Tootfinder

Is #AI really just dumb statistics? "Olympiad-level physics problem-solving presents a significant challenge for both humans and artificial intelligence (AI), as it requires a sophisticated integration of precise calculation, abstract reasoning, and a fundamental grasp of physical principles," says the (abstract of the) paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10515: "The Chinese Physics Olympiad (CPhO), renowned for its complexity and depth, serves as an ideal and rigorous testbed for these advanced capabilities. In this paper, we introduce LOCA-R (LOgical Chain Augmentation for Reasoning), an improved version of the LOCA framework adapted for complex reasoning, and apply it to the CPhO 2025 theory examination. LOCA-R achieves a near-perfect score of 313 out of 320 points, solidly surpassing the highest-scoring human competitor and significantly outperforming all baseline methods." Oops ...?

Chinese short-video company Kuaishou launches Kling Video O1, saying it is the first multimodal AI model to unify video generation, editing, and post-production (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/a…

Kuaishou debuts multimodal AI video model with ‘Nano Banana’ editing capability
Kuaishou expects the new model’s abilities to drive its adoption by filmmakers, production studios, advertisers and influencers.

Chinese short-video company Kuaishou launches Kling Video O1, saying it is the first multimodal AI model to unify video generation, editing, and post-production (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/a…

Kuaishou debuts multimodal AI video model with ‘Nano Banana’ editing capability
Kuaishou expects the new model’s abilities to drive its adoption by filmmakers, production studios, advertisers and influencers.

New malware uses AI to adapt during attacks, report finds https://therecord.media/new-malware-uses-ai-to-adapt

🎲 TextBandit: Evaluating Probabilistic Reasoning in LLMs Through Language-Only Decision Tasks
#llm

TextBandit: Evaluating Probabilistic Reasoning in LLMs Through Language-Only Decision Tasks
Large language models (LLMs) have shown to be increasingly capable of performing reasoning tasks, but their ability to make sequential decisions under uncertainty only using natural language remains underexplored. We introduce a novel benchmark in which LLMs interact with multi-armed bandit environments using purely textual feedback, "you earned a token", without access to numerical cues or explicit probabilities, resulting in the model to infer latent reward structures purely off linguistic cu…

US startups are increasingly adopting Chinese open source AI models, as some capabilities of Chinese models start to catch up with those of frontier US labs (NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/silicon-valley-building-free-chinese-ai-r…

More of Silicon Valley is building on free Chinese AI
Surveying the state of America’s artificial intelligence landscape earlier this year, Misha Laskin was concerned

Dataminr to acquire cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect for $290 million
https://cyberscoop.com/dataminr-threatconnect-acquisition/

Dataminr to acquire cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect for $290 million
Dataminr, a New York-based company specializing in real-time threat intelligence, announced plans Tuesday to acquire ThreatConnect, a cybersecurity threat intelligence provider, for $290 million. The acquisition will combine Dataminr’s AI-powered analysis of public data with ThreatConnect’s internal threat management capabilities, creating what the companies describe as “Client-Tailored intelligence” that adapts to individual customer needs. The […]

🚴 Benchmarking On-Device Machine Learning on Apple Silicon with MLX
#apple #hardware

Benchmarking On-Device Machine Learning on Apple Silicon with MLX
The recent widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) and machine learning in general has sparked research interest in exploring the possibilities of deploying these models on smaller devices such as laptops and mobile phones. This creates a need for frameworks and approaches that are capable of taking advantage of on-device hardware. The MLX framework was created to address this need. It is a framework optimized for machine learning (ML) computations on Apple silicon devices, facilita…

Threat intel company Dataminr plans to acquire cybersecurity threat intel provider ThreatConnect for $290M; Dataminr raised $85M in convertible funding in March (Greg Otto/CyberScoop)
https://cyberscoop.com/dataminr-threatconnect-acquisition/

Dataminr to acquire cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect for $290 million
Dataminr, a New York-based company specializing in real-time threat intelligence, announced plans Tuesday to acquire ThreatConnect, a cybersecurity threat intelligence provider, for $290 million. The acquisition will combine Dataminr’s AI-powered analysis of public data with ThreatConnect’s internal threat management capabilities, creating what the companies describe as “Client-Tailored intelligence” that adapts to individual customer needs. The […]

Anthropic commits to buy $30B in Azure capacity in a new deal with Microsoft and Nvidia, which commit to invest up to $5B and $10B, respectively, in Anthropic (Microsoft)
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/18/microsoft-nvidia-…

Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announce strategic partnerships - The Official Microsoft Blog
Anthropic to scale Claude on Azure Anthropic to adopt NVIDIA architecture NVIDIA and Microsoft to invest in Anthropic Today Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announced new strategic partnerships. Anthropic is scaling its rapidly-growing Claude AI model on Microsoft Azure, powered by NVIDIA, which will broaden access to Claude and provide Azure enterprise customers with expanded model choice and new capabilities. Anthropic...