a16Z announced the top 100 AI apps
1. Consumer AI is starting to stabilize.
This edition of the list saw only 11 new names on the web rankings compared with 17 on last edition.
The mobile list saw more new entrants, as the App Store cracked down on ChatGPT copycats.
2. For the first time, a16Z ranked Google domains separately - and four properties made the web ranks.
3. Grok and Meta get in the game. Grok debuted at #4 on the web list and #23 on mobile - going from no app to 20M+ MAUs in less than a year.
Grok 4 and the companion launch continued to push traffic up.
Meta squeaked on to the web list at #46, but missed the mobile cutoff.
4. China gets winners + exports abroad. ChatGPT, Claude, etc. are banned in China, so a domestic ecosystem has emerged - Quark, Doubao, Kimi made the list with largely Chinese usage.
And, 7 web cos and 22 mobile cos were developed in China but made the list for global usage.
1. Consumer AI is starting to stabilize.
This edition of the list saw only 11 new names on the web rankings compared with 17 on last edition.
The mobile list saw more new entrants, as the App Store cracked down on ChatGPT copycats.
2. For the first time, a16Z ranked Google domains separately - and four properties made the web ranks.
3. Grok and Meta get in the game. Grok debuted at #4 on the web list and #23 on mobile - going from no app to 20M+ MAUs in less than a year.
Grok 4 and the companion launch continued to push traffic up.
Meta squeaked on to the web list at #46, but missed the mobile cutoff.
4. China gets winners + exports abroad. ChatGPT, Claude, etc. are banned in China, so a domestic ecosystem has emerged - Quark, Doubao, Kimi made the list with largely Chinese usage.
And, 7 web cos and 22 mobile cos were developed in China but made the list for global usage.
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Anthropic launched the PHP SDK for the Anthropic API. Now offer SDKs for Python, TypeScript, Java, Go, Ruby, and PHP.
Claude Platform Docs
CLI, SDKs, and libraries
Official tools for building with the Claude API: the ant CLI, client SDKs in seven languages, and framework-specific libraries.
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Tencent: VLMs can self-reward during RL training β no visual annotations needed
-Decompose VLM reasoning into visual vs. language parts
-Prompt the same VLM without visual input for visual reward
-Decompose VLM reasoning into visual vs. language parts
-Prompt the same VLM without visual input for visual reward
arXiv.org
Self-Rewarding Vision-Language Model via Reasoning Decomposition
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often suffer from visual hallucinations: generating things that are not consistent with visual inputs and language shortcuts, where they skip the visual part and just...
The US Commerce Dept has published Q2 GDP data on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, TRON, Stellar, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Polygon & Optimism, with distribution via Pyth and Chainlink.
Cointelegraph
Chainlink, Pyth Become Oracle Providers for US Government
The US government has selected blockchain data oracle providers Chainlink and Pyth for its onchain government economic data initiative.
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OpenAI released a new Codex features:
- A new IDE extension
- Easily move tasks between the cloud and your local environment
- Code reviews in GitHub
- Revamped Codex CLI
Powered by GPT-5 and available through your ChatGPT plan.
- A new IDE extension
- Easily move tasks between the cloud and your local environment
- Code reviews in GitHub
- Revamped Codex CLI
Powered by GPT-5 and available through your ChatGPT plan.
OpenAI
Codex in ChatGPT | AI Coding Agents for Software Engineering
Codex in ChatGPT helps engineering teams build faster with AI coding agents. Complete pull requests, refactors, code reviews, automations, and more across parallel workflows.
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Microsoft introduced MAI-1-preview:
- the first foundation model trained end to end in house
- in public testing on LMArena.
Microsoft has been working on MAI-1 since at least May 2024. The goal was to have an in-house alternative to OpenAI's models. If previous leaks in the press were correct we even know its size: 500B.
- the first foundation model trained end to end in house
- in public testing on LMArena.
Microsoft has been working on MAI-1 since at least May 2024. The goal was to have an in-house alternative to OpenAI's models. If previous leaks in the press were correct we even know its size: 500B.
Microsoft AI
Two in-house models in support of our mission | Microsoft AI
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xAI has released their coding model. It is free to try out for a limited time on multiple platforms.
This is a guide with tips on how to get the best results from Grok Code Fast 1.
