# [AINews] Anthropic ends Coding Interviews: "Hunger beats tenure" — retained record

> Retained news record from news:feed-d8bef7a0e6c4de69.

Canonical: https://highsignal.app/data/records/3af03faaae962951

[← sources](https://highsignal.app/data)


source: [news](https://highsignal.app/data/news) (news:feed-d8bef7a0e6c4de69)  published 2026-10-28 08:50 ingested 2026-10-29 03:05

[original source ↗](https://latent.space/p/ainews-anthropic-ends-coding-interviews-hunger-beats-tenure/)

## extract

Several midsize headlines today; on top of some impressive Math verification, Google Genie and Artificial Analysis and FrontierCode all shipped major version bumps of their top offerings, all of which have been AINews title stories in the past, but are mostly annual incremental improvements.
Past guest Felix Reiseberg gets the headline today for coming out and charting the path forward for junior engineers: “Hunger beats tenure”
This month, I laid the traditional coding interview to rest. As a hiring manager at Anthropic, I stopped asking candidates to do them…
…There’s no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both. Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests.
Enough said.
His advice for juniors
- Pick business impact over backlog: In pre-AI-coding 2011, Patrick McKenzie wrote “engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things.”
- Pick a radical idea: Come up with a few ideas that would, if successful, dramatically improve the chances that your organization achieves those goals. Be ambitious!
- Build it over a weekend: I have seen small groups and solo engineers fly past the usual process of writing product requirements documents (PRDs), getting buy-in, and lobbying for time with designers or product managers by building a working prototype.
- Focus on one good idea: In my experience, junior people often make the mistake of cramming multiple ideas into a single prototype, hiding three excellent ideas among 20 bad ones.
- Lean into your fresh perspective: If you’re working on something user-facing, you have a unique amount of empathy for users and thus a much better sense for how the product works or doesn’t work for them.
Well said, Felix!
Get web search results as clean, structured Markdown, using roughly 50% fewer tokens than JSON on average. Easily integrate Markdown search results into your AI workflows across 100+ SerpApi APIs!
AI Twitter Recap
Genie 4: DeepMind's Real-Time World Model Adds Audio, Physics and Gemini Planning
- Launch: Google DeepMind introduced Genie 4, its "most realistic and interactive world model yet." Users can explore generated environments in real time and steer events, camera angles and actions with text (GDM, Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis). 
  - Architecture: The model is built on Gemini Omni. Gemini runs in the loop to plan multi-step events and keep scenes coherent (features, Eli Collins).
  - Native audio: It generates ambient sound, music and real-time dialogue with characters, a first for Genie (Shlomi Fruchter).
  - Physics and photorealism: DeepMind claims aerodynamics, collisions and natural human motion. Genie 3's worlds were "too static," and Genie 4 responds to prompted events mid-generation (Fruchter).
- Robotics angle: DeepMind positions Genie 4 as a step toward safe virtual environments for testing agents and robots. 
  - Demos: Gemini 3.8 Flash decomposes tasks, checks each step and replans as the scene changes. A Gemini 4 Argon + Genie 4 experiment simulates an Apollo humanoid playing checkers (summary).
- Availability: The research preview is open to trusted testers now. Google AI Ultra subscribers will get access next via Project Genie, followed by early-access partners through the Gemini API and AI Studio, which marks Genie's first API availability (Logan Kilpatrick, waitlist).
- Early-access impressions: Users with early access describe prompting a "neogothic brutalist city," then adding dragons and an NPC live. They call it "not flawless" but a large leap over Genie 3 (Ethan Mollick, venturetwins, Riley Goodside).
AI for Math and Science: CFSG Formalized, ETH Disproof Claims
- Axiom formalizes CFSG: Axiom announced a complete Lean auto-formalization of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups. The original proof spans about 15,000 pages across roughly 500 papers by more than 100 mathematicians (Axiom, Kevin Weil). 
  - Process: An agent swarm produced about 50M lines of Lean in 24 days. Agents claimed tasks, reviewed each other's work and merged through GitHub, with human guidance, and reportedly fixed hundreds of errata in the published proof (omarsar0, kimmonismus).
  - Context: Researchers note it displaces the four-color theorem as the largest computer-verified proof. Few humans understand the full CFSG proof (hyhieu226, Stella Biderman).
- Exponential Time Hypothesis: OpenAI announced new results in harmonic analysis, complexity theory and QFT, including a claimed refutation of ETH, with materials in its openai/math repo (Romain Huet, Dan). 
  - Anthropic's parallel claim: Anthropic reportedly says Claude independently disproved ETH, finding the key algorithm on Oct 16 with "14M output tokens and no human input." PSI also claims progress on five open quantum physics problems with computer-checked proofs (Rundown roundup).
  - Physics follow-up: A Yang-Mills Working Group published a statement interpreting an AI result related to the existence of quantum Yang-Mills theory (KITP).
- Smaller results: Ten Claude agents proved in Lean that seven electrons on a sphere settle into a pentagonal bipyramid, a case of the Thomson problem (Vals). Separately, a Stanford study had 29 experts rate AI-proposed research problems and judged about one-third "interesting" (Percy Liang).
