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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

SenseTime open-sources SenseNova-RoboRSI embodied AI harness and 27B robot brain model: SenseTime open-sourced SenseNova-RoboRSI, an embodied AI evaluation harness, and a 27B robot brain model. The release follows a company study of GPT-6-Astra across 12 simulated benchmarks and 8 real robots. Performance figures are SenseTime's own.

SenseTime • Pandaily

Axera launches AX8860 Edge AI chip series with 256 TOPS, up to 128 GB memory: Axera launched the AX8860 Edge AI chip series at CIIF 2026. The 6nm chips provide 256 TOPS and support up to 128 GB memory, with AXLink cascading and PCIe 5.0. The toolchain is vLLM/SGLang-friendly for on-site large-model inference.

Semiconductors • Pandaily

Microsoft unveils MAI-Base-2 MoE with 2.8T total, 80B active parameters: Microsoft unveiled MAI-Base-2, a mixture-of-experts model with 2.8T total and 80B active parameters. It claims 4x-12x more pretraining FLOPs-efficiency than DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Base. Microsoft also cited MAI-Thinking-1, a general-purpose foundation model post-trained on MAI-Base-1 announced in June.

AI Models • Techmeme