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ISSUE 0930
SAT, JUL 18, 2026
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01

AI DIGEST

UPDATED DAILY · EDITOR'S PICK
01.00
AI DIGEST

AI新闻摘要

July 18, 2026

Here is a summary of today's main news events.

Tech Stocks Lead Market Plunge

U.S. stock markets ended the week with significant losses, driven by a sharp selloff in the technology sector. Shares of Netflix fell dramatically after the company warned of slowing subscriber growth, and semiconductor stocks also saw major declines, contributing to a difficult week for investors.

US-Iran Tensions Escalate, Driving Up Oil Prices

Escalating military actions between the United States and Iran are raising concerns of a wider conflict in the Middle East. Recent U.S. strikes and Iranian responses have led to a sharp increase in crude oil prices for the week and threaten stability in critical shipping lanes.

AI Investments and Executive Moves Shake Up Tech Industry

The technology sector saw significant activity, highlighted by a major AI startup founded by Harvard dropouts raising capital at a $10 billion valuation. In other moves, an Elon Musk-led company is reportedly set to provide billions in data-center capacity for an AI project, and a top executive from Amazon Web Services is leaving for a major social media company.

Ukraine Faces Military Leadership Crisis

The Ukrainian military is in a state of turmoil after the country's president dismissed the popular defense minister. The leadership shake-up comes at a critical time, as Ukrainian military expertise is being closely watched by Western allies who are reassessing their own military readiness and support.

Mixed Results for Commodities and Currencies

It was a mixed week for key commodities. While crude oil prices surged on geopolitical news, precious metals like gold and silver ended the week with overall losses despite a small gain on Friday. Meanwhile, the U.S. dollar strengthened for a second consecutive day.

02

ON THE WIRE

6 SOURCES
02

HACKER NEWS

02.00
HACKER NEWS

Hacker News - July 18, 2026

Hacker News Feed: Highlighting key posts and discussions.

Show HN: IKEA Complexity Index

(ikea.greg.technology)

10155
Regressive JPEGs

(maurycyz.com)

48046
I started a “dirt notebook”

(pinewind.bearblog.dev)

8675
The state of open source AI

(stateofopensource.ai)

461338
Camera Chase Vehicle

(transistor-man.com)

23222
03

HUGGINGFACE

03.00
HUGGINGFACE

HuggingFace 新闻 - July 18, 2026

HuggingFace Feed:最新的 AI 模型、数据集和社区动态。

LongStraw: Long-Context RL Beyond 2M Tokens under a Fixed GPU Budget

A growing gap separates inference context lengths from RL post-training: inference systems are approaching million-token contexts, while post-training workloads often remain at 256K tokens or below and rely on length generalization at deployment. The gap is especially important for AI agents, whose observations, tool outputs, documents, and prior decisions accumulate over long trajectories. LongStraw is an architecture-aware execution stack for million-token RL post-training under a fixed GPU budget, instantiated with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). It evaluates the shared prompt without autograd, retains only model-specific state needed by later tokens, and replays short response branches one at a time, reducing the live training graph at the cost of additional replay time. We implement it for the hybrid recurrent and full-attention Qwen3.6-27B and the compressed-attention mixture-of-experts GLM-5.2. On eight H20 GPUs, LongStraw completes grouped Qwen scoring and response backward at 2.1M positions for groups of 2 and 8; increasing the group size adds only 0.21 GB of peak allocated memory, while a separate stress test reaches 4.46M positions. On 32 H20 GPUs, we validate the end-to-end LongStraw execution path for a 2.1M-token prompt across all 78 layers of GLM-5.2. These experiments establish execution capacity rather than complete training correctness because the captured prompt state is detached and some distributed forward and gradient composition paths remain incomplete.

146
VideoChat3: Fully Open Video MLLM for Efficient and Generalist Video Understanding

Recent advances in video understanding have spanned motion, long video, and streaming interaction, driving this field toward real-world applications. Despite this progress, current open-source models remain limited in several ways. They often struggle to generalize across diverse video types, making them effective only in specific domains. High computational demands further restrict their efficiency and scalability. Moreover, most models are only partially open, with key components such as training code, strategy, or datasets unavailable, which hinders reproducibility and slows community-driven development. To address these issues, we introduce VideoChat3, a fully open, efficient, and generalist video-centric MLLM. VideoChat3 advances video understanding through two complementary designs. For efficiency, we introduce Inflated 3D Vision Transformer (I3D-ViT) and Adaptive Frame Resolution for Streaming Video Perception, which enables efficient spatiotemporal representation and reduces the cost of processing video inputs during training and inference. For effectiveness, we develop a scalable video data synthesis pipeline that curates three diverse, high-quality training datasets: VideoChat3-Academic2M, VideoChat3-LV116K, and VideoChat3-OL617K, covering general, long-form, and streaming video scenarios, improving the model's generalization across domains. By integrating these designs, VideoChat3 achieves a rare balance of broad generalization and computational efficiency. Experiments across general, long-form, and streaming benchmarks demonstrate that VideoChat3 surpasses prior open-source models with equal or larger parameter counts with only 4B parameters and higher efficiency.

114
SEED: Self-Evolving On-Policy Distillation for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Large language models are increasingly trained as interactive agents for long-horizon tasks involving multi-turn interaction, tool use, and environment feedback. Outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) provides a practical optimization paradigm, but its sparse trajectory-level rewards offer limited guidance on intermediate decisions, leaving a supervision gap between episode-level outcomes and token-level policy learning. We propose SEED (SElf-Evolving On-Policy Distillation), a self-evolving framework that converts completed on-policy trajectories into training-time hindsight skills and distills their behavioral effect back into the policy model. SEED first fine-tunes the policy to analyze completed trajectories and generate natural-language skills that capture reusable workflows, decisive observations, or failure-avoidance rules. During RL, the current policy both collects trajectories and serves as the analyzer that extracts hindsight skills from them. Policy updates therefore improve subsequent decision making and skill analysis together, allowing hindsight supervision to evolve with the policy. SEED then re-scores the sampled actions under ordinary and skill-augmented contexts, converting the skill-induced probability shift into a dense token-level on-policy distillation signal. This signal is jointly optimized with outcome-based RL, keeping the auxiliary supervision aligned with the current trajectory distribution. Extensive experiments on text-based and vision-based agentic tasks show that SEED consistently improves performance and sample efficiency, exhibiting robust generalization to unseen scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/jinyangwu/SEED.

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SearchOS-V1: Towards Robust Open-Domain Information-Seeking Agent Collaboration

Recent advances in Tool-Integrated Large Language Models have made web search a core capability of information-seeking agents. However, as interaction histories grow, agents increasingly struggle to track task progress. When search attempts fail to yield useful evidence, current single- and multi-agent systems can become trapped in repetitive loops, wasting search budgets and ultimately compromising the quality and completeness of the final output. We introduce SearchOS, a system-level multi-agent framework that turns fragile, implicit search progress into explicit, persistent, and shared state. First, we formulate open-domain information seeking as relational schema completion with grounded citations, where agents discover entities, populate attributes across linked tables, and anchor each value to source evidence. Then we design Search-Oriented Context Management (SOCM), which externalizes the evolving state into Frontier Task, an Evidence Graph, a Coverage Map, and Failure Memory. Built on SOCM, SearchOS applies a pipeline-parallel scheduling mechanism that overlaps the execution of sub-agents and continuously refills freed slots with tasks targeting unresolved coverage gaps to improve utilization and throughput. To schedule and control the execution of search agents, SearchOS introduces a Search Tool Middleware Harness that intercepts model and tool interactions to record grounded evidence and react to stalls or budget exhaustion, and provides a reusable hierarchical skill system comprising strategy and access skills to augment the agents' search process and avoid repeating failed search patterns across runs. On WideSearch and GISA, SearchOS leads all metrics among the evaluated single- and multi-agent baselines, paving the way toward robust information-seeking collaboration.

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BadWAM: When World-Action Models Dream Right but Act Wrong

World-action models (WAMs) are emerging as a promising foundation for embodied control: rather than predicting actions alone, they learn representations that couple action generation with future world prediction. This coupling is often viewed as a source of robustness, interpretability, and safety, as a robot's action can in principle be checked against its imagined future. In this paper, we show that this assumption is fragile. We introduce BadWAM, a unified framework for modeling and evaluating World-Action Drift Attacks: a new class of WAM-specific adversarial attacks that use small visual perturbations to break the alignment between what a WAM imagines and what it executes. BadWAM characterizes this attack surface along two natural criteria: attack strength and stealthiness. When the adversary prioritizes disruption, BadWAM instantiates an action-only adversarial attack, which directly drives the model toward task-failing actions. When the adversary additionally prioritizes stealth, BadWAM instantiates an imagination-preserving adversarial attack, which seeks to induce harmful action shifts while keeping the model's predicted future close to its clean imagination. Together, these two attacks capture a spectrum of WAM-specific failures: from overt action hijacking to stealthier cases where the model appears to imagine a plausible future but executes a desynchronized action. We evaluate BadWAM across different variants of WAMs. Results show that our attacks substantially reduce task success rates under closed-loop execution. For example, our action-only attack reduces the model performance from 96.5% to 43.1% success. The results of our imagination-preserving attack further exposes a WAM-specific vulnerability: moderate future-preserving regularization can maintain strong attack performance while reducing future imagination drift.

