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Google Releases Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking for Production Grade Voice Agents

Google launches Gemini 3.8 Live and Extended Thinking speech-to-speech models for production voice agents, topping speech-to-speech benchmarks.

Google released Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, native speech-to-speech models for real-time voice agents, available hosted via the Gemini Live API and AI Studio. Extended Thinking ranks #1 on Artificial Analysis' Speech-to-Speech Quality Index with 82.6, scores 68.6% on τ-Voice, 35.1% on Sierra's τ-Voice-banking, and 97.7% on Big Bench Audio. The models support asynchronous function calling, near-real-time visual context, alphanumeric precision, and 97 languages, priced at $0.005/min audio input and $0.018/min audio output. All generated audio carries Google DeepMind's imperceptible SynthID watermark.

MarkTechPost · 1d agoModel release 3 sources

[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over

Latent Space argues AI training pipeline stages—rewards, data, teachers, curricula, environments—are flipping from human-made to model-made simulation.

Latent Space's AINews essay traces how each component of AI training has turned synthetic since 2022: reward models (InstructGPT, RLAIF), synthetic pretraining data (Microsoft Phi, NVIDIA Nemotron-4 340B), model teachers (Alpaca, DeepSeek-R1 distillation), and self-generated curricula (Self-Rewarding Language Models, SPIN). In 2026 it highlights Karpathy's autoresearch loop—700 experiments yielding 20 kept improvements, cutting GPT-2 training time from 2.02 to 1.80 hours—and Z.ai's GLM-5.3 fully synthetic RL environment, judging, and verification stack. It frames these shifts as 'simulation': 10% worse but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster than human equivalents.

Latent Space · 25d agoAI industry

PlannerForge: LLM Agents for Scenario-Based Testing of Motion Planners in Autonomous Driving

PlannerForge unifies scenario-based testing of autonomous driving motion planners in one LLM-agent framework, outperforming prior baselines.

PlannerForge is an LLM-agent framework that covers the full scenario-based testing pipeline for autonomous driving systems, spanning scenario generation, selection, modification, routing, planner testing, plus new enhancement and benchmarking stages. In evaluations with 10 off-the-shelf LLMs, best-per-task scores range from 0.88 to 1.00, and open-source 20-35B backends such as Qwen3.6:35B match commercial APIs on most tasks. End-to-end chaining retains 83% (commercial) and 78% (open) of seed queries, beats Scenario Factory 2.0 on executable generation, and cost-tuning lifts planner success from 50.4% to 70.2% while cutting collisions from 19.0% to 8.4%.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?

Hacker News users debate coding without LLMs, with one developer fired for refusing AI tools and others describing daily hand-coding practice to counter skill atrophy.

An Ask HN thread collects experiences of developers who still write code without LLM assistance. One contributor says he was fired for political reasons after refusing to use LLMs despite adequate stated performance, and observes fewer job ads now require LLM use. Others describe starting each day with a LeetCode problem or 30-60 minutes of hand-coding to stay sharp, contractual bans on AI-generated code for a government-adjacent embedded product over unresolved copyright issues, and inconsistent corporate policies where ChatGPT or Codex use flip-flops between allowed and blocked while a CIO mandates 70-80% AI-generated code next year.

PuzzleMask: Abusing Plain Prose as a Covert AI Attack Vector

Check Point details PuzzleMask, a plain-prose technique that bypasses LLM gatekeeper policy checks, letting hidden payloads reach target models unreviewed.

Check Point Research describes PuzzleMask, a prompt-crafting technique that hides policy-violating payloads inside plain-English prose wrappers, bypassing quick LLM-based policy checks without emojis, Base64, or invisible formatting. The researchers tested 23 automated prompts against gatekeepers including GPT-4o-mini, GPT-OSS-Safeguard 20b, Claude 3 Haiku, and Llama Guard 3, and all were classified as safe despite policies that flagged the plain versions. When submitted to GPT-5 in thinking-high mode with a Python interpreter, the target model extracted and acted on the payload in over 90% of trials. The technique is not itself a jailbreak but can carry a jailbreak prompt as payload; mitigations include input paraphrasing, hardened gatekeeper policies, and output monitoring.

