Maximilian Schreiner
Max is the managing editor of THE DECODER, bringing his background in philosophy to explore questions of consciousness and whether machines truly think or just pretend to.
Read full article about: Transformer co-creator Vaswani unveils high-performance Rnj-1 coding model
Essential AI's new open-source model, Rnj-1, outperforms significantly larger competitors on the "SWE-bench Verified" test. This benchmark is considered particularly challenging because it evaluates an AI's ability to independently solve real-world programming problems. Despite being a compact model with just eight billion parameters, Rnj-1 scores 20.8 points.
By comparison, similarly sized models like Qwen 3 (without reasoning, 8B) only reach 4.5 points in Essential AI's testing. The system was introduced by Ashish Vaswani, co-founder of Essential AI and co-author of the famous "Attention Is All You Need" paper that launched the Transformer architecture. Rnj-1 is also Transformer-based, specifically utilizing the Gemma 3 architecture. According to the company, development focused primarily on better pre-training rather than post-training methods like reinforcement learning. These improvements also result in lower pre-training computational costs, thanks to the use of the Muon optimizer.
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Source: EssentialAI
Read full article about: Google Cloud enters multi-year partnership with Replit
Google Cloud has signed a multi-year partnership with the AI coding startup Replit as it looks to strengthen its position against competitors like Anthropic and Cursor. Under the agreement, Replit will deepen its use of Google Cloud services and offer Google models directly on its platform.
Replit has been on a remarkable growth streak, reportedly boosting its annual revenue from 2.8 million dollars to 150 million dollars in less than a year. Google is leaning on the momentum of its new Gemini 3 model as part of this push.
Its biggest rival in the coding-assistant space is Anthropic, whose Claude Code tool hit an annualized revenue of 1 billion dollars in November. Developers also use Claude models widely through other tools like Cursor. Anthropic recently signed a partnership with Snowflake and even acquired the Bun JavaScript runtime to bolster Claude Code.
Despite the competition, Anthropic is also a Google Cloud customer. In October, the company announced plans to rent up to one million TPUs from Google by 2026.