Tech & AI Daily
Anthropic dropped two new models today and this is the story of the day for anyone building on their API. Benchmark positions, pricing, and context window details are all on the release page and you will want to check how these slot against what you are currently using.
AnkiDroid got hit first: Google is refusing to let apps link to Open Collective for community funding, which is a direct squeeze on FOSS sustainability on Android. This policy will ripple through dozens of well-loved open source apps if it stands.
Google has blocked AuroraStore, the privacy-first Play Store client, leaving de-Googled Android users without a clean path to mainstream apps. If you care about running Android without handing everything to Google, this is a significant and deliberate setback.
A small task-specific transformer trained in under two hours reportedly outperforms much larger models on the ARC-1 benchmark. Either ARC-1 is more gameable than the community assumed, or this is a genuinely interesting data point about targeted training efficiency over brute scale.
Dan Luu went through Ed Zitron's bearish AI predictions and actually ran the numbers rather than just vibing about them. Worth reading if you want a calibrated reality check on the AI skeptic position rather than another hot take.
Mozilla shipped native ad blocking in Firefox for iOS, finally making the browser a real option on Apple hardware rather than just a skinned WebKit shell. This is one of the better outcomes from Apple loosening its browser restrictions.
Simon Willison caught the ChatGPT/Codex app bundling an entire LibreOffice installation and nobody seems to know why it is there. It is a funny bloatware story but also a real signal about how sloppily these desktop wrappers are being assembled.
Fei-Fei Li's WorldLabs released Atlas, a model designed for spatial reasoning and 3D environment understanding. Early-stage but this is exactly the class of model that robotics and AR actually need to stop being demo-ware.
Martin von Zweigbergk, the engineer behind the Jujutsu version control system, has joined ERSC. If you have been watching jj quietly grow as a serious Git alternative, this move tells you something about where the funding and institutional backing is heading.
Slotstream is a new inference tool that splits large model layers across unified memory and swap to run models that should not fit on consumer Apple Silicon. Twelve tokens per second on a 104GB model with a 48GB machine is the kind of result that makes local LLMs a genuinely viable daily driver.
Ambient CSS v3 brings node-based visual effects inspired by Blender directly into CSS without WebGL. It is niche but the demos are wild and it opens up generative UI aesthetics that previously required dropping down to a canvas.
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