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Vals AI finds AI agent teams barely outperform solo agents, costing up to 5.1x more: Vals AI research found that teams of AI agents barely outperform solo agents while costing up to 5.1x more. In tests with GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5, only one of four showed a measurable quality gain. Anthropic data showed quality plateaus beyond ten agents while token costs keep rising.

AI agents • The Decoder

Manus 2.0 launches Cascade agent harness to cut token costs by 32%: Manus 2.0 has debuted featuring the Cascade agent harness, which reduced token usage by 23.2% and costs by 32% in a test. The release also introduces Cue, an application that provides each agent with its own email, phone number, and wallet, with a Chinese version currently in development.

AI Applications • Pandaily

Meituan releases 1.6-trillion parameter LongCat-2.5-Preview model: Meituan launched LongCat-2.5-Preview, a 1.6-trillion parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with approximately 48 billion active parameters. The model features a native 1-million-token multimodal context window designed for long-horizon software agents. No benchmarks were published during this release.

AI Models • Pandaily

StepFun debuts Step 5 Preview model with 600B parameters: StepFun launched its Step 5 Preview model, a sparse Mixture of Experts model with approximately 600 billion total parameters and 27 billion active parameters. The model features a 1 million token context window for long-horizon agents, with its API live now and BF16 open weights scheduled for October 15, 2026.

StepFun • Pandaily

NaiveAI releases open-weights 309B parameter MoE model: NaiveAI has released Naive-N0.5-Flash under an MIT license. The 309-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model features 15.5 billion active parameters and a native 1-million-token context window. Built on MiMo-V2.5 without full-attention layers, it is designed for coding and AI research.

AI Models • Pandaily