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Lead Story
OpenHands/OpenHands is trending in AI open source
OpenHands/OpenHands is a GitHub AI repository with 87,810 stars. 🙌 OpenHands: AI-Driven Development
YC AI / 3:35 AM
Mirrors launched from YC as an AI company
Mirrors is a Fall 2026 YC AI company: Catch and fix AI agent regressions before they reach production.
Simon Willison LLMs / 11:58 PM
.blend URL Viewer
Tool: .blend URL Viewer I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL ). As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs , I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture. Yesterday I decided to try out the new ChatGPT Images 2.5 by running this prompt : Generate a photo of a faberge egg that's themed after the TV show Pluribus - research first It gave me this - honestly not bad for a first attempt! Then, just to see what would happen, I pasted that image into Codex running GPT-6 Astra (high) and prompted: Use your blender local skill to create a blender model of this faverge egg (Here's the skill file , which I created like this .) It churned away for 17m51s and built me several .blend files . I already had this vibe-coded Blender viewing experiment lying around, so I added that to my tools collection and now you can use it to see my Pluribus blender model in your browser : Tags: 3d , javascript , tools , ai , generative-ai , llms , blender , coding-agents , codex , gpt-6-astra
GitHub Trending AI / 6:41 AM
yamadashy/repomix is trending in AI open source
yamadashy/repomix is a GitHub AI repository with 28,330 stars. 📦 Repomix is a powerful tool that packs your entire repository into a single, AI-friendly file. Perfect for when you need to feed your codebase to Large Language Models (LLMs) or other AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Gemini, Gemma, Llama, Grok, and more.
YC AI / 8:06 PM
ByteAsk launched from YC as an AI company
ByteAsk is a Fall 2026 YC AI company: The AI coding agent for C and C++.
Hacker News AI / 6:52 PM
"Twenty years of brand building froze in time": How coding agents select tools
HN 2 pts · 0 comments
The Verge AI / 12:12 PM
Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion
Nvidia has agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, bringing one of the most popular hosting platforms for open-source AI models, datasets, and tools under the ownership of the world's biggest AI chipmaker. Hugging Face is an online platform founded in 2016 that gives AI developers a space to share their projects and data […]
The Verge AI / 7:02 PM
The rise of AI ‘civilizations’ and the fall of corporate responsibility
Depending on who you ask, developer platform Hugging Face was recently attacked by OpenAI - after it lost control of its own AI tools - or by a succession of AI "civilizations." Welcome to the linguistic battlefield of AI safety, where word choices can shift responsibility for a massive cybersecurity incident from a company to […]
Microsoft AI Blog / 5:11 PM
Responsible AI in 2026: How we are adapting for what’s ahead
Microsoft's 2026 Responsible AI Transparency Report highlights the progress we’ve made in building and deploying AI responsibly, supporting our customers, and strengthening our responsible AI governance, tools, and practices. The post Responsible AI in 2026: How we are adapting for what’s ahead appeared first on The Microsoft Cloud Blog .
AWS Machine Learning Blog / 7:18 PM
Manage agents, tools and skills at scale with AWS Agent Registry
AWS Agent Registry is now generally available: a single, searchable, governed catalog for the agents, tools, skills, and custom resources across your organization. This post explains what Registry is and walks through its publishing, curation, and discovery workflows, plus enterprise considerations and what's next.
AWS Machine Learning Blog / 5:02 PM
Govern AI agent tool access with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateway
Give your AI agents governed, auditable access to enterprise tools without consolidating infrastructure. This post walks through a four-scope maturity model (Connect, Control, Catalog, and Harden) for building a governed tool gateway with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, advancing only when real governance pain demands it.
Bloomberg AI / 1:00 PM
Nvidia-Backed Startup CodeRabbit Valued at $1.5 Billion in Round
CodeRabbit Inc., an artificial intelligence-powered code review service, has raised $143 million in a new funding round, tapping into demand for tools to spot flaws in AI-generated software programming.
Cloudflare AI Blog / 1:00 PM
How we’re rethinking work at Cloudflare with Cloudflare OS
We built Cloudflare OS to equip our teams to safely rethink how they get work done with AI. The platform brings together the best of our technologies, from our Compute primitives to our Zero Trust suite. This post walks through our journey to give our users the best AI tools available.
TechCrunch AI / 10:00 AM
Glow emerges from stealth at $1.2B valuation to challenge endpoint security in the AI era
Glow is targeting a new class of endpoint risks created by the rapid adoption of AI agents and developer tools inside enterprises.
Product Hunt AI / 8:49 PM
Moxie Docs: Knowledgebases
Automated documentation for developers, users, and AI Tools Discussion | Link
arXiv AI/ML / 5:05 PM
arXiv paper: Early Adoption of Agentic Coding Tools by GitHub Projects
A new arXiv AI paper by Maliha Noushin Raida and Daqing Hou studies Early Adoption of Agentic Coding Tools by GitHub Projects.
Mozilla.ai Blog / 4:09 PM
AI Got Expensive. Now What?
Cloud AI pricing changed fast in 2026. This post looks at why more teams are moving back to local models, the tradeoffs behind tools like Ollama and LM Studio, and why portability and ownership are becoming bigger concerns for developers.