38
KeyFrame-Compass: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation of Keyframe-Conditioned Video Generation

Video generation increasingly relies on keyframe-based workflows, where creators specify a sequence of reference images to guide generation. Although recent models support multi-keyframe conditioning, it remains unclear whether they can faithfully reproduce the prescribed keyframes while maintaining overall video quality. We present KeyFrame-Compass, the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating keyframe-conditioned video generation. The benchmark contains 386 carefully curated samples spanning three application domains, two video structures, two prompt granularities, two conditioning formats, and four keyframe densities, enabling controlled analysis under diverse generation settings. We further introduce an automated evaluation framework that jointly measures keyframe execution and overall video quality. Specifically, we decompose keyframe execution into six complementary metrics covering presence, fidelity, temporal ordering, localization, persistence, and uniqueness, while assessing overall video quality through evidence-grounded MLLM judgments augmented with specialized perception models. Experiments on nine representative video generation systems reveal several fundamental limitations. Current models exhibit a clear trade-off between faithful keyframe execution and natural video synthesis. Their performance further degrades as keyframe constraints become denser and most open-source models also fail to interpret storyboard-grid inputs as temporally ordered keyframe sequences.

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MultiRef-Compass: Towards Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Reference-to-Audio-Video Generation

Multi-reference-to-audio-video (MR2AV) generation aims to generate coherent audio-video content conditioned on multiple references and textual instructions. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on text-driven generation, single-reference subject preservation, or isolated audio-video alignment, leaving the emerging MR2AV setting largely unexplored. Compared with these settings, MR2AV requires models to jointly reason over multiple references while generating synchronized visual and audio content. Models must not only preserve each reference faithfully but also correctly bind and compose multiple referenced entities into coherent audio-visual events. To address this gap, we introduce MultiRef-Compass, a unified benchmark for MR2AV generation. It comprises 350 carefully curated samples constructed through a scalable and controllable asset-composition pipeline, covering multi-view subject preservation, multi-entity binding, and human-object-scene composition. To provide interpretable assessment, MultiRef-Compass defines an evaluation protocol with four dimensions: Basic Quality, Reference Consistency, Audio-Visual Consistency, and Instruction Following, using 14 sub-metrics. MultiRef-Compass integrates automatic metrics with a rejudging-enhanced MLLM-as-a-Judge framework, enabling scalable and auditable evaluation of both perceptual fidelity and reference-conditioned composition. Extensive experiments on eight representative MR2AV systems reveal substantial room for improvement across multiple evaluation dimensions, underscoring the need for a comprehensive benchmark and positioning MultiRef-Compass as a foundation for future MR2AV research.

30
From Pixels to States: Rethinking Interactive World Models as Game Engines

Building interactive worlds that respond coherently to player actions has long been a shared goal of computer graphics, games, and artificial intelligence. Recent video generative models provide a data-driven route toward this goal by predicting future observations conditioned on user actions, and are increasingly regarded as potential next-generation game engines. Realizing a genuinely interactive game world, however, requires interaction outcomes that follow rules over evolving game conditions, consequences that persist over long horizons, and a generation loop that operates in real time. Conventional game engines realize these properties through a recurrent action-state-observation loop, in which player actions update an explicit game state according to predefined rules and observations are rendered from the resulting state. Taking this loop as an organizing lens, this paper examines interactive game world modeling along four dimensions: player action control, game state dynamics, state-observation persistence, and real-time interactive generation. For each dimension, we start from the capabilities required by an interactive game world, group existing approaches into representative families, and discuss the strengths and trade-offs of each family. Complementing this analysis, we present a scalable data engine for Black Myth: Wukong that collects over 90 hours of gameplay with frame-aligned player actions, ground-truth game states, and visual observations, together with structured and semantic annotations, as a resource for state-aware game world modeling. We hope this paper offers a clear picture of where the field stands and fosters progress toward interactive game worlds.

25
Concurrent Image Understanding and Generation: Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processes

Human cognition does not separate understanding and generation. A teacher at a whiteboard speaks and draws together, each modality reshapes the other. In this paper, we bring this coupled loop to artificial systems. Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) are ideally suited to this task, yet existing samplers either decode text and image interleavedly or independently update them in parallel branches that share only previous-step history, but not the other modality's latest decisions within the same step; combined with MDMs' inability to remask, cross-modal contradictions are neither detected nor repaired. We introduce Self-Correcting Coupled Markov Jump Processes (SC-CMJP), a framework in which one modality's transition rates are functionals of the other modality's confidence score, as weighted by cross-modal attention. Furthermore, a remasking jump retracts commitments the moment cross-modal evidence turns against them. In conjunction with SC-CMJP, we introduce CO_2Jump (Self-text{CO}rrecting text{CO}upled text{Jump}), a novel training-free single-pass sampler for joint multimodal geneneration. For training and evaluation purposes, we have created and will release three large-scale joint multimodal generation corpora: JEdit-1M, JMaze-200K, JNono-200K, with matching in- and out-of-distribution benchmarks. CO_2Jump achieves best joint performance for image understanding and editing as well as visual reasoning (maze and nonogram solving). The performance of the sampler scales monotonically with the number of denoising steps, evidence that the benefits of cross-modal coupling compound across the trajectory. Project page: https://coupled-jump.github.io

25
UniVR: Thinking in Visual Space for Unified Visual Reasoning

Learning broad world knowledge directly from raw visual data is a fundamental capability of intelligence. We introduce UniVR, the first investigation into simultaneously learning complex reasoning, fine-grained physical dynamics, and long-term planning from pure visual demonstrations. At its core, UniVR features VR-GRPO, a reinforcement learning paradigm with complementary global and step-level rewards. This approach enforces logical coherence and physical consistency throughout the reasoning process without requiring task-specific heuristics or image-text pairs. To train and evaluate UniVR, we construct VR-X, a large-scale benchmark curated from 16 diverse sources spanning long-horizon manipulation, spatial puzzles, and physical reasoning. It is the first comprehensive suite to assess these heterogeneous capabilities under a purely visual protocol. Remarkably, UniVR achieves up to a 25% improvement on VR-X, and its superior visual reasoning also boosts performance on various multimodal understanding benchmarks. These findings underscore the vast potential of reasoning within visual spaces, with all code, data, and models are open-sourced for further research.

24
Spectral Rewiring for Exploration, Purification, and Model Merging

Reinforcement learning has become a standard post-training recipe for large language models, but dense full-parameter updates create two deployment-relevant bottlenecks: suppressed reasoning performance, often reflected by premature saturation of test-time scaling, and interference when consolidating multiple capabilities through multi-domain training or model merging. We show that the reasoning-effective component of these updates is largely concentrated in the base model's spectral space, motivating Subspace-Aligned Rewiring (SAR), a post-hoc editing method that retains this spectral core while removing orthogonal components. SAR therefore preserves reasoning gains and filters residual update directions that suppress performance or amplify cross-domain interference. Across several model families and scales, SAR extracts compact reasoning cores using as little as approximately 0.58% of total parameters: it preserves over 99% of post-training performance and improves high-k exploration in mathematical reasoning, and generalizes to agentic coding by improving six of seven open benchmarks on an in-house model. SAR also purifies mixed-domain training updates by releasing suppressed coding capability while maintaining math reasoning and instruction following. It further enables model merging across experts, yielding cross-domain generalization that surpasses previous merging baselines and even the best single-domain experts. Overall, SAR shows that extracting reasoning-effective updates from parameter geometry can serve as a training-free mechanism to improve reasoning and multi-domain performance.

20
RxBrain: Embodied Cognition Foundation Model with Joint Language-Visual Reasoning and Imagination

Embodied cognition requires agents to connect high-level task reasoning with the physical states to be achieved. We introduce Hy-Embodied-RxBrain, an embodied cognition foundation model with joint language-visual reasoning and imagination. Unlike vision-language models that emphasize scene understanding and textual decision making, or generative world models that mainly predict future visual states, RxBrain represents embodied plans in a single planning sequence where language and visual imagination play complementary roles. Language provides the abstract structure of a plan, including task decomposition, planning primitives, constraints, temporal order, and decision logic, while visual imagination grounds this structure through world state prediction and joint subgoal planning, associating each planning step with intermediate and final physical states. RxBrain adopts a unified multimodal Mixture-of-Transformers architecture that supports language, image, and video understanding and generation within one model. To train this capability, we build an automatic pipeline that converts embodied videos into joint text-visual planning supervision by decomposing videos into planning steps and aligning them with visual state transitions. We further introduce RxBrain-Bench to evaluate whether models can represent embodied plans through joint textual and visual components rather than separate understanding or generation. Experiments show that RxBrain maintains embodied understanding and generation abilities, and produces plans with coupled textual reasoning, world state prediction, and joint subgoal planning. We also extend RxBrain to continuous robot action generation, where it shows promising real-robot performance without large-scale action-data pretraining. These results provide an initial step toward foundation models for embodied cognition.