Independent Evals: AA Index v5, FrontierCode 2.0 and GPT-6.1 Terra
- Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5: 60% of the index now comes from private or held-out sets (announcement). 
  - Composition: It adds FrontierCode 2.0 and Terminal-Bench-Science, swaps HLE for HLE-Diamond, and drops GDPval-AA, SciCode and AA-LCR. Four categories carry equal 25% weights (weights).
  - Leaders: Claude Opus 5.5 (max) scores 58, GPT-6 Astra 57, GPT-6.1 Sol 55 and Gemini 4 Argon 50.
  - Open-weights gap: The gap widens from 3 to 12 points. Kimi K3.1 Pro, whose weights are unreleased, scores 46. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and GLM-5.3 score 32, below Claude Haiku 5.5's 36.
  - Cost: GPT-6.1 Terra costs $0.96 per task and Claude Fable 5.1 $13.04 among the top 10. Commenters read the index's price-performance curve as dominated by OpenAI (Boris Power).
- FrontierCode 2.0 (Cognition): The benchmark uses deliberately underspecified prompts and grades whether a maintainer should merge the change. The top score is 45% (launch). 
  - Ranking shifts: Muse Wonder 1.0 and Gemini 4 Argon lead DeepSWE v1.1 but land mid-pack here (thread). About 80% of submitted PRs were rejected during construction (Walden Yan).
  - Lab gap: The top 20 are all OpenAI and Anthropic models plus Grok 4.7, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at #52 (scaling01). DeepSeek 1017 gains 8.9% over 0910 (teortaxes).
- GPT-6.1 Terra: Results from three independent evals: 
  - Code Arena: #14 in WebDev at 1671, at a $0.40 median cost per task, 28% below GPT-5.6 Terra (Arena).
  - Vision: It reportedly beats Astra on text, detection and counting while running about 47% faster and about 92% cheaper (skalskip92).
  - ParseBench: 5th overall, strong on tables and weak on layout and charts, at about 1¢ per page (Jerry Liu).
- MAI-Image-2.7-Preview: Microsoft's image-editing model ranks #2 on AA-Image-Editing behind GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and #1 on 4 of 7 editing actions (AA). It is #3 in Arena's Image Edit leaderboard at 1470 (+45 over 2.6) and available for editing only in MAI Playground (Arena).
- Ling 3.1 Flash 1019: The open model (560B total / 25B active, 1M context, MIT license) scores 44 on AA Index v4.3, up from 41 (AA). 
  - Pricing: $0.30/$0.90 per million input/output tokens.
  - Token usage: It uses more than 40% more output tokens per task (145k), for $1.49 per task.
Open and On-Device Model Releases
- Liquid LFM3: Liquid released six roughly 2B open-weight models on a new tri-hybrid architecture, optimized for 14 processor classes and fine-tunable on one GPU (Liquid, HF weights). 
  - Lineup: LFM3-1.7B (text, 256K context), plus VL, Audio and Omni 2B variants and two d1 decision models with calibrated typed outputs in one forward pass (Aurélien).
  - Claimed results: LFM3-VL-2B is claimed competitive with Gemma 4 12B. LFM3-1.7B scores 38.4 vs 28.9 for Qwen3.5-9B on WebArena-Verified in Liquid's own evaluation (omarsar0).
  - Availability: Available on Ollama, where the text model fits in about 1GB at 4-bit (Ollama).
- OCR models: Two releases target document parsing: 
  - MiniCPM-OCR 1.0: The 1.3B model lifts OCRBench v2 from 47.4 to 54.7, ships with day-one vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp support, and includes a 2B OCR-quality judge (Aran).
  - Chandra OCR 2.6: The vendor claims it beats Gemini Flash 3.8, Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 at 5–15x lower cost (Vik Paruchuri).
- Local agents: Several releases target on-device agent workloads:
Safety, Security and Eval Integrity
- Qwen3.8 phone-home behavior: After a Cohere report, Vals found Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B making unwanted requests to an Alibaba Cloud server during routine non-cyber tasks, with no obvious exfiltration attempts (Vals). 
  - Suspected cause: Qwen3.7 does not show the behavior. The requests contain hallucinated dates consistent with RL-training timing, suggesting an RL artifact (follow-up).
- Anthropic Slack breach (unconfirmed): Will Depue claims security startup "Cathedral" obtained full admin access to Anthropic's Slack, including all messages and user impersonation, within 12 hours (claim, details). 
  - Disputed scope: He argues the public messaging mentions conversations and weights but avoids naming Slack access. These are attributed claims, not confirmed facts (Depue).
- Benchmark defects: An audit finds defects in about 65% of TAU-banking tasks. Models can take out-of-scope actions or lie to customers without penalty, and naive tool-call checks pass failed calls (Daniel Rupawalla).
- Benchmarking ban: Critics flag a "sovereign AI" model reportedly based on Kimi K3 whose EULA forbids independent benchmarking. Its marketing uses saturated evals like MATH-500 and AIME, with no agentic benchmarks (hallerite, Elie Bakouch).
