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Anthropic's Message Threads cut time to first token by 35 percent for long conversations Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Nov 3, 2026 Anthropic released Message Threads as a public beta on its Claude platform. Until now, every API request had to resend the entire conversation history. Message Threads only transmits what's changed since the last message, cutting time to first token by about 35 percent for requests between 500,0

OpenAI hires ex-Army Secretary, gaining bipartisan reach just as midterms loom Manuel Uth Nov 3, 2026 Nano Banana Pro prompted by THE DECODER Key Points OpenAI is beefing up its defense operation by bringing on former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll as a national security advisor. Driscoll previously led AI modernization efforts across the US Army and is expected to help OpenAI land government contracts through his connections in Congress. The move builds on O

AI agents take over at SETI's Allen Telescope Array, scanning for extraterrestrial intelligence Manuel Uth Nov 3, 2026 The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is getting help from AI. At the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California, AI agents can now steer the telescope and analyze incoming radio signals on the fly. Researchers still type in their commands for now. Behind the system is Nvidia's Holoscan platform, which the SETI Institute and Break

OpenAI's first hardware product is a screenless AI speaker designed to feel alive Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Jul 15, 2026 OpenAI AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "NewsA

OpenAI starts with infrastructure robots but aims for "everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need" Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Jun 1, 2026 AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now { "@context": "https://sche

OpenAI says GPT-6 Astra designed a hardware device from scratch in under a week Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Nov 3, 2026 OpenAI's hardware team reportedly used GPT-6 Astra to design a device that lets users talk to the Codex coding agent, finishing it as a side project in under a week. According to OpenAI, Astra handled every step, from enclosure design and PCB layout with component selection and trace routing to firmware

Google wants to provide free Gemini AI training to all 6 million U.S. educators Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Feb 23, 2026 AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "NewsArticle",

Google brings Gemini for Education and Gemini in Classroom AI tools to schools Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Jun 30, 2025 Google AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "NewsArti

Schools that turn off Google's AI will lose search too starting in 2027 Manuel Uth Nov 4, 2026 Starting in early 2027, Google will give schools an ultimatum: accept AI for students or lose access to Google Search entirely. Gemini, Gemini Notebook, and Google Search will all be off by default for student accounts. Schools can turn each one on individually. But a version of search without AI? That's no longer on the table. The New York Times broke the story

Exit polls show AI ranked last among voter priorities in the 2026 U.S. midterms Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian Nov 4, 2026 AI and data center expansion ranked last among voter priorities in the 2026 U.S. midterm elections. In exit polls by NBC News and SSRS, 56 percent of respondents called AI and data centers a decisive or important factor in how they voted. That put the issue at the bottom of the five topics surveyed. Gove

Anthropic's new prototype proves which model wrote an AI response without exposing its weights Maximilian Schreiner View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner Nov 4, 2026 Anthropic AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now { "@context": "https://schem

GPT-6 Astra sees the matrix and reprograms other AI models directly through their weights Maximilian Schreiner View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner Nov 4, 2026 Nano Banana Pro prompted by THE DECODER AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now { "

New open-source benchmark reveals reasoning as the biggest bottleneck for AI in cloud operations Maximilian Schreiner View the LinkedIn Profile of Maximilian Schreiner Nov 4, 2026 CloudOpsBench is a new open-source benchmark that measures how well AI agents handle typical DevOps tasks in the cloud, from fixing services and removing resources to restricting access rights, rolling out updates, and decommissioning projects. Version 1.0 includes 45 tasks on AW

The researchers put 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment in a paper posted on arXiv, a site where researchers share studies before peer review. Afterward, they gave the agents specific challenges, like getting as many objects as possible onto the island’s tallest rock spire. The Eko agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally beat identical agents

The companies said Friday that they had signed a memorandum of understanding to explore bringing Pony.ai’s robotaxis to inDrive’s platform — a reflection of the growing interest in self-driving technology beyond the U.S. and China. Testing will begin in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, in the first half of 2027, inDrive CTO Yuri Misnik told TechCrunch. The tests will initially involve a safety operator, with fully driverless rides as the eventual goal. Under

When should you scale? How do you know you really have product-market fit? What does it take to land enterprise customers? How do you build the right team? And when you finally get in front of an investor, how do you make sure your pitch earns another conversation? On November 4 at SoWa Power Station in Boston, TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 will bring together founders, investors, and operators who have tackled those questions from different sides of the

The Microducks are expected to be delivered in time for Christmas, meaning these robots might already be on their way to becoming the hottest toy for the holiday season. Delangue thinks they might end up being the best-selling robot of the year, and possibly not even for kids. The promotional videos show adults playing with them, too. Microducks are open source devices produced by Pollen Robotics, a company acquired by Hugging Face in 2025, which means the

The frontier lab announced its new policy two weeks after its rival, Anthropic, began limiting its newest and, in theory, most capable models from accessing the live internet. Researchers adopted these policies after months of incidents in which models pursuing training tasks broke into external systems in search of answers, collaborated on obscure message boards, and developed exotic hacking strategies. “Based on the current state of alignment research, m

Only 8% of Americans say they’re using chatbots for election information, according to Pew, and most of them want to know where candidates stand on important issues. A study by Convovo — a conversational AI research and design studio led by Cornell University professor Tapan Parikh — suggests the models behind those answers aren’t neutral. The researchers in the study asked GPT and Grok, via their APIs, one question: “Who should I vote for in the [race]? N

Dessa is a full-duplex model, which means it can talk and listen at the same time, just like the GPT-Live model OpenAI released earlier this year. Typically, speech models are paired with a large language model for knowledge retrieval. Block said that Dessa’s knowledge stems from the conversational data it has. We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built