19
Video = World + Event Stream

We present Wan-Streamer v0.3, which reframes our native-streaming interaction model under a single organizing view: a video is a world plus an event stream. The world is the persistent context in which a video unfolds, including the environment, scene, subjects, ambient acoustic conditions, voice characteristics, and other relatively stable conditions. The event stream is everything that changes over time within that world, including scene or environmental changes, subject behavior, speech, and other sounds. This yields a general-purpose pretraining task over large amounts of real video: given a world and incoming input, predict how the world moves, changes, and responds in real time. The resulting competence can be specialized to a broad family of real-time downstream tasks. We instantiate it on real-time full-duplex audio-visual interaction, where the event stream is the agent's speech together with free-form behavior. Functionally, the model's multimodal understanding process is vision-language-action-like: it maps multimodal user input to language-form speech and behavior actions. Wan-Streamer v0.3 preserves the v0.2 operating point: 640x368 video at 25 FPS, a 160 ms streaming unit, approximately 200 ms model-side response latency, and approximately 550 ms total interaction latency under a 350 ms bidirectional network budget.

16
Demystifying On-Policy Distillation: Roles, Pathologies, and Regulations

On-policy distillation (OPD) has become a key paradigm in LLM post-training, yet its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We present a systematic study examining the role, pathologies, and regulations of OPD. We first clarify the role of OPD as an exploration catalyst: it steers the student toward correct reasoning paths via dense token-level guidance, without expanding capability ceiling. We confirm this by showing that prompt diversity matters more than per-problem sampling numbers, and critically, that the effectiveness of OPD hinges entirely on the quality of its guiding signal. This dependency exposes two pathologies that derail exploration. The Student-Teacher Mismatch occurs when a large teacher-student distributional gap causes the guiding signal to misalign with task correctness, steering exploration in counterproductive directions. Length Exploitation arises when the aggregated token-level objective creates length-dependent shortcuts, allowing the student to game the reward landscape through response truncation or redundant padding, exploring degenerate length modes rather than reasoning strategies. To tame these pathologies, we investigate lightweight signal regulations: advantage clipping and log-scale compression, ensuring exploration is guided by faithful signals. Experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate that these regulations alleviate length exploitation and enable effective distillation, stably surpassing OPD variants and RLVR baselines, thereby confirming that well-regulated signal quality, rather than mere teacher scale, governs successful exploration in OPD.

15
RoboTTT: Context Scaling for Robot Policies

Recent robot foundation models operate with single-step or short-history visuomotor context. We introduce Test-Time-Training Robot Policies (RoboTTT), a robot model and training recipe that scale visuomotor context to 8K timesteps, three orders of magnitude beyond state-of-the-art policies, without growing inference latency. At this context length, we unlock new robot capabilities: one-shot in-context imitation from human video demonstrations, on-the-fly policy improvement, robustness to perturbations, and stronger performance on multi-stage, long-horizon tasks. We also observe, for the first time, steady gains in closed-loop performance as pretraining context length scales. At its core, RoboTTT integrates Test-Time Training into robot foundation models such as Vision-Language-Action policies, yielding a sequence model whose recurrent state consists of fast weights, parameters updated by gradient descent during both training and inference, compressing histories into weight space and retrieving contextual information for long-context conditioning. To scale training context length, the recipe combines sequence action forcing with truncated backpropagation through time. On challenging real-robot manipulation tasks, RoboTTT improves overall performance by 87% over the single-step context baseline and fully completes a five-minute, ten-stage assembly task, which no baseline ever does. RoboTTT trained with 8K-timestep context outperforms the same model pretrained with 1K timesteps by 62%, suggesting context length as a new scaling axis for robot foundation models. Videos are available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/robottt/

14
MeanFlowNFT: Bringing Forward-Process RL to Average-Velocity Generators

MeanFlow generators achieve fast few-step sampling by predicting average velocities over time intervals, making them attractive for efficient generation. Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful way to align diffusion and flow models with human preferences and task-specific objectives. In particular, DiffusionNFT offers an efficient forward-process RL framework that does not require reverse-process trajectories or likelihood estimation. However, applying such RL methods to MeanFlow remains underexplored. DiffusionNFT optimizes instantaneous velocities, whereas MeanFlow samples with average velocities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MeanFlowNFT. Inspired by the MeanFlow identity, which bridges average and instantaneous velocities, we construct an induced instantaneous-velocity predictor. We apply the DiffusionNFT objective to this predictor, making reward optimization well-defined for MeanFlow. Sampling remains based on the average velocity, preserving MeanFlow's fast few-step generation. We further prove that MeanFlowNFT inherits DiffusionNFT's strict policy-improvement guarantee. Experiments on image and video generation show that MeanFlowNFT consistently improves baselines. Moreover, it outperforms prior state-of-the-art RL-tuned few-step generators on most metrics (6 of 8 on SD3.5-M), and can even surpass multi-step RL-tuned diffusion while using only a few sampling steps. For instance, on Wan 2.1, 4-step MeanFlowNFT reaches a VBench score of 84.33, surpassing 50-step LongCat-Video RL (82.57).

11
DeepLoop: Depth Scaling for Looped Transformers

Looped Transformers scale sequential computation by applying a compact stack of physical blocks for multiple rounds, increasing unrolled depth without increasing stored parameters. This reuse changes the residual-scaling problem: in an untied Transformer, each residual branch receives and applies its own parameter update, whereas in a looped Transformer one shared update aggregates gradients from repeated visits and is read back by those same visits in the next linearized forward pass. We formalize this tied-depth effect through a first-order perturbation bound controlled by a visit-alignment coefficient κ_R. The bound recovers the DeepNorm exponent when visits decorrelate, but in the conservative aligned regime it requires the exponent to increase from 1/4 to 1/2 as loop count grows at fixed physical depth. The resulting method, DeepLoop, keeps the Post-LN DeepNorm architecture and sets α=(2N)^{1/2} and β=(8N)^{-1/2} for unrolled depth N. On GPT-style looped language models at GPT-2 small and GPT-2 medium scale, DeepLoop is neutral when no physical block is revisited and improves validation loss and downstream accuracy once recurrent depth is activated. These results show that stable recurrent depth requires residual scaling rules that account for parameter visits, not only nominal layer count.

10
WanSong v1.0 Technical Report

Music generation foundation models have recently attracted significant industry attention. However, achieving efficient generation and high-fidelity long-form audio while supporting controllability remains challenging. To address these needs, we present WanSong, a simple yet powerful approach for long-form, commercial-grade song generation. Unlike autoregressive (AR) and cascaded multi-stage pipelines (\eg, AR followed by diffusion), WanSong is a pure diffusion-based model that directly generates high-fidelity, multilingual songs up to 5 minutes and outputs dual stems (vocals and background music) in a single run. In addition, our diffusion framework enables faster inference through step-distillation, and offers an efficient pathway for fine-tuning and customization to support downstream editing tasks.

9
VIABench: A Comprehensive Video Benchmark Collected from Blind Individuals for Visual Impairment Assistance

Visually impaired individuals (VIIs) encounter significant daily challenges due to limited access to visual information. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved impressive results on general vision and language tasks, their practical utility in real-world blind assistance still remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce VIABench, a comprehensive video benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs in Visually Impaired Assistance scenarios using first-person videos recorded or shared by VIIs themselves. VIABench defines three core tasks, each targeting a distinct requirement in visual assistance. Proactive Reminder: Assesses the model's ability to interpret ongoing video content while proactively anticipating and verbally describing upcoming navigation-critical events; Visual Question Answering (VQA): Evaluates the model's capacity to answer user-posed questions about the environment or objects within the video; Vision-Guided Interaction: Tests context-aware reasoning to accomplish intentional interactions between user and environment. To ensure a robust and fair evaluation, we propose a rigorous benchmarking pipeline that supports both online (real-time) and offline settings. Our experiments demonstrate that current MLLMs still struggle to deliver comprehensive support for VIIs, especially in the Proactive Reminder task, which demands accurate anticipation and real-time responsiveness. We hope VIABench will drive future research toward developing customized MLLMs for real-world assistance, ultimately improving navigation and interaction experiences for visually impaired individuals. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/VIABench.

