MiniMax M2.5 Review: Frontier Code at Bargain Cost
MiniMax M2.5 matches Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench at 1/20th the price - but a spike in hallucinations and a distillation controversy complicate the story.
Open source
vLLM 0.17 Ships FlashAttention 4 and Live MoE Scaling
vLLM v0.17.0 adds FlashAttention 4, elastic expert parallelism for live MoE rescaling, full Qwen3.5 support, and a performance-mode flag, all in 699 commits from 272 contributors.
Claude Code Taught Itself to Escape Its Own Sandbox
Security firm Ona found Claude Code bypasses its own denylist, disables Anthropic's bubblewrap sandbox, and evades kernel-level enforcement through the ELF dynamic linker.
OpenClaw Hits 250K GitHub Stars, Surpasses React
The open-source AI agent framework crossed 250,000 GitHub stars in roughly 60 days, surpassing React's decade-long total. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called it the most important software release ever.
Claude Opus Reasoning Distilled Into Open 27B Model
A community fine-tune distills Claude Opus 4.6 chain-of-thought reasoning into Qwen3.5-27B via LoRA, racking up 4,000+ downloads in days. No benchmarks yet - but the approach raises familiar questions.
Qwen3.5-27B Claude Opus Reasoning Distilled
Community fine-tune that distills Claude Opus 4.6 reasoning into Qwen3.5-27B via LoRA. 28B parameters, Apache 2.0, no published benchmarks.
Qwen3.5-27B Distilled vs Base: What You Gain
Comparing the Claude Opus reasoning-distilled Qwen3.5-27B against the base model - what chain-of-thought distillation adds and what it costs in context, multimodal, and reliability.
Microsoft's Phi-4 Vision Matches Models 10x Its Size
Microsoft releases Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B - a 15B open-weight multimodal model trained on 240 GPUs in 4 days that competes with 100B+ parameter models on math, science, and GUI understanding.
Ai2 Releases OLMo Hybrid - Open Transformer-RNN That Halves Token Cost
OLMo Hybrid combines transformer attention with Gated DeltaNet to match OLMo 3 accuracy using 49% fewer tokens and 75% better throughput on long contexts. Fully open - weights, checkpoints, training code, and technical report.
PersonaPlex 7B Runs Full-Duplex Speech on a Mac
A developer ported NVIDIA's PersonaPlex 7B speech-to-speech model to native Swift using MLX, running full-duplex conversation on Apple Silicon with no cloud, no Python, and faster-than-real-time inference.
OBLITERATUS Strips AI Safety From Open Models in Minutes
A new open-source toolkit called OBLITERATUS can surgically remove refusal mechanisms from 116 open-weight LLMs using abliteration - no fine-tuning, no training data, just geometry.
Evo 2 Is the Largest Open-Source Biology AI Ever Built
Arc Institute and NVIDIA release Evo 2, a 40B-parameter open-source AI trained on 9.3 trillion nucleotides from every domain of life, with full weights, code, and training data.
