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- 🤖 Alibaba's New Model Beats GPT-5.6 on Agentic Work
🤖 Alibaba's New Model Beats GPT-5.6 on Agentic Work
🦾Plus: 🧪 OpenAI’s ‘Astra’ cracks long-open math problems
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Hey folks! Let’s get into Big Data and AI craziness…
In today's edition: Here is roundup of SkillSmith, OpenAI’s ‘Astra’, DeepSeek V4-Flash API 👇
🧠 Google DeepMind unveils its SkillSmith approach
⚡DeepSeek launches V4-Flash API with stronger agent skills
🦀Open-source Rust tool classifies PDFs in 20ms
🤖 OpenAI’s ‘Astra’ cracks long-open math problems
💡 AI Tutorial:How to create a video podcast using any PDF with AI
🤖AI Tools and Data Tools to checkout
Alibaba just released Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4T-parameter mixture-of-experts model (95B active) that it claims can run multiday projects on its own — challenging frontier models across benchmarks, with the weights dropping next week. Qwen3.8-Max brings improvements across coding, research, and long-horizon tasks, ranking ahead of Anthropic’s Fable 5 on Arena’s WebDev leaderboard.
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Data visualizations are everywhere today. From creating a visual representation of data points to impress potential investors, report on progress, or even visualize concepts for customer segments, data visualizations are a valuable tool in a variety of settings.
In a new paper, Google DeepMind introduced SkillSmith, a framework that enables LLMs to synthesize custom AI skills by reading textual knowledge and prefix weights at the same time. Using "instruction-steered parametric synthesis," SkillSmith ingests prefix parameters and text descriptions to output new prefix weights tailored to a target task, outperforming standard text-only prompting and weight-merging techniques.
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DeepSeek just pushed V4-Flash into public beta, and the story here is not a bigger model. Same architecture, same size as the preview. They just retrained it, and the numbers jumped hard. The agent scores now beat the higher-tier V4-Pro-Preview across all nine benchmarks.
PDFs have always been a pain for AI agents. You send one through OCR (a slow process that reads text from images), and you wait seconds per page. Firecrawl just shipped pdf-inspector to fix that. The trick: not every PDF needs OCR. About 54% of PDFs are already text-based, like reports, invoices, and research papers.
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Atera brings RMM, helpdesk, patching, and monitoring into a single platform. And AI isn't the add-on—it's the foundation of every workflow. Most IT platforms were built for a different era—then AI was added later, as a layer. Atera was designed differently. One AI-native platform for everything IT.
AI News:
OpenAI just revealed that Astra, an internal version of its next major model family, solved 10 long-open math and computer science problems (one nearly 30 years old), covering geometry, group theory, quantum complexity, and more. Astra proved non-sofic groups exist, building the first symmetry structure that can’t be imitated by any finite shuffle, an exception hunted since 1999.
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With your permission, Gemini Spark can complete online tasks using your logged-in accounts and saved passwords to do things like research flights or hunt for new apartments. See how auto browse works. In a separate update, Google now lets you summon Gemini at any time by pressing the FN key in the macOS Gemini app.
OpenAI turned up the other cases while reviewing how one of its models escaped a sandbox and reached Hugging Face's production systems. Outside experts are helping run that search, and OpenAI has not said how many cases it has produced so far.Anthropic disclosed days earlier that its own models had broken into three unrelated companies as far back as April.
A bipartisan House bill would require developers of the most powerful AI systems to maintain reliable shutdown controls, giving the Department of Homeland Security emergency authority to restrict or stop a model during a catastrophic incident.
Alphabet rolls back generative AI features in Google Earth citing policy violations, latest retreat following Gemini image controversy earlier this year.
AI Tutorial
How to create a video podcast using any PDF with AI
HeyGen has a tool that lets you turn a PDF into an AI video podcast. You upload your file, and HeyGen creates a video where two AI hosts discuss the main ideas from the document.
Open HeyGen’s Video Podcast tool and sign in to your account.
Upload the PDF you want to turn into a video podcast. You can also add a website link or enter a topic.
HeyGen reads the PDF, writes the podcast script, and creates a discussion between two AI hosts.
You can choose the AI hosts and voices, then edit the script, tone, and key points before creating the video.
Click “Generate” to create the video podcast. Review the final video, make any needed changes, and export it as an MP4 file.
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👀 Odysseus's Cosmic Voyage
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