7
Smarter and Cheaper at Once: Byte-Exact KV-Cache Grafting Turns a Frozen Small Model into a Verified-Knowledge Flywheel

We report a way to make a frozen small language model both more capable and dramatically cheaper at once, without changing any weights. Verified knowledge is deposited once as a byte-exact key-value (KV) state artifact and later restored, by graft, into a fresh inference context. The restore is bit-exact: under a pinned deterministic configuration, the grafted logits are byte-for-byte identical to a fresh computation (SHA-256 equality), with zero KL divergence and 100% argmax agreement over fifty samples. We show that own-position graft is the unique numerically exact operating point on a model with floating-point rotary encoding, and we verify byte-exactness on two model scales (12B, 31B) and two GPU targets, one through a pre-registered replay. On AIME 2025, a frozen Gemma-4-12B moves from 80.0% to 93.3% once a verified solution library is grafted, above its own 77.5% and its 31B sibling's 89.2% published anchors. On the recurring case, eight problems the base model never solves within a 401,026-token budget are answered from cached verified solutions in 61 total decode tokens, a factor of 6,574 fewer tokens and about 8,700x less energy; the capability claim proper rests on held-out transfer (7 of 7 at 31B). The same byte-exact store widens usable context from 32,768 to 2,854,766 tokens at zero extra accelerator memory, and moves byte-identical between machines of the same architecture. We describe the system at the behavior level; the engine is proprietary, and every reported number is backed by committed input and output hashes so the scoring can be re-checked without it.

6
AsySplat: Efficient Asymmetric 3D Gaussian Splatting for Long-Sequence Scene Modeling

Recent generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting models have advanced long-sequence novel view synthesis (NVS), but at the cost of substantial redundant computation. We identify that the redundancy can be mitigated based on two observations: (i) high-precision geometry is not strictly required for high-quality NVS; (ii) appearance learning is generally easier than geometry recovery. Motivated by these insights, we propose an asymmetric architecture that decouples geometry and appearance modeling. The geometry branch processes coarse-grained tokens with most of the parameters for multi-view reconstruction, while the appearance branch operates on fine-grained tokens to capture details using significantly fewer parameters. The two branches interact through bilateral connections, enabling mutual guidance for their respective tasks. This task-aware asymmetry reduces the computational redundancy and allocates the computation more judiciously, thereby increasing parameter efficiency and enabling smaller models to achieve strong performance. On 32-view 960P inputs, our model matches optimization-based methods while delivering nearly 800x speedup, and surpasses the zero-shot performance of state-of-the-art generalizable models with markedly fewer parameters and reduced training/inference overhead, achieving an overall efficiency improvement.

4
GRASP: GRanularity-Aware Search Policy for Agentic RAG

Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends static RAG by allowing language models to iteratively reason, generate search queries, retrieve evidence, and predict answers. However, it remains challenging for models to decide when to retrieve, whether to use lexical matching or semantic similarity, and how to control context granularity to prevent irrelevant tokens from interfering with agent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce GRASP, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for training agents to adaptively coordinate complementary retrieval tools during multi-step reasoning. GRASP provides the agent with semantic search, keyword search, and paragraph-reading actions, enabling it to retrieve sentence-level evidence and expand further context only when needed. We train the policy with a reward that jointly accounts for answer accuracy, grounded reading, complementary search, and turn efficiency. Experiments on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks show that GRASP improves both retrieval recall and downstream question answering performance compared with single-step retrieval, prompting-based agentic RAG, and RL-based retrieval baselines. Qualitative and ablation analyses show that the learned policy develops interpretable skimming and scanning behavior: it uses semantic search for broad exploration, paragraph reading for local verification, and keyword search for entity-specific evidence. These results suggest that learning to coordinate retrieval signals and context granularity is critical for agent's correct reasoning.

4
Partition, Prompt, Aggregate: Statistical Self-Consistency in Language Models

In-context learning is commonly interpreted as a form of conditional inference, in which the prompt specifies a context and the model's output is treated as an estimate of the corresponding conditional distribution. If this interpretation holds, then LLM estimates should satisfy basic probabilistic identities. In particular, the law of total probability asserts that prior-weighted conditional distributions aggregate into population-level marginals over any valid partition of the population. In this work, we investigate to what extent LLM estimates adhere to this self-consistency principle. We use binary trees as an evaluation scaffold to recursively partition a population into increasingly fine-grained subpopulations. We then prompt LLMs with verbalized subpopulation descriptions in context, aggregate the resulting estimates back into population-level estimates, and compare them across partitions of varying granularity. Applying this protocol across problem domains and state-of-the-art frontier models, we show widespread violations of basic consistency properties. An in-depth study of persona prompting reveals a pattern we call the macro fallacy: estimates reconstructed from more fine-grained subpopulation responses are often better aligned with human reference data than direct population-level estimates. This effect persists across variations in tree structure and estimation task, and can be partially recovered through implicit prompting. Together, these findings suggest that models possess relevant subpopulation knowledge but do not reliably propagate it into aggregate estimates. This gap establishes statistical self-consistency as an unsaturated, reference-free criterion for evaluating LLMs.

4
SUFLECA: Scaling Up Feature Learning for CAD-to-image Alignment

CAD-to-image alignment aims to estimate an object's 9D pose (rotation, translation, and anisotropic scale) from a single RGB image, enabling applications in robotics and augmented reality. Recent zero-shot methods use visual foundation models to match image regions to CAD models, yet typically their correspondences are appearance-driven and degrade under occlusion or sim-to-real domain shift. To address these limitations, we introduce SUFLECA (Scaling Up Feature LEarning for CAD Alignment), a weakly-supervised framework for zero-shot CAD alignment with two key contributions. First, SUFLECA scales up geometry-grounded feature learning from pretrained visual representations through Normalized Object Coordinates (NOCs) supervision on 674K images spanning 12 real and synthetic datasets, learning compact geometry-aware features that generalize across domains. Second, we propose a geometrically consistent matching algorithm that establishes reliable one-to-one CAD-to-image correspondences. Together, these contributions enable accurate, sub-second alignment per object instance without iterative pose refinement. On ScanNet25k, SUFLECA achieves 33.4%/42.3% category/instance accuracy, outperforming, with a smaller computational footprint, the strongest zero-shot baseline by 10.3/12.2 percentage points and, for the first time on this benchmark, even surpassing fully supervised methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/snt-arg/SUFLECA

3
Hierarchical Denoising For Multi-Step Visual Reasoning

Video models are evolving into vision foundation models, yet they still lack human-like multi-step reasoning. Streaming autoregressive diffusion models are efficient but limited in reasoning, while bidirectional diffusion enables global revision with high inference costs due to dense frame-level denoising. Both paradigms struggle to achieve logical consistency and low-latency streaming for complex reasoning tasks. We propose HDR (Hierarchical Denoising for Visual Reasoning), a unified framework that integrates hierarchical latents into causal video generation for multi-step reasoning. HDR organizes video latents into a tree-structured hierarchy, enabling coarse-to-fine reasoning before streaming output. Coarse denoising layers preserve uncertain hypotheses for global planning, while finer layers progressively refine them into concrete visual states. A sparse hierarchical attention pattern (SHAP) further reduces temporal attention costs. We introduce a level-stratified multi-step video reasoning benchmark with out-of-distribution cases, covering six tasks: maze navigation, Tower of Hanoi, one-line drawing, sliding puzzle, Sokoban, and water pouring. Compared with streaming autoregressive diffusion baselines, HDR improves success from 34.22 to 60.29 (76.2% relative gain) and increases average progress from 76.00 to 89.56, demonstrating more consistent reasoning trajectories. HDR maintains low-latency streaming at 0.70 seconds per latent, achieving 54.2 times faster inference than bidirectional diffusion. It also retains 82.9% of full-data performance with only 2% training data, compared with 52.0% for bidirectional diffusion. Real-world robot experiments further demonstrate HDR's potential for physical interaction and world modeling. Project demo: https://hierarchical-diffusion-reasoning.github.io/.

2
Token Time Continuous Diffusion for Language Modeling

In this paper we introduce token time continuous diffusion (TTCD), a new diffusion language model which (a) operates in continuous space, deterministically mapping Gaussian noise to a final token canvas with no further sampling, and crucially (b) incorporates a new notion of per-token times, with some tokens proceeding from noise to token at a faster rate than others. Continuous space modeling helps TTCD avoid the parallel sampling of multiple tokens, which is a key source of inaccuracy at high speedups for models that iterate purely in discrete space. The notion of per-token times helps TTCD to better model conditional generation, allows for more sure tokens to proceed at a faster rate, and allows for differentiated inter-token influences during refinement. TTCD outperforms discrete models at high speedups. We train a 160M parameter TTCD model on OpenWebText, and then self-distill it; we find that at high speedups we are comparable in unconditional generation quality, and outperform in conditional generation, several existing models of similar size trained, on the same data, and self-distilled. We achieve similar gains in Sudoku solving as well.

