No single event defined the week. Capital and product development both concentrated around mechanisms that promise greater selectivity: Lilly bought an autoimmune program aimed at rogue antibodies, while Tencent and Qwen released sparse models that put far fewer parameters to work at inference than their total size suggests. The economic evidence remains early. Business AI adoption has risen sharply since 2023, but the available firm survey data have not yet shown a corresponding employment disruption.
ai AI products found new commercial and technical scale
A milestone in expanding access to AI
ChatGPT advertising reached a $1B annualized revenue run rate and expanded globally, OpenAI said. The company presented advertising as support for free and lower-cost access to its service. The figure gives a measure of the revenue base behind a consumer AI product whose pricing has previously centered on subscriptions and paid usage.
Introducing Hy4 Preview
Tencent released an open-weight, text-only language model with 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, and a 1M-token context window. Its July predecessor had 295B total parameters, 21B active parameters, and a 256,000-token context window. The sparse architecture activated only a fraction of its parameters per request, which can limit inference compute relative to the model's total size.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
Qwen released a multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 125B parameters but 6B active parameters, describing it as an early preview of the architecture planned for its next generation. Quantized versions tested locally required 72.5GB and 78.9GB of storage. The difference between total and active parameters reflects the continuing push to make larger models faster to run.
Better answers, broader thinking: What students gain from ChatGPT and critical-thinking training
A randomized study of more than 1,000 university students tested ChatGPT alongside critical-thinking training on a real-world assignment. OpenAI said the study examined answer quality, originality, critical thinking, and student performance. The design tested the system in coursework rather than relying on self-reported use, though the supplied results did not specify the size of effects on each outcome.
software Security response meets faster automated pressure
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days
OCaml projects saw attempted security exploits within about 10 minutes of patches being shared for discussion, according to Cambridge computer science professor and OCaml maintainer Anil Madhavapeddy. He contrasted that with a prior expectation that issues would take days to attract attention and releases could follow within 1 or 2 weeks. Public discussion of a vulnerability now appears sufficient to trigger rapid probing of exposed systems.
How we saved 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1’s DNS cache
Cloudflare cut memory used by each DNS cache entry in its 1.1.1.1 service by 56% through five Rust-level changes to the cache layout. The company estimated that the work freed about 100TB across its fleet. The result shows how low-level data layout changes can materially alter infrastructure capacity at global service scale.
BotBase for Operators: A clearer path to joining Cloudflare's directory of bots and agents
Cloudflare added a dashboard area for bot operators to submit and manage their bots and agents. The update included submission-status tracking, editing, and a behavior model intended to let operators declare how their systems use content. The directory gives operators a structured channel for identifying automated traffic as websites and intermediaries develop policies for agents.
pharma Autoimmune dealmaking and mixed clinical signals
Eli Lilly inks $2.88B Merida buyout for autoimmune drugs against rogue antibodies
Eli Lilly agreed to acquire Merida Biosciences for up to $2.875B. The transaction gives Lilly a position in therapies designed to selectively degrade pathogenic autoantibodies, an approach to autoimmune disease that targets disease-causing antibodies rather than broadly suppressing immune activity. The price places substantial value on a program built around a specific protein-degradation mechanism.
STAT+: FDA approves Protagonist and Takeda’s drug for rare blood cancer
The FDA approved Mimrylo from Takeda and Protagonist for polycythemia vera, a rare blood cancer. The drug introduced a new treatment mechanism for the condition, according to the report. Takeda's approval expanded its blood-cancer portfolio in a disease where controlling excess red blood cell production is central to treatment.
Jazz’s Ziihera secures 2nd survival win to solidify its HER2-positive stomach cancer status
Jazz Pharmaceuticals reported a second overall-survival win for Ziihera in HER2-positive stomach cancer. The bispecific drug had already recorded one survival result, and the additional outcome strengthened Jazz's claim that it can become a preferred HER2 treatment in the disease. Overall survival remains one of the most consequential clinical endpoints in oncology drug development.
ESC: AZ, Ionis' Wainua post-mortem throws water on silencer-plus-stabilizer approach in ATTR-CM
A phase 3 study of AstraZeneca and Ionis's antisense drug Wainua produced a surprise washout in transthyretin-mediated amyloid cardiomyopathy. The result put pressure on the strategy of combining a gene-silencing drug with a stabilizer, which other developers are also pursuing. Alnylam subsequently defended its own heart-disease medicines after the AstraZeneca failure.