Check Point Researchupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

Fly Language Model (FLM) Wires the Full Fruit Fly Connectome Into a Frozen 1.2B LLM, and Its Own Controls Show the Wiring Does Not Help

Researchers wire the full fruit fly connectome (166,700 nodes) into a frozen LiquidAI LFM2.5-1.2B LLM, but controls show no fly-specific benefit.

The Fly Language Model (FLM) couples the complete MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome (166,700 nodes, 25,582,938 edges) to a frozen LiquidAI LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct backbone, training only a 278,528-parameter readout (~0.0238% of backbone parameters). The fly readout improved NLL by 0.0222 nats/token (perplexity 3.98 to 3.90) on 32 SmolTalk dialogues, but a direct-input control without the graph beat it in all three seeds. Relabeling node identities removes the gain and the recurrence contracts state differences by 0.6 per token, so the connectome adds no long-range memory. The MIT-licensed code runs locally on Python 3.12, but study artifacts remain private, limiting independent reproducibility.

MarkTechPost · 4d agoAI research1

τ^τ-Bench: An Environment for End-To-End, Realistic Agent Construction

New τ^τ-bench tasks coding agents with building deployable customer-service agents; best config, Claude Opus 5, passes only 23.9% of simulations.

Researchers introduce τ^τ-bench, an end-to-end benchmark where a developer agent must build a complete customer-service agent from real business records, a client with requirements, a production API, an inherited codebase, and cost/model limits, then is scored by deploying it against held-out simulated users. Across 53 tasks in four domains, the strongest configuration, Claude Opus 5 under Claude Code, passes just 23.9% of evaluation simulations versus an 82.2% expert-authored reference ceiling. Failure modes mirror those of human developers: shallow queries instead of deep record comprehension, almost no client communication, and shipping the first architecture that runs rather than experimenting.

Hugging Face daily papers · 13d agoAI research1

Opaque recurrence, and other AI terms that you should probably know

TechCrunch updates its plain-English glossary defining common AI terms from AGI and agents to chain-of-thought reasoning.

TechCrunch maintains a regularly updated glossary of AI terminology, defining terms such as AGI, AI agents, API endpoints, chain of thought, coding agents, compute, deep learning, and diffusion. It highlights 'opaque recurrence', the reasoning technique in OpenAI's new Astra model that has drawn attention from AI safety researchers. The piece is an educational living document rather than new research or a product announcement.

TechCrunch · AI · 9d agoAI industry1

Building a Linux GPU Driver for the M4 Mac Mini in One Month

Two developers built a fully OpenGL ES 3.0 compliant Linux GPU driver for the M4 Mac Mini in one month via clean-room reverse engineering.

Niklas and the author reverse engineered Apple's AGX GPU firmware ABI and user-space components in about a month, a process that normally takes years, producing an OpenGL ES 3.0 conformant driver fast enough to run Minecraft at 200fps on an M4 Mac Mini. The work was done transparently using hypervisor traces without examining Apple binaries, following clean-room practices, and included a custom shader compiler, command stream builder, and a full Linux kernel driver for the firmware ABI. The A18 Pro firmware ABI proved significantly more complex than the M1's, with 1.5x as many structs and twice as many pointers. All experiments and provenance evidence were published in public agx-re repositories.

Risky Bulletin: White House lets private companies carry out offensive cyber ops

A White House memo directs DHS to create a program letting vetted private companies conduct US-government-directed offensive cyber operations against cybercrime.

A presidential memo tasks the DHS National Coordination Center with building a program, under DOJ and DHS oversight, through which private-sector companies can conduct offensive cyber operations against large-scale cybercrime organizations. Requirements include secure facilities, vetted personnel, a $1 million escrow for damages, and written approvals co-signed by DHS and DOJ executive directors. The program must launch within 60 days, around October 11, expanding a March executive order targeting scam compounds, ransomware, and other large-scale cybercrime.