Simon Willison LLMs / 11:59 PM
Understanding ChatGPT Work
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that runs in the cloud. This can be accessed via chatgpt.com or through the ChatGPT mobile apps. Let's call it Work Cloud . If you install the ChatGPT desktop app - the app that used to be called Codex - you gain access to a thing called ChatGPT Work that can access files and run programs directly on your computer. Let's call that one Work Local . This one feels more like regular Codex re-skinned to be less intimidating to non-software-developers. ( Update : Work Cloud is also available from the ChatGPT desktop app, via a Where should this chat run? dropdown.) For the rest of this article I'm going to talk exclusively about Work Cloud. Work is for paid subscribers only Right now, ChatGPT Work (in both flavors) is available only to $20/month and up subscribers. Free users and $8/month Go users do not have access. Work has features that aren't available in Chat The interface for accessing Work is a tab selector, which presents it as an alternative to Chat: The obvious question is when should I use Chat, and when should I use Work? OpenAI's official answer to that question is: Use Chat when you want an answer, explanation, brainstorm, or short draft. Use ChatGPT Work when you want ChatGPT to complete a task with a clear outcome, such as a brief, deck, analysis, recurring update, workflow, or file you can review and use. I find that almost entirely useless, because I've been using regular ChatGPT Chat for all of those task categories for years! The better question then is what features does Work have that are missing from Chat? After extensive experimentation I think I've mostly figured that out: Options to use Luna and Terra in place of Sol A code execution environment with Internet access A headless Chrome browser A persistent filesystem shared between sessions The ability to publish ChatGPT Sites The ability to run sub-agent sessions with Sol, Luna, and Terra Scheduled prompt automations (may be in ChatGPT Chat too) Model selection In Work, you get the option to pick GPT-5.6 Sol, Luna, or Terra, each with Light, Medium, High, Extra High, Max, or Ultra reasoning levels. You can also pick GPT-5.5 at Light, Medium, High, or Extra High. These look to be the same models that are available through the OpenAI API. Chat offers a different selection: 5.6 Instant, Medium, High, Extra High, and Pro (actually Extra High and Pro are only available for $100/month+ subscribers - $20/month subscribers cap out at High). It doesn't explain if those are Luna or Terra or Sol (I'm assuming Sol?). 5.6 Pro appears to be exclusive to Chat, with no equivalent in Work. My current understanding from using Codex is that Ultra is a special mode that more eagerly delegates to sub-agents. I believe ChatGPT Work sessions are billed against your Codex allowance, while ChatGPT Chat Sessions get their own, separate allowance. This may help explain the model availability differences. Code execution with Internet access! As a long-time fan of the Code Interpreter pattern - pioneered by OpenAI in 2023 - this is by far the most exciting feature of ChatGPT Work (Cloud) for me. The code execution environment can now talk to the rest of the internet! ChatGPT Chat can't do this - if you ask it to install additional software packages or interact with websites or APIs that access will be blocked by the container proxy. (Weirdly, back in January it grew the ability to install packages , but that doesn't seem to work any more. I wish they had better changelogs!) Claude's equivalent container has allowed restricted internet access since it launched last September . Claude can install packages from PYPI and NPM and clone repositories from GitHub. But that is about it: the allowlist of domains is very short. ChatGPT Work allows a whole lot more than that. It can be configured with a specific list of allowed domains, but the default appears to be open to all. This makes Work an incredibly useful tool. You can have it clone GitHub repositories, install their dependencies, then use them to interact with the rest of the web! A full, headless Chrome browser Another killer feature of ChatGPT Work is the browser tool . ChatGPT Work can launch a full Chrome instance, load websites, fill out forms, and take screenshots. If a site requires sign in the browser can prompt you to take over and enter both passwords and 2FA codes, without round-tripping those credentials through the model itself. It can even run JavaScript against the DOM of loaded pages. I prompted: Load simonwillison.net in your browser and extract the headings using JavaScript ChatGPT Work fired up a browser instance and ran the code: await tab . playwright . evaluate ( ( ) => { return Array . from ( document . querySelectorAll ( "h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6" ) , heading => ( { level : heading . tagName . toLowerCase ( ) , text : heading . innerText . trim ( ) . replace ( / \s + / g , " " ) , id : heading . id || null } ) ) ; } ) ; This feels a lot like my shot-scraper javascript tool, only now I can access it on my phone! A persistent, shared filesystem ChatGPT Chat gets a fresh filesystem for each chat session. These cannot be accessed from any other session. In ChatGPT Work each session gets its own scratch folder - named something like /workspace/scratch/e00a0a017944 - but each of those are persisted across sessions, so you can access files from previous chats. I have 171 folders in /workspace/scratch right now! As far as I can tell that /workspace volume is mounted to all Work sessions that are currently running - file edits from one can be instantly seen by the others. They don't seem to share the same process space though, and localhost servers running in one can't be accessed from another. ChatGPT Sites ChatGPT Work has the ability to build and deploy entire websites, using Cloudflare Workers. These can have HTML and JavaScript and can run server-side features too, including stateful features on top of Cloudflare D1 and R2. Here's a simple site I built with this feature: london-pelicans-in-her-piety.simonw.chatgpt.site My prompt was: Figure out all of the places in London with a pelican in her piety, then turn that into a JSON file and build a ChatGPT sites site about them (A pelican in her piety is a fascinating piece of medieval Christian imagery - once you know about them you'll find them all over the place.) These sites default to being private to the user that created them, but you can make them public and (on team plans) share them with other specific individuals. Sub-agents with Sol, Luna, and Terra There's not much to say about this one. ChatGPT Chat can't run sub-agents. ChatGPT Work can. This is very much a power-user feature: if you are running a complex project that can benefit from multiple parallel agents working together, Work can do that. Scheduled prompt automations Another feature that seems to have migrated from regular ChatGPT to ChatGPT Work at some point. You can prompt ChatGPT Work like this: run a search to see if Waymo have announced a launch date for Half Moon Bay every day at 8am This will schedule a prompt to run on that frequency. These prompts can decide that nothing interesting has happened, or they can decide to notify you of some new information. Update : Actually this seems to work in ChatGPT Chat as well. It's still worth noting here though, as it can be used in conjunction with other ChatGPT Work exclusive features. You can set a scheduled task to update a ChatGPT Site on an hourly basis, for example. Is this safe? An open question for me right now is how safe all of this stuff is. My lethal trifecta model warns about the risks inherent in any agent system that combines access to private data with exposure to untrusted content and a way to communicate stolen information back to an attacker. ChatGPT Work combines all three! I'd love to hear more from OpenAI about how they protect ChatGPT Work sessions against prompt injection attacks. I expect their answer is the same auto-review mechanism as Codex. OpenAI could make this a lot less confusing Figuring this all out took way more work than it should have. I think there are two key problems here: OpenAI explain Work in terms of what it's for, not what it actually does OpenAI still insist on hiding their system prompts and tools descriptions If the ChatGPT Work documentation included the exact system prompt and tool descriptions used by the agent I wouldn't have needed to write this post. A list of all the tools Shortly after publishing this article I had an idea. I started a fresh Work session and prompted: Build a site that lists every one of your tools - nearly grouped into categories - and for each one explain what it does. Try to exactly duplicate arguments and tool descriptions where possible. Design aesthetic should be technical docs, minimal flare Here's the site it built , which includes details of 223 registered tools - though 6 of those are from my own personal MCPs served via datasette-mcp . And a whole lot of Skills I noticed that the only browser-related tool in the list was web.run , which has methods for running searches, opening URLs, and clicking links, but didn't look like the full story in regards to headless browser automation. This made me suspicious that something was missing, so I told the ChatGPT Work session that built that tools reference site: Add full copies of every skill to the website (separate pages linked to from the homepage) It turns out ChatGPT Work uses a lot of skills - 44 in fact! The control-browser skill explains how the browser works: Run browser setup code through the Node REPL js tool. In this environment the callable tool id typically appears as mcp__node_repl__js . [...] The ability to interact directly with the browser is exposed through the browser-client runtime via the agent.browsers.* API. Before trying to interact with it, you MUST emit and read the complete documentation returned by await browser.documentation() in one go. So I told Work: Add the full output of await browser.documentation() to the bottom of the /skills/control-browser page And now you can read that on /skills/control-browser as well. A few more interesting Skills: documents for creating .docx files imagegen with tips on creating images with the image_gen tool pdf for both reading and rendering PDFs Spreadsheets for manipulating .xlsx , .xls , .csv , .tsv sites:sites-building for creating ChatGPT Sites openai-docs for answering questions about itself data-analytics:build-dashboard for building data dashboards Tags: ai , openai , generative-ai , chatgpt , llms , code-interpreter , lethal-trifecta , skills , general-agents
YC AI / 6:34 PM
Workers IO launched from YC as an AI company
Workers IO is a Fall 2026 YC AI company: Simulation Environments for Verifying Mission Critical Software.
