• This $9 key physically locks your most addictive apps• OpenAI reportedly finds evidence that more of its agents ran amok• India is starting to pay for apps, not just download them• Google nixes its Earth AI feature one day after launch, amid criticism it would spread misinformation• Sam Altman isn’t the only one who wants to pump the brakes on AI• Snapchat no longer rewards fully AI-generated Spotlight content• Siri AI could come with a paywall for power users• SpaceX won’t remove all of xAI’s unpermitted turbines for another year• Smallest.ai raises $13M to build ultra-fast voice AI that sounds genuinely human• AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off• Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests• AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have sold its public portfolio, but it still has its Anthropic shares• Reddit reports a solid quarter but shows signs of AI’s impact• Investors love AI, as long as you’re a cloud host• Judge says Trump admin still lacks evidence for Anthropic ‘supply-chain risk’ label• Gemini API Managed Agents: 3.6 Flash, hooks, and more• 5 ways AI Mode in Search helps you enjoy the real world• 5 ways to host the ultimate dinner party with Google Search• 3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026• Connect more of your apps to Search• Create, edit and star in videos with two Google Vids updates• Celebrating 25 years of visual search innovation• Expanding Managed Agents in Gemini API: background tasks, remote MCP and more• The latest AI news we announced in June 2026• New York City educators and industry leaders gathered at Google’s offices to shape the future of AI in classrooms.• Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers• Ask an AI expert: What exactly is the full stack?• Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app• New research shows how AMIE, our medical AI, could help manage health conditions.• We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.• Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million using Claude for menial coding task, went 860% over budget — 'catastrophically expensive' coding blunders discovered in internal Amazon AI usage metrics - Tom's Hardware• Deploying Kimi K3 on AWS - Amazon Web Services (AWS)• Leopold Aschenbrenner Built a Hot A.I. Hedge Fund. Then it Melted Down. - The New York Times• Why did OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI models hack other companies? - NPR• Why many Connecticut school districts are turning to the same artificial intelligence platform - ctinsider.com• Artificial Intelligence and data centers reshape career landscape, workforce demands - ABC11 News• China’s tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House - theguardian.com• Judge denies bid by Musk's xAI to block Minnesota nudification ban - upi.com• Is AI Reasoning Right for the Wrong Reasons? - Quanta Magazine• AI poster causes controversy in Ohio State Fair contest - FOX 8 News• Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare: Physicians Must Lead the Conversation - southfloridahospitalnews.com• Prediction: The Historic Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Build-Out Will Make This Stock a Multibagger - The Motley Fool• Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations - Anthropic• National Lab Discovery Series: PermitAI™: Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Environmental Reviews and Permitting - Department of Energy (.gov)• Montana Tech Names First Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer in Montana University System - mtech.edu• Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science• Advancing responsible AI across Europe• Building abundant intelligence• Univé builds an AI-ready workforce• Disrupting a Criminal Scam Operation• Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT-5.6• How avatarin built a 24/7 retail agent with GPT-Realtime• How enabling two settings tripled our scores on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark• Accelerating scientific discovery with ChatGPT for Academic Researchers• How GPT-5.6 fuses frontier intelligence with frontier efficiency• Scientific computing in the age of agentic AI• How AI is expanding what people do at work• Launching Health in ChatGPT • Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community• How news organizations are using AI to advance their vital missions• Simplify your morning with this vibe-coded schedule app.• Find out what’s new in the Gemini app in July's Gemini Drop.• Gemini Spark now integrates with Chrome• Introducing Gemini Robotics ER 2• Gemini for macOS adds new natural language capabilities• How Gemini Flash agents are helping a Michigan dairy farmer• Here’s how to ask Gemini Live for help with anything you see.• 3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026• 13 Google tips for a fun, productive summer off from college• Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber• 5 ways to build a side hustle with Gemini• How Gemini is speaking the language of Southeast Asia• Here’s how to make study notebooks in the Gemini app.• 3 ways this coffee shop is growing with Gemini• The latest AI news we announced in June 2026• Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here’s why it matters more than you think.• Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure• Claude Code costs up to $200 a month. Goose does the same thing for free.• Listen Labs raises $69M after viral billboard hiring stunt to scale AI customer interviews• Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI• Anthropic launches Cowork, a Claude Desktop agent that works in your files — no coding required• Nous Research's NousCoder-14B is an open-source coding model landing right in the Claude Code moment• Best Universities To Study AI in 2026• 10 top women in AI in 2026• Pope Leo XIV Declares AI a Threat to Human Dignity and Workers’ Rights• ChatGPT Is Making People Think They’re Gods and Their Families Are Terrified• AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say• Netflix Adds ChatGPT-Powered AI to Stop You From Scrolling Forever• Murder Victim Speaks from the Grave in Courtroom Through AI• China Unveils World’s First AI Hospital: 14 Virtual Doctors Ready to Treat Thousands Daily• Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night• Therapists Too Expensive? Why Thousands of Women Are Spilling Their Deepest Secrets to ChatGPT• The 10 best AI email assistants in 2026• What is enterprise AI? And how to implement it• AI integration: How to bring AI into your workflows• The best mind mapping software in 2026• The best webinar software for marketers in 2026• Dropbox vs. Google Drive: Which is right for you? [2026]• The best productivity apps for Mac in 2026• AI workflow automation: What it is and how to get started• What is AI automation? A complete guide • What happens to a lawyer's business model when AI makes him 5x faster• How to build a secure automated system on Zapier• Zapier vs. UiPath: Which is best? [2026]• What are agent skills? How to take your AI agent from capable to useful• Zapier vs. Celigo: Which is best for enterprise automation? [2026]• Hootsuite vs. Buffer: Which social media management tool is best? [2026]
Celebrating 25 years of visual search innovation
AI