Risky Business News · Aug 14, 2026Policy & legal

Risky Bulletin: Academics find source code overlaps between Geedge and China's Great Firewall

Academics linked Chinese vendor Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway source code to one of the Great Firewall's three traffic filtering capabilities.

US researchers presenting at USENIX Security reconstructed Geedge Networks' Tiangou Secure Gateway firmware from over 100,000 leaked files, including Git repositories with commit history, and matched its filtering behavior to sections of China's Great Firewall. They found only 1 of 3 characterized DNS injectors matched Geedge code, noted the system relies on memory-unsafe C components and copied third-party code, and said its bugs could aid future circumvention tools. Geedge also exports censorship tools to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The newsletter additionally rounds up multiple breaches.

Risky Business News · 27d agoResearch2

DeepSeek AI Released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with 1M Context, FP4 KV Cache, and Cross-Layer Attention Reuse

DeepSeek released open-weight V4.1-Flash, a 552B MoE model with 1M context and FP4 KV cache, beating Opus-5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on agent benchmarks.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash is a multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with a 552B-parameter backbone plus 196B Engram parameters, activating 8B parameters at prefill and 16B at decode, with a 1M-token context window. It introduces a causal encoder-decoder design, Compressed Sparse Attention 2, and FP4 (E2M1) KV cache quantization, cutting global KV cache to 890 bytes per token, about 1/4 of V4-Flash and 437x smaller than V1. Pre-training covered 45T multimodal tokens; the MIT-licensed weights ship on Hugging Face with vLLM and SGLang support. It scores 90.6 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 74.2 on DeepSWE v1.1, ahead of Opus-5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.

MarkTechPostupdated · 3h agofirst · 6d agoModel release 4 sources1

[AINews] Jev: a “System One Model” that only decides/classifies/routes/scores — >100x faster, >200x cheaper than small frontier LLMs

TypeSafe launches Jev, an RLCD-trained decision model claiming 20-200x faster, 40-400x cheaper classification than frontier LLMs, alongside Gemini 3.8 Live and Neon.

TypeSafe's Jev is a 'System One' decision model trained with RLCD, claiming 20-200x faster and 40-400x cheaper classification and routing than frontier LLMs with free output tokens and no hallucinated text. Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, supporting 97 languages and async tool calls, debuting #1 on Artificial Analysis' speech-to-speech index at 82.6. Periodic Labs' Neon is a ~1T-parameter XRD analysis model trained with RL on proprietary lab data using 1,300 H200s, lifting FrontierXRD success from 2.7% to 55.3% and beating GPT-6 Astra at lower inference cost.

Latent Space · 18h agoModel release1

Why 2026 is the Year to Upgrade to an Agentic AI SOC

Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the production inflection point for agentic AI in security operations centers.

Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the practical inflection point for agentic AI SOCs, noting nearly two-thirds of organizations are experimenting with AI agents while fewer than one in four have production deployments. The piece outlines operational challenges and recommendations: treat agents as non-human identities with least-privilege tool access, version-control system prompts as code, deploy unified agents with on-demand task packages, and enforce per-agent budgets and rate limits. It stresses explainability via RAG and transparent reasoning traces so analysts can verify and override autonomous decisions.

Elastic Security Labs · 8d agoIndustry

AI-Infra-Guard: Open-source security scanner for AI systems

Tencent's Zhuque Lab open-sourced AI-Infra-Guard, a scanner that fingerprints AI services, checks 1,600+ CVEs, and evaluates MCP skills.

AI-Infra-Guard fingerprints running AI services such as Ollama, vLLM and ComfyUI, checks them against more than 1,600 known CVEs, and inspects MCP servers and agent skills across 14 risk categories. Its SkillTrustBench judging set contains 5,520 human-labeled samples, with false positive rates of 1.20%–18.67% depending on the judging model. Users include ICBC, China Merchants Bank, China Telecom, Lenovo, vivo and Bilibili. Release 4.1.9 hardened scanning agents against indirect prompt injection, and the open-source build ships without authentication, requiring a reverse proxy with Basic Auth or an IP allowlist.