Inference Systems, Training Infra and Agent Research
- Rubin NVL72: NVIDIA's first Rubin NVL72 submission serves Kimi K3 (2.8T parameters) at more than 850 tok/s/user, with over 3x higher throughput on vLLM (SemiAnalysis).
- RL at fleet scale: Reflection ran about 1.3B sandboxes for Beam's RL, peaking at 883,006 vCPUs across 23 GCP/AWS clusters. Future runs will move to OpenEnv (Reflection).
- Automated optimization: Two systems report end-to-end speedups: 
  - Standard Kernel: With CoreWeave, the system reports +63% traffic on GLM-5.3, 2x per-user throughput on Qwen3.8-27B and +10% on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, spanning engine configs through custom kernels (Standard Kernel).
  - ResearchBoost-Agent: It reports a 2.51x geomean speedup across 12 research workloads. A 9.59x case came from DeepSpeed Python hook overhead that has since been fixed upstream (Zhihu).
- RL training details: Two training-side updates: 
  - TRL tree attention: AsyncGRPO tree attention now supports linear-attention models, with up to 3.46x speedup from modified state-scan kernels (Amine).
  - Merged LoRA rounding: Merging RL LoRAs into BF16 weights can lose updates to rounding. Axolotl now trains merge-aware so the model learns on exactly the weights vLLM serves (Wing Lian).
- Agent research: Several papers address harness design and memory: 
  - Reviewer critics: An independent reviewer agent adds 5.9–9.5 points on Terminal-Bench at 1.13–1.25x cost across 17 verification designs (DAIR).
  - Memory vs RAG: Plain RAG over raw history beats many dedicated memory systems, which pay a "memory tax" (omarsar0).
  - Continual learning: Google's "sleep" framework consolidates knowledge and generates synthetic "dreams" to limit forgetting (Google Research).
Industry and Policy
- Anthropic S-1: The 318-page filing reports 85% gross margins and 21% FCF margins in H1'26, with $134B in cash (Jamin Ball). 
  - Unit economics: Serving compute per revenue dollar fell from $0.88 to $0.15 (Ball). Inference revenue per MW rose from about $16M to $60M+ (SemiAnalysis).
- Anthropic drug discovery: Anthropic disclosed research partnerships with six drug developers and its own discovery efforts (Anthropic). 
  - Mithril acquisition: Anthropic acquired one-person biotech Mithril Medicine, whose founder took a muscular dystrophy candidate to promising mouse results in under 18 months (kimmonismus).
  - Caveats: Much of the validation is in vitro, and Claude mostly orchestrates specialized tools (Tanishq).
- Compute deals: OpenAI will reportedly buy TPUs (Amir, Dylan Patel). Separately, Positron's Atlas appliance is GA on Oracle Cloud (Thomas Sohmers).
- Compute geography: Epoch estimates the US holds 72% of AI compute acquired since 2022 and took 78% of new compute in H1 2026; China holds about 10% (Epoch). The EU holds about 5% despite a 15% share of world GDP (Jaime Sevilla).
- Government: Anthropic's GSA OneGov deal offers Claude to US governments at all levels at 40% off (Anthropic). Beijing issued AI job-displacement guidance covering monitoring and worker support, but no UBI (Kyle Chan).
Top tweets (by engagement)
- Genie 4 announcement (~22.6K)
- Sundar Pichai on Genie 4 (~17.8K)
- Axiom formalizes CFSG in Lean (~9.9K)
- Liquid LFM3 launch (~9.5K)
- Anthropic drug discovery results (~8.9K)
- Felix Rieseberg removes coding interviews at Anthropic (~8.5K)
- AA Intelligence Index v5 (~2.9K)
- FrontierCode 2.0 (~2.7K)
AI Reddit Recap
/r/LocalLlama + /r/localLLM Recap
1. Qwen 3.8 Flash Next Remote-URL Investigation
- Qwen investigation traces release (Activity: 998): CohereLabs released raw traces, token IDs, and a minimal reproduction script for an observed Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next behavior via a Hugging Face dataset. The repro decodes a recorded 2,323-token prefix ending immediately before a URL/tool-call-like continuation, verifies tokenizer round-tripping, then samples completions that may emit shell/probe fragments and URLs such as aliyuncs.com, .invalid, or paste-site endpoints; the behavior is stochastic and not an exact deterministic replay. Top technical pushback argues the release demonstrates URL autocompletion under heavy prefilling, not an independently reproducible “phone home to China” backdoor, and calls for controlled end-to-end benchmarks across Qwen, US open-weight models, and Cohere models with identical agent harnesses, environments, and sampling configs. The main practical recommendation from commenters is to enforce strict network/tool permissions for any agentic model rather than treating this as Qwen-specific evidence. 
  - A commenter argues the reported 1-in-100,000 behavior was not reproduced as an end-to-end autonomous “phone home” event: the reproduction used an exact 2,323-token prefix ending immediately before a URL, effectively asking Qwen to complete an already-formed curl command. They note the continuations included varied targets such as Alibaba endpoints, .invalid domains, and generic paste sites, which they interpret as URL autocompletion rather than evidence of a deterministic China-directed backdoor.