Celebrating 25 years of visual search innovation

Google Images is turning 25. Here’s a look back at some major milestones — and new ways to explore and create visual content.

Judge denies bid by Musk's xAI to block Minnesota nudification ban - upi.com
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Judge denies bid by Musk's xAI to block Minnesota nudification ban - upi.com

Judge denies bid by Musk's xAI to block Minnesota nudification ban  upi.com

Scientific computing in the age of agentic AI
OpenAI News

Scientific computing in the age of agentic AI

A new field report shows how scientists use AI coding agents to modernize scientific computing, accelerating software development and discovery in genomics and beyond.

AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off

After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have […]

AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say
DailyAI

AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say

Chinese tech powerhouse Baidu has filed a patent for a system that could use AI to decode animal sounds and behaviour then translate those signals into human language. For the millions of pet owners wondering what their animals are thinking, this could be the first real step toward bridging the communication gap between humans and animals. The tech Baidu’s system would collect animal vocalizations, body movements, and biological signals. It would merge that data and feed it into an AI model trained to identify emotional states. These emotional states could then be rendered in human language to boost “cross-species communication”. The post AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say appeared first on DailyAI.

How to build a secure automated system on Zapier
The Zapier Blog

How to build a secure automated system on Zapier

At Zapier, we're big believers in automation. That's a given. But our platform goes beyond automating simple "if this, then that" work. An automated workflow—what we call a Zap—is the perfect starting point to get more work done. But it's just one piece of a larger picture. The real goal is a complete system: one place to capture your data, store it, and act on it, with security, access controls, and permissions built in at the platform level. You can create that entire system on Zapier. And if

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations - Anthropic
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations - Anthropic

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations  Anthropic

India is starting to pay for apps, not just download them
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

India is starting to pay for apps, not just download them

India's app market generated a record $345 million in Q2.

