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said that both companies have long been aware that they are hosting apps in violation of state law.

Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of the first day of the Recurse Center ( ) My cofounders and I did YC all the way back in the Summer of 2010, with the initial idea of building "OkCupid for jobs." That idea quickly fizzled, and we spent the better part of a year pivoting between other ideas that also failed. Finally, we made something that we wanted ourselves: a self-directed programming retreat, where people built fun projects, contributed to open source, and helped each other become better pro

Google and Apple were sent cease-and-desist letters regarding 13 apps on their respective stores.

arXiv:2607.13239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Foundation models, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), are increasingly used for transportation management center (TMC) tasks such as anomaly detection, incident reporting, and traveler information. Deploying multiple such models across TMC functions raises a portfolio question: which model should serve each function, in which deployment mode, and under what shared hardware budget? We formulate this as the Foun

Multi-reference-to-audio-video (MR2AV) generation aims to generate coherent audio-video content conditioned on multiple references and textual instructions. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on text-driven generation, single-reference subject preservation, or isolated audio-video alignment, leaving the emerging MR2AV setting largely unexplored. Compared with these settings, MR2AV requires models to jointly reason over multiple references while generating synchronized visual and audio content. Mod

I made this experimental art project/game that's an LLM chat assistant, but where you're the AI. I wanted people to get a visceral sense of what it's like to answer the kinds of things that people prompt their chatbots day in and day out. If you're interested, I wrote up some more info on how I made it, including how the "user" prompts are generated with an eye for realism: Hope you enjoy it! I'd love to hear people's takeaways. Comments URL: Points: 48 # Comments: 22

Learning broad world knowledge directly from raw visual data is a fundamental capability of intelligence. We introduce UniVR, the first investigation into simultaneously learning complex reasoning, fine-grained physical dynamics, and long-term planning from pure visual demonstrations. At its core, UniVR features VR-GRPO, a reinforcement learning paradigm with complementary global and step-level rewards. This approach enforces logical coherence and physical consistency throughout the reasoning pr

While recent advances in 3D generation have enabled impressive visual synthesis, existing methods often rely on 2D diffusion supervision without explicit mechanisms for geometric consistency, leading to spatial hallucinations such as duplicated structures and misaligned geometry. These issues become more severe in 4D generation, where maintaining consistency across viewpoints and temporal evolution introduces additional challenges, including jitter, identity flicker, and structural drift. We pre

I've been considering this for a while but it just seems hard for me as I don't really know how docker works. I only use docker compose and many online resources assume I run docker and provide docker compose files. Many projects only really provide docker compose files. I really want to switch to running rootless containers. I had considered docker rootless but figured I might as well just go to podman if I'm gonna do that. The biggest barrier has been the architecture shift and being confused