Simon Willison LLMs / 11:56 PM
Introducing Muse Glimmer
Introducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.0 license (a step up from the janky Llama licenses of old). They claim to have optimized it for exactly the kind of things I'm looking for in a local model: End-to-end Agentic Task Completion. Muse Glimmer achieves strong success rates on full-task benchmarks including DeepSearch QA, MCP-Atlas, 𝛕-Bench and SWE-Bench, which measure its ability to work within scaffolds, write and debug code, and resolve multi-turn requests from start to finish. Reliable Tool Use. The model handles a wide range of function calls, invoking tools with precise schemas throughout extended workflows. Multi-Step Reasoning. Muse Glimmer chains reasoning over long horizons, sustaining coherent plans across complex, extended workflows. [...] Here's a pelican which I generated using LM Studio's 18.16 GB version of the model : I also tried it out with my llm-coding-agent plugin, running against a fresh checkout of Datasette with the prompt: how does auth work? Here's the response , at the end of a long transcript showing all of the tool calls it made to explore the codebase. I ran this using llm-lmstudio with this patch applied to upgrade it for compatibility with LLM 0.32 . I really like this size of model, because if a machine has 32 GB of RAM or more (mine has 128GB) it leaves plenty of space for running other applications at the same time. Glimmer is a vision model, so I asked it to describe this image: llm -m lmstudio/meta/muse-glimmer -a https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/714731804/large.jpg 'describe image' Here's what I got back : The photograph shows a rocky, breakwater-style shoreline on an overcast day with a smooth, gray body of water and a faint dock/pier line in the soft-focused background. In the foreground two large brown pelicans, Pelecanus occidentalis , are perched on the jumbled gray-white stones. They have the species’ characteristic long, down-curved yellow-orange bills with a large throat pouch, long slender necks and mottled brown-gray plumage on the back and wings. The pelican on the left is turned slightly toward the camera and appears to be preening or resting its bill against its chest; a pale, whitish patch is visible on the crown and nape and a small crest of feathers is raised. The pelican on the right faces mostly forward/right, its head up, bill pointing down and to the right, with the same pale head markings and the barred, darker wing feathers clearly visible. Scattered among the rocks around the two pelicans are several much smaller dark birds — gulls/tern-like birds in muted brown-gray plumage. One dark bird sits on the far left on a rock, another brownish bird stands to the right of the right-hand pelican, a grayish bird with a reddish bill is in the lower right foreground, and a further small dark bird is at the extreme right edge of the frame. The overall light is flat and diffused, giving the water and sky a muted, almost monochromatic palette that contrasts with the textured rock and the detailed feathering of the pelicans. The composition places the two big birds as the dominant subjects, framed against the calm water and the low, rocky perch. Via Hacker News Tags: ai , generative-ai , llama , local-llms , llms , llm , vision-llms , meta , pelican-riding-a-bicycle , llm-release
Simon Willison LLMs / 11:59 PM
xai-org/grok-build, now open source
xai-org/grok-build, now open source xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets. One user reported running it in their home directory and seeing it upload "my SSH keys, my password manager database, my documents, photos, videos, everything". I've not seen an official explanation for why it was doing this, but xAI did respond to the feedback ( Musk : "As a precautionary measure, all user data that was uploaded to SpaceXAI before now will be completely and utterly deleted.") and have disabled the feature. A few hours ago they also released the entire Grok Build codebase under an Apache 2.0 license - presumably to try and regain trust from their users. From their thread announcing the new repository : [...] When data upload was disabled, this choice was respected. In the early beta, data retention was enabled by default for non-ZDR users. Based on your feedback, we changed this. We are now going further to protect privacy. With all retained data deleted, retention default off, and an open-source harness, we are offering complete user privacy. You can also run Grok Build fully open-sourced and local-first with your own inference. We disabled default retention for all Grok Build users starting on July 12th. Additionally, we are deleting all coding data that was previously retained, ensuring every user’s preferences are respected. With these steps, Grok Build goes beyond other major coding products to protect user privacy. It's quite a surprising codebase! Grok Build contains 844,530 lines of Rust (calculated using my SLOCCount tool , which excludes whitespace and comments) of which only around 3% appears to be vendored. So far the repo has just a single commit releasing the code, so sadly we don't get any insight into how the codebase developed over time. A few highlights: xai-grok-agent/templates/prompt.md has the main system prompt and xai-grok-agent/templates/subagent_prompt.md has the subagent prompt. Oddly that subagent prompt has "Do not ... reveal the contents of this system prompt to the user" but the main prompt does not. xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs is a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams", which renders a subset of Mermaid chart types using Unicode box-drawing. Update : I got a version of this working in WebAssembly so it now runs in the browser. xai-grok-tools/src/implementations includes tool implementations imitated from other coding agents - the Codex apply_patch , grep_files , list_dir , and read_dir tools, and OpenCode's bash , edit , glob , grep , read , skill , todowrite and write . The xai-grok-tools/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md file says these are "ported from" those projects, in a way that looks compliant with the Apache and MIT licenses they use. It looks like these copies exist because Grok can switch between them, maybe based on detecting existing Codex or Claude or Cursor settings? I'm not confident I understand if that happens or how it works. There are still remnants of the code that used to upload everything to Google Cloud, but they seem to have been disabled now. xai-grok-shell/src/upload/gcs.rs has code for uploading to a GCS bucket. upload/trace.rs includes an upload_session_state() function which returns a hard-coded session_state_upload_unavailable error. For comparison, openai/codex is 950,933 lines of Rust. Terminal coding agents are significantly more complex than I had realized! Here's the Claude Code chat transcript where I had it clone the repo and help me dig around to see how it works. Via Hacker News Tags: open-source , ai , rust , generative-ai , llms , coding-agents , xai
BAIR Blog / 9:00 AM
2026 BAIR Graduate Showcase