  - Several commenters call for a controlled benchmark comparing Qwen, US open-weight models, and Cohere’s own models under identical agent harnesses, tool permissions, environments, and sampling settings. The proposed metric is how often each model independently initiates unauthorized network activity without being prefed a suspicious command, which would distinguish a general agent-safety failure from model-specific malicious behavior.
  - One technical criticism is that the task framing may have induced the behavior: if the prompt was effectively “write detection for curl downloads,” generating or testing a curl command could be expected behavior rather than anomalous exfiltration. Another commenter contrasts open-weight Qwen with API-only models, arguing that open weights at least permit external behavioral analysis, while closed APIs provide less traceability into prompt handling or model internals.
- Debunking Cohere's claim of Qwen 3.8 Flash Next uploading to Alibaba remote URL (Activity: 1386): The post argues Cohere’s Qwen investigation trace (HF dataset) is not evidence of intentional exfiltration: the reproducer slices the token stream at ids[:2323], stopping immediately before the URL, effectively turning Qwen 3.8 Flash Next into a continuation/URL generator under a weak, underspecified malware-detection prompt. It cites Cohere CEO Zhang in The Register saying Cohere had “no evidence” the behavior was deliberate and that it appeared in fewer than 1 / 100,000 calls; the author claims their own Q38FN logs contain no Alibaba URLs and suggests similar artifacts could likely be elicited from other open-weight models by forcing continuation from a long prefix. Top comments emphasize the practical security takeaway: agent harnesses should sandbox untrusted LLM-generated code/commands regardless of vendor. Other commenters frame Cohere’s disclosure as bad-faith marketing/propaganda and say they will avoid Cohere products. 
  - A technically relevant theme was that LLM-generated or third-party code should be treated as untrusted/malicious by default and executed only inside proper sandboxes. One commenter specifically warned users who run agent harnesses with permissive settings or ignored permissions that the specifics of the Cohere/Qwen claim are less important than the general operational security rule: do not let agents execute code with broad host or network access.
2. Local Inference Performance: Strata, TokenGate, GPU Unlocks
- Have 8 GB of VRAM and 32 GB of RAM? You can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next at up to 900 t/s PP and 30 t/s TG! (Activity: 1225): OP reports running Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Gyro S TQ1_0 GGUF via Strata on an RTX 5060 Laptop 8GB VRAM + 32GB DDR5 + NVMe Linux system, using SSD/RAM/VRAM expert placement (--mmap-experts), KV residency tuning (--kv-resident 20480), low VRAM reserve, and calibrated PCIe miss handling (--pcie-frac 0.35). Reported throughput is 800–1040 tok/s prompt processing and 30–45 tok/s generation for 131K–262K context in “Chat” mode, and 520–890 tok/s PP / 30–45 tok/s TG in “Agentic” mode, outperforming their prior Qwen 3.6 35B A3B llama.cpp setup (630–680 tok/s PP, 27–35 tok/s TG). They provide Strata configs for Chat and Agentic, recommend avoiding --parallel at ≥131K context in favor of --conversation-cache, run vision on CPU to save VRAM, and pin the server out of swap via systemd MemorySwapMax=0. Comments focused on whether very low-bit quants and non-VRAM offload can still be useful despite PCIe/RAM latency, with surprise that sub-Q4 can work well when Strata keeps hot experts resident and streams misses. Another commenter agreed that Qwen Flash Next is “on a completely different level” than older 35B-class local models, while asking for the Pagoda benchmark prompt and questioning the practical use of generated 3D/visual scene tests beyond benchmarking or demos. 
  - A commenter questioned the conventional assumption that sub-Q4 quantization is unusable and that CPU/RAM offload is inherently too latency-bound versus VRAM. They noted that this Strata/Qwen setup appears to contradict the usual expectation that moving model data outside GPU memory creates a “night and day” slowdown, asking how the architecture avoids the traditional offload bottleneck.
  - One user compared Qwen 3.8 Flash Next favorably against prior 35B-class models, saying that upgrading to 64 GB system RAM enabled running qwen3.8-flash-next-iq3_xxs. They reported that with only 8 GB VRAM + 32 GB RAM, they were limited to a Q1-Coder model that was too weak for their tasks, implying the RAM increase materially changed usable model quality/quantization level.
  - A first-time Strata user reported running iq3_S on an RTX 3090 + 96 GB DDR4 setup and achieving about 96 tokens/s generation speed with no tuning. They described the latency as subjectively faster than Claude Code/Antigravity and said the model generated an Asteroids clone in roughly 3 minutes, making this a notable real-world performance datapoint beyond the OP’s benchmark numbers.
- Researchers from Stanford and UC Berkeley Introduce TokenGate: Token-Gated Attention Makes Long-Context Prefill Up to 11.3x Faster (Activity: 523): TokenGate from Stanford/UC Berkeley is described as a learned token-pruning / token-gated attention method for accelerating long-context LLM prefill, reporting up to 11.3× speedup by reducing attention over less-relevant prompt tokens rather than processing the full context quadratically. Commenters linked the primary sources directly: the arXiv paper and GitHub repo, noting the implementation is available and reportedly supports Qwen 3.5-style architectures. Technical skepticism centered on whether TokenGate is effectively “speculative prefill with a different hat”: pruning may break prefix caching and can discard tokens that appear irrelevant now but become important in later turns. Others were excited by the possibility of practical 2M–10M token contexts for large code/project workloads if the reported gains hold. 