BioNTech-Genentech cancer vax records more deaths than control in scrapped ph. 2 test
BioNTech and Genentech scrapped a phase 2 cancer-vaccine study after their treatment arm recorded more deaths than the control group. The failure came after Merck and Moderna reported a phase 3 success for a personalized mRNA vaccine paired with Keytruda. The contrasting results leave combination therapy and standalone use as materially different tests of the mRNA cancer-vaccine approach.
economy Business AI adoption rose without a visible jobs shock
AI and Employment: So Far, So Good
The Census Bureau found that the share of businesses reporting AI use to produce goods and services rose from 3.7% in September 2023 to about 10% by late 2025. The agency asked hundreds of thousands of firms whether they had used AI during the previous 2 weeks. Tyler Cowen characterized the employment picture as favorable so far, while the survey documents adoption rather than a causal effect on jobs.
China fact of the day
Advanced AI video tools are threatening work for Chinese actors and online influencers, according to reporting highlighted by Tyler Cowen. ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 was cited as software that lets producers replace digital performers with generated video. The affected market includes millions of jobs in China's gig economy, where lower production costs can change the economics of short-form content.
Everything else this period 206
Items that came through the feeds this period but didn't graduate to a full write-up.
ai 113
a16z (YouTube)
a16z News
AI Explained
- New Claude Opus 4.8: 15 Things You May’ve Missed
- Sam Altman :‘AGI in 2026’, just as Models Start to [Mis]Train Themselves
Alpha Signal
- Z.ai's GLM-5.3 Beats GPT-5.6 on Coding Without Touching Its Base Weights
- Apodex 1.1 Beats DeepSeek on Real-World Agentic Work With a 35B Open Model
- GitHub Ships Pinned Views and a Security Fix to Its Issues Tracker
- OpenAI Cuts Cursor's Access to GPT Models After SpaceX Takeover
- Perplexity's Search API Tops Agent Leaderboard, Beating Rivals at $5 Flat
- Stripe's Link Wallet Lets AI Agents Buy Things on Your Behalf
- Perplexity Adds Z.ai's GLM 5.3 to Power Deep Research Inside Computer
- Epoch's EBR-Bench Reveals Humans Learn While Frontier AI Stays Stuck
- Exa's Dynamic Highlights Cuts Agent Search Tokens by 40% Without Losing Quality
- Anthropic's Claude Beats Human Researchers Fixing AI Alignment at $4 an Hour
- GitHub Copilot Invades Slack and Teams to Fix Bugs During Meetings
- Krea Reveals Krea 3 and an Agent-Driven Creative Platform for Designers
Andrej Karpathy (YouTube)
Anthropic (YouTube)
- We're building a way for AI models to connect to any device and run real experiments.
- AI models can now help run physical science experiments
- Model Hardware Standard: AI operating physical equipment
Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander)
- Open Thread 449
- Your Book Review: Thomas Urquhart’s Translation Of Rabelais
- Hidden Open Thread 448.5
- Take The 2026 ACX Survey
- Highlights From The Comments On The Substack Religion Debate
- Re: Re: Re: Pritchard On Liberal Happiness
Cloudflare Blog
CodeEmporium
DeepLearningAI
- Your coding agent keeps solving the same problem
- Spec-driven development and local AI are a natural pair.
- Take back control of your AI coding workflow
Dwarkesh Patel
- The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
- Dylan Patel – Anthropic & OpenAI will have most of the world’s compute by 2028
Dwarkesh Patel (YouTube)
- We're Worried About the Wrong Kind of Centralization - Dylan Patel
- Two Labs Are About to Take Half the World's New Compute - Dylan Patel
- Why Jane Street Makes More From Claude Than Anthropic Does - Dylan Patel
- Why Humans Can Still Beat AI at Coding - Ryan Greenblatt
- Why Isn’t China Further Behind in AI? - Dylan Patel
- AI Doesn't Need to Be Good at Politics to Change Everything - Ryan Greenblatt
- Dylan Patel – Two labs will soon control most of the world's workforce
- Why AI labs are shelving their best models - Dylan Patel
- Machine Learning Is Shallow Compared to Math - Ryan Greenblatt
Fireship
- DeepSeek is back... and Silicon Valley is terrified
- The most expensive software bug in history...
- The summer Math fell to the machines...