The model is generally available via the xAI API, priced at $0.20 / 1M input tokens, $1.50 / 1M output tokens, and $0.02 / 1M cached tokens.
Grok Code Fast 1 is versatile across the full stack and is particularly strong at TypeScript, Python, Java, Rust, C++, and Go.
For the next 7 days, Grok Code Fast 1 is available for free on popular agentic coding platforms including Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Cline, opencode, Windsurf, Roo Code, and Kilo Code.
This is a guide with tips on how to get the best results from Grok Code Fast 1.
The model is generally available via the xAI API, priced at $0.20 / 1M input tokens, $1.50 / 1M output tokens, and $0.02 / 1M cached tokens.
Grok Code Fast 1 is versatile across the full stack and is particularly strong at TypeScript, Python, Java, Rust, C++, and Go.
For the next 7 days, Grok Code Fast 1 is available for free on popular agentic coding platforms including Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Cline, opencode, Windsurf, Roo Code, and Kilo Code.
x.ai
Grok Code Fast 1
We're thrilled to introduce grok-code-fast-1, a speedy and economical reasoning model that excels at agentic coding.
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Is GPT-realtime too pricey for you? Here is a free alternative - Step-Audio 2 mini (7B): new SOTA open source LALM:
- Free alternative to expensive GPT Realtime API
- End-to-end speech I/O
- Advanced speech & audio understanding
- Expressive prosody control
- Intelligent speech conversation
- Web search support
SOTA on LibriSpeech, MMAU, URO-Bench & more.
HF.
- Free alternative to expensive GPT Realtime API
- End-to-end speech I/O
- Advanced speech & audio understanding
- Expressive prosody control
- Intelligent speech conversation
- Web search support
SOTA on LibriSpeech, MMAU, URO-Bench & more.
HF.
GitHub
GitHub - stepfun-ai/Step-Audio2: Step-Audio 2 is an end-to-end multi-modal large language model designed for industry-strengthβ¦
Step-Audio 2 is an end-to-end multi-modal large language model designed for industry-strength audio understanding and speech conversation. - stepfun-ai/Step-Audio2
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This humanoid robot can now rally over 100 consecutive shots against a human in real table tennis β fully autonomous, sub-second reaction, human-like strikes.
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Google DeepMind claims: general agents contain world models
This study gives a formal answer:
- Any agent that generalizes to multi-step goals must have learned a predictive model of its environment.
- This model can be extracted from its policy.
- Higher performance & more complex goals demand increasingly accurate world models.
Implications span:
- Safer, more general AI
- Limits on agent capabilities in complex settings
- New algorithms to elicit world models directly from agents.
This study gives a formal answer:
- Any agent that generalizes to multi-step goals must have learned a predictive model of its environment.
- This model can be extracted from its policy.
- Higher performance & more complex goals demand increasingly accurate world models.
Implications span:
- Safer, more general AI
- Limits on agent capabilities in complex settings
- New algorithms to elicit world models directly from agents.
arXiv.org
General agents contain world models
Are world models a necessary ingredient for flexible, goal-directed behaviour, or is model-free learning sufficient? We provide a formal answer to this question, showing that any agent capable of...
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New open-weights Chinese model with a really detailed tech report dropped. Meituan (delivery app company DoorDash) released LongCat-Flash.
The model is a 560B passive ~27B active MoE with adaptive number of active parameters depending on the context thanks to the Zero-Computational expert.
1) New architecture
-Layers have 2 Attention blocks and both FFN and MoE, that way you can overlap the 2 all-to-all coms. (also it's only 28 layers but you have to take into account the 2 attention blocks).
- They add the zero-computational expert that tokens can choose and do nothing, kinda like a "sink" for easy tokens.
- For load balancing, they have a dsv3-like aux loss free to set the average real/fake expert per token. They apply a decay schedule to this bias update. They also do loss balance control.
2) Scaling
- They made changes to MLA/MoE to have variance alignment at init. The gains are pretty impressive in Figure 5, but i don't know to what extent this has impact later on.
- Model growth init is pretty cool, they first train a 2x smaller model and then "when it's trained enough" (a bit unclear here how many B tokens) they init the final model by just stacking the layers of the smaller model.
3) Stability
- They track Gradient Norm Ratio and cosine similarity between experts to adjust the weight of the load balancing loss (they recommend Gradient Norm Ratio <0.1).
