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15 stories in the last 7d

Inside NVIDIA’s cuDNN Graph API: Fusion, Autotuning, and Plan Reuse with cuDNN Frontend

MarkTechPost tutorial walks through NVIDIA's cuDNN Frontend graph API, covering kernel fusion, autotuning, plan reuse, and CUDA graph capture on Colab GPUs.

The tutorial explains how to express GPU computations as operation graphs via the cuDNN Frontend graph API, running the five-step build pipeline of validate, build operation graph, create execution plans, check support, and build plans. It progresses from a single fused convolution with bias and ReLU to autotuning across engine configs, FP8-style epilogues, attention, plan serialization, dynamic shapes, and CUDA graph capture. Each kernel is benchmarked against a PyTorch reference on a single Colab GPU to verify correctness and measure cost. The piece also covers practical setup issues like making libcudnn.so visible to the frontend's dynamic loader.

MarkTechPost · 1d agoAI tools & infra2

Hierarchical NeRF with JAX3D for Volumetric Rendering, Novel-View Synthesis, and 3D Reconstruction

MarkTechPost tutorial implements a hierarchical NeRF in JAX using jax3d volume-rendering primitives for novel-view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.

The tutorial builds an end-to-end hierarchical Neural Radiance Field using JAX, Flax, Optax, and jax3d's volume-rendering functions (sample_along_rays, volume_rendering, sample_piecewise_constant_pdf). It implements positional encoding, skip connections, separate coarse and fine networks, and view-direction conditioning with hierarchical importance sampling. Training uses JAX JIT compilation, Adam optimization, exponential learning-rate decay, and gradient clipping. Evaluation covers PSNR, depth and opacity visualization, 360-degree rendering, and marching-cubes geometry extraction.

MarkTechPost · 3d agoAI research

[AINews] Reality Checks on AI News (Yegge shuts down Gas Town, Databricks’ +60% Astra cost)

Latent Space AI news roundup: Steve Yegge shuts down Gas Town, Databricks reports 60% higher coding spend on GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI launches misalignment disclosure framework.

Latent Space's AI News digest for September 15-16, 2026 leads with Steve Yegge shutting down his Gas Town orchestrator despite spending thousands monthly on coding-agent subscriptions. Databricks rolled out GPT-6 Astra to roughly 3,500 engineers, reporting superior long-horizon performance over Opus 5 and Sol 5.6 but a ~60% increase in coding spend. OpenAI published a formal framework for disclosing model misalignment incidents with six case reports, while Microsoft and Google Research released safety papers on 'capability laundering' and the Fuse motive-inference benchmark. Xiaomi shared live RL training telemetry for MiMo-V2.6, estimated at $493k/day for the 1T-class Pro run.

Latent Space · 5h agoAI industry

Show HN: MultiMatte, a Promptable Image Background Removal Model

Feyn releases MultiMatte, a promptable background-removal model fine-tuned from Meta's SAM 3 via LoRA, outputting alpha mattes that beat SAM 3 on segmentation benchmarks.

Feyn introduced MultiMatte, a promptable image background-removal model built on Meta's SAM 3 (860M parameters). It modifies only 19.49M parameters (2.27%) using a rank-16 LoRA adapter and replaces binary masks with alpha mattes to handle fuzzy boundaries like hair. On the DIS-VD benchmark it scores 0.901 S-measure versus SAM 3's 0.667, and it improves on SAM 3 across all twelve evaluated splits. Training used 19,953 images for 14,000 steps with focal and Dice loss, and the merged weights are available via the nobg library and a web demo.

Implementation of Machine Learning Workflows with NVIDIA cuML, RAPIDS, GPU Benchmarking, Explainability, Clustering, and Model Inference

Hands-on tutorial implements NVIDIA cuML and RAPIDS to GPU-accelerate scikit-learn-style ML workflows with benchmarking, clustering, and inference.