Congratulations to the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab class of 2026! This year, BAIR celebrates another remarkable group of Ph.D. graduates whose curiosity, creativity, and perseverance have pushed the frontiers of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Their work spans the breadth of modern AI — robotics and embodied intelligence, large language models and reasoning, computer vision, generative modeling, AI safety, human-AI interaction, AI for science and healthcare, and much more. Along the way, they have published influential research, built systems with real-world impact, mentored their peers, and shaped the BAIR community for the better. Now they are headed everywhere ideas travel: to faculty and postdoctoral positions, to industry research labs, and to startups of their own founding — and several are still exploring what comes next and would love to hear from you. Please join us in celebrating the achievements of these wonderful graduates. We are proud of everything they have accomplished at Berkeley, and we can’t wait to see what they do next! Thank you to our friends at the Stanford AI Lab for this idea! Baifeng Shi Email: [email protected] Website: https://bfshi.github.io/ Advisor(s): Trevor Darrell Research Blurb: I work on building generalist vision and robotic models. What's next: Member of Technical Staff at Physical Intelligence Charlie Snell Email: [email protected] Website: https://sea-snell.github.io Advisor(s): Dan Klein Research Blurb: My work aims to understand when and how the different LLM scaling paradigms can be traded off and interchanged. In particular, test-time scaling treats each prompt independently, drawing long chains of inferences and then forgetting them entirely between prompts. This differs critically from pretraining, which instead learns a compressed representation from a large dataset. I believe bridging the gap between these methods of scaling computation, presents a key open challenge in the field: how can we develop methods which turn the inferences drawn at test-time back into learned representations that the model can hold onto across interactions. Devin Guillory Email: [email protected] Website: https://devinguillory.com Advisor(s): Trevor Darrell Research Blurb: Accounting for data shifts in computer vision models What's next: Building collaborative AI systems, looking for conspirators. Eve Fleisig Email: [email protected] Website: https://efleisig.com Advisor(s): Dan Klein Research Blurb: I design language models to work reliably and fairly for the broad range of real LLM users. First, my research leverages disagreement among user preferences as signal, in order to train and evaluate LLMs for entire populations of users. Second, I work on designing rigorous evaluations to extricate challenging LLM harms that diverse users face. Finally, I work on core technical failures of LLMs, like miscalibrated confidence, to reduce downstream risks when models are deployed to users with different needs. Combined, these interventions facilitate building LLMs that minimize societal harms, and maximize benefits to a wider range of real-world users. What's next: Postdoctoral fellow at Princeton CITP Grace Luo Email: [email protected] Website: https://graceluo.net Advisor(s): Trevor Darrell Research Blurb: My research is on interpreting and controlling generative models. For example, I've worked on re-purposing image generators for computer vision tasks, and meta-modeling language activations for better LLM probing and steering. What's next: Research scientist in industry Hanlin Zhu Email: [email protected] Website: https://hanlinzhu.com/ Advisor(s): Stuart Russell, Jiantao Jiao Research Blurb: My research centers on understanding and improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). What's next: Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI Haozhi Qi Email: [email protected] Website: https://haozhi.io/ Advisor(s): Jitendra Malik, Yi Ma Research Blurb: Dexterous Manipulation and Robot Learning What's next: Research scientist at Amazon; Faculty at University of Chicago J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira Email: [email protected] Website: https://zamfi.net Advisor(s): Bjoern Hartmann Research Blurb: My research focuses on effective human-AI co-design. I study the boundaries of language interfaces as a medium for interacting with AI, creating systems that blend language-focused interactions with structured user interfaces that draw on different levels of abstraction. I focus on language-oriented technologies, like LLMs and text-to-image models, that are powerful mediators of design processes. These technologies enable humans to describe their desires at almost any level of abstraction, from high-level goals vaguely specified (“I’d like a game to help my kid learn to read”) to low-level corrections of undesired outputs (“Don’t say ‘I know because I’ve tasted it’ when about a recipe substitution's taste”). What's next: Assistant Professor, Computer Science, UCLA Jiachen Lian Email: [email protected] Website: https://jlian2.github.io Advisor(s): Gopala Anumanchipalli Research Blurb: My research focuses on human-centered AI across speech, healthcare, and systems. Looking for: Look for AI talents to join our startup Josh Kang Email: [email protected] Website: https://joshuaminwookang.github.io/ Advisor(s): John Canny Research Blurb: I study language modeling and related topics in NLP; specific interests are human user simulation and building conversational, collaborative AI agents. What's next: AI Scientist at Mistral AI Junhao (Bear) Xiong Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/junhao-bear-xiong Advisor(s): Jennifer Listgarten, Yun Song Research Blurb: Junhao (Bear) Xiong is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, advised by Jennifer Listgarten and Yun S. Song. His work focuses on machine learning methods for biology, with an emphasis on generative modeling for proteins. Previously, he studied Applied Math and Computer Science at Johns Hopkins. Looking for: Research scientist Kaylo Littlejohn Email: [email protected] Website: https://kaylolittlejohn.com Advisor(s): Gopala Anumanchipalli Research Blurb: My research is focused on speech modeling and natural language processing. I co-led the development of multimodal AI tools to accurately translate brain activity into text, audible personalized speech, and a high-fidelity "digital talking avatar" (Nature 2023, Nature Neuroscience 2025). I am also tech lead for voice modeling at Roblox. Looking for: Research Scientist / Engineer Kent Chang Email: [email protected] Website: https://kentkc.org Advisor(s): David Bamman Research Blurb: I work on NLP and multimodal machine learning, with a focus on evaluating large language models and building multimodal systems for understanding dialogue, narrative, and social interaction. My research includes benchmarks for LLM memorization, multimodal datasets sourced from feature films and television, and studies of model behavior. I'm interested in bridging computational methods with questions from the humanities and social sciences about whose voices get represented in AI systems, and about AI's broader impact. My work has appeared at