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.
Latest
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.
Machine Learning Research
Qwen3-Next Accelerates: Alibaba’s new model uses hybrid attention layers and a sparse MoE architecture for speed and performance
Alibaba updated its popular Qwen3 open-weights models with a number of fresh, speed-boosting tweaks.
Data Points
Qwen pilots new attention mechanisms: Who uses ChatGPT and why? Answers from a new study
Replit’s self-testing updates to Agent 3. Stable Audio speeds up custom sounds for enterprise. Google’s plan to spread paid Gemini plans worldwide. Zoox’s unusual robotaxis hit the road in Las Vegas.
Data Points
Claude corners the market on office docs: A path to training AI models on copyrighted music
Why Anthropic’s books copyright deal is postponed. The U.S. government’s new AI youth safety investigation. Seedream 4.0, Bytedance’s new image model. Jupyter Agent 2, a set of tools for solving data science problems.
Letters
Knowledge Is Great, Skills Are Greater: Educators are shifting from teaching knowledge to teaching practical skills. A report from the Coursera Connect conference
This week, Coursera held its annual conference in Las Vegas. A major theme was the shift from knowledge- to skills-based education, which will help many individuals, businesses, and educational institutions.
The Batch Newsletter
Stronger Chatbot Guardrails, Weaker Google Monopoly, AI-Assisted Education, 10 Million Tokens of Context
The Batch AI News and Insights: This week, Coursera held its annual conference in Las Vegas. A major theme was the shift from knowledge- to skills-based education, which will help many individuals, businesses, and educational institutions.
Machine Learning Research
10 Million Tokens of Input Context: ATLAS, a transformer-like architecture, can process a context window as large as ten million tokens
An alternative to attention enables large language models to track relationships among words across extraordinarily wide spans of text.
Tech & Society
2 Hours With AI Versus 6 With Teacher: Inside Alpha School, a Texas-based program using algorithms and video monitors to teach children
A growing private school system replaces the typical 6-hour school day with 2 hours of personalized, AI-assisted education.