Google AI / DeepMind
Google Research Blog
- Planetary prediction engine: Automating global models via Earth AI
- GlucoFM: Foundation model for continuous glucose monitoring
Hacker News (front page)
- I think the military commissary's freezers were hacked
- OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor
- Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
- Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates
Hugging Face Blog
InfoQ
- Java News Roundup: GraalVM, Jakarta Data, JNoSQL, Azul Payara, WildFly, Quarkus, Atmosphere
- Article: Eliminating Long-Lived Credentials in GCP with Workload Identity Federation
- Podcast: Scott Jenson on Evolving Desktop OS, Local-First, & Agentic UX
- Presentation: Running AI at the Edge: Running Real Workloads Directly in the Browser
- Foundry Model Router Expands from Two Regions to 28, Refreshing Its Model Pool
- FlexGanttFX is Open Source
- Cloudflare Extends AI Search to Make it Easier for Agents and Developers to Search Custom Data
- AWS Open Sources Kiro Crew for Asynchronous Coding Agents
- Presentation: Architecting the Data Layer for AI Agents: from Transactional Systems to MCP and Semantic Models
- Cloudflare Workers Accept Inbound TCP, with gRPC the First Protocol on Top
- FreeToken Unlocks Frontier MoE Inference on Consumer Hardware via Dynamic Co-Execution
- Uber Builds GitFarm to Run Git Operations as a Service for Large-Scale Monorepos
Latent Space
- [AINews] OpenAI shuts off Cursor
- [AINews] OpenAI to reach AGI bar by end-2026
- [AINews] NVIDIA buys HuggingFace for $13B, as OpenAI publishes their HF incident retro
- [AINews] Hot Chips: OpenAI’s Jalapeño, Cerebras CS-5, Groq 3 LPX, Apple M6
- Lovable CTO: The Future of SaaS Is Apps That Agents Can Use
Mo Bitar (YouTube)
OpenAI News
- Polimill builds Japan's next-generation public AI infrastructure
- Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
- Supporting Thailand’s next generation of AI startups
- Expanding OpenAI’s presence in Brazil
- Learning never stops: How AI makes learning continuous
- Bringing ChatGPT for Teachers to more U.S. school districts
- The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead
- How loveholidays is making everyone a builder with Codex
- The full stack behind abundant intelligence
- Jalapeño’s first results show industry-leading speed and efficiency in AI inference
r/LocalLLaMA
- CUDA: extend MOE fusion to specdec, earlier MOE glu fusion and topk-router fusion were restricted to 1 token by ynankani · Pull Request #27621 · ggml-org/llama.cpp
- deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp · Hugging Face
- pipecat-ai/phonellm-alpha-1: GPT 5.6 Terra performance on typical voice agent tasks at 1/3 the latency and 1/18 the cost
- How I got Qwen 3.8 27b running at ~75t/s decode on 16GB RTX 5080
- Could this affect M5 Ultra price/availability?
- Me these days
- We’re the Team Behind Apodex 1.1 — Ask Us Anything!
r/MachineLearning
- Good Machine Learning Posters [D]
- [D] Monthly Who's Hiring and Who wants to be Hired?
- Claude Code for Research Papers [R]
- NeurIPS accepted papers leaked? [D]
- Reconstructing 3D bone geometry from 2 X-ray silhouettes using a statistical shape model + differentiable rendering [P]
- [R] Autonomous Mathematical Discovery in an Open-World Multi-Agent Environment
- Implementing Kimi K3 from scratch in PyTorch [P]
- *ACL Findings or TMLR? [D]
- Open-source access-control checker for retrieval-based AI applications [P]
- Do you use a whiteboard when thinking? [D]
- You can beat SOTA Time Series Anomaly Detection methods with a 100 year old algorithm [R]
- I analyzed 31,352 hourly LLM benchmark scores: within-day variation was 2.8 points, while between-day variation was 8.4 [P]
Rowan Cheung
- Can AI design a working jet engine? 🚀👀 #trendingshorts #ai #technology
- He designed a vaccine to cure his dog’s cancer🔬👀 #trendingshorts #ai #tech #medical #science
- These researchers figured out how to slow down the speed of light 💡👀 #trendingshorts #science
Simon Willison
- Understanding ChatGPT Work
- Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
- Quoting Paul Dix
- EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
- llm-anthropic 0.27
Two Minute Papers
- The Billion Dollar AI Gap Is Collapsing
- DeepSeek’s New AI System Shouldn’t Be Possible
- This Small AI Will Change Everything
Yannic Kilcher
software 5
PostHog Engineering
Stripe Engineering
The Pragmatic Engineer
pharma 46
BioPharma Dive
- The next frontier: Advancing foundation models with multimodal data
- Moderna raises $2.6B to support cancer work; FDA clears updated COVID vaccines
- AstraZeneca, Ionis data spark debate about RNA drugs’ impact on deadly heart disease
- This week in charts: Biotech’s rebound is undeniable
- FDA green lights Priovant drug for rare skin disease
- Michael Polansky has a new, skin-focused biotech. Don’t call it a drug company.