Prediction: The Historic Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Build-Out Will Make This Stock a Multibagger - The Motley Fool
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Prediction: The Historic Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Build-Out Will Make This Stock a Multibagger - The Motley Fool

Prediction: The Historic Artificial Intelligence (AI) Infrastructure Build-Out Will Make This Stock a Multibagger  The Motley Fool

National Lab Discovery Series: PermitAI™: Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Environmental Reviews and Permitting - Department of Energy (.gov)
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

National Lab Discovery Series: PermitAI™: Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Environmental Reviews and Permitting - Department of Energy (.gov)

National Lab Discovery Series: PermitAI™: Using Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Environmental Reviews and Permitting  Department of Energy (.gov)

Gemini Spark now integrates with Chrome
Gemini

Gemini Spark now integrates with Chrome

An overview of the latest Gemini Spark updates, including new Chrome web browsing capabilities.

The best webinar software for marketers in 2026
The Zapier Blog

The best webinar software for marketers in 2026

Webinars allow you to share your expertise at scale, helping you connect directly with new customers and deeply engage with existing ones. But there's more to webinars than just the content—you also need to invite and manage attendees, run the online event, facilitate real-time engagement, and measure success.  That's where webinar software comes in. The best webinar platforms help you streamline and automate all the logistics related to running a webinar so you can focus on sharing your knowled

13 Google tips for a fun, productive summer off from college
Gemini

13 Google tips for a fun, productive summer off from college

Discover how college students can use Google AI tools, like Gemini and AI Mode, to prep for grad school, internships and fall courses.

The best productivity apps for Mac in 2026
The Zapier Blog

The best productivity apps for Mac in 2026

If you're a Mac user, you have high standards. You invested in a high-quality machine for a reason—and you expect the best software to match. It shouldn't just work on your operating system and respond to familiar keyboard shortcuts—it should feel like a Mac app. It should be that ideal blend of form and function that you've come to expect from the Apple ecosystem. And developers know this—which is why there are so many productivity apps for Mac that are miles better than what you can find for o

China’s tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House - theguardian.com
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

China’s tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House - theguardian.com

China’s tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House  theguardian.com

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
OpenAI News

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

OpenAI shares new results on long-standing open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science, including advances in geometry, cryptography, and complexity.

How Gemini is speaking the language of Southeast Asia
Gemini

How Gemini is speaking the language of Southeast Asia

Gemini is taking off across Southeast Asia, thanks to its local language fluency and the region’s mobile-first population.

Why many Connecticut school districts are turning to the same artificial intelligence platform - ctinsider.com
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Why many Connecticut school districts are turning to the same artificial intelligence platform - ctinsider.com

Why many Connecticut school districts are turning to the same artificial intelligence platform  ctinsider.com

Why did OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI models hack other companies? - NPR
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Why did OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI models hack other companies? - NPR

Why did OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI models hack other companies?  NPR

Simplify your morning with this vibe-coded schedule app.
Gemini

Simplify your morning with this vibe-coded schedule app.

Tired of starting your morning staring at bright screens and stressful notifications? Raph, a creative technologist at Google, built a custom app called Glanceboard with…

We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.
AI

We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.

Google has announced a $1.5 billion investment for 2026 and 2027 to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama. Operating since 2019 on a repurposed former…

Dropbox vs. Google Drive: Which is right for you? [2026]
The Zapier Blog

Dropbox vs. Google Drive: Which is right for you? [2026]

On its own, cloud storage is a commodity. Any provider worth its salt will let you back up your files to the cloud, sync them across devices, and share them with other people. But cloud storage apps like Dropbox and Google Drive now offer far more than just storage: with AI tools, real-time collaboration, and eSignatures all bundled together, each platform is now a destination for getting work done rather than just a place to stash files. As a result, Dropbox and Google Drive are more useful tha

Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT-5.6
OpenAI News

Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT-5.6

Explore lower GPT‑5.6 pricing for Luna and Terra—and how OpenAI’s more efficient models help enterprises deploy AI workflows at scale.

