Training a 3.8B LLM for $998: what one person with rented B200s can do
Hugo Vergnes trained a 3.8 billion parameter language model from scratch for $998, scoring 0.384 on the CORE benchmark after 43 hours on eight rented B200 GPUs. That number matters because of what sits next to it in the comparison table. Karpathy’s nanochat d32, a 1B model trained for roughly the same $1,000 budget, scores […]
Running a 2.8T parameter model from SSDs on a MacBook Pro
A 2.8 trillion parameter model just ran on a laptop, and it didn’t fit in RAM when it did. A project on Hacker News streamed Kimi K3’s weights off four SSDs at about 1 token per second on a MacBook Pro, which is slow by chatbot standards and remarkable by any other measure. What Kimi […]
OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Says No Lab Is Ready to Scale at Full Speed
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published an essay on September 6 called An Alien Mind, and the timing is hard to ignore. Three days earlier, the company shipped GPT-6 Astra, its most capable model yet and the first to cross a Critical threshold on cybersecurity evaluations. Days after that launch, the person who runs research […]
Qwen 3.8 27B Hits 1500 Tokens Per Second on Cerebras
Cerebras is now serving Qwen 3.8 27B at roughly 1500 tokens per second, according to the company’s inference documentation. The HN thread announcing it pulled 498 points, and the reason is simple: that is roughly an order of magnitude faster than most GPU-based providers deliver for a model of this size. For comparison points from […]
GPT-6 Astra Breaks Through ARC-AGI-3, But the Harness Did Half the Work
ARC-AGI-3 is the benchmark that asks an AI to walk into an unfamiliar game with no instructions, figure out the rules by poking at things, and then win. Humans solve 100% of its environments. Until this week, no model came close. GPT-6 Astra changes that. According to the ARC Prize team’s independent writeup, Astra scored […]
WebLLM brings fast LLM inference to the browser with WebGPU
Running a language model entirely in the browser sounds like a party trick until you look at what WebLLM actually does. The project from the MLC community, which just crossed 18,800 GitHub stars, compiles LLM inference to run on the GPU through WebGPU, with nothing leaving the machine. No API calls, no server, no usage […]
GLM-5.3 goes open-weight, and its specialty is unsettling
Z.ai has released the weights for GLM-5.3, its frontier coding model, on Hugging Face. The launch blog post from mid-August promised the weights two weeks after launch, once safety evaluation and hardening finished, and that window has now closed. What makes this release unusual is not the benchmark table, though the numbers are strong. It […]
Gemini 3.5 Transcribe Pushes Speech-to-Text Toward Production-Grade Accuracy
Google introduced Gemini 3.5 Transcribe this week, its most accurate speech-to-text model to date, and the interesting part is what it does after the words are recognized. The model converts raw audio directly into polished, formatted text: it strips filler words, resolves self-corrections like “let’s meet Tuesday, no, Wednesday”, and auto-formats the output. Conventional speech […]
Qwen 3.8 27B Delivers Frontier Work on a Single GPU, If You Control Its Default Reasoning
Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 27B is the latest open-weights flagship, and early impressions are strong: it is a 27B parameter, vision-capable model that hands a genuinely professional level of coding, tool-calling, and long-context work to a single consumer GPU. But it arrives with a catch that changes how you should use it. The default reasoning setting […]
Researchers pull hidden reasoning out of Claude, GPT, and Gemini
Advanced AI models do not give you a straight answer all at once. They break a problem into pieces and work through them step by step, in a chain of thought that providers deliberately keep hidden. That hidden reasoning is valuable, because it is exactly what you would want if you were training your own […]
Azure Cosmos DB Now Does Vector Search Natively
Azure Cosmos DB Now Does Vector Search Natively Azure Cosmos DB just made a significant move in the AI infrastructure space: vector indexing and search is now generally available. That means you can store embeddings alongside your operational data and run similarity searches directly in Cosmos DB, without exporting to a separate vector database like […]