Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Science

Feb 4, 2026

Alibaba has released Qwen3-Coder-Next, a new open-weight AI model for programming agents and local development. Trained on 800,000 verifiable tasks, the model has 80 billion parameters total but only 3 billion active at any time. Despite this small footprint, Alibaba says it outperforms or matches much larger open-source models on coding benchmarks, scoring above 70 percent on SWE-Bench Verified with the SWE-Agent framework. As always, benchmarks only indicate real-world performance.

Performance on Coding Agent Benchmarks — Qwen3-Coder-Next competes with much larger models across multiple coding benchmarks while using only 3 billion active parameters. | Image: Qwen

The model supports 256,000 tokens of context and works with development environments like Claude Code, Qwen Code, Qoder, Kilo, Trae, and Cline. Local tools like Ollama, LMStudio, MLX-LM, llama.cpp, and KTransformers also support it. Qwen3-Coder-Next is available on Hugging Face and ModelScope under the Apache 2.0 license. More details in the blog post and technical report.

Comment Source: Qwen via X

Maximilian Schreiner

Feb 4, 2026

AI and society

OpenAI accuses Musk's xAI of systematic evidence destruction in antitrust case

Elon Musk did not want to portray OpenAI as a "marketing bitch" from Microsoft

Matthias Bastian

Feb 4, 2026

Short News

OpenAI has filled its "Head of Preparedness" position with Dylan Scandinaro, who previously worked on AI safety at competitor Anthropic. CEO Sam Altman announced the hire on X, calling Scandinaro "by far the best candidate" for the role. With OpenAI working on "extremely powerful models," Altman said strong safety measures are essential.

In his own post, Scandinaro acknowledged the technology's major potential benefits but "risks of extreme and even irrecoverable harm." OpenAI recently disclosed that a new coding model received a "high" risk rating in cybersecurity evaluations.

There’s a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it!
Dylan Scandinaro

Scandinaro's Anthropic background adds an interesting layer. The company was founded by former OpenAI employees concerned about OpenAI's product focus and what they saw as insufficient safety measures, and has since become known as one of the more safety-conscious AI developers. Altman says he plans to work with Scandinaro to implement changes across the company.

Comment Source: Altman via X | Scandinaro via X

Matthias Bastian

Feb 4, 2026

AI and society

A new platform lets AI agents pay humans to do the real-world work they can't

On Rentahuman.ai, AI agents can hire people for real-world tasks, from holding signs to picking up packages. It sounds absurd, but it shows what happens when language models stop just talking and start taking action.

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Jonathan Kemper

Feb 4, 2026

Short News

Anthropic has announced two partnerships with major US research institutions to develop AI agents for biological research. The Allen Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) will serve as founding partners in the initiative. According to Anthropic, "modern biological research generates data at unprecedented scale," but turning it into "validated biological insights remains a fundamental bottleneck." The company says manual processes "can't keep pace with the data being produced."

HHMI will develop specialized AI agents at the Janelia Research Campus that connect experimental knowledge to scientific instruments and analysis pipelines. The Allen Institute is working on multi-agent systems for data integration and experiment design that could "compress months of manual analysis into hours." According to Anthropic, these systems "are designed to amplify scientific intuition rather than replace it, keeping researchers in control of scientific direction while handling computational complexity."

The move extends Anthropic's push into scientific applications. The company recently launched Cowork, a feature designed for office work that gives Claude access to local files. OpenAI is also targeting the research market with Prism, an AI workspace for scientific writing.

Comment Source: Anthropic

Matthias Bastian

Feb 4, 2026

Update

AI in practice

Nvidia is reportedly investing $20 billion in OpenAI, says it will proceed "one step at a time"

Matthias Bastian

Feb 3, 2026

Short News

Google's Gemini models are outperforming the competition in board game benchmarks. Google Deepmind and Kaggle have expanded their "Game Arena" platform with two new games: Werewolf and Poker. The platform tests AI models across strategic games that measure different cognitive abilities—chess evaluates logical thinking, Werewolf tests social skills like communication and detecting deception, and Poker assesses how models handle risk and incomplete information.

These games provide objective ways to measure skills like planning and decision-making under uncertainty. Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash currently hold the top spots in all rankings. The Werewolf benchmark serves double duty for security research as well: it tests whether models can detect manipulation without any real-world consequences. According to Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis, the AI industry needs more rigorous tests to properly evaluate the latest models.

Comment Source: Google Blog | Kaggle Blog

Maximilian Schreiner

Feb 3, 2026

Short News

French prosecutors have raided the Paris offices of Elon Musk's platform X. The cybercrime unit is investigating multiple allegations, including unlawful data extraction and aiding the distribution of child sexual abuse material. Sexual deepfakes are also part of the investigation. Musk and former X CEO Linda Yaccarino have been summoned for hearings in April, according to the BBC. X has previously called the investigation politically motivated.

At the same time, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has opened an investigation into Musk's AI tool Grok. The probe focuses on whether personal data was used without consent to create sexualized images. The UK media regulator Ofcom and the European Commission are also continuing their reviews of the platform. X has not commented on the investigations.

Comment Source: BBC