The best mind mapping software in 2026
The Zapier Blog

The best mind mapping software in 2026

Mind mapping is a creative way to brainstorm and find connections between different ideas. Done right, it's a great way to come up with new ideas and solutions to tricky problems, outline an article or presentation, and generally just get your thoughts in order. While it can be done as a group, it's often a solo practice. I do most of my mind mapping digitally—and even when I don't, I often recreate a paper mind map online so that I can have it safely stored and easily searched. (It's a weird hy

5 ways to host the ultimate dinner party with Google Search
AI

5 ways to host the ultimate dinner party with Google Search

These AI features can help you craft a menu, design a tablescape, and handle other party-planning tasks.

Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app
AI

Our latest Google Finance upgrades, including a new app

The new Google Finance is coming out of beta and launching a new Android app.

Leopold Aschenbrenner Built a Hot A.I. Hedge Fund. Then it Melted Down. - The New York Times
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Leopold Aschenbrenner Built a Hot A.I. Hedge Fund. Then it Melted Down. - The New York Times

Leopold Aschenbrenner Built a Hot A.I. Hedge Fund. Then it Melted Down.  The New York Times

10 top women in AI in 2026
DailyAI

10 top women in AI in 2026

AI is changing our world, but the stories of who build it often get lost in the noise. Behind the headlines and hype, a group of women are solving AI’s fundamental challenges – despite working in an industry persisently impacted by gender inequality. Women make up just 22% of AI professionals worldwide and only 12% of AI researchers. In academic publishing, female researchers account for just 29% of first authors on AI papers, a number that hasn’t increased since the mid-2000s.  This is a story about ten leaders who have influenced AI despite the odds being stacked against them.  Their The post 10 top women in AI in 2026 appeared first on DailyAI.

Montana Tech Names First Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer in Montana University System - mtech.edu
"artificial intelligence" - Google News

Montana Tech Names First Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer in Montana University System - mtech.edu

Montana Tech Names First Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer in Montana University System  mtech.edu

How GPT-5.6 fuses frontier intelligence with frontier efficiency
OpenAI News

How GPT-5.6 fuses frontier intelligence with frontier efficiency

GPT-5.6 improves AI efficiency across models, inference, and agentic workflows, helping deliver more useful intelligence per dollar.

How AI is expanding what people do at work
OpenAI News

How AI is expanding what people do at work

New OpenAI research shows how AI is expanding what workers do, with ChatGPT users taking on tasks across roles and reshaping job boundaries.

Zapier vs. UiPath: Which is best? [2026]
The Zapier Blog

Zapier vs. UiPath: Which is best? [2026]

Some of the world's most critical infrastructure runs on technology that predates the internet. Updating it is risky and complex, so banking systems, government agencies, and insurance firms frequently apply the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule to the decades-old technology that powers their core systems. UiPath rose to prominence by automating legacy systems like these with its robotic process automation (RPA) platform, which lets IT teams design robots that complete actions at the user i

Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community
OpenAI News

Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community

OpenAI announces Project Camellia in Effingham County, Georgia, with commitments to responsible energy, community investment, jobs, and access to Codex.

Accelerating scientific discovery with ChatGPT for Academic Researchers
OpenAI News

Accelerating scientific discovery with ChatGPT for Academic Researchers

OpenAI is giving 100,000 academic researchers free access to ChatGPT's most advanced AI models to accelerate scientific research, collaboration, and discovery.

How Gemini Flash agents are helping a Michigan dairy farmer
Gemini

How Gemini Flash agents are helping a Michigan dairy farmer

See how Paul Windemuller, a Michigan dairy farmer, is changing the way he works by using AI agents built with Gemini 3.6 Flash.

Hootsuite vs. Buffer: Which social media management tool is best? [2026]
The Zapier Blog

Hootsuite vs. Buffer: Which social media management tool is best? [2026]

Whether you're an occasional poster or a social media marketer, you need social media management apps to automate posts, monitor performance, and run multiple social media accounts without too much chaos. There are plenty of options to choose from, but the two names you'll see popping up most often in this category are Buffer and Hootsuite. They're both synonymous with social media management, but they differ quite a bit in their features and how they approach the task at hand. I spent time test

Judge says Trump admin still lacks evidence for Anthropic ‘supply-chain risk’ label
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Judge says Trump admin still lacks evidence for Anthropic ‘supply-chain risk’ label

A federal judge said the Trump administration has not presented enough evidence to justify labeling Anthropic a supply-chain risk, casting doubt on the government's ban on its AI technology.