The tutorial demonstrates NVIDIA cuML as a GPU-accelerated machine learning framework, using cuml.accel to speed up unmodified scikit-learn scripts with zero code changes and the native cuML API for CuPy/cuDF interoperability. It benchmarks CPU versus GPU implementations of PCA, K-Means, nearest-neighbor search, logistic regression, random forests, and DBSCAN on datasets up to 200,000 samples with 64 features. It also builds GPU pipelines with UMAP, t-SNE, and HDBSCAN, validates GPU-generated SHAP explanations, uses the FIL library for forest inference, and covers model serialization and GPU/CPU portability.

MarkTechPost · 4d agoAI tools & infra

SpectralShift: Effective Context Window Extension of Gated DeltaNet via Spectral Reparameterization

SpectralShift extends Gated DeltaNet context windows via spectral reparameterization of alpha projections, improving long-context capabilities without architectural changes.

The paper studies long-context extension of Gated DeltaNet (GDN) linear attention from the spectral perspective of its transition matrix, identifying two key factors: a broad slow spectral band aligned with target dependency lengths, and preserved fast-decaying modes for state clearing and context switching. SpectralShift reparameterizes the alpha projections initialization to reshape the decay spectrum and adds a learning-rate scaling for alpha projections during long-context continual pretraining. Experiments show consistent long-context improvements over direct continued pretraining, and the code is open-sourced.

Hugging Face daily papers · 4d agoAI research

datasette 1.0a40

Datasette 1.0a40 alpha adds a background task plugin API and migrates to httpx2, carrying the same security fix as 0.65.5.

Simon Willison released Datasette 1.0a40, an alpha on the road to a stable 1.0, which includes the same security fix shipped in 0.65.5. New capabilities include a datasette.add_background_task() method letting plugins launch and manage background tasks, and a migration to httpx2 powering internal client methods like datasette.client.get(). Many bug fixes resulted from issue triage ahead of the 1.0 stable release.

Simon Willison · 13h agoAI tools & infra 5 sources

Social Laws for Multi-agent Coordination in Stochastic Environments

Researchers extend social laws to stochastic, reward-based multi-agent environments, defining alpha-robustness and a verification method via Markov decision processes.

The paper extends the concept of social laws from deterministic, goal-based settings to stochastic, reward-based multi-agent environments. It introduces alpha-robustness, a measure of the guaranteed utility each agent retains while pursuing its optimal single-agent policy assuming all agents obey the social law. Robustness verification is reduced to solving a series of Markov decision processes, with empirical evaluations on toy environments.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 20h agoAI research

Sakana AI Researchers Introduce PC-ALM, a Layer-Local Alternative to Backpropagation That Trains 1000-Layer Networks

Sakana AI's PC-ALM adds per-layer Lagrange multipliers to predictive coding, matching backprop on networks up to 1000 layers with layer-local updates.

Sakana AI researchers propose Augmented Lagrangian Predictive Coding (PC-ALM), a training method that keeps every update layer-local while recovering backprop-aligned credit signals. The team proves multipliers converge to exact backprop adjoints in linear networks and trains 1000-layer residual MLPs on MNIST within about 2 points of backprop accuracy. PC-ALM matched backprop across a width/depth grid from 8 to 128 on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST where standard predictive coding failed in deep, narrow networks, and improved over PC on ResNet-18 with CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet. An MIT-licensed JAX reference implementation reproduces the results on CPU.

MarkTechPost · 2d agoAI research2

ukisai/Swift-Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

UkisAI released Swift-Qwen3.8-27B GGUF, a Qwen3.8-27B derivative cutting thinking tokens by 58.3% with under 1% performance loss and roughly 1.95x speedup.

UkisAI released Swift-Qwen3.8-27B as GGUF on Hugging Face, a reasoning-efficient derivative of Qwen3.8-27B using a Swift adapter that reduces median thinking tokens by up to 58.3% while keeping performance losses under 1% and delivering a 1.95x speed-up on several tasks. Reported benchmarks include GPQA-Diamond 88.28%, MMLU-Pro 84.95%, C-Eval 90.62%, AIME 2026 94.00% and Terminal-Bench 2.1 65.84%. The model is trending at #30 on Hugging Face, with BF16 weights and enterprise licensing also available.