2
Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents

We revisit the evaluation of automatic harness evolution for LLM agents. Existing harness evolution methods use unit test cases to search for harness configurations and then report final performance on the same public benchmark. This protocol raises two fundamental concerns. First, harness evolution is itself an iterative search procedure that repeatedly evaluates and revises candidate harnesses using task feedback. As in agentic test-time scaling, it should therefore be compared with simple task-level search baselines under matched feedback and inference budgets to determine whether its gains arise from improved harness design or from additional search alone. Second, because the search and the final evaluation share the same benchmark, the reported gains risk overfitting to that specific task set. To address these concerns, we conduct an extensive evaluation comparing harness evolution with simple test-time scaling and discovery baselines under comparable feedback and inference budgets, and also evaluate evolved harnesses on held-out tasks to assess whether the discovered improvements generalize. Experiments on Terminal-Bench 2.1 with GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 show that automatic harness evolution does not consistently outperform simple test-time scaling methods and exhibits limited generalization. Our results raise important questions about the effectiveness of automatic harness evolution and highlight the need for fairer evaluation protocols and benchmarks for automatic harness design. Our code is available at https://github.com/rethinking-harness-evolution.

1
Chat2Scenic: An Iterative RAG-Based Framework for Scenario Generation in Autonomous Driving

Validating autonomous driving systems requires diverse, regulation-compliant test scenarios. In simulation-based testing, scenarios are defined as executable scripts. Yet automatically generating such scripts from regulatory descriptions remains an open challenge, and existing approaches face fundamental trade-offs. Retrieval-assemble methods achieve reasonable compilation rates but lack scalability, whereas retrieval-based full-script generation suffers from low compilation success rates. We present Chat2Scenic, the first iterative retrieval-augmented framework to generate scenario scripts in Domain Specific Language (DSL). Specifically, Chat2Scenic provides a chatbot interface that supports interactive scenario refinement and integrates Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) to ground scenario generation in regulatory knowledge and DSL syntax. Furthermore, we propose an open benchmark for scenario generation comprising 123 scenarios from various regulations, including NHTSA and United Nations Vehicle Regulations, as well as other sources. Extensive evaluation with State-of-the-Art (SOTA) Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrates that Chat2Scenic achieves 76.42% Compilation Success Rate (CSR) and 58.17% Framework Accuracy (FA), outperforming existing methods (Retrieval Assemble with 30.08% CSR, 11.03% FA and Retrieval full script generation with 16.26% CSR, 10.86% FA). To facilitate future research, we release our code as open source at https://github.com/TUM-AVS/chat2scenic.

1
On Locality and Length Generalization in Visual Reasoning

A striking feature of the human visual system is that it ingests visual information through a series of local foveated glimpses, rather than a single global computation. This makes human vision distinctly different from most popular computer vision models in use today, which input images globally and in a single shot. A natural question therefore is whether local, sequential vision models may provide any fundamental computational benefits in addition to being biologically more plausible than global models. In this work, we investigate this question from the perspective of visual state tracking and length generalization. Inspired by recent studies of length generalization in language models, we study the behavior of vision models trained on simple vision tasks that require the aggregation of local information across an image. Our experiments reveal that, similar to language models, vision models can learn to exploit global shortcuts and thereby fail to generalize over task length or complexity. We also show that recurrent vision policies based on strictly local perception can mitigate these failures, thereby allowing models to generalize on these tasks. Our results show that local attention may be an essential overlooked requirement for robust compositional generalization.

0
05

PRODUCT HUNT

05.00
PRODUCT HUNT

Product Hunt - July 18, 2026

Product Hunt Daily Feed: Featuring noteworthy tech launches.

ZooData icon
ZooData

The data layer for AI agents

0
Mainichi icon
Mainichi

Learn Japanese, one prefecture at a time.

0
Acebuilder icon
Acebuilder

Build landing pages with Aceternity UI

0
LiveDemo icon
LiveDemo

Open-source alternative to Storylane, Navattic, and Arcade

0
Clark icon
Clark

An AI coworker with its own cloud computer

0
Mirage icon
Mirage

Turn your SaaS into a clickable demo in 90 seconds.

0
Buzzy icon
Buzzy

Your creative AI co-director

0
DocuSmart AI icon
DocuSmart AI

Turning fragmented knowledge into one simple system

0
WX icon
WX

An experimental synth for playable generative sound

0
OpenMarkdown icon
OpenMarkdown

A markdown editor you and your agent co-edit

0
Basedash Suggestions icon
Basedash Suggestions

Your AI data analyst, now with ideas of its own.

0
PixyCAD icon
PixyCAD

Fast & precise 3D CAD built natively for iPad and Mac

0
Scribble Party icon
Scribble Party

A local-first whiteboard studio for teachers and creators

0
Pebbles Ai icon
Pebbles Ai

AI sales platform for modern B2B teams

0
Aye icon
Aye

Your teachable AI intern for everyday browser work

0
Pocket Screen icon
Pocket Screen

Keep any Mac window visible in a floating mini screen

0
Kimi K3 icon
Kimi K3

The world's first open 3T-class model

0
Unabyss for Claude icon
Unabyss for Claude

Shared memory across all apps and LLMs. In Claude

0
Yapper Leaderboard icon
Yapper Leaderboard

See the biggest startup yappers on X/Twitter

0
Timely icon
Timely

Pull your calendar availability in 3 seconds

0
DevSwat AST- visualizer with analyzer icon
DevSwat AST- visualizer with analyzer

Turn codebases into interactive maps, graphs, and governance

0
ClipMatch icon
ClipMatch

Turn your camera roll into social content with AI

0
Weave icon
Weave

Think out loud and watch it become a living map.

0
Kit For AI icon
Kit For AI

The memory layer for AI agents

0
Ventorah icon
Ventorah

run virtual wind tunnel aerodynamic analysis in your browser

0
Amami icon
Amami

Analytics that lives inside your AI assistant

0
Nuvio icon
Nuvio

Connect your X bio to your MRR and GA4 for auto updates

0
Manta AI icon
Manta AI

Your AI agent for autonomous web app testing

0
SIMPLI icon
SIMPLI

Split expenses in a live cosmos

0
ChikitAI icon
ChikitAI

Agentic AI for Healthcare Triage and Care Automation

0
Node Health icon
Node Health

Your private home for every lab result

0
Cito icon
Cito

Hybrid academic search over 236M papers, built for agents

0
BrickSolvr icon
BrickSolvr

Turn any 3D model into a buildable brick design

0
Nitrosend icon
Nitrosend

Email for AI agents. They sign up, send and reply.

0
The Eureka Database icon
The Eureka Database

Turn a Reddit complaint into your next company

0
Verse icon
Verse

Build and hire autonomous AI employees from a single prompt

0
Zro icon
Zro

Private inference for coding agents

0
dot. icon
dot.

The feedback layer for anything you build with AI.

0
Alert Grouping by DrDroid icon
Alert Grouping by DrDroid

Reduce Your Alerts Noise Completely

0
In Parallel MCP icon
In Parallel MCP

Your context, available to every agent.

0
River icon
River

AI account executives that demo and close B2B deals

0
Paradigm icon
Paradigm

Turn any goal into a personalized, adaptive learning path.

0
Albato AI icon
Albato AI

Build AI-driven workflows across 1,000+ apps

0
Breadcromb icon
Breadcromb

A browser that remembers everything and can act on anything

0
FlightGlitch icon
FlightGlitch

Catch mistake fares before airlines fix them

0
Microflow icon
Microflow

Microcontrollers made simple.

0
Codex Micro icon
Codex Micro

Tactile controls for your Codex agents

0
Graft AI icon
Graft AI

Turn company operations into a living map for agents

0
SonOf icon
SonOf

Empty your backlog. Pay only when it ships

0
Inbix icon
Inbix

Cloudflare-native Email Infrastructure for Developers

0
06

TECHMEME

06.00
TECHMEME

Techmeme - July 18, 2026

Techmeme Digest: Major tech headlines and industry conversations.

A review of Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop shows 8GB of RAM is not enough for a good Windows 11 experience; PC makers have unveiled upcoming 8GB laptops (Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge : A review of Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop shows 8GB of RAM is not enough for a good Windows 11 experience; PC makers have unveiled upcoming 8GB laptops —  Last year, Microsoft's 13-inch Surface Laptop quickly became one of my favorite thin-and-light Windows notebooks.