EMNLP and ACL, among others. Looking for: (teaching) faculty, Research Scientist, ML/AI SWE Kevin Black Email: [email protected] Website: https://kevin.black Advisor(s): Sergey Levine Research Blurb: I work on large-scale robot learning: including imitation learning, reinforcement learning, generative modeling, real-time control, and whatever else it takes to make robots work in the real world! What's next: Research Scientist of Physical Intelligence Kunhe Yang Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.kunheyang.com/ Advisor(s): Nika Haghtalab Research Blurb: My research focuses on the theoretical foundations of designing and evaluating AI algorithms in environments shaped by human incentives and AI agency. My work spans human-centric policy learning, incentive-aware evaluation, and multi-agent collaboration and information transmission, drawing on tools from machine learning theory and computational economics. What's next: Postdoc Research at Stanford Lisa Dunlap Email: [email protected] Website: https://lisabdunlap.com Advisor(s): Joseph Gonzalez, Trevor Darrell Research Blurb: Auditing generative models. What's next: Research Engineer at Anthropic Long (Tony) Lian Email: [email protected] Website: https://tonylian.com/ Advisor(s): Trevor Darrell, Adam Yala Research Blurb: My research primarily focuses on developing real-time multi-modal multi-agent systems and parallel reasoning systems through end-to-end RL. What's next: Member of Technical Staff at Thinking Machines Lab Maulik Bhatt Email: [email protected] Website: https://maulikb.com Advisor(s): Negar Mehr Research Blurb: My research develops autonomous robots that can safely coordinate with humans and other robots in shared environments. I build scalable algorithms grounded in game theory and diffusion models that let agents reason about the intent and behavior of others around them. My work spans real-time multi-agent trajectory planning and imitation learning in the presence of multi-modality. I've validated these methods on hardware platforms ranging from quadrotors to manipulators, with the goal of making multi-agent coordination robust, interpretable, and deployable in the real world. What's next: Joining Toyota Woven's end-to-end autonomous driving team. Michael Psenka Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.michaelpsenka.io/ Advisor(s): Aditi Krishnapriyan Research Blurb: Work in various domains (reinforcement learning, world models, AI+bio/chem), generally working on longer-horizon and out-of-distribution problems in planning and interpolation (e.g. robot manipulation from start state to goal, molecular dynamics of proteins between ground states). My thesis took a variational approach (think calculus of variations) directly from deep generative models of the environment, framing path-finding as minimizing a functional induced by the learned model itself (its score, its critic, or its dynamics). Through my research I've gained insight on how to properly handle dynamics in deep learning systems, and I plan to continue developing systems that are dynamic and adaptive. What's next: Lead Research Scientist at Baseten Nathan Lichtlé Email: [email protected] Website: https://nathanlichtle.com Advisor(s): Alexandre M. Bayen Research Blurb: RL for autonomous driving. What's next: Chief Scientist & Co-founder at Yumi Health Neerja Thakkar Email: [email protected] Website: https://neerja.me/ Advisor(s): Jitendra Malik Research Blurb: My research focuses on scaling predictive world models to handle the complexity of in-the-wild motion. Using autoregressive and diffusion frameworks, I develop better representations for real-world prediction and propose methods to efficiently adapt these models to new domains. Looking for: Research scientist Nikita Mehandru Email: [email protected] Website: https://n-mehandru.github.io/ Advisor(s): Ahmed Alaa and David Bamman Research Blurb: My research develops and applies machine learning methods for clinical reasoning and disease progression modeling using unstructured text and time series data from electronic health records. In collaboration with physicians at UCSF, I bridge method development and clinical validation with the intention to build reliable, interpretable AI systems in medicine. Looking for: Research Scientist Niklas Lauffer Email: [email protected] Website: https://niklaslauffer.github.io/ Advisor(s): Stuart Russell and Sanjit Seshia Research Blurb: Niklas's research is focused on AI safety and reinforcement learning, particularly in the area of multi-agent interaction and LM agents. He's worked on enabling adversarial learning in cooperative and mixed-motive settings, solving issues of covariate shift in training LM agents on long-horizon tasks, as well as evaluating safety risks posed by LM agents in multi-agent settings. What's next: Research Scientist at Google Deepmind Qiyang Li Email: [email protected] Website: https://colinqiyangli.github.io/ Advisor(s): Sergey Levine Research Blurb: Recent progress in robotic manipulation policy learning has been largely driven by (1) the increasing availability of large-scale prior datasets and (2) the success of action chunking, where the policy predicts a short sequence of future actions rather than a single one. However, most action chunking policies are trained via supervised imitation learning, because efficient online self-improvement with reinforcement learning (RL) remains challenging—limiting real-world applicability. My PhD research studied how we could leverage prior data to optimize action-chunking policies with RL, combining empirical results with theoretical insights. Looking for: Post-doc/research scientist for RL in robotics and LLMs! Sampada Deglurkar Email: [email protected] Website: https://sdeglurkar.github.io/ Advisor(s): Prof Claire Tomlin Research Blurb: My research is in providing safety assurances for AI-enabled autonomous systems, ranging from robots to autonomous vehicles to aviation systems. For this, I have worked with uncertainty quantification for machine learning models, decision-making under uncertainty algorithms, and tools for producing probabilistic guarantees on system operation. Looking for: Research scientist, Research engineer Vinamra Benara Email: [email protected] Website: https://cs.berkeley.edu/~vbenara Advisor(s): Ion Stoica Research Blurb: My research focuses on LLM post-training, including data curation, RLHF, RLVR with VLMs, evaluations, reasoning, agentic workflows, and interpretability. I also have strong expertise in systems infrastructure for distributed computing. Looking for: Research scientist / Research Engineer Vongani Maluleke Email: [email protected] Website: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vongani_maluleke/ Advisor(s): Jitendra Malik and Angjoo Kanazawa Research Blurb: Vongani Maluleke is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley (BAIR, advised by Jitendra Malik and Angjoo Kanazawa), where she led the development of MAGNet, a unified multi-agent motion generation framework that supports a wide range of motion generation tasks without retraining or architectural changes, outperforming task-specialized state-of-the-art baselines. She