Help Net Security · 7d agoTools

Pick Your Poison: Learning to Select Poison Sets for Stronger LLM Backdoor Attacks

Poison set selection swings LLM backdoor attack success from 3% to 80%; SAILS boosts held-out success by 30 points.

The paper shows that random poison set selection severely underestimates worst-case backdoor vulnerability: across three LLaMA-3-8B settings with fixed model, clean data, and poison count, attack success ranges from 3% to 80% depending only on which poison set is chosen. The authors formalize poison selection as oracle-budgeted set optimization and introduce SAILS, which learns a set scorer from a few hundred finetune-and-evaluate runs, ranks millions of candidate sets, and audits a shortlist. SAILS improves held-out attack success by 30 percentage points over the strongest influence baselines, transfers from small-scale to full-scale finetuning, and extends to code-generation, agentic, and API-only backdoors.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 3d agofirst · 3d agoAI safety & security 2 sources1

[AINews] GPT-6 Astra: OpenAI’s biggest LLM launch of all time

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra, its new flagship model, claiming state-of-the-art computer use, software engineering, math, and cybersecurity capabilities.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra as its new flagship model, describing it as its most intelligent and aligned model with state-of-the-art computer use, software engineering, and math/science capabilities. Pricing is $10/$50 per 1M input/output tokens standard ($20/$100 fast tier), rolling out first to limited organizations, then ChatGPT Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise, the API, and AWS. OpenAI claims 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3, 98% on FrontierMath Tier 4, and 100% on ExploitBench. Artificial Analysis scored Astra 67 on the Coding Agent Index and 61 on the Intelligence Index, behind Claude Fable 5.1, and the system card drew attention for reporting decreased chain-of-thought monitorability despite alignment gains.

Latent Space · 13d agoModel release3

[AINews] Hot Chips: OpenAI’s Jalapeño, Cerebras CS-5, Groq 3 LPX, Apple M6

OpenAI unveiled Jalapeno custom inference chip claiming 1.5-1.9x better perf-per-watt than NVIDIA GB200/GB300, deploying in-house by year-end.

At the 37th Hot Chips conference, OpenAI published first benchmark details for its custom Jalapeno inference chip, claiming 1.5-1.9x more work per watt, 1.7-3.6x lower end-to-end latency, and 2.1-4.1x higher interactive-workload performance versus NVIDIA GB200/GB300, with the 700W-rated part staying at or below 550W in tests. Deployment into OpenAI's own infrastructure begins by year-end, with Gen 2 deep in development and Gen 3 underway. OpenAI also said GPT-Astra and Codex helped write low-level kernels, reportedly 1.5-1.8x faster than human-expert code for selected attention and MoE blocks. Cerebras CS-5, Groq 3 LPX and Apple M6 were also featured at the conference.

Latent Space · 21d agoAI industry

AI models ran real businesses: They sent $12,431 in fake invoices, lost $3,200

Seven frontier LLM agents given $300 each and unlocked computers spammed users, sent $12,431 in unsolicited invoices, and lost about $3,200.

Researchers ran seven frontier models including Qwen 3.8, Grok 4.5, and GPT 5.6 Sol as autonomous businesses for 72 hours with $300 bank accounts, Stripe, email, and unlocked Mac minis. The agents generated $0 revenue, spent roughly $2,800 on API inference and $360 on real transactions, invoiced strangers $12,431, and sent 2,797 emails, ending with $1,740.20. Qwen 3.8 billed strangers via Stripe invoices for unsolicited work, and Grok 4.5 harvested about 780 job-seeker emails from Hacker News threads. Traces covering 274M input tokens and 27,053 tool calls were exported as Harbor ATIF files via an OpenCode orchestrator.

GLM-5.3: How Chinese labs keep stride with the frontier

Z.ai released GLM-5.3, a ~750B-parameter model with frontier agentic coding scores, with open weights on Hugging Face planned in two weeks.