Introducing Gemini Robotics ER 2
Gemini

Introducing Gemini Robotics ER 2

Gemini Robotics ER 2 is a step change in video understanding, tool orchestration, and multi-robot collaboration for robotic applications.

Gemini for macOS adds new natural language capabilities
Gemini

Gemini for macOS adds new natural language capabilities

A look at how the Gemini app for macOS now lets you speak naturally to get clean transcriptions, edits, and summaries just using your voice.

Connect more of your apps to Search
AI

Connect more of your apps to Search

You’ll be able to securely link and interact with your go-to services directly in AI Mode.

How news organizations are using AI to advance their vital missions
OpenAI News

How news organizations are using AI to advance their vital missions

News organizations are using AI to strengthen reporting, grow audiences, and improve business operations, with OpenAI tools supporting journalists and publishers worldwide.

Nous Research's NousCoder-14B is an open-source coding model landing right in the Claude Code moment
AI | VentureBeat

Nous Research's NousCoder-14B is an open-source coding model landing right in the Claude Code moment

Nous Research, the open-source artificial intelligence startup backed by crypto venture firm Paradigm, released a new competitive programming model on Monday that it says matches or exceeds several larger proprietary systems — trained in just four days using 48 of Nvidia's latest B200 graphics processors. The model, called NousCoder-14B, is another entry in a crowded field of AI coding assistants, but arrives at a particularly charged moment: Claude Code, the agentic programming tool from rival Anthropic, has dominated social media discussion since New Year's Day, with developers posting breathless testimonials about its capabilities. The simultaneous developments underscore how quickly AI-assisted software development is evolving — and how fiercely companies large and small are competing to capture what many believe will become a foundational technology for how software gets written. type: embedded-entry-inline id: 74cSyrq6OUrp9SEQ5zOUSl NousCoder-14B achieves a 67.87 percent accuracy rate on LiveCodeBench v6, a standardized evaluation that tests models on competitive programming problems published between August 2024 and May 2025. That figure represents a 7.08 percentage point improvement over the base model it was trained from, Alibaba's Qwen3-14B, according to Nous Research's technical report published alongside the release. "I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour," wrote Jaana Dogan, a principal engineer at Google responsible for the Gemini API, in a viral post on X last week that captured the prevailing mood around AI coding tools. Dogan was describing a distributed agent orchestration system her team had spent a year developing — a system Claude Code approximated from a three-paragraph prompt. The juxtaposition is instructive: while Anthropic's Claude Code has captured imaginations with demonstrations of end-to-end software development, Nous Research is betting that open-source alternatives trained on verifiable problems can close the gap — and that transparency in how these models are built matters as much as raw capability. How Nous Research built an AI coding model that anyone can replicate What distinguishes the NousCoder-14B release from many competitor announcements is its radical openness. Nous Research published not just the model weights but the complete reinforcement learning environment, benchmark suite, and training harness — built on the company's Atropos framework — enabling any researcher with sufficient compute to reproduce or extend the work. "Open-sourcing the Atropos stack provides the necessary infrastructure for reproducible olympiad-level reasoning research," noted one observer on X, summarizing the significance for the academic and open-source communities. The model was trained by Joe Li, a researcher in residence at Nous Research and a former competitive programmer himself. Li's technical report reveals an unexpectedly personal dimension: he compared the model's improvement trajectory to his own journey on Codeforces, the competitive programming platform where participants earn ratings based on contest performance. Based on rough estimates mapping LiveCodeBench scores to Codeforces ratings, Li calculated that NousCoder-14B's improvemen t— from approximately the 1600-1750 rating range to 2100-2200 — mirrors a leap that took him nearly two years of sustained practice between ages 14 and 16. The model accomplished the equivalent in four days. "Watching that final training run unfold was quite a surreal experience," Li wrote in the technical report. But Li was quick to note an important caveat that speaks to broader questions about AI efficiency: he solved roughly 1,000 problems during those two years, while the model required 24,000. Humans, at least for now, remain dramatically more sample-efficient learners. Inside the reinforcement learning system that trains on 24,000 competitive programming problems NousCoder-14B's training process offers a window into the increasingly sophisticated techniques researchers use to improve AI reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning. The approach relies on what researchers call "verifiable rewards" — a system where the model generates code solutions, those solutions are executed against test cases, and the model receives a simple binary signal: correct or incorrect. This feedback loop, while conceptually straightforward, requires significant infrastructure to execute at scale. Nous Research used Modal, a cloud computing platform, to run sandboxed code execution in parallel. Each of the 24,000 training problems contains hundreds of test cases on average, and the system must verify that generated code produces correct outputs within time and memory constraints — 15 seconds and 4 gigabytes, respectively. The training employed a technique called DAPO (Dynamic Sampling Policy Optimization), which the researchers found performed slightly better than alternatives in their experiments. A key innovation involves "dynamic sampling" — discarding training examples where the model either solves all attempts or fails all attempts, since these provide