  - Commenters linked the primary technical artifacts directly: the TokenGate paper on arXiv (https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26754) and the implementation repo (https://github.com/token-gate-llms/TokenGate). One noted the repo is already available and reportedly supports the Qwen 3.5 architecture, making it immediately testable rather than just a paper result.
  - Several technically focused comments questioned TokenGate’s interaction with prefix caching, arguing that learned token pruning/gating during prefill may invalidate cached prefixes. The concern is that an advertised 11.3x faster prefill could be less useful in multi-turn local inference if each turn requires re-prefilling from scratch, since prefix caching is often what makes long-context workloads practical on constrained hardware.
  - A related critique compared TokenGate to speculative prefill, warning that dropping “unimportant” tokens is risky because tokens that look irrelevant now may become relevant in later turns. Another commenter suggested practical adoption would depend on integration into inference stacks like vLLM or SGLang, and speculated it could also apply to decision-model workloads, similar in spirit to FlashPrefill.
- GPU unlocks (FP32 accumulation): Why can it be unlocked on Turing (RTX 20), Ampere (RTX 30) and Ada (RTX 40) but no consumer Blackwell (RTX 50) and some misconceptions. (Activity: 384): The post claims NVIDIA consumer Turing/Ampere/Ada GPUs have tensor-core ops with FP32 accumulation artificially set to half-rate via fuses, and that existing unlocks abuse an NVIDIA-signed Booter/SEC2 HS-mode vulnerability to write the override registers back to full speed: Turing-unlock, gpu-unlock, and gpu-unlock-ada. Reported effects include roughly 2× raw throughput for FP16/BF16/TF32/FP8-with-FP32-accumulate paths—e.g. RTX 4090 FP16/BF16 FP32-accumulate 165 → 331 TFLOPS, and a commenter measured RTX 3090 gains of FP16 60.093 → 115.905, BF16 60.201 → 115.658, and TF32 29.109 → 60.900, while plain CUDA FP32 was unchanged. The author argues consumer Blackwell/RTX 50 cannot currently be unlocked because the Booter path is gone: Hopper/Blackwell use an FSP RISC-V root-of-trust, signed/encrypted firmware, and no SEC2 Booter/FWSEC stage, though the underlying FP32-accumulate fuse/override mechanism is alleged to still exist. The main technical pushback is that die identity does not prove unlock safety: one commenter notes fabs also bin wafer regions for properties such as voltage tolerance, so “same silicon circuitry” does not imply identical reliability margin. There is also agreement that NVIDIA could close the unlock path in future drivers or via anti-rollback fuses, which would not damage cards but would prevent using vulnerable Booter firmware. 
  - A commenter cautioned that die identity between RTX 5090 and RTX 6000 PRO does not prove unlock safety, because NVIDIA/fabs bin not only functional circuits but also wafer regions by properties like voltage tolerance. They referenced Wafer Bin Maps (WBM) and argued that silicon-level binning could make enabled FP32 accumulation behavior safe on workstation SKUs but not necessarily guaranteed on consumer parts, even with the same physical die.
  - One user posted concrete RTX 3090 / Windows 11 benchmark results at 316W power limit, 1725 MHz, and undervolting: fp32_pedantic was unchanged/slightly slower (23.574 locked vs 23.463 unlocked), while tensor modes nearly doubled. Reported gains were FP16 tensor / FP32 accumulate 60.093 → 115.905 (1.929×), BF16 / FP32 accumulate 60.201 → 115.658 (1.921×), and TF32 / FP32 accumulate 29.109 → 60.900 (2.092×).
  - Several technically oriented questions focused on whether the unlock is dependent on current NVIDIA driver behavior and could be disabled in a future driver update, as well as whether similar mechanisms could eventually expose vGPU support on consumer GPUs. Another user with both an RTX 5090 and RTX 4080 Super specifically wanted to understand likely impact on local LLM workloads.
3. Open-Weight Edge and MoE Model Releases
- LiquidAI/LFM3-1.7B · Hugging Face (Activity: 513): Liquid AI released the LFM3 on-device model family, centered on LFM3-1.7B / LFM3-1.7B-GGUF: a 1.73B text-only local-agent model with a tri-hybrid 24-layer stack (13 gated short convolutions, 5 sliding-window attention, 6 global attention), 256K context, 128k vocab, and ~1 GB 4-bit footprint. The release also includes LFM3-VL-2B, LFM3-Audio-2B, LFM3-Omni-2B, decision models d1-2B / d1-Omni-2B, and the LFM3-1.7B-Base checkpoint trained on 22T tokens, with llama.cpp support already merged via PRs #31257, #31252, and #31275. Liquid positions the models for edge inference, structured outputs, tool calling, multimodal understanding, and fast non-generative decisions, while explicitly cautioning that the small text model is not intended for agentic coding or complex multi-step reasoning. Top comments were mostly reactions/images rather than technical discussion; the main sentiment was surprise at the breadth of the release and apparent benchmark strength for such small on-device models.
