Firehose

Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking models have been launched, offering fast and fluid conversations with real-time visual and language support. These models can handle complex reasoning, background task execution, and interruptions without disrupting the conversation. AI summary

This paper proposes a new method for estimating confidence in language models, called XConf, which uses the model's past experiences to inform its confidence, rather than just relying on the current inference process. Practitioners might care about this because it could lead to more reliable and trustworthy deployment of language models.

This paper tests the robustness of rubrics generated by language models as reward signals in reinforcement learning, finding that even generic rubrics can be exploited 64% of the time, while tailored rubrics can be used to create fake answers. Practitioners should care because this can lead to biased grading and evaluation.

This paper introduces a fast and efficient post-hoc defense against a type of attack that can bypass safety features in language models, allowing the model to continue functioning but with compromised security. Practitioners caring about model security may be interested in this approach as it can provide an additional layer of protection without requiring significant computational resources.

This paper helps developers make stronger backdoor attacks on large language models by learning to select the most effective set of poisoned examples. Practitioners might care about this because it can be used to improve the security of these models in real-world applications.

This paper investigates the losslessness of a new language model architecture called Orthrus, which claims to achieve exact output sequences through a speculative decoding mechanism. The study finds that the architecture's performance depends on the numerical precision used, and that downstream task performance is not necessarily affected by the losslessness of the speculative decoding.

GPT-6-Astra has demonstrated exceptional capabilities in various domains, including 3D modeling, computer use, and game creation, with benchmark scores indicating a significant jump over previous models. Its performance on scientific evaluations and math benchmarks also showcases its raw intelligence factor, with scores ranging from 62.7% to 169, surpassing human baseline performance in some cases. AI summary

Tim Scarfe interviews the Tufa Labs ARC-AGI-3 team to dissect their winning approach on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, focusing on how their system discovers goals and balances exploration with action efficiency. The episode explores the challeng…