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Qwen3-4B Instruct and Thinking

Yet another interesting model from Qwen—these are tiny compared to their other recent releases (just 4B parameters, 7.5GB on Hugging Face and even smaller when quantized) but with a 262,144 context length, which Qwen suggest is essential for all of those thinking tokens.

The new model somehow beats the significantly larger Qwen3-30B-A3B Thinking on the AIME25 and HMMT25 benchmarks, according to Qwen’s self-reported scores.

The easiest way to try it on a Mac is via LM Studio, who already have their own MLX quantized versions out in

Matt Webb on copyrighting your faults. “I think part of growing up is taking what it is that people tease you about at school, and figuring out how to make it a superpower.”

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mRNA vaccines for HIV trigger strong immune response in people. “Two vaccine candidates using mRNA technology elicit a potent immune response against HIV, according to an early-stage clinical trial.” The good news lately re: HIV is incredible. Fund this!

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“Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled nearly $500 million of grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines.” This, like many other Trump regime actions, will result in easily avoided deaths.

Fall Out Boy is a band from Chicago that formed in 2001. Their first album, Take This To Your Grave, was a hit, especially in the punk rock world. When they put out their second album, though, in 2005, that was on a whole other scale. That album is called From Under the Cork Tree, and it went double platinum, and they were nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. For this episode, I talked to the band’s singer, Patrick Stump, about how they made their breakout hit from that album, the song “Sugar, We’re Goin Down.” 

For more info, visit songexploder.net/fall-out-boy.

gpt-oss-120b is the most intelligent American open weights model, comes behind DeepSeek R1 and Qwen3 235B in intelligence but offers efficiency benefits [...]

We’re seeing the 120B beat o3-mini but come in behind o4-mini and o3. The 120B is the most intelligent model that can be run on a single H100 and the 20B is the most intelligent model that can be run on a consumer GPU. [...]

While the larger gpt-oss-120b does not come in above DeepSeek R1 0528’s score of 59 or Qwen3 235B 2507s score of 64, it is notable that it is significantly smaller in both total and active parameters than both of those models.

— Artificial Analysis, see also their updated leaderboard

Tags: evals, openai, deepseek, ai, qwen, llms, gpt-oss, generative-ai

Counterculture icon… artist… nun? A new art center has opened up in downtown LA dedicated to the work of Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita, a nun and art teacher whose bright, colorful, and political Pop Art prints made her famous in the 1960s…and also got her in big trouble with the church.

 

Pay a visit to the Corita Art Center next time you’re in LA! Or: driving through Boston? Keep your eyes peeled for Rainbow Swash. 

 

For more on Corita and the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, check out the Rebel Hearts documentary. And if you need some inspiration, here’s the art department rules Corita posted in her classroom at Immaculate Heart College. 

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Anthropic: GitHub notes that Claude Opus 4.1 improves across most capabilities relative to Opus 4, with particularly notable performance gains in multi-file code refactoring. Rakuten Group finds that Opus 4.1 excels at pinpointing exact corrections within large codebases...

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive Colton Voege on "curing your AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome". There's a lot of rhetoric out there suggesting that if you can't 10x your productivity through tricks like running a dozen Claude Code instances at once you're f...

Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica: Porn sites may have blown up Meta’s key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries” to train its AI models. [.....

Tom Warren:

In a new Pixel 10 ad, Google dunks on Apple’s failed promise of Siri AI improvements, with a narrator that suggests you could “just change your phone” if you bought “a new phone because of a feature that’s coming soon, but it’s been coming soon for a full year.”

The 30-second spot appeared on YouTube and X today, teasing the launch of Google’s new Pixel 10 devices on August 20th.

The whole Siri/Apple Intelligence thing has been an enormous self-inflicted embarrassment, but when it comes to Pixel phones, all I can think of is that Mad Men “I don’t think about you at all” GIF.

Link: theverge.com/news/718191/google-apple-intelligence-dunk…

Ghost: When we announced Ghost 5.0 a few years ago, we were proud to share that Ghost’s revenue had hit $4M — while publisher earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt great to have such a clear sign that our goal to create a sustainable business model for independent creator...

MacRumors, on June 20: Apple executives have been discussing the possibility of the company making a bid to acquire Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Perplexity is one of the leading AI startups that has proven popular as an AI-infused web search engin...

The Cloudflare blog: We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity...

Alexandra Steigrad, reporting for The New York Post:

The new publication will be headquartered in Los Angeles and feature a robust staff of editors, reporters and photographers dedicated to covering news, entertainment, politics, culture, sports and business — all with a distinctly California perspective.

The California Post will be supported by the team in New York providing national and international news. The content will appear in a daily print edition and will have its own dedicated homepage for Californians with stories being published across multiple other platforms, including video, audio and social media.

Who says print is dead?

Link: nypost.com/2025/08/04/media/start-the-presses-new-york-post…

Antonio G. Di Benedetto: Part of me still can’t believe it, but Lenovo did the thing: it took a bonkers concept for a laptop with a rollable screen and built the tech into something you can actually own and use like a normal computer. Except, as conventional as the Think...

Coming March 17, 2026:

In time for Apple’s 50th anniversary, “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue tells the iconic company’s entire life story: how it was born, nearly died, was born again under Steve Jobs, and became, under CEO Tim Cook, one of the most valuable companies in the world.

The 600-page book features 360 full-color photos, new facts that correct the record and illuminate Apple’s subversive culture, and 150 fresh interviews with the legendary figures who shaped Apple into what it is today.

Link: applefirst50.com/

Some facts about the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese: 1. As you can see in the photo above, purportedly taken in 1974, there was originally a Quarter Pounder without cheese, which was scrubbed from the menu at some undetermined point (even though you can still orde...

Molly White: Curate your own newspaper with RSS. “What if you could take all your favorite newsletters, ditch the data collection, and curate your own newspaper?”

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The long promised OpenAI open weight models are here, and they are very impressive. They're available under proper open source licenses - Apache 2.0 - and come in two sizes, 120B and 20B. OpenAI's own benchmarks are eyebrow-raising - emphasis mine: The gpt-oss-120b model ac...