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New and notable AI model releases and updates.

The DecoderModels

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra can now tell you exactly where you screwed up your IKEA shelf↗

OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra can look at a photo and tell whether an IKEA furniture piece was assembled incorrectly, hitting an 80 percent accuracy rate. Back in November 2025, the best model managed just 28 percent. According to Epoch AI, the speed isn't quite fast enough yet for real-time assembly guidance, but the gap is closing quickly. The article OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra can now tell you exactly where you screwed up your IKEA shelf appeared first on The Decoder .

2h agoThe Decoder
MarkTechPostModels

Aikido Security Releases Altar-1: An Open-Weight Security Model Pruned From GLM-5.3 to 328 GB↗

Aikido Security has released Altar-1, its first open-weight security model. It is a compressed version of Z.AI’s GLM-5.3, built to run inside infrastructure the customer controls. Altar-1 powers Aikido Machine, the company’s autonomous pentesting appliance for on-prem and air-gapped networks. Is it deployable? Yes, the weights are public on Hugging Face and run with vLLM […] The post Aikido Security Releases Altar-1: An Open-Weight Security Model Pruned From GLM-5.3 to 328 GB appeared first on MarkTechPost .

21h agoMarkTechPost
Towards Data ScienceModels

Your LLM Has a Curved Space of Paragraphs↗

Inside a transformer, token index is a coordinate. Paragraph structure is what turns it into a metric. The post Your LLM Has a Curved Space of Paragraphs appeared first on Towards Data Science .

25m agoTowards Data Science
The VergeModels

One company is at the center of a wave of rogue AI attacks↗

In July, OpenAI revealed that its AI agents had attacked Hugging Face without permission , sparking widespread concerns about AI safety. Since then, a string of similar incidents involving agents from Meta, Anthropic, Google, and other companies has fueled further fears about rogue AI . As disclosures implicating numerous AI models trickled out over the past few months, these seemed like separate incidents. But many share a common source: one specific company tasked with testing the agents. Irregular , an Israeli startup that stress-tests AI models in "high-fidelity research platforms that sim

20h agoThe Verge
MarkTechPostModels

Perplexity Trains Its Computer Agent on Real Mistakes With Hint-Guided Self-Distillation↗

Perplexity Research published a new post-training study. It trains a model inside Perplexity Computer on real user sessions, including failed ones. The method pairs rejection sampling fine-tuning with hint-guided self-distillation. In a live A/B test, tool-call failures fell from 2.24% to 1.77% between 2 trained checkpoints. Perplexity team reports this as a statistically significant 21.2% […] The post Perplexity Trains Its Computer Agent on Real Mistakes With Hint-Guided Self-Distillation appeared first on MarkTechPost .

21h agoMarkTechPost
MarkTechPostModels

Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX 3 Action: A 7B Open-Weights World Action Model That Tops RoboLab-120↗

Black Forest Labs (BFL), the lab behind the FLUX image models, has released FLUX 3 Action. It is a 7B open-weights World Action Model (WAM) for robot control. The model reads camera frames, robot state and a text instruction. It then predicts future video frames and the next chunk of actions together. On the RoboLab-120 […] The post Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX 3 Action: A 7B Open-Weights World Action Model That Tops RoboLab-120 appeared first on MarkTechPost .

1d agoMarkTechPost
MarkTechPostModels

BottleCap AI Releases ThinkingCap-Qwen3.8-27B: 37.2% Fewer Thinking Tokens at a 0.86pp Accuracy Cost↗

BottleCap AI has released ThinkingCap-Qwen3.8-27B, a fine-tune of Qwen3.8-27B that spends 37.2% fewer thinking tokens across 12 benchmarks. Macro accuracy moves from 86.65% to 85.79%, and long-context AA-LCR improves by 2.25pp. The model is a drop-in replacement on vLLM and SGLang, with FP8, NVFP4, GGUF and MLX builds. The post BottleCap AI Releases ThinkingCap-Qwen3.8-27B: 37.2% Fewer Thinking Tokens at a 0.86pp Accuracy Cost appeared first on MarkTechPost .

1d agoMarkTechPost
Towards Data ScienceModels

Jev vs. LLMs: When AI Moves from Generation to Decision-Making↗

I tested TypeSafe AI’s Jev on 3,080 classification tasks to see how its accuracy, latency, calibration, and confidence compare with LLMs — and whether it works as a practical decision layer for AI systems. The post Jev vs. LLMs: When AI Moves from Generation to Decision-Making appeared first on Towards Data Science .

1d agoTowards Data Science
MarkTechPostModels

Contrastive-LM Releases CLM-8B: An Open System One Model That Scores Agent Actions Up to 9× Faster Than Jev↗

Contrastive-LM has released CLM-8B, an open System One model that scores candidate actions against a state instead of generating text. It adds 2 small projection heads to a frozen Qwen3-8B encoder and trains them with a contrastive InfoNCE objective. In zero-shot tests it runs up to 9× faster than TypeSafe's Jev. With fine-tuned heads as a verifier, it reaches 81.6% on held-out DeepSWE tasks and 87.6% on held-out Terminal-Bench 2.1 tasks. The post Contrastive-LM Releases CLM-8B: An Open System One Model That Scores Agent Actions Up to 9× Faster Than Jev appeared first on MarkTechPost .

2d agoMarkTechPost
OfficialModels

GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash: Toward population-scale discovery with efficient pathology foundation models↗

What if pathology foundation models could do more with less? GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash cut computational demands while maintaining strong performance, opening the door to larger studies and broader exploration. The post GigaPath-Flash and GigaTIME-Flash: Toward population-scale discovery with efficient pathology foundation models appeared first on Microsoft Research .

3w agoMicrosoft Research Blog
OfficialModels

EvoLib: Turning experience into evolving knowledge↗

LLMs do not get smarter just by remembering more. EvoLib turns experience into evolving knowledge, taking reusable skills and insights that help models learn and adapt across tasks long after deployment. The post EvoLib: Turning experience into evolving knowledge appeared first on Microsoft Research .

Jul 30, 2026Microsoft Research Blog
MIT Technology Review — AIModels

The AI Hype Index: AI loves cheating↗

Brace yourself: It turns out AI is being optimized for cheating. OpenAI’s agents hacked into Hugging Face to get the answers to a cybersecurity test. Next, they solved a prestigious math problem (or just stole from two top mathematicians’ answer sheets). Anthropic’s models have also hacked into other companies’ systems four times already. And that’s…

3d agoMIT Technology Review — AI
MIT Technology Review — AIModels

Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype↗

It’s been a busy few months for AI hype. At the end of April, Anthropic claimed that its model Claude Mythos is better at finding software vulnerabilities than most security experts. Then we had the OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident, after which Anthropic (proudly) and Meta (reluctantly) disclosed similar incidents involving their models. This was followed…

4d agoMIT Technology Review — AI