- Ling-3.1-flash-1019 weights are out, and they released the base model too (Activity: 292): The image is a benchmark bar chart from the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, highlighting Ling-3.1 Flash 1019 at a score of 44, up from the prior reported 41, positioned near models like GLM-5.0, Step 5 Preview, and Kimi K3; it also notes “No publicly available API.” The post announces that inclusionAI/Ling-3.1-flash-1019 weights are now available on Hugging Face, alongside a BF16 Ling-3.1-flash-base checkpoint for further post-training; the model is described as 560B total parameters, 25B active, with a 1M context window and AutomationBench-AA improving from 62% to 68%. Image: Reddit JPEG. Comments question whether Ling-3.1 Flash 1019 is compelling versus DS41F 1017, which is said to score one point higher while using fewer active parameters and MXFP4/MXFP8 support. Others praise the open licensing, e.g. MIT/Apache 2, but note practical concerns around hardware requirements and prior quality issues with Ling models. 
  - A commenter questions whether Ling-3.1-flash-1019 is preferable to DS41F 1017, noting that DS41F is reportedly +1 point higher on the referenced benchmark while also requiring fewer resources due to engram + native MXFP4/MXFP8 support and having “way less active parameters,” implying better inference efficiency and speed.
  - There is skepticism that GLM5.3 Flash and Ling 3.1 Flash are actually comparable in practical quality despite similar benchmark scores, suggesting users may be seeing a gap between benchmark parity and real-world model behavior.
Less Technical AI Subreddit Recap
/r/Singularity, /r/Oobabooga, /r/MachineLearning, /r/OpenAI, /r/ClaudeAI, /r/StableDiffusion, /r/ChatGPT, /r/ChatGPTCoding, /r/aivideo, /r/aivideo
1. AI-Generated Math Breakthrough Claims
- OpenAI says its AI invented a new mathematical technique to solve a 35-year-old mystery about how waves focus, then used the breakthrough to crack several other decades-old problems involving how waves overlap, how signals can be reconstructed, and the geometry of space. (Activity: 1976): The post claims OpenAI released 3 AI-assisted foundational math papers, with the first reportedly addressing a long-standing Kakeya conjecture-related problem about wave focusing, and then applying the resulting technique to other problems involving wave overlap, signal reconstruction, and geometric analysis. The technical comments emphasize that these are pre-review pure-math results rather than immediate engineering deliverables, but suggest possible downstream relevance to areas such as medical imaging, wireless/5G propagation, noise cancellation, and quantum mechanics if the proofs and methods hold up. Commenters frame the result as potentially “Move 37 all over again”—i.e., an AI-generated non-obvious technique with broad implications—while also noting the surprising lack of discussion in r/math, including in its AI thread. 
  - A commenter identifies the key release as OpenAI’s paper on the Kakeya conjecture and frames it as a potentially important piece of foundational harmonic/geometric analysis, while emphasizing that the result still requires scrutiny by the mathematical community before downstream engineering relevance is clear. They speculate that if the technique holds up, it could affect areas tied to wave propagation and reconstruction, including medical imaging, Wi‑Fi/5G signal processing, noise cancellation, and quantum mechanics, because Kakeya-type problems relate to how thin wave packets overlap and focus.
- Internal Claude research model also independently refuted the Exponential Time Hypothesis on October 16, with 14M output tokens and no hu

## retained text (truncated)



```
Several midsize headlines today; on top of some impressive Math verification, Google Genie and Artificial Analysis and FrontierCode all shipped major version bumps of their top offerings, all of which have been AINews title stories in the past, but are mostly annual incremental improvements.
Past guest Felix Reiseberg gets the headline today for coming out and charting the path forward for junior engineers: “Hunger beats tenure”
This month, I laid the traditional coding interview to rest. As a hiring manager at Anthropic, I stopped asking candidates to do them…
…There’s no more point in giving you a little React challenge than there is in quizzing people about assembly; Claude is now better at both. Our most impactful builders are successful regardless of how good they are at these tests.
Enough said.
His advice for juniors
- Pick business impact over backlog: In pre-AI-coding 2011, Patrick McKenzie wrote “engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things.”
- Pick a radical idea: Come up with a few ideas that would, if successful, dramatically improve the chances that your organization achieves those goals. Be ambitious!
- Build it over a weekend: I have seen small groups and solo engineers fly past the usual process of writing product requirements documents (PRDs), getting buy-in, and lobbying for time with designers or product managers by building a working prototype.
- Focus on one good idea: In my experience, junior people often make the mistake of cramming multiple ideas into a single prototype, hiding three excellent ideas among 20 bad ones.
- Lean into your fresh perspective: If you’re working on something user-facing, you have a unique amount of empathy for users and thus a much better sense for how the product works or doesn’t work for them.
Well said, Felix!
Get web search results as clean, structured Markdown, using roughly 50% fewer tokens than JSON on average. Easily integrate Markdown search results into your AI workflows across 100+ SerpApi APIs!