Fierce Biotech
- Electra aims to light up Nasdaq with IPO for phase 2/3 I&I push
- ESC26: AstraZeneca's heart failure drug shows promise in ph. 2 trial
- Natera teams with Angiex on cancer drug trial monitoring
- AusperBio adds $120M series C to advance hep B oligo therapy through phase 3 and beyond
- Teva saddles up as stalking horse bidder for bankrupt BioXcel’s neuroscience portfolio
- Genentech doubles down on ADC-resistant cancers with $1B DualityBio pact
- Chutes & Ladders—Vivace revs up C-suite ahead of pivotal push
- CEPI backs push to bring Egyptian biotech's Ebola vaccine into clinic to curb fast-growing outbreak
- Osivax bags flu vaccine rights to pursue combination shot vision
- Roche nabs expanded FDA approval for diagnostic tied to Jazz’s cancer drug
Fierce Pharma
- CDMO Lonza hones commercial focus with company vet's return to new role
- B. Braun adds to a string of IV solution recalls in US
- Takeda bolsters blood cancer portfolio with FDA nod for Mimrylo in polycythemia vera
- On the 'cusp,' PharmaEssentia gains FDA label expansion for Besremi
- MrBeast, Snapchat, AI and more: Pharma marketing’s pulse check
- Lilly scores Novo-pressuring Mounjaro expansion to curb heart risks in diabetes patients
- Biogen enlists lupus patient advocate to share social media story of resilience
- Omnicom PR consultancy injects new leadership into pharma push
- Stephen Farquhar takes over as CEO of Publicis Health Media
- Teva saddles up as stalking horse bidder for bankrupt BioXcel’s neuroscience portfolio
Healthcare Dive
- The first 14 days: How specialty programs set patients up for success
- Boston Scientific says cyberattack has disrupted product manufacturing
- Physicians want compensation boost from AI productivity gains: survey
- Specialty providers refute hefty Georgetown estimates of No Surprises costs
- Humana-owned Villages Health agrees to $542M settlement for overbilling Medicare
- Most Americans want providers to disclose AI use, report says
- Sword Health to acquire Headspace
STAT News
- Opinion: The most shocking thing about the latest statistics on CTE in football is that we find them so shocking
- STAT+: After a rough stretch, mRNA gets a boost — at least for now
- STAT+: Cadre of radiopharmaceuticals experts pushes the bounds in cancer therapy
- STAT+: Alnylam defends heart disease drugs after failure of AstraZeneca’s Wainua
- STAT+: A Novartis drug cut inflammation. Can it improve heart outcomes?
- Juul gets OK to sell updated vaping device with age-gating technology
- Opinion: The unintended consequences of the Lindsay Clancy case
- STAT+: Up and down the ladder: The latest comings and goings
- STAT+: AstraZeneca and Ionis detail surprise failure of heart disease drug, with Alnylam closely watching
- At a federal autism advisory committee meeting, members double down on long-debunked theories
- STAT+: Pharmalittle: We’re reading about an AstraZeneca trial failure, a ‘monstrous’ conflict of interest, and more
Works in Progress
healthtech 5
economy 31
Bank Underground (Bank of England)
- Has UK food inflation been under the weather?
- Is UK productivity growth low? A historical and cross-country perspective
Ben Felix
Conversable Economist (Timothy Taylor)
- GAO: One More Warning on US Federal Debt
- Secular Stagnation and Wealth Inequality: Antecedents and Lessons
Kyla Scanlon
Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen)
- Spain fact of the day
- Anthropomorphizing AI?
- Russia markets in everything
- Sunday assorted links
- Finding Emily
- Interviewing Yiyang Zhuge (Zhong Shu)
- Scholar Data
- Costco facts of the day
- Visions from San Francisco Bay
- Saturday assorted links
Money & Macro
- What happened to China's property collapse?
- Why you should stop worrying about the birth rate collapse
Net Interest (Marc Rubinstein)
Noahpinion (Noah Smith)
Patrick Boyle
- Scott Bessent Is at War With Prices — and Prices Are Winning!
- The Insane US-Japan Currency Bailout
- How Much Would an AI Crash Destroy?
Prof G Media
culture 2
The Ezra Klein Show
vc 4
Not Boring (Packy McCormick)
Tomasz Tunguz