- To avoid large activations, they apply a z-loss to the hidden state, with a pretty small coef (another alternative to qk-clip/norm).
- They set Adam epsilon to 1e-16 and show that you want it to be lower than the gradient RMS range.
4) Others
-They train on 20T tokens for phase 1, "multiple T of tokens" for mid training on STEM/code data (70% of the mixture), 100B for long context extension without yarn (80B for 32k, 20B for 128k). The long context documents represent 25% of the mixture (not sure if it's % of documents or tokens, which changes a lot here).
- Pre-training data pipeline is context extraction, quality filtering, dedup.
- They release two new benchmarks Meeseeks (multi-turn IF) and VitaBench (real-world business scenario).
- Lots of details in the infra/inference with info on speculative decoding acceptance, quantization, deployment, kernel optimization, coms overlapping, etc.
HuggingFace.
The model is a 560B passive ~27B active MoE with adaptive number of active parameters depending on the context thanks to the Zero-Computational expert.
1) New architecture
-Layers have 2 Attention blocks and both FFN and MoE, that way you can overlap the 2 all-to-all coms. (also it's only 28 layers but you have to take into account the 2 attention blocks).
- They add the zero-computational expert that tokens can choose and do nothing, kinda like a "sink" for easy tokens.
- For load balancing, they have a dsv3-like aux loss free to set the average real/fake expert per token. They apply a decay schedule to this bias update. They also do loss balance control.
2) Scaling
- They made changes to MLA/MoE to have variance alignment at init. The gains are pretty impressive in Figure 5, but i don't know to what extent this has impact later on.
- Model growth init is pretty cool, they first train a 2x smaller model and then "when it's trained enough" (a bit unclear here how many B tokens) they init the final model by just stacking the layers of the smaller model.
3) Stability
- They track Gradient Norm Ratio and cosine similarity between experts to adjust the weight of the load balancing loss (they recommend Gradient Norm Ratio <0.1).
- To avoid large activations, they apply a z-loss to the hidden state, with a pretty small coef (another alternative to qk-clip/norm).
- They set Adam epsilon to 1e-16 and show that you want it to be lower than the gradient RMS range.
4) Others
-They train on 20T tokens for phase 1, "multiple T of tokens" for mid training on STEM/code data (70% of the mixture), 100B for long context extension without yarn (80B for 32k, 20B for 128k). The long context documents represent 25% of the mixture (not sure if it's % of documents or tokens, which changes a lot here).
- Pre-training data pipeline is context extraction, quality filtering, dedup.
- They release two new benchmarks Meeseeks (multi-turn IF) and VitaBench (real-world business scenario).
- Lots of details in the infra/inference with info on speculative decoding acceptance, quantization, deployment, kernel optimization, coms overlapping, etc.
HuggingFace.
GitHub
LongCat-Flash-Chat/tech_report.pdf at main Β· meituan-longcat/LongCat-Flash-Chat
Contribute to meituan-longcat/LongCat-Flash-Chat development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Neurofounders Startup Map
Neurofounders launched a living database of 100+ cutting-edge neuroscience startups.
Submit a startup here.
Each company is listed with:
- Logo & mission summary
- Funding stage & founding year
- Country of origin & identifying tags
You can search, sort, and filter to explore the landscape across five categories:
1. Brain-Computer Interfaces
2. Neuromodulation
3. Neuroimaging
4. Tools & Infrastructure
5. Cognitive & Mental Health
The map already includes many of the most groundbreaking ventures, but itβs just the start.
Neurofounders launched a living database of 100+ cutting-edge neuroscience startups.
Submit a startup here.
Each company is listed with:
- Logo & mission summary
- Funding stage & founding year
- Country of origin & identifying tags
You can search, sort, and filter to explore the landscape across five categories:
1. Brain-Computer Interfaces
2. Neuromodulation
3. Neuroimaging
4. Tools & Infrastructure
5. Cognitive & Mental Health
The map already includes many of the most groundbreaking ventures, but itβs just the start.
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Apple just released FastVLM and MobileCLIP2 on Hugging Face.
The models are up to 85x faster and 3.4x smaller than previous work, enabling real-time vision language model (VLM) applications.