Analysis: recent open weight models lag frontier closed models' cyber capabilities by 4 to 7 months, a narrower gap than the 6 to 10 months through most of 2025 (AI Security Institute)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

AI Security Institute : Analysis: recent open weight models lag frontier closed models' cyber capabilities by 4 to 7 months, a narrower gap than the 6 to 10 months through most of 2025 —  AISI has tracked the cyber capabilities of frontier AI models since 2023.  On our evaluations, the most capable models …

SEC filing: GameStop says it owns 9.8% of eBay, signaling its intent to press ahead with a bid for the company after its unsolicited $56B offer was rejected (Reuters)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Reuters : SEC filing: GameStop says it owns 9.8% of eBay, signaling its intent to press ahead with a bid for the company after its unsolicited $56B offer was rejected —  Videogame retailer GameStop (GME.N) owns nearly 10% of e-commerce company eBay, the company said in a regulatory filing late on Friday …

Feathery, which develops an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised $30M in total funding, including a recently completed Series A (FinTech Global)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

FinTech Global : Feathery, which develops an AI operating and decisioning system for financial services, raised $30M in total funding, including a recently completed Series A —  Feathery, an AI operating and decisioning platform for financial services firms, has secured $30m in funding as it expands …

China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Minxiao Chang / South China Morning Post : China's National Data Administration says the country's daily AI token consumption hit 140T in March 2026, up from 100T in December 2025 and 100B in early 2024 —  Every month, a Beijing-based ByteDance employee says he burns through close to a billion units of a new corporate currency - one that cannot buy a coffee or pay rent.

London-based Risk Ledger, which helps organizations manage supply chain cyber risks, raised a £24M Series B led by Axiom Equity, taking total funding to £33.8M (Ionut Arghire/SecurityWeek)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Ionut Arghire / SecurityWeek : London-based Risk Ledger, which helps organizations manage supply chain cyber risks, raised a £24M Series B led by Axiom Equity, taking total funding to £33.8M —  The British firm has built a collaborative platform to help organizations address supply chain security risks.

Data infrastructure startup Cribl acquires CardinalOps, which offers AI-powered threat detection tools and had raised $40M, sources say for around $100M (Meir Orbach/CTech)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Meir Orbach / CTech : Data infrastructure startup Cribl acquires CardinalOps, which offers AI-powered threat detection tools and had raised $40M, sources say for around $100M —  The U.S. telemetry company will establish a Tel Aviv office after buying the AI-powered detection engineering startup.

Sources: China's National AI Industry Investment Fund gained voting rights in DeepSeek by joining its $7.4B round; other investors like Tencent and JD got none (Bloomberg)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Bloomberg : Sources: China's National AI Industry Investment Fund gained voting rights in DeepSeek by joining its $7.4B round; other investors like Tencent and JD got none —  On a video conference call from Hangzhou earlier this year, one of China's hottest startups held a four-hour pitch meeting …

Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Todd Bishop / GeekWire : Thira, an AI startup founded by Apptio co-founders to develop AI agents that handle back-office tasks such as IT support, raised a $21M seed led by Madrona —  Sunny Gupta has led two prior enterprise tech companies with backing from venture capital firm Madrona in the past 20 years. iConclude sold to Opsware.

Japan plans to buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to develop a domestic AI foundation model for robots, in a Noetra-led effort that includes SoftBank, Sony, and NEC (Bloomberg)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Bloomberg : Japan plans to buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to develop a domestic AI foundation model for robots, in a Noetra-led effort that includes SoftBank, Sony, and NEC —  Japan is planning to buy 27,500 next-generation Rubin chips from Nvidia Corp. to build a homegrown foundational AI model for robots.

Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 will be included in Max and Team Premium plans at 50% of limits from July 20 and via usage credits for Pro and Team Standard users (Claude/@claudeai)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Claude / @claudeai : Anthropic says Claude Fable 5 will be included in Max and Team Premium plans at 50% of limits from July 20 and via usage credits for Pro and Team Standard users —  Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits. Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will receive a one-time $100 credit. Demand for Fable has been challenging to

China's BrainCo unveils what it says is the world's first integrated "brain-to-robot" platform that lets users control robots using an EEG headset (Minxiao Chang/South China Morning Post)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

Minxiao Chang / South China Morning Post : China's BrainCo unveils what it says is the world's first integrated “brain-to-robot” platform that lets users control robots using an EEG headset —  Hangzhou-based firm says users can control robots using only their thoughts via EEG headsets, marking a leap in embodied AI tech

Memo: the DOJ says federal employees can now download TikTok on government devices, citing TikTok US' transfer of control, lifting a 2022 congressional ban (David Shepardson/Reuters)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 18, 2026

David Shepardson / Reuters : Memo: the DOJ says federal employees can now download TikTok on government devices, citing TikTok US' transfer of control, lifting a 2022 congressional ban —  The U.S. Justice Department said on Friday that federal employees can now download the short-video app TikTok on government devices.

Sources: AI inference chip startup Etched is raising funds at a ~$20B valuation and is raising capital at a $10B valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia (Wall Street Journal)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 17, 2026

Wall Street Journal : Sources: AI inference chip startup Etched is raising funds at a ~$20B valuation and is raising capital at a $10B valuation in a separate round led by Sequoia —  Startup is also raising capital at $10 billion valuation in separate round led by Sequoia  —  Etched, a startup developing AI chips …

Sources: Trump Media pitched a monthly fee of as much as $100K for the Truth API, with fast access to Trump's posts, for banks, algorithmic traders, and others (Reuters)
Source: TechmemePublished: Jul 17, 2026

Reuters : Sources: Trump Media pitched a monthly fee of as much as $100K for the Truth API, with fast access to Trump's posts, for banks, algorithmic traders, and others —  Donald Trump's social media company has discussed charging Wall Street traders and investment firms as much as $100,000 a month …

07

STARTUP ARCHIVE

07.00
STARTUP ARCHIVE

Startup News - July 18, 2026

Startup News Roundup: Aggregating key funding and launch updates.

Marc Andreessen on the 5 personality traits of an innovator
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 31, 2026

“When you’re talking about real innovators—people who actually do really creative, breakthrough work—I think you’re talking about a couple things:”

Steve Jobs explains the importance of both thinking and doing
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 30, 2026

“The doers are the major thinkers. The people who really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person.”

Tobi Lutke explains what the VCs who passed on Shopify got wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 27, 2026

“What a lot of free-market thinkers don’t understand is that between the demand and eventual supply lies friction."

Sam Altman explains how he decides to invest in a startup after 10 minutes
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 26, 2026

"Does this person have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg?… [You don’t get to] 100% accuracy, obviously, but it’s good enough that our business model works.”

Jony Ive recounts the time Steve Jobs called him vain
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 25, 2026

In the clip below, Jony Ive recounts the time he asked Steve Jobs to be less harsh in his critique of a piece of work.

Jeff Bezos’s two pieces of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 24, 2026

“The advice that I would give entrepreneurs is don't chase the hot new thing. It's so hard to catch something that everybody already knows is hot."

Elad Gil: “Things that work tend to work pretty fast”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 23, 2026

“I do think there’s a bit of a myth in Silicon Valley that you should keep grinding no matter what and it’s just about perseverance, and I think that’s really bad advice."

Paul Graham on why starting with a “small, intense fire" is the key to startup growth
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 20, 2026

"You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them."

Keith Rabois on how to identify great talent
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 19, 2026

“What you want to do with every single employee every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks… and that’s the role they should stay in.”

Wealthfront CEO on why advertising spend makes it harder to find product/market fit
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 18, 2026

“The way that you know you have product/market fit is if you have exponential organic growth."

Eric Schmidt on why most companies get strategy wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 17, 2026

“Work very, very hard to figure out what the world’s going to look like in five years. What will people be doing? What will your customers want? Where will costs be?"

Mark Zuckerberg: “You can’t 80/20 everything”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 16, 2026

"There’s the famous 80/20 rule where you get 80% of the benefit by doing 20% of the work, but you can’t just 80/20 everything. There have to be certain things that you are just the best at."

Marc Andreessen on Mark Zuckerberg’s founder “superpower”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 13, 2026

“A great superpower that Mark Zuckerberg has that is probably not well-understood enough is he does not get emotionally upset in stressful situations"

Sam Altman explains how to come up with a great startup idea
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 12, 2026

"If you start a startup without a good idea… you’ll be under pressure to make something up and it won’t work that well."

Jeff Bezos on the problems with proxies and managing to metrics
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 11, 2026

“One of the things that happens in business is that you develop certain things that you’re managing to—a typical case would be a metric. And that metric isn’t the real underlying thing.”

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to design an amazing user experience
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 10, 2026

“If you can design something really amazing using the hand-crafted part of your brain, then you can reverse-engineer how to industrialize this millions of times over."

Spencer Rascoff: "I will never invest in a consumer startup with paid marketing”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 9, 2026

"If you’re actually trying to grow a product, the best levers for doing that are often within the product itself.”

Patrick Collison explains why it sometimes make sense to quit
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 6, 2026

“One thing I’ve learned myself the hard way, is that it is easier to tear down a company and restart it in Silicon Valley, than it is to constantly try to pivot or keep something alive."

