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The ARC benchmark's fall marks another casualty of relentless AI optimization

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DeepseekMath-V2 is Deepseek's latest attempt to pop the US AI bubble

AI research

Frustrated authors withdraw papers after realizing their reviewers are just lazy LLMs

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AI in practice
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Microsoft is disputing a report that it dialed back growth targets for its AI software business after many sales teams fell short last fiscal year. The Information reported that fewer than 20 percent of salespeople in one US unit hit a 50 percent growth target for Azure Foundry, the company's platform for building AI agents. In another group, the original 100 percent goal was reportedly reduced to 50 percent.

Microsoft told CNBC that it has not changed its overall targets and claimed The Information mixed up growth with quotas. Even so, Microsoft's stock dropped more than two percent at times, suggesting investors are taking concerns about the sector's momentum seriously.

AI and society
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A new study from MATS and Anthropic shows that advanced AI models like Claude Opus 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, and GPT-5 can spot and exploit smart contract vulnerabilities in controlled tests. Using the SCONE-bench benchmark, which includes 405 real smart contract exploits from 2020 to 2025, the models produced simulated damage of up to 4.6 million dollars.

Anthropic

In a separate experiment, AI agents reviewed 2,849 new contracts and uncovered two previously unknown vulnerabilities. GPT-5 generated simulated revenue of 3,694 dollars at an estimated API cost of about 3,476 dollars, averaging a net gain of 109 dollars per exploit. All experiments were run in isolated sandbox environments.

The researchers say the findings point to real security risks but also show how the same models could help build stronger defensive tools. Anthropic recently released a study suggesting that AI systems can play a meaningful role in improving cybersecurity.

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Google is rolling out Workspace Studio, a tool for building and managing AI agents inside Google Workspace. The platform lets users automate everything from simple tasks to multi-step processes without writing any code. At the core is the Gemini 3 agent model, which can work independently on long-running tasks and use tools along the way. In Workspace Studio, teams can set up workflows, add instructions, and plug in the tools an agent needs. Microsoft, OpenAI, and other companies are working on similar products.

The agents plug directly into Gmail, Drive, and Chat. They can also connect to services like Asana or Salesforce, though that kind of integration is generally discouraged for security reasons. Google says Workspace Studio will roll out to business customers in the coming weeks. For more background on AI agents, there's an AI Pro webinar and a Deep Dive covering the topic.

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Google is testing an AI feature in its "Discover" news feed that automatically rewrites editorial headlines, often turning them into shorter, more provocative, or simply incorrect versions. The result is the kind of engagement-focused headline the company warns against in its own Discover rules, which explicitly reject clickbait.

Google's guidelines set clear limits on the kinds of headlines Discover should surface. | Image: via Google

Some of the changes are striking. At Ars Technica, the headline "Valve's Steam Machine looks like a console, but don't expect it to be priced like one" was replaced with the inaccurate "Steam Machine price revealed." A Mindfactory report titled "Radeon RX 9070 XT Outsells The Entire NVIDIA RTX 50 Series On Popular German Retailer" was shortened to "AMD GPU tops Nvidia."

Google told The Verge that the feature is a small test meant to help users grasp articles more quickly. Still, the AI-generated rewrites replace newsroom decisions with Google's own automated framing, raising concerns that the company is using AI to tighten its grip on how news is shaped and delivered on top of the influence it already exercises.

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Nvidia used the NeurIPS conference to debut new AI models for autonomous driving and speech processing. The company introduced Alpamayo-R1, a system designed to handle traffic situations through step-by-step logical reasoning. Nvidia says this approach helps the model respond more effectively to complex real-world scenarios than previous systems. The code is public, but the license limits it to non-commercial use.

Nvidia also showed new tools for robotics simulation. In speech AI, the company unveiled MultiTalker, a model that can separate and transcribe overlapping conversations from multiple speakers.

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AI research

The ARC benchmark's fall marks another casualty of relentless AI optimization

AI in practice

DeepseekMath-V2 is Deepseek's latest attempt to pop the US AI bubble

AI research

Frustrated authors withdraw papers after realizing their reviewers are just lazy LLMs

Google News