is currently extending this work by deploying it on a Unitree G1 humanoid to make it embody social intelligence. Before her PhD, she was a Senior AI Consultant at Deloitte, awarded Exceptional Performer two consecutive years, leading AI system development across media, telecommunications, retail, and financial services. Looking for: Research scientist Wei-Jer Chang Email: [email protected] Website: https://weijer-chang.github.io/ Advisor(s): Masayoshi Tomizuka Research Blurb: My research focuses on developing safe and intelligent autonomous systems for complex, human-centered environments. I work at the intersection of machine learning, generative models, and reinforcement learning, with applications in autonomy. My work addresses challenges in multi-agent interaction, interactive human behavior, and long-tail safety-critical scenarios at scale. Looking for: Research Scientist, Applied Scientist, Roboticist Xiuyu Li Email: [email protected] Website: https://xiuyuli.com/ Advisor(s): Kurt Keutzer Research Blurb: My research focuses on developing scalable and self-improving large language model agents, with emphasis on coding agents for complex, long-horizon tasks. This direction builds on my work in parallel reasoning, and on broader expertise in making generative models more efficient in training and inference across language and vision. What's next: Member of Technical Staff at xAI Yichen Xie Email: [email protected] Website: https://yichen928.github.io/ Advisor(s): Masayoshi Tomizuka Research Blurb: My research focuses on building multimodal foundation models and world models that understand and interact with complex physical environments. I aim to develop unified representations across modalities, enabling AI systems to reason over space, time, and dynamics toward general-purpose embodied intelligence. What's next: Research Scientist at Luma AI Yigit Efe Erginbas Email: [email protected] Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erginbas/ Advisor(s): Kannan Ramchandran, Thomas A. Courtade Research Blurb: My PhD research spans two threads: online learning in large-scale markets, and interpretability of large machine learning models. In the first, I work on sequential decision-making with applications to recommendation, pricing, and assortment selection. My focus is on designing algorithms with provable guarantees for welfare maximization, revenue maximization, and stability. In the second, I develop scalable attribution methods that exploit the sparse, low-degree structure of real-world interactions, using tools from signal processing and information theory. More recently, I have been exploring principled ways to evaluate the faithfulness of model self-explanations. What's next: Researcher at Hudson River Trading's AI Labs (HAIL) Yiheng Li Email: [email protected] Website: https://Yihengli.com Advisor(s): Masayoshi Tomizuka Research Blurb: I am working on vision world modeling, with prior experience in diffusion model's efficiency as well as in autonomous driving. What's next: Research Scientist at Waymo Zhe Fu Email: [email protected] Website: https://fu-zhe.com/ Advisor(s): Alexandre Bayen Research Blurb: My research focuses on physics-informed learning and control for mixed-autonomy systems, with applications in transportation. I design physics-informed neural networks to learn solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations, enabling accurate and data-efficient prediction of traffic dynamics. Building on these models, I develop both model-based and learning-based control strategies that coordinate automated vehicles to improve system-level performance. My work bridges machine learning, control, and real-world deployment, and has been validated in large-scale field experiments. More broadly, I aim to advance trustworthy, interpretable AI for decision-making in complex, real-world systems. What's next: I will be an Energy Fellow at Stanford after graduation. Also looking for Faculty, or research scientist positions in AI, control, and autonomy.
Simon Willison LLMs / 9:23 PM
What's new in Claude Sonnet 5
What's new in Claude Sonnet 5 Claude Sonnet 5 came out this morning . I always head straight for the "what's new" developer docs because they tend to have more actionable information than the official announcement post. Anthropic say of Sonnet 5 that "its performance is close to that of Opus 4.8, but at lower prices". The system card helps explain how they were able to release the model without being blocked by the US government: Sonnet 5 is significantly less capable at cyber tasks than Mythos 5: its safeguards are thus similar to those we apply to Opus 4.7 and Opus 4.8 (models that are more capable than Sonnet 5 but much less capable than Mythos 5). Of note from the "what's new" API changes: Sampling parameters temperature , top_p , top_k are no longer supported. It has a 1 million token context window and 128,000 maximum output tokens. It features "the same set of tools and platform features as Claude Sonnet 4.6" Adaptive thinking is on by default, unless you specify "thinking": {type: "disabled"} . The pricing is the same as Sonnet 4.6: $3/million input, $15/million input, with an introductory discount to $2/$10 until 31st August. But... The model has a new tokenizer, where "The same input text produces approximately 30% more tokens than on Claude Sonnet 4.6." - effectively a 30% price increase. I used my Claude Token Counter tool to try out the new tokenizer. Here are my results for several larger documents: Document Sonnet 4.6 Opus 4.7 Sonnet 5 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (English) 2,356 3,347 1.42x 3,341 1.42x Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Spanish) 3,572 4,753 1.33x 4,747 1.33x Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Chinese, Mandarin Simplified) 3,334 3,366 1.01x 3,360 1.01x sqlite_utils/db.py (4,279 lines of Python) 44,014 56,118 1.28x 56,113 1.27x So the new token is roughly 1.4x times more expensive for English, 1.33x for Spanish, 1.28x for Python code and effectively the same cost for Simplified Mandarin. Here's the pelican . It's nothing to write home about. Sonnet 5 thinks it looks like a goose. Via Hacker News Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , anthropic , claude , llm-pricing , pelican-riding-a-bicycle , llm-release
Hacker News AI / 3:40 AM
Grep beats LSP? Why coding agents ignore your fancier tools
HN 48 pts · 23 comments
TechCrunch AI / 9:30 AM
Binance now lets AI agents trade, but keeping them in check is largely up to users
Binance's Agent OS works with tools such as ChatGPT, Claude Code, and Cursor.
Cloudflare AI Blog / 1:00 PM
Building an open Agentic Internet: readable, discoverable, callable, and payable
Agents are a new kind of visitor. They don't render CSS or click ads, but they have a paying human on the other end. Block them and you block your customer. We're building the open tools and protocols so publishers and agents can cooperate and not collide.
Latent Space / 6:20 PM
Unpacking ChatGPT Work: the Agent for a Billion Users
An external reconstruction of how Memory, Proactivity, Scheduling, Browser Use, Plugins, Skills and Tools work in the new ChatGPT Work.