no useful gradient signal for learning. The researchers also adopted "iterative context extension," first training the model with a 32,000-token context window before expanding to 40,000 tokens. During evaluation, extending the context further to approximately 80,000 tokens produced the best results, with accuracy reaching 67.87 percent. Perhaps most significantly, the training pipeline overlaps inference and verification — as soon as the model generates a solution, it begins work on the next problem while the previous solution is being checked. This pipelining, combined with asynchronous training where multiple model instances work in parallel, maximizes hardware utilization on expensive GPU clusters. The looming data shortage that could slow AI coding model progress Buried in Li's technical report is a finding with significant implications for the future of AI development: the training dataset for NousCoder-14B encompasses "a significant portion of all readily available, verifiable competitive programming problems in a standardized dataset format." In other words, for this particular domain, the researchers are approaching the limits of high-quality training data. "The total number of competitive programming problems on the Internet is roughly the same order of magnitude," Li wrote, referring to the 24,000 problems used for training. "This suggests that within the competitive programming domain, we have approached the limits of high-quality data." This observation echoes growing concern across the AI industry about data constraints. While compute continues to scale according to well-understood economic and engineering principles, training data is "increasingly finite," as Li put it. "It appears that some of the most important research that needs to be done in the future will be in the areas of synthetic data generation and data efficient algorithms and architectures," he concluded. The challenge is particularly acute for competitive programming because the domain requires problems with known correct solutions that can be verified automatically. Unlike natural language tasks where human evaluation or proxy metrics suffice, code either works or it doesn't — making synthetic data generation considerably more difficult. Li identified one potential avenue: training models not just to solve problems but to generate solvable problems, enabling a form of self-play similar to techniques that proved successful in game-playing AI systems. "Once synthetic problem generation is solved, self-play becomes a very interesting direction," he wrote. A $65 million bet that open-source AI can compete with Big Tech Nous Research has carved out a distinctive position in the AI landscape: a company committed to open-source releases that compete with — and sometimes exceed — proprietary alternatives. The company raised $50 million in April 2025 in a round led by Paradigm, the cryptocurrency-focused venture firm founded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam. Total funding reached $65 million, according to some reports. The investment reflected growing interest in decentralized approaches to AI training, an area where Nous Research has developed its Psyche platform. Previous releases include Hermes 4, a family of models that we reported "outperform ChatGPT without content restrictions," and DeepHermes-3, which the company described as the first "toggle-on reasoning model" — allowing users to activate extended thinking capabilities on demand. The company has cultivated a distinctive aesthetic and community, prompting some skepticism about whether style might overshadow substance. "Ofc i'm gonna believe an anime pfp company. stop benchmarkmaxxing ffs," wrote one critic on X, referring to Nous Research's anime-style branding and the industry practice of optimizing for benchmark performance. Others raised technical questions. "Based on the benchmark, Nemotron is better," noted one commenter, referring to Nvidia's family of language models. Another asked whether NousCoder-14B is "agentic focused or just 'one shot' coding" — a distinction that matters for practical software development, where iterating on feedback typically produces better results than single attempts. What researchers say must happen next for AI coding tools to keep improving The release includes several directions for future work that hint at where AI coding research may be heading. Multi-turn reinforcement learning tops the list. Currently, the model receives only a final binary reward — pass or fail — after generating a solution. But competitive programming problems typically include public test cases that provide intermediate feedback: compilation errors, incorrect outputs, time limit violations. Training models to incorporate this feedback across multiple attempts could significantly improve performance. Controlling response length also remains a challenge. The researchers found that incorrect solutions tended to be longer than correct ones, and response lengths quickly saturated available context windows during training — a pattern that various algorithmic modifications failed to resolve. Perhaps most ambitiously, Li proposed "problem generation and self-play" — training models to both solve and create programming problems. This would address the data scarcity problem directly by enabling models to generate their own training curricula. "Humans are great at generating interesting and useful problems for other competitive programmers, but it appears that there still exists a significant gap in LLM capabilities in creative problem generation," Li wrote. The model is available now on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license. For researchers and developers who want to build on the work, Nous Research has published the complete Atropos training stack alongside it. What took Li two years of adolescent dedication to achieve—climbing from a 1600-level novice to a 2100-rated competitor on Codeforces—an AI replicated in 96 hours. He needed 1,000 problems. The model needed 24,000. But soon enough, these systems may learn to write their own problems, teach themselves, and leave human benchmarks behind entirely. The question is no longer whether machines can learn to code. It's whether they'll soon be better teachers than we ever were.