It can even do live video captioning 100% locally in your browser.
Try the live demo here.
The models are up to 85x faster and 3.4x smaller than previous work, enabling real-time vision language model (VLM) applications.
It can even do live video captioning 100% locally in your browser.
Try the live demo here.
huggingface.co
apple (Apple)
Org profile for Apple on Hugging Face, the AI community building the future.
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5_SCs_1756803544.pdf
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The new money layer: insights into the future of stablecoins - report
1. Stablecoins go institutional in 2025
2. Payments power the next wave of adoption
3. Distribution is the engine of value creation
4. Local stablecoins will unlock more use cases
5. Stablecoins will grow 10Γ but are not a one-size-fits-all solution
Where to play?
- Strategic ambition.
- Use-case selection.
How to win?
- Technology design
- Go-to-market strategy
1. Stablecoins go institutional in 2025
2. Payments power the next wave of adoption
3. Distribution is the engine of value creation
4. Local stablecoins will unlock more use cases
5. Stablecoins will grow 10Γ but are not a one-size-fits-all solution
Where to play?
- Strategic ambition.
- Use-case selection.
How to win?
- Technology design
- Go-to-market strategy
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Can AI help understand how the brain learns to see the world? New work from Meta.
Researchers compared the activation of DINOv3
to the activations of the human brain in response to the same images using both fMRI and MEG.
It shows how the training of DINOv3, with different architectures, types and amount of data, can clarify the structure and emergence of visual representations in the humain brain.
Researchers compared the activation of DINOv3
to the activations of the human brain in response to the same images using both fMRI and MEG.
It shows how the training of DINOv3, with different architectures, types and amount of data, can clarify the structure and emergence of visual representations in the humain brain.
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Biomni-R0 is the first RL agent end-to-end for biomedical research.
1. nearly 2Γ stronger than its open-source base
2. >10% better than frontier closed-source models
3. Scalable path to hill climb to expert-level performance
1. nearly 2Γ stronger than its open-source base
2. >10% better than frontier closed-source models
3. Scalable path to hill climb to expert-level performance
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OpenAI acquired Statsig (A/B testing) for $1.1 billion
Vijaye Raji founder & CEO of Statsig, will join OpenAI as CTO of Applications to lead engineering for ChatGPT & Codex, following the acquisition of Statsig.
Srinivas Narayanan promoted to CTO of B2B Applications.
Kevin Weil will be heading a new team as the VP of AI for Science.
Vijaye Raji founder & CEO of Statsig, will join OpenAI as CTO of Applications to lead engineering for ChatGPT & Codex, following the acquisition of Statsig.
Srinivas Narayanan promoted to CTO of B2B Applications.
Kevin Weil will be heading a new team as the VP of AI for Science.
OpenAI
Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig
Vijaye Raji will step into a new role as CTO of Applications, reporting to CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo, following the acquisition of Statsig.
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EPFL , ETH Zurich released Apertus, Switzerland's first large-scale, multilingual LLM.
apertvs.ai
Fully Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI
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NVIDIA just dropped Universal Deep Research.You can use it to design your own AI research assistant.
Universal Deep Research (UDR) is the first truly customizable research agent that breaks free from hard-coded limitations.
Unlike existing research tools that force you into predetermined workflows, UDR lets users create, edit, and refine completely custom research strategies without any training required.
The system comes with example strategies (minimal, expansive, intensive) but the real power is in the customization.
Code.
Universal Deep Research (UDR) is the first truly customizable research agent that breaks free from hard-coded limitations.
Unlike existing research tools that force you into predetermined workflows, UDR lets users create, edit, and refine completely custom research strategies without any training required.
The system comes with example strategies (minimal, expansive, intensive) but the real power is in the customization.
Code.
Nvidia
Universal Deep Research
Website for the project 'Universal Deep Research: Bring Your Own Model and Strategy'
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A great work from MIT:General Social Agents
In a nutshell, it's about how you might create "general" agents in the sense that their behavior would match real humans even in novel settings.
It's both about the method (agent-building pipeline) & some demonstrations that this "works" (using real human subject experiments).
In a nutshell, it's about how you might create "general" agents in the sense that their behavior would match real humans even in novel settings.
It's both about the method (agent-building pipeline) & some demonstrations that this "works" (using real human subject experiments).
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