Agentic AI news, research notes, and industry analysis.
Tag
3 stories in this tag.
A preprint from Salesforce and UIUC shows that a strong model can construct inference-time "harnesses" — structural scaffolds applied to a weaker model at test time — that nearly double Theory-of-Mind accuracy from 0.49 to 0.91 without any fine-tuning. The mechanism isn't more reasoning; it's converting unstable reasoning into deterministic code, routing, and format enforcement.
Read more →Anthropic disclosed to the US Senate that operators affiliated with Alibaba ran 28.8 million exchanges against Claude through 25,000 fraudulent accounts over six weeks — the largest known distillation attack against Anthropic. The numbers are real; the framing is lobbying.
Read more →Cactus Compute released Needle, a 26M-parameter MIT-licensed model for on-device function calling that strips out all feed-forward networks from the transformer. The architectural choice is a thesis: tool calling is retrieval-and-routing, not reasoning, and attention is the right primitive for it. The numbers are striking — 6000 tok/s prefill on consumer hardware — even if the playground has rough edges.
Read more →