The Stack - SiliconNoon (Page 10)

The Stack

OpenAI puts its full-duplex voice model in the API at $0.05 a minute

OpenAI shipped twice in one day — a voice model developers can finally build on, and a finance product that has Wall Street asking what happens to the apprenticeship. Both push the same thesis: AI stops being an assistant you prompt and becomes infrastructure you assemble. OpenAI put GPT-Live-1, its full-duplex voice model, into the API at $0.05 per minute for the voice layer. One model now handles listening and speaking at once — reasoning over incoming and outgoing audio together instead of c

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Skild's S1 teaches robots a 10-minute task from one video

Robots normally need thousands of teleoperated practice runs to learn a single job. Today two stories pointed the other way — a foundation model that learns by watching once, and a European startup betting €28 million that the transformer is not the end of the story. Skild AI's new S1 foundation model picks up a task the way a person does — by watching it done once. Show S1 a single egocentric video of a human demonstration and the robot reproduces the task on real hardware within minutes: in t

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Open Source Radar — September 10: agents get their hands on physical space

Today's board finally leaves the terminal. Three of the five hottest repos are about agents producing geometry you can build, print, or move a wall through, and the other two are about giving a whole team — or a whole desktop — a shared agent setup. Pascal Editor (TypeScript, 23,200 stars, MIT) — An open-source 3D building editor, built on React Three Fiber and WebGPU, that runs in the browser or from a local CLI and exposes the scene to agents over MCP. It's the mid-rise version of the "agent

The Stack

AI 101 — What is HBM (high-bandwidth memory)?

HBM is the stacked memory package that an AI accelerator's processor can read from and write to many times faster than normal RAM — and right now it is the single most expensive, scarcest part of the AI buildout. If you have read that the memory shortage is raising chip prices, throttling roadmaps, or forcing startups to rethink fabs, HBM is the "memory" in that sentence. This is the ten-minute version. It matters today for one plain reason: every frontier AI chip depends on it, and there is no

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Kepler Computing leaves stealth with $468M to fix AI's memory shortage

Two things landed overnight: a memory startup with serious money behind a claim that matters to every AI data center, and a computer-vision paper that wants to turn ordinary human video into robot skills. Kepler Computing emerged from stealth with $468 million and a claim the AI industry desperately wants to be true: more HBM and SRAM density without EUV machines. The San Jose company, founded in 2018 by CEO Debo Olaosebikan and CTO Sasi Manipatruni, says a ferroelectric composite material plus

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Devin factored RSA-260 on spare GPUs — for about $400,000

Cognition has finally published how its record factorization happened, and the answer is more interesting than the record: an engineer with no expertise in the math pointed a fleet of coding agents at a spare-compute problem and got a world-first in three weeks. Cognition engineer Eric Lu posted the write-up we asked for: RSA-260, the largest number from RSA Laboratories' 1991 challenge ever cracked, fell in about three weeks of part-time work at an estimated 4,900 GPU-days — roughly $400,000 a

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Apple wants to prove your iPhone photos aren't AI slop

Apple's launch event was mostly hardware, but the most consequential announcement was defensive: a way to prove a photo came out of a camera and not a model. Here's what shipped, and what it changes. Apple is shipping cryptographic proof of provenance on the iPhone 18 Pro. When you press the shutter, the main camera sensor also captures signed sensor data, and Apple's Private Cloud Compute turns it into a reference image — Apple's own phrase is a "digital negative" — that you can view in Photos

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Open Source Radar — September 9: video, plugins, and a 2B model

Today's board splits four ways: a renderer that turns agent-written HTML into real video, a skill that cuts the preamble out of agent answers, OpenAI quietly moving Codex's extension surface into one marketplace, and an open-weights 2.5B model that says it beats everything in its weight class. HyperFrames (TypeScript, ~48,200 stars, Apache-2.0) — HeyGen's open-source renderer takes HTML, CSS, media and seekable animations and outputs a deterministic MP4. That's a much better fit for an agent th

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AI 101 — What is a diffusion language model?

A diffusion language model writes text the way an image generator paints a picture: it starts with a block of noise and refines the whole thing over several passes, instead of typing one word at a time left to right. Almost every AI you have used does the typing. This is the main rival design, and in the last week it went from research curiosity to something running real phone calls and coding agents. The reason it is in the news is Inception's Mercury 2.5 release, which the company calls the m

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Inception ships Mercury 2.5, the largest diffusion LLM yet

Two releases in one afternoon: a startup argues that text generation doesn't have to be sequential, and a frontier lab walks out of the industry's biggest lobbying tent over chip exports. Inception has released Mercury 2.5, which it calls the most capable diffusion language model on the market and, to its knowledge, the largest one ever trained. Diffusion LLMs are the road not taken by nearly everyone else: instead of writing one token at a time, each depending on the last, they refine a whole

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Open Source Radar — September 8: the browser is the new agent runtime

Today's board is unusually coherent — three of the four hottest repos are about getting an agent onto the open web without paying Chrome's memory tax or getting fingerprinted at the door. The fourth is a research agent that wants to do your reading for you. Lightpanda (Zig, 35,096 stars) — A headless browser written from scratch in Zig rather than forked from Chromium, aimed squarely at AI agents and automation. The pitch is measurable: its own benchmark across 933 real pages puts peak memory a

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AI 101 — What is a world model?

Robotics companies shipped at least ten "world models" between May and August. The phrase is now everywhere in AI — and means three different things depending on who says it. A world model is a learned internal simulation of an environment: give it what you see and what you're about to do, and it predicts what the world looks like next. That's the one-sentence version. A language model predicts the next word; a world model predicts the next state — the next camera frame, the next joint angle, t

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