Sora 2 (5 minute read) OpenAI introduced Sora 2, its next-generation video generation model with improved physical realism, finer detail, and greater control. The update supports synchronized dialogue, sound effects, and user interaction through a new app interface. | Former OpenAI and DeepMind researchers raise whopping $300M seed to automate science (2 minute read) Periodic Labs emerged from stealth to build AI scientists that conduct physical experiments autonomously in robotic labs. Founders Ekin Dogus Cubuk (who led Google Brain's materials team that discovered 2 million new crystals with AI) and Liam Fedus (former OpenAI VP who helped create) aim to automate scientific discovery, starting with superconductors, and claim that LLMs need fresh data for physical experiments because they've exhausted the internet as a training source. | | Taking the Bitter Lesson Seriously (3 minute read) AI is fundamentally advanced by scaling, but AI researchers continue to work on algorithms, architecture, and data as if scaling laws were yet to be discovered. More compute and more energy is the most reliable path to advancing AI. Many labs are aiming for recursive self-improvement, but the notion that AI will algorithmically self-improve ad infinitum ignores scaling laws and that research is compute-bound. This makes problems like autonomous science a better problem for AI researchers to work on. | Real AI Agents and Real Work (7 minute read) Quietly and all at once, frontier AIs crossed a threshold into economically valuable work. OpenAI tested experts against AI on multi-hour tasks, and humans won, but barely, with AI's weakness being formatting rather than accuracy. Claude Sonnet 4.5 reproduced an economics paper's findings in minutes, work that would take academics hours of tedious conversion, potentially solving academia's replication crisis at scale. The difference between transformation and waste lies entirely in human judgment about what's worth doing, not merely what can be done. | | Designing agentic loops (11 minute read) Agents can now directly exercise the code they are writing, correct errors, dig through existing implementation details, and even run experiments to find effective code solutions to problems. Coding agents are brute force tools for finding solutions to coding problems. Reducing problems to clear goals and sets of tools that can iterate towards those goals can help coding agents brute-force their way to an effective solution. The art of using agents well is to carefully design the tools and loops for them to use. | How We Made SWE-Bench 50x Smaller (9 minute read) Logicstar shrank SWE-Bench Verified from 240 GiB to just 5 GiB. It can now be downloaded in under a minute, making large-scale evaluation and trace generation on cloud machines fast and painless. The team achieved this result by restructuring layers, trimming unnecessary files, and compressing the results. This article gets into details about how the smaller SWE-Bench Verified was created. | Pre-training under infinite compute (33 minute read) Compute for pretraining grows 4× annually, but web data increases just 1.03× per year, forcing a shift toward more efficient learning algorithms. Regularization parameters 30× higher than standard practice prevent overfitting when models see the same data repeatedly. Ensembling independently trained models achieves lower loss than simply making models larger. The combination cuts data requirements by 5× to match baseline performance and directly translates to improvements on pretraining benchmarks. | | INTELLECT-2: Breaking Centralized AI Training Bottlenecks (10 minute read) Prime Intellect has released INTELLECT-2, a 32B parameter model trained via distributed reinforcement learning instead of traditional centralized GPU clusters. This breakthrough demonstrates that advanced AI models can be developed using a network of volunteer computing resources spread worldwide, potentially democratizing AI development by eliminating the need for massive co-located data centers that currently give tech giants their competitive advantage in the race for more powerful AI systems. | | Love TLDR? Tell your friends and get rewards! | Share your referral link below with friends to get free TLDR swag! | | Track your referrals here. | Want to advertise in TLDR? 📰 If your company is interested in reaching an audience of AI professionals and decision makers, you may want to advertise with us. Want to work at TLDR? 💼 Apply here or send a friend's resume to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email! Thanks for reading, Andrew Tan, Ali Aminian, & Jacob Turner | | | |
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