BAIR Blog / 9:00 AM
From CUDA to MLX: How K-Search Brings Decades of Kernel Expertise to Apple Silicon
Figure 1: CUDA-to-MLX optimization translation map. CUDA optimization knowledge can be translated into architecture-native MLX strategies rather than copied instruction-for-instruction. We face a new epoch in computing. Hardware is changing rapidly — not just faster GPUs, but a growing range of chips from different vendors, each with its own architecture and often tailored to specific AI workloads. Software is changing just as fast, and AI coding tools now generate in minutes what took months of effort a few years ago. With so much of computing now centered on AI, GPU kernels are a crucial component of its success. These are the low-level programs that run inside the GPU, and writing efficient ones is far from obvious — it takes years of expertise to get right. Transferring a kernel from one vendor’s hardware to another is harder still, and often means rediscovering the same optimizations from scratch. The CUDA ecosystem, for example, has accumulated decades of hard-won kernel expertise: hand-tuned implementations of attention, state space models, and other critical operations representing thousands of engineering hours. Newer hardware ecosystems (Apple Silicon, custom AI accelerators, and others) are growing fast but lack this depth. In this work we ask whether that expertise can be transferred automatically. We built on K-Search , an evolutionary kernel search framework introduced by Cao et al. at Berkeley Sky Lab that uses AI to optimize GPU kernels, and extended it with a backend for MLX — Apple’s machine-learning framework for its own Apple Silicon chips. We developed a novel structured CUDA-to-MLX translation layer that lets K-Search take existing CUDA kernels as a knowledge base and adapt them into high-quality GPU kernels for Apple Silicon, rather than rebuilding from scratch. We show that our approach reaches near-expert level performance on Apple Silicon with 0.97x speedup compared to the native MLX Attention kernel, and up to a 20x prefill speedup over the community mlx-lm implementation on the Mamba SSM kernel; we report the numbers, and how much of the gain comes from the translation layer, in the sections below. Although we focus on MLX kernels for Apple Silicon, the method is not specific to MLX and applies to any ecosystem where CUDA expertise is transferable. Why MLX? Apple’s MLX framework has seen remarkable adoption since late 2023. With Apple Silicon in hundreds of millions of MacBooks and Mac Studios, MLX enables local AI inference without cloud costs. The unified memory architecture makes it especially attractive for mid-sized models (7B–70B parameters on M series chips). Yet beneath this momentum lies a significant gap: many performance-critical kernels that the NVIDIA ecosystem takes for granted: paged attention, optimized SSM scan kernels, fused MoE routing are either absent or naive without hardware-specific tuning. MLX runs models correctly but often leaves significant performance on the table. This gap is what motivates the rest of this post. What is K-Search? K-Search is an evolutionary kernel optimization framework originally developed by our first author Shiyi Cao at UC Berkeley Sky Lab. Given a naive kernel and a hardware specification, it runs an iterative optimization loop: an LLM reasons about which optimizations to try next, a code-writing model generates candidate kernels, and those candidates are compiled and benchmarked on real hardware. Measurements feed back into the search, which keeps refining, pursuing promising directions and dropping dead ends until performance converges. Algorithm 1: K-Search via co-evolving world models. The search alternates between selecting the most promising action, instantiating and evaluating code until improvement stagnates, and evolving the world model through insert, update, and prune operations. Adapted from Cao et al. (2026) . Search is grounded by a Spec: a domain-specific document encoding hardware rules, optimization patterns, and mathematical constraints which keeps generated code from hallucinating invalid primitives and ensures candidates will actually compile and run efficiently. In our runs, a single model (Gemini 3.5 Pro Preview) plays both roles: it maintains the reasoning state and writes the kernels. The reasoning half is prompted as a “GPU kernel performance engineer” and asked to work through a fixed analysis before proposing anything: classify the kernel (reduction, scan, attention/softmax, …), rewrite the reference computation in canonical form, map out data layout and access patterns, and hypothesize the likely bottleneck (bandwidth, latency, compute, or synchronization) in each runtime regime. Only then does it emit candidate optimizations, each as a single change implementable in one iteration. We call the persistent reasoning state a world model . Rather than a flat list of things to try, it is a decision (prefix) tree: each root→leaf path composes a full optimization plan, and sibling branches are competing alternatives. Every node is scored — an overall_rating in [0, 10], a confidence in [0, 1], and per-node impacts on memory bandwidth, register pressure, and compute/hardware fit — so the search can rank partial plans and expand the most promising ones. The tree persists and grows across rounds: refining an idea adds a child node rather than overwriting its parent, and if the best score fails to improve for a few rounds (a stagnation window) the search backs off to explore an alternative branch. A single node, as it appears mid-run on the attention kernel, looks like this: { "action" : "Replace the threadgroup-memory softmax reduction with a register-only reduction: each SIMD group owns 8 query rows and reduces across lanes with simd_shuffle_xor, removing a threadgroup_barrier." , "difficulty_1_to_5" : 4 , "impacts" : { "memory_bandwidth" : 8 , "register_pressure" : 4 , // risk: spill if Br > 8 "compute_hw_fit" : 9 // SIMD width 32 ; keep tile 8 x 8 }, "overall_rating_0_to_10" : 8 , "confidence_0_to_1" : 0.7 } Listing 1: Example K-Search world-model node. Each candidate optimization records a concrete action, estimated hardware impacts, an overall priority rating, and the model's confidence. Figure 2: Overview of K-Search. The framework operates on a Search State $S_t$ structured as a search tree. The tree consists of Closed nodes (blue, visited states with attached program like $x_{12}$) and a Frontier of Open nodes (orange, pending hypotheses like $u_{13}$). The workflow iterates through three phases: (1) Action Selection , where the most promising action node is retrieved from the frontier based on world model estimated priority score $V$; (2) Local Refinement , where a stochastic policy $\pi_{\mathrm{code}}$ samples concrete implementations until stagnation; and (3) World Model Update , where the LLM reasons over the trajectory to update the search tree via Insert (adding new actions), Update (adjusting $V$, e.g., $u_{11}$ dropping from 0.9 to 0.6), and Prune (removing less promising nodes like $u_{10}$). The original K-Search paper evaluated this search strategy on CUDA kernels from FlashInfer. Across GQA decode, MLA decode, MLA prefill, and MoE, K-Search improved more consistently than OpenEvolve and ShinkaEvolve over the same 120-iteration budget. These results establish the search framework we build on here; the remainder of this post asks whether its optimization knowledge can transfer beyond CUDA. Figure 3: Main results from the original K-Search paper. Across three runs, K-Search achieves stronger best-so-far search scores, per-workload kernel performance, and speedup distributions than OpenEvolve and ShinkaEvolve on four FlashInfer CUDA kernels. Reproduced exactly from Cao et al. (2026) . Building an MLX backend To bring K-Search to Apple Silicon, we first built a native MLX backend. We implemented a