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  4. Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion model claims to beat GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at a fraction of the wait
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Benchmarks

Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion model claims to beat GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at a fraction of the wait

Inception says Mercury 3 is the most capable diffusion language model released so far. The company claims it runs four to eight times faster than GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 and beats both in eight of 12 benchmarks. There are no independent tests yet. The article Inception's Mercury 3 diffusion model claims to beat GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at a fraction of the wait appeared first on The Decoder.

Part of a story that several outlets report: Inception releases Mercury 3 model claiming speed advantage

Get smart on it

An AI startup has released a new language model that uses diffusion technology, a different approach than standard models. Instead of generating text word by word, diffusion models create a rough draft of an entire answer and then refine it through multiple passes, which the company claims makes it substantially faster. In the company's internal benchmarks, the model outperforms comparable competitors on most tests while running significantly faster, though independent testing does not yet exist. The model is designed for applications where speed is critical, such as AI agents, customer support, and smart glasses, where small delays accumulate into noticeable slowdowns.

Explainer: Choosing Your Claude Model: Why Cheaper Isn't Always Faster for Agentic Workflows

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Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark moves his prediction for self-improving AI forward to 2027

A new benchmark by P-Zero Research measures how well AI models design and evaluate experiments on their own. The results are improving so fast that Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark now thinks self-improving AI could arrive by 2027. The article Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark moves his prediction for self-improving AI forward to 2027 appeared first on The Decoder.

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Claude Science tackles deadly scorpion stings by designing protein binders from scratch

Anthropic's Claude independently designed protein binders targeting deadly scorpion neurotoxins. Out of more than 318,000 designs, 211 were tested in the lab. Seventeen met the criteria, and the two strongest bind extremely tightly to Cn2, a toxin from a Mexican scorpion. Whether they actually work as antivenom remains an open question. The article Claude Science tackles deadly scorpion stings by designing protein binders from scratch appeared first on The Decoder.

Also reported by The Verge

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Microsoft says its AI tool is better than doctors at diagnosing conditions

Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman. | Getty Images For years, AI leaders have touted healthcare as one of the clearest examples of where their technology will improve lives. Now "it is finally here," Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman tells The Verge. The company claims to have developed an AI-powered tool it says can diagnose conditions up to four times more accurately than human doctors. The findings, published Thursday in one of the world's most prestigious journals, Science,

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Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman says its AI outperforms doctors on hard cases as he chases ‘medical superintelligence’

Microsoft’s new AI diagnostic system beat generalist doctors on hard cases, according to a study in Science. But most of the improvement seems to come from the AI models underneath, not from Microsoft’s system itself.

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Fancy harnesses make coding agents more expensive but not better, study finds

A controlled study shows that switching between coding-agent harnesses like Claude Code, OpenCode, or mini-SWE-agent barely moves pass rates more than rerunning the same setup. Cost per task, however, can triple, driven mainly by the system prompt that gets resent with every step. The article Fancy harnesses make coding agents more expensive but not better, study finds appeared first on The Decoder.

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Forced to pick, Grok’s AI model chooses Republicans. OpenAI’s picks Democrats.

A new study found Grok's AI overwhelmingly recommends Republican candidates while OpenAI's GPT favors Democrats, with the two AI models disagreeing in more than 90% of nearly 500 election races.