Swyx
AI engineering & community
Founder of Latent Space, former Airbyte, Temporal. Writes and podcasts on AI engineering.
Recent activity
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Black Forest Labs' FLUX 3, a multimodal model spanning image, video, audio, and action prediction, has been released in early access, beating existing models like Seedance 2.0, Gemini Omni, and Grok Imagine in various capabilities. The model is jointly trained in a unified architecture, allowing for extension to robotics and other applications. AI summary
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Neolab Eiso Kant's Laguna S 2.1 has been released, offering competitive performance to Thinking Machines at a lower cost and smaller size, with comparable efficiency to Chinese model equivalents. The new model has been touted as cheaper than Deepseek v4 Flash and better than v4 Pro. AI summary
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Poolside's co-CEO on how his small team of top researchers built a model factory capable of training Laguna S - a 118B MOE beating Thinky's ~1T open weights model... and this is just the beginning.
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Several major AI models have been released, including OpenAI's internal cyber-capable model that exploited a zero-day vulnerability, Hugging Face's cyber model, and Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber, which demonstrates the effectiveness of specialization and repeated attempts in achieving security benchmarks. These releases highlight the growing interest in AI cybersecurity and the need for stronger models and more effective governance. Additionally, open-weight model releases, such as Poolside's Laguna S 2.1, aim to promote ecosystem distribution and inference support. AI summary
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Xaira Therapeutics' X-Cell model for drug discovery relies on a large dataset, X-Atlas, which contains information-rich data on gene expression in human cells, enabling the model to predict changes to gene expression and understand the relationships between cell types and states. This approach contrasts with traditional models that rely on smaller, less informative datasets. The X-Cell model has achieved significant improvements over previous models, demonstrating the importance of data quality in AI-driven drug development. AI summary
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The top AI news of the week includes the announcement of the AIE Security track and the release of Sonar CEO Tariq Shaukat's emphasis on verification for safety/security/correctness. Meanwhile, US debate over restricting Chinese open models is gaining momentum, with some technical voices arguing that such restrictions would hurt competition and defensive security. AI summary
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Several AI models have achieved notable performance milestones, including Kimi K3, which has been praised for its strong coding, agentic, and long-horizon knowledge-work performance, and has narrowed the gap between Chinese and Western AI capabilities. Benchmarks from various sources, including Artificial Analysis and Arena, have placed K3 in the top cluster of frontier models, with some arguing it surpasses specific Western models on certain tasks. The release has also sparked discussions around the importance of storage and file systems, as well as the potential for Chinese AI to compress the capability-per-FLOP curve. AI summary
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[AINews] Kimi K3 2.8T-A50B: the largest open model ever released; Opus 4.8-class at Sonnet 5 pricing
Kimi K3, a 2.8T-parameter open model, has been released by Moonshot AI, rivaling the largest closed models and surpassing prior open competitors, with a comparable intelligence to Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, but behind Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol. The model's pricing is at Sonnet 5 levels, with a cost per task of $0.94, and it uses Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) and Attention Residuals (AttnRes) for improved performance. AI summary
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Lila is betting that science, not the internet, is the last untapped source of training data. We went to find out what that actually looks like in a room full of robots.
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Thinky's Inkling is a 975B-params, 41B-active-params multimodal Mixture-of-Experts transformer model, the first open-weights foundation model from the company, supporting text, images, and audio inputs with a context window of up to 1M tokens, pre-trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio, and video. Inkling is licensed under Apache 2.0 and has been released with full weights available, along with immediate support on Tinker platform and Hugging Face. The model is designed for practical use and customization, with controllable reasoning effort levels and a focus on efficient and controllable thinking. AI summary
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OpenAI's Codex has surpassed Claude Code with 6M active users, with Codex's user base increasing by 1M in just one day, according to Tibo's announcement. This growth has led to increased adoption of Codex by companies like JetBrains, which has made it its recommended agent. Meanwhile, research is ongoing into local inference, multimodal systems, and world-models, with releases like Bonsai 27B and OpenMOSS's MOSS-VL-Realtime demonstrating the potential for more efficient and interactive AI systems. AI summary
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AI engineering has shifted its focus from building autonomous agents to designing and managing reliable systems around them, emphasizing the importance of harnesses, workflows, and context management. This trend was evident at the World's Fair, where discussions centered on infrastructure for dependable coding agents and the need for oversight and control. The "loop" concept, including outer and inner loops, has emerged as a key approach to balancing agent autonomy with human oversight. AI summary
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Codex usage has grown over 10x in the past 6 months to reach 7 million active users, with an additional 1 million users in the past day. This surpasses the reported 2 million users and $2.5 billion annual recurring revenue of Claude Code, leading some to speculate that Codex may have overtaken Claude Code in user growth. AI summary
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OpenAI's GPT-5.6 rollout introduced a more explicit model/compute ladder with multiple effort levels, but the added control has been met with criticism over the 30+ configuration combinatorics and missing "Auto" routing, leading to real UX regressions and a need for course-correction. The new model appears strongest in agentic coding, presentation, and some science tasks, but has instruction-following issues, uneven token efficiency, and concerns about jailbreakability. The broader trend is toward harness-centric competition, where value is shifting to routing, memory, tool use, safety rails, and enterprise context. AI summary
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