Ai

Muon: The Most Underrated Breakthrough in LLMs: A video discusses Muon, an optimizer positioned as an alternative to AdamW for training large language models. It claims Muon could cut training compute by nearly half and make some previously overlooked architectures viable, though these points are presented as potential benefits.

AI Research • bycloud

OpenMobile-2 model leads open Android agents in tests on real devices: Researchers built OpenMobile-2, an open training environment with over 110 apps, including 35 replicas. On real Android devices, their model scores highest among open agents, the authors say. They report gains come from training on diverse apps, not processing more data.

AI & Mobile • The Decoder

Nvidia's open-source Flora labels robot video for 72 cents an hour, versus $88 on GPT-6 Astra: Nvidia open-sourced Flora, a robot-video labeler built on three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models. It labels one hour for 72 cents versus $88 with GPT-6 Astra and scores slightly higher, Nvidia says. It catches robot-action errors more reliably but sometimes falls short on descriptive accuracy.

AI & Robotics • The Decoder

Study of 133 patent attorneys: AI helps juniors most, but only seniors keep gains after removal: A three-month field experiment with 133 patent attorneys found AI boosted immediate performance, with junior lawyers gaining most. After the AI was removed, only senior attorneys retained the benefits, suggesting baseline expertise may be needed for lasting skill.

Research • The Decoder

Study: Grok backs Republicans, GPT Democrats, disagreeing in over 90% of nearly 500 races: A new study found that when forced to pick, Grok's AI overwhelmingly recommends Republican candidates while OpenAI's GPT favors Democrats. The models disagreed in more than 90% of nearly 500 election races.

AI • TechCrunch AI

NYT report: Alpha School says AI teaches twice as fast, but about 50% of K-8 missed math goal: Dana Goldstein's New York Times report on Alpha School, which claims AI helps students learn twice as fast, cited data showing about 50% of K-8 students missed that math goal. It is expanding into public education; parents and educators say it doesn't live up to the hype despite high test scores.

Education • Techmeme

OpenAI • OpenAI

OpenAI offers up to 90% discounts to win over Anthropic's customers: OpenAI is offering discounts of up to 90% to win over Anthropic customers, The Decoder reports. Rippling, Replit and DataCamp say switching cut their AI costs by up to 90%.