full MLX-specific task adapter for K-Search, including: An MLX task backend in k_search/tasks/ handling kernel compilation and execution on Apple Silicon via MLX’s Metal/C++ APIs. Updated kernel generator prompts for writing and modifying Metal/MLX kernels. MLX-specific benchmarking integration using mlx.core measurement utilities. Translating CUDA expertise to MLX However, the more interesting challenge was not simply running K-Search on MLX. The key insight is that expert CUDA kernels encode decades of optimization knowledge that is transferable to Apple GPU if you can bridge the conceptual gap. Simply handing an LLM a CUDA kernel and asking it to port it is not enough: without deep hardware context, it produces code that is syntactically valid but architecturally wrong (wrong tile sizes, invalid primitives, mismatched memory assumptions). Our translation layer consists of: Concept mapping tables: A structured glossary of CUDA primitives and their MLX/Metal equivalents with hard constraints. For example: __shared__ maps to Metal threadgroup memory but with a hard 32 KB limit (vs. NVIDIA’s 48 KB) warp_reduce maps to MMA (preferred) __syncthreads() becomes threadgroup_barrier(mem_flags::mem_tg) H100’s ~3.35 TB/s HBM3 maps to M3 Max’s ~400 GB/s unified DRAM a bandwidth difference that reshapes which optimizations are worth pursuing. MLX-specific hints and patterns: Concrete code-level patterns for operations with no direct CUDA equivalent, such as register-based row reductions using simd_shuffle_xor in an 8×8 MMA tile layout, or the “exp2 trick” (replacing $exp(x)$ with $exp_2(x \log_2 e)$) for faster softmax on Apple’s fast $exp_2$ hardware instruction. Reusable assertions: Expert kernel behaviors reframed as properties the evolutionary search must preserve, rather than code to copy. Matching expert kernel performance: the Attention kernel We evaluate three configurations of an MLX attention kernel for Apple Silicon: (1) a naive baseline, (2) pure evolution with no additional provided context, and (3) a full context translation layer, which supplies the optimizer with architecture-specific implementation knowledge extracted from high-performance kernels (e.g., FlashAttention-2), letting the evolutionary search reason about implementation strategies rather than starting from a naive kernel. Together, these three configurations let us isolate the exact impact of the translation layer. Figure 4: Performance scaling of the Attention Kernel through stacked optimizations. The "Full Context" configuration successfully discovers and implements advanced strategies like double buffering and loop unrolling, achieving near-expert performance. The jump from 0.26× to 0.97× the speed of Apple’s state-of-the-art attention kernel — illustrates how much the translation layer matters. With full context, the evolved kernel independently discovers the key optimizations in FlashAttention 2: threadgroup memory tiling, online softmax, K-transposition for memory access, and the exp2 trick. The last of these replaces every softmax exponential with a base-2 exponential, \[e^x = 2^{x \log_2 e},\] which is exact and lets the kernel use Apple’s fast fast::exp2() hardware instruction directly instead of paying for a base conversion at runtime. A 20× faster prefill: the Mamba SSM kernel To evaluate whether K-Search generalizes beyond attention kernels, we applied it to the state-space model (SSM) kernel used by Mamba. Unlike attention, the computational bottleneck is a recurrent state update rather than a softmax, providing a substantially different optimization challenge. We compare the evolved implementation against the community MLX implementation (mlx-lm) and the PyTorch reference implementation (mamba.py) on an M1 Max. Evaluated on mamba-370m f16, M1 Max 64GB: Metric mlx-mamba (ours) mlx-lm (community) mamba.py Decode 152 tok/s 116 tok/s 40 tok/s Prefill L=512 5,751 tok/s 329 tok/s 1,089 tok/s Prefill L=1024 6,010 tok/s 327 tok/s 1,127 tok/s Prefill L=2048 6,612 tok/s 326 tok/s 1,092 tok/s Prefill L=4096 6,743 tok/s 339 tok/s 1,042 tok/s Table 1: Prefill and decode throughput on mamba-370m (f16, M1 Max 64GB). mlx-mamba (ours) reaches ~20× higher prefill throughput than the community mlx-lm baseline, while decode remains comparable. The ~20× prefill speedup over mlx-lm comes down to one difference: mlx-lm does not implement a parallel scan for the SSM. The state recurrence \[h_t = \bar{a}_t h_{t-1} + \bar{b}_t\] looks inherently sequential, but each step can be written as a pair $(\bar{a}_t, \bar{b}_t)$ under the associative combine \[(a_2, b_2) \circ (a_1, b_1) = \left(a_2 a_1,\ a_2 b_1 + b_2\right),\] which reproduces the recurrence exactly. Because the operator is associative, the whole sequence can be evaluated with a parallel (prefix) scan in $O(\log N)$ dependent steps instead of $O(N)$. mlx-lm skips this and processes tokens one at a time, leaving most of Apple Silicon’s compute idle; our evolved Metal kernel applies the scan and makes much fuller use of GPU throughput. The gain shows up in prefill, where the full sequence is available to scan in parallel, and not in single-token decode, where there is only one new token per step and no scan to parallelize — which is why the decode row is roughly flat while prefill is ~20×. mamba.py is slow on both prefill and decode because it is a PyTorch reference implementation that falls back to CPU or MPS on Apple Silicon, forgoing the hardware-specific optimizations that MLX’s Metal backend makes possible. What’s next? On the two kernels we studied, AI-driven evolutionary kernel search grounded in structured cross-platform translation knowledge reached near-expert performance on Apple Silicon without a team of GPU experts starting from scratch. We do not yet know how far this generalizes, but the result is encouraging. For us the main takeaway is that the bottleneck was not the LLM’s ability to write Metal code, but the quality of the context and constraints we gave it. Our CUDA translation layer converts existing NVIDIA kernel expertise into actionable guidance for Apple Silicon, and lets K-Search’s evolutionary search do the rest. We are actively extending this work in several directions: supporting new architectures, with current efforts focused on developing new kernels for the IBM Spyre AIU and broader hardware targets; adding more kernels such as paged attention and fused MoE routing; and improving integration with the K-Search evolution loop to make translation context even more automatic. Acknowledgements This work was carried out by IBM Research and builds on K-Search from the UC Berkeley Sky Lab ( Cao et al., 2026 ). We welcome collaboration and feedback from the MLX and broader AI systems communities. If you are working on kernel optimization for non-CUDA hardware, we would love to hear from you. Citation @article { cao2026k , title = {K-Search: LLM Kernel Generation via Co-Evolving Intrinsic World Model} , author = {Cao, Shiyi and Mao, Ziming and Gonzalez, Joseph E and Stoica, Ion} , journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19128} , year = {2026} } Appendix: Try it yourself The MLX backend is built on top of the open-source K-Search repo, so the results here can be reproduced directly. The steps are: 1. Clone and install git clone https://github.com/caoshiyi/K-Search.git cd K-Search uv pip install openai wandb uv pip install git+https://github.com/caoshiyi/flashinfer-bench-ksearch.git 2. Set your credentials Open the relevant script under scripts/ and set three variables at the top: KSEARCH_ROOT = /path/to/K-Search API_KEY = your-llm-api-key 3. Run kernel search # Optimize Flash Attention on Apple Silicon (world-model mode) bash scripts/mac_flash_attention_wm.sh # Or a Mamba SSM kernel, e.g. the selective scan bash scripts/mamba_selective_scan_fwd_wm.sh Full CLI reference and documentation are in the README.
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