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This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the ups and downs of AI, follow Stevie Bonifield. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Most people probably know Grammarly for its browser extension that suggests how to spruce up your emails, but over the past few years, it's been eyeing bigger ambitions. In October, the company formerly known as Grammarly made a public pivot to rebrand as an AI company called Superhuman. The new name was adopted from Superhuman Mail, an AI email platform that Grammarly acquired i … Read the full story at The Verge.



Reinforcement learning hits a wall with reasoning models because every token gets the same reward. A new algorithm from Alibaba's Qwen team fixes this by weighting each step based on how much it shapes what comes next, doubling the length of thought processes in the process. The article Alibaba's Qwen team makes AI models think deeper with new algorithm appeared first on The Decoder.

As artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure spending continues to accelerate, two members of the "Magnificent Seven" look particularly appealing as beneficiaries over the next decade.

The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) wouldn't be possible without this foundational business.

A qualitative study looks at how developers perceive and push back against low-quality AI content, or "slop," in software development. The critics describe a "tragedy of the commons" where individual productivity gains come at the cost of reviewers and the open-source community. The article Study maps developer frustration over "AI slop" as a "tragedy of the commons" in software development appeared first on The Decoder.

For years, Ted Dintersmith has been sounding the alarm that American schools don’t adequately prepare children for the future. Artificial intelligence will be an inflection point, he said.

EY's Joe Depa says he sees a split in staff. There's "high adoption, right out of the gate" for juniors but senior workers "are somewhat resistant."

Article URL: https://www.orchestra-research.com/perspectives/introducing-new-orchestra Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644877 Points: 2 # Comments: 1

Imai threw 5⅔ scoreless innings with nine strikeouts to earn his first career major league win.

With the midterms right around the corner, the new group is positioned to back candidates who support the AI company's policy agenda.

In addition to Lightcap's new role, OpenAI CMO Kate Rouch will be stepping away from the company to focus on cancer recovery, with a plan to return when her health allows.

A Google study finds that the standard three to five human raters per test example often aren't enough for reliable AI benchmarks, and that splitting your annotation budget the right way matters just as much as the budget itself. The article AI benchmarks systematically ignore how humans disagree, Google study finds appeared first on The Decoder.

AI chatbot traffic is growing seven times faster than social media, but still has four times less total traffic, a Similarweb analysis shows. The data reveals differences in device usage and user behavior. The article AI chatbot traffic grows seven times faster than social media but still trails by a factor of four appeared first on The Decoder.

I've stopped asking, "which AI company should I back?" Instead, I've started asking which problems the major players are ignoring.

Logan Brown, the founder of AI-powered law firm Soxton, lived out her “Legally Blonde” dreams through hometown court hearings as a preteen and attending Harvard Law School.

Article URL: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aef5697 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646241 Points: 10 # Comments: 5

The security industry has spent the last year talking about models, copilots, and agents, but a quieter shift is happening one layer below all of that: Vendors are lining up around a shared way to describe security data. The Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), is emerging as one of the strongest candidates for that job. It gives vendors, enterprises, and practitioners a common way to represent security events, findings, objects, and context. That means less time rewriting field names and custom parsers and more time correlating detections, running analytics, and building workflows that can work across products. In a market where every security team is stitching together endpoint, identity, cloud, SaaS, and AI telemetry, a common infrastructure long felt like a pipe dream, and OCSF now puts it within reach. OCSF in plain language OCSF is an open-source framework for cybersecurity schemas. It’s vendor neutral by design and deliberately agnostic to storage format, data collection,

Murphy Campbell is at the center of a brewing storm around AI and a broken copyright system. | Image: Murphy Campbell In January, folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered several songs on her Spotify profile that did not belong there. They were songs that she had recorded, but she'd never uploaded them to Spotify, and something was off about the vocals. She quickly surmised that someone had pulled performances of the songs she posted to YouTube, created AI covers, and uploaded them to streaming platforms under her name. I ran one of the songs, "Four Marys", through two different AI detectors, and it seemed to support her suspicions with both saying it was probably AI-generated. Campbell was shocked, "I was kind of under the impression that we had a little b … Read the full story at The Verge.

Nearly 50% of data center projects delayed as China holds key to power infrastructure.
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It’s not just Arm Holdings (NASDAQ:ARM) that’s betting big on the future of agentic AI with its new AGI CPU; Chinese tech giant Alibaba (NASDAQ:BABA) also has a new chip that specializes in running next-generation AI agents. Undoubtedly, if you’ve completely written off Alibaba or any of the other Chinese internet stocks amid their latest ... Alibaba Has a New Agentic AI Chip, Too—But Investors Don’t Seem to Care

Article URL: https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/memori-labs-launches-openclaw-plugin-bringing-persistent-ai-memory-to-multi-agent-gateways-c0d32116 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47644665 Points: 2 # Comments: 0

Article URL: https://vibooks.ai/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47645019 Points: 2 # Comments: 1

AI models are rapidly improving at exploiting security vulnerabilities. According to a new study, their offensive cyber capability has been doubling every 5.7 months since 2024, with Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3 Codex now solving tasks that take human experts about three hours. The article AI offensive cyber capabilities are doubling every six months, safety researchers find appeared first on The Decoder.

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11430 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47646345 Points: 2 # Comments: 0

It’s about to become more expensive for Claude Code subscribers to use Anthropic’s coding assistant with OpenClaw and other third-party tools.

Big moves OpenAI acquired TBPN, the founder-led tech/business talk show. Unusual media play — covered by TechCrunch, Ars Technica, and WSJ. Google released Gemma 4 under Apache 2.0. The license shift from their previous terms may matter more than the benchmarks. Direct shot at Chinese open-weights models. Microsoft unveiled three homegrown AI models for speech and image generation — clearly reducing dependence on OpenAI. Security Claude Code source code leaked, triggering enterprise security concerns. VentureBeat published a 5-action checklist for security teams. Axios npm package was trojanized in a supply-chain attack. If your team uses it (most do), worth checking immediately. Granola notes are viewable by anyone with a link by default. PSA if you use it. Product & research Google added Veo, Lyria, and directable AI avatars to Google Vids. Arcee launched Trinity-Large-Thinking — open source, U.S.-made, downloadable enterprise model. AI chatbots are now being use

Plus: The FBI says a recent hack of its wiretap tools poses a national security risk, attackers stole Cisco source code as part of an ongoing supply chain hacking spree, and more.

Building the next generation of robots for successful integration into our homes, offices, and factories is more than just solving the hardware and software problems – we also need to understand how they will be perceived and how they can work effectively with people in those spaces. aspect_ratio In summer 2025, RAI Institute set up a free popup robot experience in the CambridgeSide mall, designed to let people experience state-of-the-art robotics first hand. While news stories about robots and AI are common, with some being overly critical and some overly optimistic, most people have not encountered robots in the flesh (or metal) as it were. With no direct experience, their opinions are largely shaped by pop culture and social media, both of which are more focused on sensational stories instead of accurate information about how the robots might be used effectively and where the technology still falls short. Our goal with the popup was two-fold: first, to give people an opportunity