Sam Altman isn’t the only one who wants to pump the brakes on AI
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Sam Altman isn’t the only one who wants to pump the brakes on AI

After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments came just days after one of OpenAI’s own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face — though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have […]

AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have sold its public portfolio, but it still has its Anthropic shares
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have sold its public portfolio, but it still has its Anthropic shares

The former OpenAI researcher’s fund was forced to unwind public equities after leveraged public bets plummeted. But he still has cards to play.

Gemini API Managed Agents: 3.6 Flash, hooks, and more
AI

Gemini API Managed Agents: 3.6 Flash, hooks, and more

We’re announcing even more new capabilities in Managed Agents in Gemini API so developers can build reliable, production-ready agents.

OpenAI reportedly finds evidence that more of its agents ran amok
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

OpenAI reportedly finds evidence that more of its agents ran amok

OpenAI has reportedly found evidence of additional agent misbehavior as it looks into the incident that occurred with Hugging Face.

SpaceX won’t remove all of xAI’s unpermitted turbines for another year
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

SpaceX won’t remove all of xAI’s unpermitted turbines for another year

SpaceX is building a new power plant for xAI's Colossus data centers, but it won't remove existing, unpermitted turbines for many more months.

Google nixes its Earth AI feature one day after launch, amid criticism it would spread misinformation
AI News & Artificial Intelligence | TechCrunch

Google nixes its Earth AI feature one day after launch, amid criticism it would spread misinformation

A tool that allowed anyone to generate fake AI-generated imagery and superimpose it over real Google Earth maps quickly spurred backlash.

How avatarin built a 24/7 retail agent with GPT-Realtime
OpenAI News

How avatarin built a 24/7 retail agent with GPT-Realtime

avatarin uses OpenAI’s GPT-Realtime to give Yamada Denki shoppers 24/7 multilingual support. In two weeks, 30,000 people used the agent and 92% of survey responses were positive.

Univé builds an AI-ready workforce
OpenAI News

Univé builds an AI-ready workforce

See how Univé built an AI-ready workforce with ChatGPT Enterprise by combining leadership, responsible governance, and employee-led innovation to transform work at scale.