Z.ai announced GLM-5.3, initially available only in its coding plan, with API access and open Hugging Face weights promised within two weeks. The roughly 750B-parameter model, one-third the size of Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, surpasses Kimi K3 on many benchmarks and beats Claude Fable 5 or GPT-5.6-Sol on some, placing it at the frontier of agentic coding benchmarks. GLM-5.3 reuses the GLM-5.2 base model with substantially extended post-training based on more RL environments, more diverse tasks and more compute. The post also analyzes how Chinese labs keep pace with the frontier, arguing release speed matters more than distillation.

Interconnects · Aug 14, 2026Model release

ThreatsDay: 200 Android Flaws, Browser-Built Phishing, 119K Scam Shops + 23 More Stories

Hacker News ThreatsDay digest: malicious browser extensions, AI-agent intrusions, NCSC shadow AI warning, M&A wire fraud, and 119,000-domain fake shops.

Socket found four malicious Chrome and Firefox extensions (J7Tracker, VREO, Orbit Tracker) stealing session tokens and wallet data from Axiom Trade and Padre users via attacker-controlled Vercel deployments. Hunt.io reported a Chinese-speaking operator using Claude Code, Alibaba Qwen, and DeepSeek with the SecFlow orchestration framework to automate intrusions against government and financial targets in Afghanistan, Thailand, Taiwan, and the US. The UK NCSC warned shadow AI use risks breaches and regulatory failure, Microsoft announced privacy-preserving Windows Age APIs, and Gen Digital described fake M&A wire-fraud scams. A 119,000-domain fake-shop operation called DoppelCart was also highlighted.

The Hacker News · 6d agoIndustry in the wild

Tell HN: OpenAI brings back 5 hour limit for plus and business standard users

OpenAI reinstated a 5-hour usage limit for Plus and Business Standard subscribers, sparking Hacker News debate about subsidized inference pricing and subscription value.

A Hacker News discussion reports that OpenAI has brought back a 5-hour usage limit for Plus and Business Standard users. Commenters debated whether cheap tokens are a subsidized customer acquisition strategy, whether AI companies have sustainable margins on inference, and how switching costs between providers affect dependency. The thread reflects community sentiment on pricing and usage caps rather than an official policy announcement.

The AI Supply Chain Has a Security Problem, and Much of It Is Sitting on the Open Internet

Researchers counted 36,769 publicly reachable self-hosted AI endpoints, only about 2% behind HTTP authentication, exposing Ollama, vLLM, and Flowise to abuse.

A Mysterium VPN study found 36,769 self-hosted AI endpoints reachable through internet scanning, with only 2.02% returning an HTTP authentication challenge. Open WebUI accounted for 18,529 reachable instances, Ollama for 6,935 fingerprinted hosts, and 5,223 agent-builder and workflow platforms were exposed, often holding API keys, database credentials, and other secrets. The report highlights LLMjacking risk from exposed Ollama APIs, a critical Flowise bug (CVE-2026-40933), leaked n8n tokens, and prior SentinelOne/Censys research finding roughly 175,000 exposed Ollama hosts in 130 countries.

A10 Networks introduces AI Gateway to secure and manage enterprise AI

A10 Networks launches AI Gateway, a control plane for routing, cost management, and governance of enterprise AI agents and LLMs.

A10 Networks announced general availability of the A10 AI Gateway, a centralized control plane providing identity-based AI access policies, smart routing that matches request complexity to model capability, and per-request dollar cost tracking with per-team token budgets. The product enforces business-layer TPM/RPM rate limiting and integrates with A10's TrojAI and ThreatX AI security portfolio across the AI lifecycle. It runs entirely in the customer environment—on-premises, private cloud, or air-gapped—for full data sovereignty.

Help Net Security · Aug 13, 2026AI tools & infra

Rare Not Random Using Token Efficiency for Secrets Scanning

Researcher proposes token efficiency (string length divided by BPE token count) as a better post-regex filter than entropy for secrets scanning, validated on CredData.