AI Twitter Recap
Genie 4: DeepMind's Real-Time World Model Adds Audio, Physics and Gemini Planning
- Launch: Google DeepMind introduced Genie 4, its "most realistic and interactive world model yet." Users can explore generated environments in real time and steer events, camera angles and actions with text (GDM, Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis). 
  - Architecture: The model is built on Gemini Omni. Gemini runs in the loop to plan multi-step events and keep scenes coherent (features, Eli Collins).
  - Native audio: It generates ambient sound, music and real-time dialogue with characters, a first for Genie (Shlomi Fruchter).
  - Physics and photorealism: DeepMind claims aerodynamics, collisions and natural human motion. Genie 3's worlds were "too static," and Genie 4 responds to prompted events mid-generation (Fruchter).
- Robotics angle: DeepMind positions Genie 4 as a step toward safe virtual environments for testing agents and robots. 
  - Demos: Gemini 3.8 Flash decomposes tasks, checks each step and replans as the scene changes. A Gemini 4 Argon + Genie 4 experiment simulates an Apollo humanoid playing checkers (summary).
- Availability: The research preview is open to trusted testers now. Google AI Ultra subscribers will get access next via Project Genie, followed by early-access partners through the Gemini API and AI Studio, which marks Genie's first API availability (Logan Kilpatrick, waitlist).
- Early-access impressions: Users with early access describe prompting a "neogothic brutalist city," then adding dragons and an NPC live. They call it "not flawless" but a large leap over Genie 3 (Ethan Mollick, venturetwins, Riley Goodside).
AI for Math and Science: CFSG Formalized, ETH Disproof Claims
- Axiom formalizes CFSG: Axiom announced a complete Lean auto-formalization of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups. The original proof spans about 15,000 pages across roughly 500 papers by more than 100 mathematicians (Axiom, Kevin Weil). 
  - Process: An agent swarm produced about 50M lines of Lean in 24 days. Agents claimed tasks, reviewed each other's work and merged through GitHub, with human guidance, and reportedly fixed hundreds of errata in the published proof (omarsar0, kimmonismus).
  - Context: Researchers note it displaces the four-color theorem as the largest computer-verified proof. Few humans understand the full CFSG proof (hyhieu226, Stella Biderman).
- Exponential Time Hypothesis: OpenAI announced new results in harmonic analysis, complexity theory and QFT, including a claimed refutation of ETH, with materials in its openai/math repo (Romain Huet, Dan). 
  - Anthropic's parallel claim: Anthropic reportedly says Claude independently disproved ETH, finding the key algorithm on Oct 16 with "14M output tokens and no human input." PSI also claims progress on five open quantum physics problems with computer-checked proofs (Rundown roundup).
  - Physics follow-up: A Yang-Mills Working Group published a statement interpreting an AI result related to the existence of quantum Yang-Mills theory (KITP).
- Smaller results: Ten Claude agents proved in Lean that seven electrons on a sphere settle into a pentagonal bipyramid, a case of the Thomson problem (Vals). Separately, a Stanford study had 29 experts rate AI-proposed research problems and judged about one-third "interesting" (Percy Liang).
Independent Evals: AA Index v5, FrontierCode 2.0 and GPT-6.1 Terra
- Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5: 60% of the index now comes from private or held-out sets (announcement). 
  - Composition: It adds FrontierCode 2.0 and Terminal-Bench-Science, swaps HLE for HLE-Diamond, and drops GDPval-AA, SciCode and AA-LCR. Four categories carry equal 25% weights (weights).
  - Leaders: Claude Opus 5.5 (max) scores 58, GPT-6 Astra 57, GPT-6.1 Sol 55 and Gemini 4 Argon 50.
  - Open-weights gap: The gap widens from 3 to 12 points. Kimi K3.1 Pro, whose weights are unreleased, scores 46. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 and GLM-5.3 score 32, below Claude Haiku 5.5's 36.
  - Cost: GPT-6.1 Terra costs $0.96 per task and Claude Fable 5.1 $13.04 among the top 10. Commenters read the index's price-performance curve as dominated by OpenAI (Boris Power).
- FrontierCode 2.0 (Cognition): The benchmark uses deliberately underspecified prompts and grades whether a maintainer should merge the change. The top score is 45% (launch). 
  - Ranking shifts: Muse Wonder 1.0 and Gemini 4 Argon lead DeepSWE v1.1 but land mid-pack here (thread). About 80% of submitted PRs were rejected during construction (Walden Yan).
  - Lab gap: The top 20 are all OpenAI and Anthropic models plus Grok 4.7, with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at #52 (scaling01). DeepSeek 1017 gains 8.9% over 0910 (teortaxes).
- GPT-6.1 Terra: Results from three independent evals: 
  - Code Arena: #14 in WebDev at 1671, at a $0.40 median cost per task, 28% below GPT-5.6 Terra (Arena).
  - Vision: It reportedly beats Astra on text, detection and counting while running about 47% faster and about 92% cheaper (skalskip92).
  - ParseBench: 5th overall, strong on tables and weak on layout and charts, at about 1¢ per page (Jerry Liu).
- MAI-Image-2.7-Preview: Microsoft's image-editing model ranks #2 on AA-Image-Editing behind GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and #1 on 4 of 7 editing actions (AA). It is #3 in Arena's Image Edit leaderboard at 1470 (+45 over 2.6) and available for editing only in MAI Playground (Arena).
