Augustus has raised $180 million to build a clearing bank tailored for the age of AI and stablecoins. The company already processes billions of euros annually through its regulated entity in Finland, serving clients including crypto exchange Kraken. It received conditional approval for a U.S. national bank charter from the OCC in May, with plans to add dollar clearing once final approval is granted. Augustus built its platform from scratch to support programmable payments and 24/7 settlement, aiming to address new risks from AI and enable stablecoin-based treasury management.
Augustus raises $180M for a clearing bank focused on AI and stablecoins.
Already processes billions in euro clearing via Finland; clients include Kraken.
Apache Spark 4.2 shifts focus towards an AI-native data platform, introducing Metric Views, native vector search, real-time Python streaming, geospatial support, and more, aimed at simplifying feature engineering, real-time signals, and embedding workflows for AI developers.
Spark 4.2 introduces Metric Views for consistent, governed business metrics that AI systems can rely on.
Native vector similarity operations allow storing and querying embeddings directly within Spark, reducing reliance on external vector databases.
In this part, we enhance the AI agent's security with Docker sandboxing, prompt injection defenses, and input validation. The Docker sandbox isolates tool execution, preventing damage to the host machine. Prompt injection defenses use delimiters and explicit instructions to treat tool outputs as data. Input validation ensures all tool inputs conform to schema before execution.
Docker sandbox isolates agent tools to limit blast radius.
Prompt injection defenses use XML-style delimiters and explicit trust boundaries.
Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia shared data showing human payroll dropped from $419K in June 2021 to $43K in June 2026, while AI token spend rose from zero to $43K in the same period, matching human costs for the first time. AI now dominates engineering commits and customer support, with response times slashed to minutes. The company sees this as a case study for deep AI integration.
Gumroad's human payroll fell from $419K to $43K per month, while AI token spend reached $43K, matching for the first time.
AI commits dwarf human developers; support response times reduced to an average of 2 minutes.
A federal judge has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion class action settlement with authors who accused the company of training AI on copyrighted books. The settlement provides about $3,000 per book and is the largest known copyright recovery in history.
Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín signed off on the $1.5 billion settlement.
Authors receive roughly $3,000 per allegedly pirated book.
This tutorial explores NVIDIA's srt-slurm framework, learning how to use srtctl to convert declarative YAML configurations into reproducible SLURM benchmark workflows for distributed LLM serving. We set up the project in Google Colab, inspect its internal architecture, define a cluster configuration, dry-run built-in and custom recipes, and model a disaggregated prefill-and-decode deployment for DeepSeek-R1. We also generate parameter sweeps, interact with the typed Python API, validate expanded configurations, and analyze simulated benchmark results through a throughput-versus-latency Pareto frontier.
srtctl converts YAML configs into SLURM benchmark workflows
Supports disaggregated prefill and decode deployments
This post explores generating thinking tokens for datasets lacking reasoning traces in SFT customization. It examines the reasoning suppression problem, introduces Self-Distilled Reasoning (SDR), validates it across three benchmarks, and provides practical recommendations. SDR reuses the base model's chain of thought as a stand-in, mitigating catastrophic forgetting while maintaining or improving target performance.
SFT on non-reasoning datasets can suppress the model's reasoning ability, even when reasoning mode is enabled.
Self-Distilled Reasoning (SDR) generates reasoning traces from the base model itself, requiring no human annotation.
PathToShip scanned 1,868 public AI-built apps, finding only 23% pass production-readiness bar. The scanner's initial false-positive rate for critical findings was 42%, reduced to ~25% after fixes. Results reveal typical gaps in production readiness, security, and architecture for AI-generated code.
23% of AI-built apps pass the 80-point production-ready threshold; mean score 68.3.
24% have at least one critical finding; 15% ship hardcoded secrets.
Moto is an AI video editor that integrates generation directly into the timeline, allowing users to create, edit, and finish videos without switching tools. Features include prompt-to-motion graphics, an assistant for natural language edits, reusable sources, and a producer for first cuts. It supports multiple AI models and is currently in private beta with a free core editor.
Moto integrates AI generation into a video timeline for streamlined editing.
Features include motion AI, assistant, sources, and producer for first cuts.
Researchers from MIT Media Lab introduce the concept of AI Cohabitants—physical AI entities with distinct personalities that coexist with users as autonomous beings, unlike traditional assistants. They built a robotic parrot, the Stochastic Parrot, to explore this paradigm, fostering spontaneous and emotionally rich interactions.
AI Cohabitants are physical, autonomous AI with character, like a roommate or pet.
The Stochastic Parrot is a robotic embodiment that lives alongside users, developing its own narrative.
LangSmith now supports tracing for voice agents built with Pipecat, LiveKit, OpenAI Realtime, and Gemini Live. Capture audio, STT and TTS latency, interruptions, tool calls, and more in one trace.
LangSmith launches Python integrations to trace four popular voice agent frameworks.
Voice agents need observability including audio recording, latency analysis, and interruption detection.
GitHub Copilot's 'canvases' transform AI from a conversational tool into a visual, interactive workspace. Developers can create custom canvases via prompts for tasks like issue triage, code visualization, session management, prompt coaching, and knowledge finding. Canvases support real-time collaboration, allowing users and AI agents to iterate together.
Canvases are GitHub Copilot extensions providing visual interfaces for complex tasks.
Users can create different canvases via prompts, such as issue triage helper or codebase diagram.
Google has released Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite as new workhorses designed to cut latency and token costs for enterprise AI agents. The new models offer significant performance improvements, targeted pricing, and integrated computer-use tools, with enterprise partners already deploying them in production.
Gemini 3.6 Flash reduces output tokens by 17% (up to 65% in specific tests), priced at $1.50/1M input and $7.50/1M output tokens.
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite offers high throughput at lower cost ($0.3/1M input, $2.5/1M output), suitable for high-volume agentic tasks.