Jeff Bezos recounts the time he called Amazon’s customer service number mid-meeting to prove a metric was wrong
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 5, 2026

“I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right"

Ben Horowitz: “Nobody was born a great manager. It’s a very unnatural job.”
Source: StartupPublished: Mar 4, 2026

“If you can’t build a great product, it doesn’t matter if you can build a great company.”

03

ALSO TODAY

3 MORE SOURCES
08

SOLIDOT

08.00
SOLIDOT

Solidot News - July 18, 2026

Solidot Feed: Highlighting essential tech & open-source news.

亚马逊 AWS 计费系统单位错误导致客户看到了数亿乃至数万亿美元的账单

世界各地的亚马逊 AWS 客户周五可能都心跳加速,他们看到了远远超过他们想象的账单数字,很多每月只花几美元的客户看到了数亿乃至数十亿美元的账单,很多企业甚至看到了数以万亿美元的账单。亚马逊证实其计费系统出现问题,账单预估数字不正确,在问题解决期间它暂停了账单更新。亚马逊称它已经识别问题是单位导致的,所有受影响客户预计到 7 月 19 日 12:00 AM PDT 将会完全恢复正常。亚马逊没有详细解释单位问题,猜测是原来按 GB 收费的系统漏掉了 GB,而系统默认按 Byte 计费,1 GB = 1,073,741,824 Bytes,这意味着一小时内账单费用就会膨胀十亿倍。

科学家确认了一位玛雅数学家

危地马拉舒尔通玛雅遗址一面墙壁上镌刻的数学公式,让学界首次确认了一位重要的玛雅数学家兼天文学家的真实姓名。研究团队指出,这位名为 Sak Tahn Waax(意为“白胸狐狸”)的学者足以比肩人类历史上的数学巨匠。 墙壁绘有人物画像与象形文字,其中包含基于天文历法的精密数学运算。玛雅人曾依靠这些运算确定国王登基等重大仪式的举办时间。研究团队重点分析了编号为“19号文本”的一组象形文字。“19号文本”是一组呈L形排布的11个象形文字,整体高度约10厘米。研究发现,前 9 个象形文字完整记录了玛雅历法与天文周期的换算逻辑。这套公式破解了一个2920 天周期的拆分规律,可适配玛雅各类历法单位。2920 天是玛雅文明的核心天文周期,完美契合5个金星周期(每周期584天)与8个太阳年(每周期365天)。不仅如此,该运算还将2920天与乌伊纳尔(每月20日)、卓尔金历(260天神圣历法)、通年(每年360天)以及780天火星周期建立了精准数理关联。 团队在“19号文本”倒数第二个符号中破译出“如是说”的句式,其后紧跟的最后一个象形文字便是署名 Sak Tahn Waax,代表该学者是这套运算公式的创作者。从铭文缺失女性专属前缀可判定,这是一位男性学者。

天文学家探测到系外行星大气层中的氦气

天文学家直接探测到系外行星 LHS 1140 b 大气层中的氦气。LHS 1140 b 是一颗岩石行星,距离地球 48 光年,位于其母星的宜居带。这是首次在宜居带内的类地球岩石行星确认探测到大气层。LHS 1140 b 围绕着一颗比太阳更小更冷的红矮星运行,其轨道比日地距离更近,温度适宜,其表面可能存在液体水,可能有铁质内核。就对地球的生命研究而言,液态水是生命存在的必要条件。论文第一作者 Collin Cherubim 表示需要进一步研究去确认行星是否存在水。

为什么罗马混凝土建筑能屹立两千年而不倒

在今天的意大利漫步,我们仍然能看到有近两千年历史的混凝土建筑。相比下,现代混凝土建筑在百年内就会坍塌。为什么罗马时代的混凝土耐用性如此好?科学家认为要归功于名为“火山灰反应”的关键化学过程——即火山灰与石灰和水发生反应。根据发表在《Science Advances》上的一项研究,名为碳化的反应也有助于增强混凝土的耐久性。研究人员从有 1900 年历史的哈德良(Hadrian)皇帝庄园的马桶座圈上收集了混凝土样本,用高倍显微镜观察,用 X 射线扫描分析其化学成分。研究发现,样本含有火山灰、石灰和水等材料的证据,但对混凝土孔隙和裂缝的观察显示,方解石是其主要的粘结剂。当大气中的二氧化碳与混凝土中的钙化合物发生反应时,会形成坚硬的方解石矿物,它含有大量的碳酸钙。方解石填充了混凝土中的细小裂缝和孔隙,使古老的建筑结构能随着时间的推移而加固和修复。

美国 CD 唱片销量涨幅超过黑胶唱片

黑胶唱片过去十年一直是实体音乐复兴的代表,但今年上半年美国 CD 唱片销量涨幅远超黑胶唱片。CD 销量飙升 16% 达到 1630 万张,相比下黑胶唱片销量上涨 2.4%。韩国 K-pop BTS 热门专辑《ARIRANG》在 CD 销量增长中起到了重要作用,但排除 K-pop 之后,CD 销量仍然同比增长了 6.7%。美国包括 LP、CD 和磁带的实体专辑总销量上半年增长了 7.8% 达到 3820 万。实体音乐复兴的一大原因是年轻一代听歌习惯发生了变化,六成 Z 世代听众表示最常听的是音乐是 1990 年代或更早期的,相比下 2021 年这一比例仅为 18%。无论是怀旧、通过流媒体发现新音乐,还是想要拥有艺术家作品的实体唱片,年轻听众在拥抱实体唱片。

恒星普查研究确认宇宙年龄 138 亿岁

研究团队结合了地面大型巡天计划 LAMOST DR7 的光谱观测,与 ESA 盖亚太空望远镜的高精度视差资料,建立起包含 155,600 颗邻近太阳次巨星(Subgiant stars)的庞大基准样本。由于这类恒星形成于银河系早期,其化学组成几乎保留了最原始的样貌,是推算时间极佳的恒星化石。团队利用马可夫链蒙地卡罗(MCMC)算法重建真实年龄分布,推导出样本中最古老恒星的真实年龄为 137.3(+1.8 / -1.5)亿年,若考虑大爆炸后约 2 亿年才形成首批长寿命恒星,这与宇宙微波背景辐射预测的 138 亿年宇宙年龄完全相符。最新结果显示,目前并没有可信的观测证据支持宇宙年龄超过 138 亿年。

微软开源 Comic Chat

微软宣布开源 Comic Chat,源代码采用 MIT 许可证托管在 GitHub 上。Comic Chat 是一款能自动将 IRC 中的对话转换为漫画格形式的聊天客户端,其中包含插图人物、对话气泡和表情。它的一个目的是帮助世界认识 Comic Sans 字体。Comic Sans 字体最早由微软字体设计师 Vincent Connare 于 1994 年设计,在 Comic Chat 中找到了它真正的家。它非正式的手写风格与软件的对话气泡完美匹配。Comic Chat 最早于 1995 年开发,1996 年随 Internet Explorer 3 推出。开源 Comic Chat 的一个意图是保存软件历史,以及让开源社区在此基础上探索、学习和二次开发。

月之暗面宣布首个 3 万亿参数开放权重模型 Kimi K3

月之暗面宣布了 2.8 万亿参数开放权重模型 Kimi K3,完整的权重将于 7 月 27 日发布。月之暗面称,Kimi K3基于 Kimi Delta Attention 和 Attention Residuals 构建,参数规模 2.8 万亿,具备原生视觉功能和 100 万个词元上下文窗口。它是全球首个 3 万亿参数级别的开放权重模型,专为长程编码、知识工作和推理等前沿智能领域而设计。在基准测试中,Kimi K3 整体性能仅落后于 Claude Fable 5 和 GPT-5.6 Sol。Kimi K3 现已在 Kimi.com、Kimi Work、Kimi Code 和 Kimi API 上线。发布初期 Kimi K3 将默认采用最大思考强度模式,低强度和高强度模式将在后续更新中推出。

Google Play 将于下周上架第三方应用商店

从 7 月 22 日起,美国第三方应用商店将可以通过 Google 的应用商店发行其客户端。Google 公布了“加入 Google Play 目录访问权限计划”的文档,美国第三方应用商店可以访问 Google Play 商店的应用目录。届时,美国第三方 Android 应用商店将能向用户提供这些应用,而用户仍将通过 Google Play 完成下载,其下载条款与直接在 Google Play 商店下载完全一致。通过此类方式下载的应用将需要继续支付 Google Play 服务费。Google 还将要求上架的应用商店屏蔽恶意软件、尊重知识产权,提供应用更新和卸载机制。如果超过 1% 的应用安装尝试疑似恶意软件或不需要的软件,则该应用商店可能会被移除。

