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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Google Must Share Data With AI Rivals: Google must share its search index, but can keep Chrome and Android

AI companies that aspire to compete with Google in search and other information-retrieval applications got a boost from the United States government.

Meta, OpenAI Reinforce Guardrails: Meta and OpenAI respond to criticism by adding new rules for teens’ chatbot use

Meta and OpenAI promised to place more controls on their chatbots’ conversations with children and teenagers, as worrisome interactions with minors come under increasing scrutiny.

Anthropic copyright suit settled for $1.5 billion: Why AI models hallucinate and how to fix them

Qwen3-Max, Alibaba’s giant, capable new model. Grok-code-fast, xAI’s new free coding agent. Google’s deals to supply TPUs to other cloud providers. Projects, ChatGPT’s newly free organizational feature.

Swiss model Apertus discloses code, datasets: AI content labels now mandatory on Chinese platforms

Hermes, a model trained to reason and follow instructions. Tencent’s new explorable 3D world framework. OpenAI’s new jobs and certification programs. Warner Bros’s lawsuit against Midjourney.

AI Skills Are Redefining What Makes a Great Developer: The job market for software developers requires knowing how to use AI

There is significant unmet demand for developers who understand AI.

The Batch Newsletter

Gemini’s Environmental Impact, China’s Emerging AI Hub, Chatbot Job Interviews, Security For Agents

The Batch AI News and Insights: There is significant unmet demand for developers who understand AI.

Machine Learning Research

Cybersecurity for Agents: Meta releases LlamaFirewall, an open-source defense against AI hijacking

Autonomous agents built on large language models introduce distinct security concerns. Researchers designed a system to protect agents from common vulnerabilities.

Science

Gemini’s Environmental Impact Measured: Google study directly measures electricity, water use, and greenhouse emissions of its models

Google determined that its large language models have a smaller environmental footprint than previous estimates had led it to expect.

Business

China’s Emerging AI Hub: Inside DeepSeek and the other "little dragons" transforming Hangzhou into China's Silicon Valley

Hangzhou, a longtime manufacturing hub in eastern China, is blossoming into a center of AI innovation.

AI Careers

Chatbot Interviewers Fill More Jobs: Study shows AI agent interviewers improve hiring, retention in customer service jobs

Large language models may have advantages over human recruiters when conducting job interviews, a study shows.

Data Points

Microsoft’s first MAI foundation models: Latam-GPT, an LLM optimized with regional data

Anthropic and OpenAI’s audits of each others’ models. Claude’s opt-out training data policies. ChatGPT’s responses to mental health crises. Alibaba’s new AI inference chip.

Data Points

Google’s Nano Banana hits the scene: OpenAI’s latest voice-to-voice model

Anthropic’s browser use extension preview. Automation hits entry-level workers first. Reinforcement Learning from Checklist Feedback. Authors settle copyright lawsuit over pirated books.

The Batch Newsletter

AI-Powered Phones Get Proactive, Robot Antelope Joins Herd, LLM Environmental Impacts Get Measured

The Batch AI News and Insights: Parallel agents are emerging as an important new direction for scaling up AI. AI capabilities have scaled with more training data, training-time compute, and test-time compute.

Letters

Agents Running in Parallel Get There Faster: Parallel agents can accelerate AI systems as test-time compute scales up.

Parallel agents are emerging as an important new direction for scaling up AI. AI capabilities have scaled with more training data, training-time compute, and test-time compute.

Machine Learning Research

Better Image Processing Through Self-Supervised Learning: Meta’s DINOv3 gets an updated loss term and improved vision performance

DINOv2 showed that a vision transformer pretrained on unlabeled images could produce embeddings that are useful for a wide variety of tasks. Now it has been updated to improve the performance of its embeddings in segmentation and other vision tasks.

Robotics

Robot Antelope Joins Herd: Chinese scientists disguise modified robot dog as antelope to study herd behavior

Researchers in China disguised a quadruped robot as a Tibetan antelope to help study the animals close-up.

Science

Mistral Measures LLM Consumption of Energy, Water, and Materials: French AI startup discloses full lifecycle consumption and emissions for Mistral Large 2

The French AI company Mistral measured the environmental impacts of its flagship large language model.