OpenAI launches Astra, its powerful (and controversial) new model
OpenAI claims that Astra represents "a new frontier on computer and browser use," and that it handles tasks with unmatched "speed, accuracy, and safety."
OpenAI released Astra, a new AI model described as its most powerful and capable to date, with particular strengths in cybersecurity tasks, coding, and computer browser use. The model is becoming available to customers through various paid plans and an API starting Thursday. A significant controversy surrounds Astra's use of a reasoning technique called opaque recurrence, which obscures a monitoring process called chain of thought that researchers use to understand how and why an AI model makes decisions, raising questions about oversight and transparency. OpenAI president Greg Brockman stated the company believes Astra represents the arrival of artificial general intelligence, describing it as a shift in what work people can delegate to AI, though he acknowledged the definition of AGI has evolved from a contractual concept to a "mission concept or spiritual concept."
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Anthropic releases new Mythos and Fable models amid RSI concerns
Anthropic says the new models "show improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision," as well as in communicating more clearly with users.
Also reported by The Verge, SiliconANGLE and MarkTechPost
Google Launches Gemini Decisions API With Gemini Decision 1 at $0.10/M Tokens
Google has launched the Gemini Decisions API, powered by a new model, Gemini Decision 1 (gemini-decision-1). The Gemini Decisions API does not generate text. It scores up to 1,000 typed questions against one shared input and returns calibrated probabilities. For developers, this targets the small branching calls inside agents: routing, policy checks, tool selection and grading. Google prices it at $0.10 per 1M input tokens, with zero output tokens billed. TL;DR Size: Context is 262,144 t
Also reported by SiliconANGLE
Google releases Gemini 4 Carbon with agent ‘swarm’ feature
Google is rolling out its latest AI model, Gemini 4 Carbon, to the general public after releasing it to a select group of "cybersecurity defenders" two weeks ago. Google claims Carbon is its "strongest model" yet, and capable of competing with the very best systems from Anthropic and OpenAI. Google says Gemini 4 Carbon "pushes the frontier even further" than Argon, referring to the company's other frontier model that launched only last month. The company said Argon will likely
Gemini 4 Carbon is now available
The latest version aims to deliver improved performance while reducing the computational resources and energy required for AI operations.
Introducing AlphaProof Code: a breakthrough in verifying complex software at depth
AlphaProof Code agents wrote three million lines of proofs in Lean to verify Signal’s core encryption.
NVIDIA launches GR00T 2 and Isaac Lab 3.0 at CoRL
A range of developers, including RLWRLD, Skild AI, and Flexion, are already using NVIDIA’s latest technology. | Source: NVIDIA NVIDIA Corp. today introduced GR00T 2, its updated open frontier world action model, and Isaac Lab 3.0, the latest version of its open-source robot learning framework. The company made these announcements at the Conference on Robot Learning, or CoRL, in Austin, Texas. NVIDIA also gave a look at how its partners, like Ambi Robotics, Bosch Research, Dexmate, Dyna Rob