Committee

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them. There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March. As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom. Read the full story. —Caiwei Chen Inside the race to find GPS alternatives Later this month, an inconspicuous 150-kilogram satellite is set to launch into space aboard the SpaceX Transporter 14 mission. Once in orbit, it will test super-accurate next-generation satnav technology designed to make up for the shortcomings of the US Global Positioning System (GPS). Despite the system’s indispensable nature, the GPS signal is easily suppressed or disrupted by everything from space weather to 5G cell towers to phone-size jammers worth a few tens of dollars. The problem has been whispered about among experts for years, but it has really come to the fore in the last three years, since Russia invaded Ukraine. Now, startup Xona Space Systems wants to create a space-based system that would do what GPS does but better. Read the full story. —Tereza Pultarova Why doctors should look for ways to prescribe hope —Jessica Hamzelou This week, I’ve been thinking about the powerful connection between mind and body. Some new research suggests that people with heart conditions have better outcomes when they are more hopeful and optimistic. Hopelessness, on the other hand, is associated with a significantly higher risk of death. The findings build upon decades of fascinating research into the phenomenon of the placebo effect. Our beliefs and expectations about a medicine (or a sham treatment) can change the way it works. The placebo effect’s “evil twin,” the nocebo effect, is just as powerful—negative thinking has been linked to real symptoms. Researchers are still trying to understand the connection between body and mind, and how our thoughts can influence our physiology. In the meantime, many are developing ways to harness it in hospital settings. Is it possible for a doctor to prescribe hope? Read the full story. This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Elon Musk threatened to cut off NASA’s use of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraftHis war of words with Donald Trump is dramatically escalating. (WP $)+ If Musk actually carried through with his threat, NASA would seriously struggle. (NYT $)+ Silicon Valley is starting to pick sides. (Wired $)+ It appears as though Musk has more to lose from their bruising breakup. (NY Mag $) 2 Apple and Alibaba’s AI rollout in China has been delayedIt’s the latest victim of Trump’s trade war. (FT $)+ The deal is supposed to support iPhones’ AI offerings in the country. (Reuters) 3 X’s new policy blocks the use of its posts to ‘fine-tune or train’ AI modelsUnless companies strike a deal with them, that is. (TechCrunch)+ The platform could end up striking agreements like Reddit and Google. (The Verge) 4 RJK Jr’s new hire is hunting for proof that vaccines cause autismVaccine skeptic David Geier is seeking access to a database he was previously barred from. (WSJ $)+ How measuring vaccine hesitancy could help health professionals tackle it. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Anthropic has launched a new service for the militaryClaude Gov is designed specifically for US defense and intelligence agencies. (The Verge)+ Generative AI is learning to spy for the US military. (MIT Technology Review) 6 There’s no guarantee your billion-dollar startup won’t failIn fact, one in five of them will. (Bloomberg $)+ Beware the rise of the AI coding startup. (Reuters) 7 Walmart’s drone deliveries are taking offIt’s expanding to 100 new US stories in the next year. (Wired $) 8 AI might be able to tell us how old the Dead Sea Scrolls really are Models suggest they’re even older than we previously thought. (The Economist $)+ How AI is helping historians better understand our past. (MIT Technology Review) 9 All-in-one super apps are a hit in the Gulf They’re following in China’s footsteps. (Rest of World) 10 Nintendo’s Switch 2 has revived the midnight launch eventFans queued for hours outside stores to get their hands on the new console. (Insider $)+ How the company managed to dodge Trump’s tariffs. (The Guardian) Quote of the day “Elon finally found a way to make Twitter fun again.” —Dan Pfeiffer, a host of the political podcast Pod Save America, jokes about Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s ongoing feud in a post on X. One more thing This rare earth metal shows us the future of our planet’s resources We’re in the middle of a potentially transformative moment. Metals discovered barely a century ago now underpin the technologies we’re relying on for cleaner energy, and not having enough of them could slow progress.  Take neodymium, one of the rare earth metals. It’s used in cryogenic coolers to reach ultra-low temperatures needed for devices like superconductors and in high-powered magnets that power everything from smartphones to wind turbines. And very soon, demand for it could outstrip supply. What happens then? And what

Should talking to an AI chatbot be protected and privileged information, like talking to a doctor or lawyer? A new court order raises the ideaRead More

A new spoken language model can quickly generate “infinite” new voices of varying genders, ages, demographics, based on a simple text prompt.Read More

arXiv:2409.19257v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In-group language is an important signifier of group dynamics. This paper proposes a novel method for inducing lexicons of in-group language, which incorporates its socio-temporal context. Existing methods for lexicon induction do not capture the evolving nature of in-group language, nor the social structure of the community. Using dynamic word and user embeddings trained on conversations from online anti-women communities, our approach outperforms prior methods for lexicon induction. We develop a test set for the task of lexicon induction and a new lexicon of manosphere language, validated by human experts, which quantifies the relevance of each term to a specific sub-community at a given point in time. Finally, we present novel insights on in-group language which illustrate the utility of this approach.

