BREAKING NEWS: according to CloudFlare Radar Data, Agentic traffic has SURPASSED human traffic across the worldwide internet for HTML webpages.

Recently met @srush_nlp and he started giving me an impromptu lecture on how targeted on-policy self-distillation works. I asked him if I could record it on my iPhone. The basic idea is this: if the model made a mistake at some point in the rollout (for example, calling a tool that doesn't exist), we want to discourage this specific error, but we don't want to just learn from the final reward, because it's a very noisy signal spread out over the whole trajectory. So we have another model read this trajectory and figure where the error was made. It simply inserts some hint tokens to the part of the trajectory right above where the mistake was made. Now with these injected hint tokens, have the model run a forward pass. You're not having to regenerate a new rollout - aka no new decode required. The hint causes the model to assign lower probabilities to the error tokens. You then trains the original model to match these new probabilities, teaching it to downweight that specific mistake.

Super excited to announce seven new world-class MAI models today. They represent what we consider a new era in AI designed to keep you in control and on the frontier. First is our text foundation model, MAI-Thinking-1, exceptionally strong on reasoning and SWE tasks. - It’s a 35B active parameter MoE with a 256K context window. Independent human raters on Surge prefer it for overall quality in blind side-by-sides versus Sonnet 4.6, and it’s achieved 97% on AIME 2025, the key measure of its general-purpose reasoning abilities. - It's at 53% on SWE Bench Pro, placing it right alongside Opus 4.6 on one of the toughest coding benchmarks. - And since we co-designed our models with our own silicon, MAI-Thinking-1 is optimized on our MAIA 200 chip. Benchmarking head-to-head against the GB200, we see 30% better performance per dollar as well as a 1.4x performance-per-watt gain when running our MAI models on the MAIA 200 end-to-end. Next is MAI-Image-2.5 and its Flash variant. Two super strong models now at #2 on the leaderboards, surpassing the score of Nano Banana 2 on image editing. Last for now is MAI-Code-1-Flash, our new inference efficient coding model, especially tuned for VS Code and GitHub Copilot CLI. - Code-1-Flash achieves 51% on SWE Bench Pro, despite having just 5B parameters, putting it closer to Haiku in size but cheaper in cost. All of this is the foundation for Microsoft Frontier Tuning. It lets you customize our models to create custom, company-specific agents that only you control. You can make our model, your model. Your data. Your agents. Your moat. Early adopters are already seeing a difference. When we tuned our models for McKinsey’s tasks, MAI delivered the highest win rate, outperforming GPT-5.5 on quality, while being 10x lower on cost. Also really excited to be collaborating with the amazing team at Mayo Clinic to jointly train a new frontier AI model for healthcare. Our announcements today mark another milestone on the road to humanist superintelligence. You can learn more and about our other new models in our latest blog: microsoft.ai/news/building-a…

For over a decade, we’ve accepted that end-to-end backprop is the only way to train deep networks. But holding the entire network in memory all at once is why AI training is hitting a resource wall. We found a new way to break the network into blocks and train them independently. The trick? Treating the network’s forward pass like a diffusion model denoising a signal. This reinterpretation slashes the memory needed to train deep models. In our #ICLR2026 paper (arxiv.org/abs/2506.14202), we matched end-to-end performance across ViTs, DiTs, and LLMs. We did this while training just one isolated block at a time.

Wharton Professor warns the high school strivers with a sudden "interest" in research Excellent sheep doing what excellent sheep do

I promise this will be the best 20 min you spend today! Robotics: Endgame, the sequel to my last year's Sequoia AI Ascent talk, "Physical Turing Test". I laid out the roadmap for solving Physical AGI as a simple parallel to the LLM success story. Be a good scientist, copy homework ;) And stay till the end, more easter eggs and predictions for your polymarket! 00:30 DGX-1 origin story at OpenAI, I was there in 2016 signing with Jensen and Elon. Heading to the Computer History Museum! 01:42 The Great Parallel 03:31 Robotics, the Endgame 03:39 Why VLAs fall short 04:32 Video world models as the 2nd pretraining paradigm 06:09 World Action Models (WAM) 07:46 Strategies for robot data collection and the FSD equivalent to physical data flywheel for robot manipulation 11:06 EgoScale and the Dexterity Scaling Law we discovered recently 14:00 Physical RL: bridging the last mile 15:39 DreamDojo: an end-to-end neural physics engine for scaling RL in silico 17:00 Civilizational Technology Tree and my predictions for the near future. Spoiler: it's closer than you think. Thanks to my friends at Sequoia for inviting me back to AI Ascent this year! I had a blast! Last year's talk is attached in the thread if you missed it.

Scientists often make breakthroughs by synthesizing ideas across papers. In our new paper, we ask whether a language model can anticipate this process: given two parent papers, can it generate the core insight of a future paper built on them? 🧵⬇️

Composer 2 is now available in Cursor.