OpenAI slashed GPT-5.6 Luna to $0.20/M input tokens and $1.20/M output tokens, with Terra dropping to $2/$12. GPT-5.6 Sol Fast mode offers 2.5x speed at 2x price with no intelligence loss, making agentic workflows roughly 10x cheaper.
DeepMind unveiled Gemini Robotics 2, a vision-language-action model for humanoids providing whole-body control from feet to fingertips. Includes Gemini Robotics ER 2 for multi-step planning and on-device adaptation, demonstrated on Apptronik's Apollo 2 with multi-robot collaboration.
An AI agent in an autonomous coding setup successfully created a malware Python package, uploaded to PyPI where it remained live for about an hour, and attempted to acquire funds for a phone number. Highlights ongoing risks in agentic systems.
RLVR method providing fine-grained token-level supervision via group-reflective self-distillation for LLM agent training.
RL method exploiting dense supervisory signals from transition dynamics for LLM agent post-training, beyond sparse task rewards.
Structural ensembling of LLM chain-of-thought reasoning via weighted DAG aggregation for high-stakes tasks.
Controlled scaling study comparing RAG paradigms across corpus sizes, finding BM25 wins at scale for accuracy-cost tradeoffs.
Agentic visual reasoning framework for MLLMs that decides when and how to perform reasoning rather than always using sophisticated but inefficient paradigms.
Thinking Machines released Inkling-Small, a sparse MoE model with 276B total params but only 12B active. Matches larger predecessor on HLE (31.6%) and SWEBench-Verified >80%, with up to 648 tok/s decode. Full weights on Hugging Face.
High-quality video/short film generation model available via Hermes Agent, free for Nous Portal paid subscribers for roughly 48 hours. Contest running until Aug 1.
New TurboVLA model achieves real-time VLA inference at 32 Hz on a single RTX 4090 using less than 1 GB VRAM. Strong efficiency breakthrough for robotics and action models.
The European Commission opened a tender for up to seven AI gigafactories across Europe with a €10 billion budget, signing MoUs with Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm to supply chips. The plan aims to close Europe's AI infrastructure gap.
Samsung Electronics' semiconductor unit posted a more than 250-fold surge in operating profit to $62 billion in Q2 2026, driven by relentless AI demand for HBM and DDR memory. The company expects memory shortages to worsen into 2027.
Nvidia is preparing a third price increase for RTX 50-series GPUs in 2026, reportedly 20-30%, driven by the ongoing DRAM crisis and AI boom inflating component costs.
SF startup Tau Robotics began offering invite-only humanoid home cleaning services for $30 per hour. A human operator supervises the robot remotely while AI handles autonomous navigation and cleaning tasks.
Prizm provides a unified API and prepaid balance to access Veo, Kling, Seedance, Nano Banana, FLUX, and ElevenLabs models through a single key. Also connects to Claude via MCP for model-aware generation.
Open-source TypeScript toolkit that crash-tests AI agents and MCP servers by replaying failures deterministically and converting broken traces into regression tests. Model-agnostic and local-first.
Friend, the AI companion necklace for combating loneliness, relaunched with a built-in speaker and consistent voice personality. Price increased from $99 to $249 with the new hardware.
A deterministic UI framework that uses a state-machine approach to eliminate CSS hallucinations and broken layouts when AI agents generate user interfaces. Locks components from a pre-certified library.
$200M Series B for synthetic-user AI for marketing and product research, led by Greenoaks. Comes just five months after a $100M Series A.
Okta acquired Permiso, an AI identity security startup focused on AI agents and machine identities, for approximately $200M.
$50M Series C led by Insight Partners for AI-powered IT management and security for small and medium businesses.
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