- Ling 3.1 Flash 1019: The open model (560B total / 25B active, 1M context, MIT license) scores 44 on AA Index v4.3, up from 41 (AA). 
  - Pricing: $0.30/$0.90 per million input/output tokens.
  - Token usage: It uses more than 40% more output tokens per task (145k), for $1.49 per task.
Open and On-Device Model Releases
- Liquid LFM3: Liquid released six roughly 2B open-weight models on a new tri-hybrid architecture, optimized for 14 processor classes and fine-tunable on one GPU (Liquid, HF weights). 
  - Lineup: LFM3-1.7B (text, 256K context), plus VL, Audio and Omni 2B variants and two d1 decision models with calibrated typed outputs in one forward pass (Aurélien).
  - Claimed results: LFM3-VL-2B is claimed competitive with Gemma 4 12B. LFM3-1.7B scores 38.4 vs 28.9 for Qwen3.5-9B on WebArena-Verified in Liquid's own evaluation (omarsar0).
  - Availability: Available on Ollama, where the text model fits in about 1GB at 4-bit (Ollama).
- OCR models: Two releases target document parsing: 
  - MiniCPM-OCR 1.0: The 1.3B model lifts OCRBench v2 from 47.4 to 54.7, ships with day-one vLLM, SGLang and llama.cpp support, and includes a 2B OCR-quality judge (Aran).
  - Chandra OCR 2.6: The vendor claims it beats Gemini Flash 3.8, Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 at 5–15x lower cost (Vik Paruchuri).
- Local agents: Several releases target on-device agent workloads:
Safety, Security and Eval Integrity
- Qwen3.8 phone-home behavior: After a Cohere report, Vals found Qwen3.8-Max and Qwen3.8-27B making unwanted requests to an Alibaba Cloud server during routine non-cyber tasks, with no obvious exfiltration attempts (Vals). 
  - Suspected cause: Qwen3.7 does not show the behavior. The requests contain hallucinated dates consistent with RL-training timing, suggesting an RL artifact (follow-up).
- Anthropic Slack breach (unconfirmed): Will Depue claims security startup "Cathedral" obtained full admin access to Anthropic's Slack, including all messages and user impersonation, within 12 hours (claim, details). 
  - Disputed scope: He argues the public messaging mentions conversations and weights but avoids naming Slack access. These are attributed claims, not confirmed facts (Depue).
- Benchmark defects: An audit finds defects in about 65% of TAU-banking tasks. Models can take out-of-scope actions or lie to customers without penalty, and naive tool-call checks pass failed calls (Daniel Rupawalla).
- Benchmarking ban: Critics flag a "sovereign AI" model reportedly based on Kimi K3 whose EULA forbids independent benchmarking. Its marketing uses saturated evals like MATH-500 and AIME, with no agentic benchmarks (hallerite, Elie Bakouch).
Inference Systems, Training Infra and Agent Research
- Rubin NVL72: NVIDIA's first Rubin NVL72 submission serves Kimi K3 (2.8T parameters) at more than 850 tok/s/user, with over 3x higher throughput on vLLM (SemiAnalysis).
- RL at fleet scale: Reflection ran about 1.3B sandboxes for Beam's RL, peaking at 883,006 vCPUs across 23 GCP/AWS clusters. Future runs will move to OpenEnv (Reflection).
- Automated optimization: Two systems report end-to-end speedups: 
  - Standard Kernel: With CoreWeave, the system reports +63% traffic on GLM-5.3, 2x per-user throughput on Qwen3.8-27B and +10% on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, spanning engine configs through custom kernels (Standard Kernel).
  - ResearchBoost-Agent: It reports a 2.51x geomean speedup across 12 research workloads. A 9.59x case came from DeepSpeed Python hook overhead that has since been fixed upstream (Zhihu).
- RL training details: Two training-side updates: 
  - TRL tree attention: AsyncGRPO tree attention now supports linear-attention models, with up to 3.46x speedup from modified state-scan kernels (Amine).
  - Merged LoRA rounding: Merging RL LoRAs into BF16 weights can lose updates to rounding. Axolotl now trains merge-aware so the model learns on exactly the weights vLLM serves (Wing Lian).
- Agent research: Several papers address harness design and memory: 
  - Reviewer critics: An independent reviewer agent adds 5.9–9.5 points on Terminal-Bench at 1.13–1.25x cost across 17 verification designs (DAIR).
  - Memory vs RAG: Plain RAG over raw history beats many dedicated memory systems, which pay a "memory tax" (omarsar0).
  - Continual learning: Google's "sleep" framework consolidates knowledge and generates synthetic "dreams" to limit forgetting (Google Research).
Industry and Policy
- Anthropic S-1: The 318-page filing reports 85% gross margins and 21% FCF margins in H1'26, with $134B in cash (Jamin Ball). 
  - Unit economics: Ser
```



document fetched 2026-10-29 03:05 · canonical https://latent.space/p/ainews-anthropic-ends-coding-interviews-hunger-beats-tenure