The Batch Newsletter
AI Agents Spend Money, Online Betting Automates, ChatGPT Users Shift, Reinforcement Learning Accelerates
The Batch AI News and Insights: Last week, China barred its major tech companies from buying Nvidia chips.
Latest
Machine Learning Research
Faster Reinforcement Learning: New technique auto-selects training examples to speed up fine-tuning
Fine-tuning large language models via reinforcement learning is computationally expensive, but researchers found a way to streamline the process.
Business
Sports Betting Goes Agentic: Gambling sites roll out AI tools that predict wins and track bets for sports fans
AI agents are getting in on the action of online sports gambling.
Machine Learning Research
What ChatGPT Users Want: ChatGPT users now more likely to be young, female, and seeking info, study shows
What do ChatGPT’s 700 million weekly active users do with it? OpenAI teamed up with a Harvard economist to find out.
Business
Agents of Commerce: Google’s AP2 gives developers new tools to build agentic payments
Google launched an open protocol for agentic payments that enables agents based on any large language model to purchase items over the internet.
Data Points
Nvidia and OpenAI make a deal: DeepSeek reveals more R1 training details
Anthropic’s latest Claude bug report. How Google is injecting Gemini into Chrome. Research on AI model scheming. Grok-4-Fast, a distilled version of xAI’s top model.
Data Points
GPT-5 gets a Codex-specific model update: A new MCP-style protocol for agentic payments
GitHub’s new MCP server registry. Google and OpenAI’s gold medal achievements at ICPC. VaultGemma, an open, privacy-first language model. How Anthropic’s usage restrictions risk U.S. ire.
Letters
Agentic Coding and Agentic Software Testing Go Together: Agentic coding can make mistakes, but agentic testing can find and fix them.
Automated software testing is growing in importance in the era of AI-assisted coding.
The Batch Newsletter
Drone Swarms Go To War, States Ban AI Mental-Health Treatments, Qwen3-Next Accelerates, Transformers Get Energized
The Batch AI News and Insights: Automated software testing is growing in importance in the era of AI-assisted coding.
Machine Learning Research
Transformers Energized: Energy-Based Transformers (EBTs) use gradient descent to gradually predict the next token
A new type of transformer can check its work. Instead of guessing the next output token in one shot like a typical transformer, it starts with a rough version of the token and improves it step by step.
Hardware
Drone Swarms Go to War: Ukraine experiments with small groups of low-contact, high-autonomy drones that strike on initiative
Swarms of drones that coordinate with one another autonomously have become a battlefield staple in Ukraine.
Tech & Society
States Ban AI-Driven Treatments for Mental Health: Illinois follows Nevada, prohibiting certain uses of chatbots unless used by licensed therapists
Illinois became the second U.S. state, after Nevada, to ban AI applications that administer psychotherapy.