Hugging Face trending models · 5d agoModel release

Prior Labs Releases TabPFN-3.5: A Tabular Foundation Model That Beats the Winning Otto Kaggle Solution With Default Settings

Prior Labs releases TabPFN-3.5, a 220M-parameter open-weights tabular foundation model that beats the 2015 Otto Kaggle winning score with default settings.

Prior Labs released TabPFN-3.5, a tabular foundation model that predicts in a single forward pass without per-dataset training or tuning. The base model grew from 53M to 220M parameters with a single multitask checkpoint, learned Fourier features, and in-context ECDF rank encodings. It scores 0.375 on the 2015 Otto Kaggle private leaderboard versus the winning 0.382 and claims first place on seven tabular benchmarks including TabArena and BeyondArena. Open weights cover the base, Fast (84M), and Thinking variants, but production use requires the Prior Labs API or a commercial license.

MarkTechPost · 1d agoModel release1

Coding Agents Have Converged: Why the SWE-bench Leaderboard Can No Longer Order Its Top Entries, and What to Measure Instead

Audit of 254 SWE-bench submissions finds top coding-agent entries statistically inseparable, so small leaderboard gaps no longer establish rank.

The paper audits 254 SWE-bench submissions across four splits without running models. On Verified, the top two entries each resolve 396 of 500 instances, and exact paired McNemar tests separate none of the 29 adjacent top-thirty pairs at alpha=0.05. Within-model scaffold score ranges reach 29.8 percentage points, versus an 8.8-point spread among the top thirty. The authors release a five-step audit protocol and recommend reporting comparison-set-specific resolution and model-scaffold provenance.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research

The Rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer — and How To Do the Job Right

Palantir veteran Vinoo Ganesh traces the forward deployed engineer role and shares practices for building effective FDE teams.

Kepler CEO and former Palantir forward deployed engineer Vinoo Ganesh argues that labs, startups, and PE firms hire FDEs without a shared definition of the role. He recounts Palantir's Project Frontline rotation, which trained about 250 software engineers as FDEs, many now leading forward deployed teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Anduril. A 2013 failure of the Phoenix transaction store at a bank, where real-world data gaps caused roughly 2.3 million keyspaces and an out-of-memory crash, illustrates why FDEs must own the gap between design and production reality. At Kepler he places the FDE function inside product rather than sales.

Latent Space · 4d agoAI industry 4 sources1

Retrospectively Reverse-Engineering Apple's Neural Engine

A developer reverse-engineers Apple's M1 Neural Engine architecture, mapping compute cores, MAC datapaths, and schedulers to explain the NPU's decline as transformers displaced CNN workloads.

A developer who previously maintained a reverse-engineered Linux driver for Apple's Neural Engine (ANE) published a retrospective deep dive mapping the M1 ANE's full internal architecture: compute, datapath, scheduler, memory, and execution model. The M1 ANE has 16 compute cores with 128 FP16 (or 256 INT8) MAC lanes each, totaling 2048 parallel MAC lanes, using 32-bit Q16.16 fixed-point accumulation with FP16 readout and an accumulator that saturates at 2^15. The author argues the ANE's dataflow was architected around the predictable reuse patterns of 2017-era CNN workloads (dating to the A11 Bionic), which autoregressive transformer decode broke, limiting its usefulness for general ML. With Apple's M5 folding ANE cores into GPU cores to tout LLM performance, the post frames this as the beginning of the end for the standalone NPU.

Now everyone can put data to work

OpenAI launched a Data agent in ChatGPT Work that connects to enterprise warehouses and builds shareable analysis dashboards without SQL.

OpenAI introduced a Data agent in ChatGPT Work that connects to approved sources including Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, ClickHouse, MongoDB, and Datadog, plus files from Google Drive and SharePoint. It investigates metric changes, builds interactive dashboards, and integrates with BI tools such as Power BI, Tableau, Omni, Sigma, and ThoughtSpot using semantic layers from dbt, Databricks Genie Ontology, and Snowflake Horizon. Queries enforce the connected account's existing table, row, and column permissions, with administrators controlling access via Workspace settings. OpenAI says nearly all of its product team and over two-thirds of its GTM organization use it internally, and NTT Data, Thermo Fisher, and ServicePiston are Alpha customers.

OpenAI News · 6d agoAI industry