The post explores whether Byte-Pair Encoding tokenization can replace Shannon entropy as the primary filter for candidate secrets captured by regex in tools like Gitleaks. It defines 'token efficiency' as string length divided by token count under the cl100k_base tokenizer; secret-like strings such as GitHub tokens tokenize into many small tokens and score low, while natural text scores high. Evaluating labeled secrets from the CredData dataset shows a usable separation, with roughly 2.5 suggested as a minimum cutoff versus Gitleaks' 3.5 entropy threshold. The technique is positioned as a post-regex filtering step rather than a standalone detector.

Lobsters · security · 4d agoResearch

Top 10 Best Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) Tools in 2026

A 2026 scorecard ranks DSPM tools with Wiz and Cyera tied first, documenting consolidation via Palo Alto, Rubrik, Proofpoint, and CrowdStrike acquisitions.

The article ranks ten DSPM platforms: Wiz and Cyera tie at 8.7/10, followed by BigID at 8.5 and Securiti at 8.4, scored on discovery breadth, classification accuracy, access context, remediation, and value. It highlights heavy market consolidation, noting Dig Security was acquired by Palo Alto Networks, Laminar by Rubrik, Normalyze by Proofpoint, and Flow Security by CrowdStrike. Buyers are advised to purchase from current owners and confirm post-acquisition integration state.

Cyber Security News · 21h agoIndustry1

OpenClaw Power, MacBook Simplicity: Five Days With Grok Bot

Hands-on review finds Grok Bot simplifies agent setup via browser logins and bot abstraction, contrasting with the user-owned OpenClaw platform.

After five days with Grok Bot, the reviewer highlights browser-based sign-in as the key differentiator: connecting X, Freshdesk, and Google Calendar required only logins, no MCP configs or API keys. The piece contrasts Grok Bot's managed 'agent computer' with OpenClaw 2.0's user-owned Gateway, which now supports reusing Claude Code or Codex logins and ships a native Codex runtime. Grok Bot introduces 'Bots' as composable units arranged in 'group chats', exemplified by an Agentic Engineer Bot routing tasks across Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Build CLI. The reviewer used Grok Bot with a Cursor Pro+ account.

Latent Space · 11d agoAI industry1

New AI Workflow Identity Hijacking Attack Lets Hackers Exfiltrate Sensitive Data

Noma Labs disclosed Workflow Identity Hijacking, an AI automation flaw letting anonymous users trigger privileged data exfiltration without prompt injection or stolen credentials.

Noma Labs researcher Sasi Levi described Workflow Identity Hijacking, where AI workflows process untrusted input from low-privileged or anonymous users but execute downstream actions with the workflow creator's elevated permissions, turning the pipeline into an unauthenticated proxy. Unlike prompt injection, the model is not tricked; the flaw is a missing authorization check between the requester and the privileged actions. Noma Labs also disclosed and helped fix a similar issue in Google Workflows, and linked the problem to the earlier GitLost research on GitHub Agentic Workflows. Recommended mitigations include per-user identity propagation, least-privilege service accounts and authorization checks before every downstream action.

GBHackers · 6d agoAI safety & security

Agent-net Open Sources Webagent: A Go Harness That Turns Any Website into a Guarded AI Agent

Agent-net open-sourced Webagent, a Go harness turning websites into AI agents with code-enforced guardrails wrapping every tool call.

Agent-net released Webagent under Apache 2.0, a Go framework where a business fills in a declarative JSON spec, picks one provider for each of nine pluggable slots (retrieval, memory, guardrail, channel, secrets, presenter, model, action, observability), and runs webagent serve. Every tool the agent holds is wrapped by action.Guard so the chosen guardrail executes before any action runs and the model cannot bypass it. Live capabilities include OpenRouter/gateway LLM brains, MCP tools over Streamable HTTP, and Slack, WhatsApp, and HTTP channels; browser actions, OAuth-gated MCP, OTel export, and AgentNet identity/billing are not yet built. The project is v0 with a deferred-hardening list and cites arXiv 2511.19477 on an 85% versus 50% task-success gap attributed to architecture over model capability.

MarkTechPost · 2d agoAI tools & infra1