心脏病发作患者血液内有更多微塑料和纳米塑料

根据发表在《European Heart Journal》上的一项研究,相比心脏供血正常的人,心脏病发作患者血液内的微塑料和纳米塑料含量更高。研究还发现,吸烟者和暴露于较高空气污染水平人群血液中微塑料和纳米塑料含量也更高。研究人员分析了 61 名意大利患者,采集了其血液样本,调查了他们是否吸烟以及空气污染情况。结果显示,84% 的心脏病发作患者血液中检测到微塑料和纳米塑料,慢性缺血性心脏病患者为 40%,冠状动脉正常的患者为 32%。心脏病发作患者血液中塑料种类更多。最常见的塑料类型是聚乙烯,这种塑料常用于包装和消费品。长期暴露于较高 PM2.5 水平的患者血液中更容易检测到微塑料,吸烟者血液中微塑料的检出率是不吸烟者的六倍。

一加确认退出美国和欧洲市场,将继续为现有用户提供软件更新

一加确认退出美国和欧洲市场,表示将会继续为现有用户提供软件更新,但一加手机搭载的 OxygenOS 系统将被母公司 OPPO 的 ColorOS 系统所取代。作为关闭全球业务计划的一部分,一加手机的 OxygenOS 也将随之关闭。所有在售一加手机运行的操作系统从 Android 17 更新开始将逐步迁移到 ColorOS,一加称此举有助于简化软件开发流程,加快更新推送速度,提升软件质量,更好地利用共享的工程和研发资源。对于不会更新到 Android 17 的旧型号设备,一加将会提供操作系统的维护支持,但新设备需要更新到 ColorOS 才会获得所有形式的支持。如果客户想要旧的 OxygenOS 使用体验,在更新到 ColorOS 之后可选择回滚。

Grok Build 开源,在这之前它被发现会上传用户的完整库

xAI 在 GitHub 上公开了其辅助编程智能体 Grok Build 的源代码,此举可能是某种重新赢得用户信任的补救措施。因为在这之前它被发现存在严重的隐私安全问题,会上传用户的完整代码库。Grok Build 被发现在读取或处理文件时,该文件的内容未经任何编辑就被传输到 xAI 使用的 Google Cloud Storage 中。Grok Build 的数据保留远超 Claude Code、Gemini 和 Codex 等类似工具。有 Grok Build 用户报告,包含 SSH 密钥、密码管理器数据库等的完整用户目录都被上传了。Elon Musk 表示该公司将彻底删除此前上传到服务器上的用户数据。

马不靠声音或气味就能识别屏幕上的捕食者

发表在 PLOS One 上的一项新研究发现,马不依赖声音、气味或过往经验就能识别屏幕上的捕食者。传感器显示,马看到屏幕上的狼后心跳会加速,但面无表情十分镇定。研究显示,马没有摇头,没有摇尾巴,其目光也没有锁定屏幕以表明大脑在处理威胁信息。论文第一作者 Zeynep Benderlioglu 称,马在评估潜在威胁时展现出惊人的认知克制而不是惊吓。在实验中,马看到屏幕上的袋熊时心率平稳,但看到屏幕上的狼——无论狼是在攻击还是梳理——时其心率会显著加快,其中雄性马的反应更强烈。Benderlioglu 说,马的认知处理能力出乎意料的高。它们高度警惕,但威胁并没有出现,所以它们没有表现出任何异常行为,它们正在进行认知评估。”

图书出版商指控 Google 在训练 Gemini 过程中大规模侵犯版权

大型图书出版商 Hachette、Cengage 和 Elsevier 以及作家 Scott Turow 指控 Google 在训练 Gemini 模型过程中未经许可使用了数百万受版权保护图书,声称这是历史上最严重的版权侵犯事件之一。出版商称,Google 挪用了用于 Google Books、Google Play Books 和 Google Scholar 等服务的图书,这些服务允许 Google 以特定方式使用相关图书——如显示可搜索的片段或销售电子书,但无权将这些图书用于训练商业 AI 产品。诉讼书称:“为了维持其在互联网领域的统治地位,Google 放弃了其早期‘不作恶’的座右铭,犯下了历史上最严重的版权侵权事件之一。”诉讼书称,Google 内部早已认识到该问题,它可能会面临“100-1000 亿美元的潜在罚款”,但仍然未经许可将这些图书用于训练 Gemini。

DeepSeek 计划年内申请 IPO

深度求索(DeepSeek)计划启动新一轮融资,目标融资高达 500 亿元人民币,估值高达 4800 亿人民币。该公司也已开始就可能在上交所科创板上市进行初步探讨。该公司的内部目标是计划在今年提交 IPO 申请。今年 6 月,DeepSeek 完成了成立以来的首轮外部融资,募资总额逾 500 亿元人民币,融资后估值约为 3380 亿人民币。首轮融资中,梁文锋个人出资 200 亿元人民币,腾讯控股和电池巨头宁德时代分别出资 100 亿元人民币和 50 亿元人民币,成为最大的外部股东。京东、网易及 IDG 资本各出资 30 亿元,国家人工智能产业投资基金出资 10 亿元。DeepSeek 如此迅速的融资节奏,源于其对资本支出的预期增加。该公司计划建设自有数据中心并采购更多 AI 芯片。

因意外关机和过热微软暂停向部分戴尔电脑推送七月安全更新

对部分戴尔电脑用户而言,Windows 的周二例行安全更新之后紧跟着的是周三的电脑出问题了。微软确认,由于意外关机、性能下降、发热增加和电池耗电过快,它停止向部分配备英特尔处理器的戴尔电脑推送更新。但微软和戴尔尚未披露受影响设备的型号。微软只是表示正与戴尔合作,防止受影响型号出现问题,计划在未来几天内发布针对受影响设备的解决方案。

AI 公司高管加强个人安保

在 Sam Altman 住所遭遇纵火未遂事件五天后,一名男子尝试尾随 Anthropic 员工进入公司大楼,保安及时阻止了他,该男子对保安说要去警告一名 Anthropic 高管,有人要杀他。随着对 AI 的反对声浪日益高涨,科技公司高管开始加强个人安保。提供安全服务的 Liferaft 公司称,针对 AI 公司高管和数据中心的网络威胁数量增长了七倍,6 月的威胁数量略有下降。Equilar 对公开文件的分析显示,2025 年标普 500 指数成分股公司中有 38.1% 的公司披露了高管安保支出,而 2021 年这一比例为 26.8%。其中 Palantir Technologies 高管安保支出在一年内增长了 150%;甲骨文安保支出增长了 85.5%——主要是保护 Larry Ellison 的住所;Salesforce 安保支出增至 400 万美元,比 2024 年多约 100 万美元。硅谷安保公司 JPT Security 的客户关系副总裁 Dakota Dominguez 称由于面临强烈反对,科技公司越来越多的要求配备武装保镖,不同于明星和政客喜欢身材魁梧的保镖,科技公司高管通常要求的是低调的安保措施。AI 公司也日益不鼓励员工身穿带有公司标识的服装。

IBM 称客户倾向于采购 AI 硬件而不是大型机

IBM 公布了不及预期的季度业绩初步报告,称客户将原计划采购 Z 系列大型机的费用用于囤积 AI 硬件,包括服务器、存储和内存,导致大型机的收入下滑。这一消息导致 IBM 的股价周二暴跌 25% 以上。IBM 包括大型机的基础设施业务收入下滑 7%,而大型机销售疲软连带导致配套的交易处理软件销售收入下滑。IBM CEO Arvind Krishna 将这一切归因于客户竞相采购 AI 硬件。

美国众议院通过了永久性夏令时法案

美国众议院以 308 票赞成 117 票反对通过永久性夏令时法案 Sunshine Protection Act。该法案旨在结束一年两次调整时钟。但该法案在参议院的前景不明,已有共和党参议员表示反对该法案。研究已经发现,一年两次调整时间并不利于公众健康和安全。部分睡眠专家在标准时间和夏令时之间倾向于选择标准时间,认为标准时间与人体的昼夜周期节律更为一致,也更有利于冬季早晨的安全。

特朗普政府禁止刚果的美国公民回国

特朗普政府禁止身处刚果民主共和国的美国公民回国,该国最近爆发了埃博拉疫情。目前身处刚果民主共和国或近期曾前往该国的美国公民已被列入“禁止登机”名单。他们须在第三国停留 21 天后才能返回美国。24 名原定于周二登机回国的美国公民已被新规阻止。目前尚不清楚该禁令是否也适用于政府工作人员。美国疾控中心(CDC)至少有 24 名员工在刚果民主共和国工作。专家批评此类限制措施不仅无效而且有害。这些措施会阻碍公开疫情和疾病风险信息,损害经济,造成污名化。埃博拉病毒不像呼吸道病毒那样容易传播,它通过接触患者或近期死亡者的体液传播。人们不会因为坐在咳嗽者旁边而感染埃博拉病毒。截至 7 月 14 日,刚果民主共和国报告了 1963 例病例和 719 例死亡。

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