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How to — build a small eval set for your own AI feature

The Stack

How to — build a small eval set for your own AI feature

You changed a prompt, and now you can't tell whether the feature got better or you just remembered the good answers. An eval set is how you stop guessing: a fixed batch of real cases with a written pass mark, run again every time you touch anything. You can build a usable one in an afternoon. There is nothing ceremonial about this. A good eval for a product team is 30 to 100 real cases, each with a short statement of what a pass looks like, kept in a file that gets re-run. The public leaderboar

Ant Group rolls Qianwen Office out to every employee

The Arena

Ant Group rolls Qianwen Office out to every employee

Two of China's biggest tech names tied their office stacks together today, and the way they did it is the story: not a cloud deal, but a private install inside Ant's own network. Ant Group has adopted Alibaba's Qianwen Office as the agent base for its entire workforce, with the product running on Kubernetes inside Ant's intranet and the group's own models available alongside it. Ant, which employs tens of thousands of people across payments, fintech and health services, says the arrangement kee

An 83-year-old Enigma message falls to a two-day agent hunt

The Frontier

An 83-year-old Enigma message falls to a two-day agent hunt

A German army dispatch from 1941 sat unread in the archive for 83 years, its 82 letters only solvable if someone recovered the machine settings behind it. This week the settings surfaced — and the interesting part is how the work was checked. A researcher-led investigation using GPT-6 Astra and a set of specialist agents recovered the Enigma key for a message sent on 10 July 1941, and published the whole audit: every search batch, every uncertain letter in the archive, and two independent imple

Open Source Radar — September 17: voice, audits, and MCP testing

The Stack

Open Source Radar — September 17: voice, audits, and MCP testing

Today's trending board is mostly agents and the skill packs that feed them, so the interesting movement is one layer down — the tools that give an agent a voice, test the servers it talks to, and check whether the code it just wrote is actually safe. Voicebox (TypeScript, ~54,700 stars, MIT) — A local-first voice studio that covers both halves of the voice loop: cloning and speech generation on the way out, dictation into any text field on the way in, which is why it reads as an open answer to

GLM's Infra Agent built the stack that serves GLM

The Stack

GLM's Infra Agent built the stack that serves GLM

Z.ai published the engineering log behind GLM-5.3-Flash today, and the news is not the cluster — it is who did the systems work. The lab says a GLM-5.3-powered "Infra Agent" wrote much of the inference stack that now serves that model, and it frames the result as an early, limited form of recursive self-improvement. Z.ai says all production inference for GLM-5.3-Flash runs on a cluster of more than 100,000 Chinese-made accelerators, and that much of the work of getting it there was done by a GL

Deep Dive — The AI buildout is now a fight for factory slots

The Arena

Deep Dive — The AI buildout is now a fight for factory slots

Amazon did not place an order for backup generators this week. It took an option on its supplier's shares, vesting only as the generators get bought. That instrument, not the grid connection, is the story of the AI buildout's next phase. The filing landed Wednesday evening with no press release attached. Generac disclosed that it had issued a warrant to Amazon.com NV Investment Holdings for up to 1,693,745 shares at $200.93 each — roughly 2.6% of the company on a fully diluted basis, and about

Five robot brains in eight days — and the money follows

The Frontier

Five robot brains in eight days — and the money follows

Two things happened to Chinese robotics in the same two weeks: the body makers shipped model after model, and the funding data caught up with why. Three Chinese robot makers released five embodied-AI foundation models in eight days this month — Unitree, AgiBot and Noetix — a pace that says the hardware race is over and the brain is the product. The sequence, per Red Star Capital Bureau: Noetix launched its Scalabot embodied-AI brand and the first HERON world model on September 8, then HERON-CR

AI 101 — How Much Power Does AI Actually Use?

The Everyday

AI 101 — How Much Power Does AI Actually Use?

AI's power use is the electricity burned by the data centers that train and answer with models — about 1.5% of the world's electricity in 2024, and on track to roughly double by 2030. That sounds small, and per query it is genuinely small. The reason it keeps making front pages is where the demand lands: a handful of regional grids, the bills of the people living on them, and the cost of running the machines in the first place. This is the ten-minute version. Why it matters right now. Three thi

The Jev idea was published a year ago — open, and unnoticed

The Frontier

The Jev idea was published a year ago — open, and unnoticed

An independent researcher says he built the thing TypeSafe raised $40 million for, in March 2025, and posted the paper, the weights and the dataset. The receipts are the story. Nandakishor M, who says he now runs a small AI company called Convai Innovations, published a reinforcement-learning model that skips autoregressive token generation entirely and outputs probability distributions in a single pass — in March 2025. On Wednesday he reposted the arXiv paper, the Hugging Face model and the tr

China orders labels and a human sign-off on every AI broadcast

The Guardrails

China orders labels and a human sign-off on every AI broadcast

China spent this month putting AI-generated television in front of viewers. Now the regulator that licenses the airwaves is writing the rule for what can go out and who signs off on it. China's broadcast regulator will require identifying labels on any programming made with AI, and a human in the loop at every key production step. At a State Council Information Office briefing on Thursday, Liu Jianguo of the National Radio and Television Administration said programs generated, produced or aired

Musk won't rule out a Tesla-SpaceX merger to feed the AI buildout

The Arena

Musk won't rule out a Tesla-SpaceX merger to feed the AI buildout

Musk spent the All-In Summit this week sitting in a trailer next to his biggest data center, saying out loud what the capital markets have been pricing for months. Then Browser Use open-sourced an agent that deletes the screenshot step entirely. Asked why Tesla and SpaceX are still two separate companies, Musk did not say they will stay that way. Speaking with SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, he said the two firms already collaborate so closely that "who kno

Utilities sign on to let Google and Nvidia dim data centers on demand

The Arena

Utilities sign on to let Google and Nvidia dim data centers on demand

The power bill is now the AI buildout's real bottleneck — and the industry just answered it with the same move it makes on safety: a voluntary alliance. Emerald AI, Google and Nvidia launched the AI Energy Management Alliance on Wednesday with 18 launch partners, including Anthropic and utilities AES, National Grid, Constellation, NRG and Germany's RWE, to make AI data centers cut their electricity draw when the grid strains. The pitch is that operators can temporarily throttle or shift certain

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