arXiv:2506.04410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contemporary approaches to assisted scientific discovery use language models to automatically generate large numbers of potential hypothesis to test, while also automatically generating code-based experiments to test those hypotheses. While hypotheses can be comparatively inexpensive to generate, automated experiments can be costly, particularly when run at scale (i.e. thousands of experiments). Developing the capacity to filter hypotheses based on their feasibility would allow discovery systems to run at scale, while increasing their likelihood of making significant discoveries. In this work we introduce Matter-of-Fact, a challenge dataset for determining the feasibility of hypotheses framed as claims. Matter-of-Fact includes 8.4k claims extracted from scientific articles spanning four high-impact contemporary materials science topics, including superconductors, semiconductors, batteries, and aerospace materials, while including qualitative and quantitative claims from theoretical, experimental, and code/simulation results. We show that strong baselines that include retrieval augmented generation over scientific literature and code generation fail to exceed 72% performance on this task (chance performance is 50%), while domain-expert verification suggests nearly all are solvable — highlighting both the difficulty of this task for current models, and the potential to accelerate scientific discovery by making near-term progress.

arXiv:2410.12872v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for knowledge tracing (KT) due to their strong reasoning and generalization abilities. While recent LLM-based KT methods have proposed new prompt formats, they struggle to represent the full interaction histories of example learners within a single prompt during in-context learning (ICL), resulting in limited scalability and high computational cost under token constraints. In this work, we present textit{LLM-based Option-weighted Knowledge Tracing (LOKT)}, a simple yet effective framework that encodes the interaction histories of example learners in context as textit{textual categorical option weights (TCOW)}. TCOW are semantic labels (e.g., “inadequate”) assigned to the options selected by learners when answering questions, enhancing the interpretability of LLMs. Experiments on multiple-choice datasets show that LOKT outperforms existing non-LLM and LLM-based KT models in both cold-start and warm-start settings. Moreover, LOKT enables scalable and cost-efficient inference, achieving strong performance even under strict token constraints. Our code is available at href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LOKT_model-3233}{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LOKT_model-3233}.

Reinforcement finetuning uses reward signals to guide the large language model toward desirable behavior. This method sharpens the model’s ability to produce logical and structured outputs by reinforcing correct responses. Yet, the challenge persists in ensuring that these models also know when not to respond—particularly when faced with incomplete or misleading questions that don’t have a definite answer. The problem arises when language models, after reinforcement finetuning, begin to lose their ability to refuse to answer unclear or ambiguous queries. Instead of signaling uncertainty, the models tend to produce confidently stated but incorrect responses. This phenomenon, identified in the paper as the “hallucination tax,” highlights a growing risk. As models are trained to perform better, they may also become more likely to hallucinate answers in situations where silence would be more appropriate. This is especially hazardous in domains that require high trust and precision. Tools currently used in training large language models often overlook the importance of refusal behavior. Reinforcement finetuning frameworks tend to reward only correct answers while penalizing incorrect ones, ignoring cases where a valid response should be no answer at all. The reward systems in use do not sufficiently reinforce refusal, resulting in overconfident models. For instance, the paper shows that refusal rates dropped to near zero across multiple models after standard RFT, demonstrating that current training fails to address hallucination properly. Researchers from the University of Southern California developed the Synthetic Unanswerable Math (SUM) dataset. SUM introduces implicitly unanswerable math problems by modifying existing questions through criteria such as missing key information or creating logical inconsistencies. The researchers used DeepScaleR as the base dataset and employed the o3-mini model to generate high-quality unanswerable questions. This synthetic dataset aims to teach models to recognize when a problem lacks sufficient information and respond accordingly. SUM’s core technique is to mix answerable and unanswerable problems during training. Questions are modified to become ambiguous or unsolvable while maintaining plausibility. The training prompts instruct models to say “I don’t know” for unanswerable inputs. By introducing only 10% of the SUM data into reinforcement finetuning, models begin to leverage inference-time reasoning to evaluate uncertainty. This structure allows them to refuse answers more appropriately without impairing their performance on solvable problems. Performance analysis shows significant improvements. After training with SUM, the Qwen2.5-7B model increased its refusal rate from 0.01 to 0.73 on the SUM benchmark and from 0.01 to 0.81 on the UMWP benchmark. On the SelfAware dataset, refusal accuracy rose dramatically from 0.01 to 0.94. Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct showed a similar trend, with refusal rates improving from 0.00 to 0.75 on SUM and from 0.01 to 0.79 on UMWP. Despite these gains in refusal behavior, accuracy on answerable datasets, such as GSM8K and MATH-500, remained stable, with most changes ranging from 0.00 to -0.05. The minimal drop indicates that refusal training can be introduced without major sacrifices in task performance. This study outlines a clear trade-off between improved reasoning and trustworthiness. Reinforcement finetuning, while powerful, tends to suppress cautious behavior. The SUM dataset corrects this by teaching models to recognize what they cannot solve. With only a small addition to training data, language models become better at identifying the boundaries of their knowledge. This approach marks a significant step in making AI systems not just smarter but also more careful and honest. Check out the Paper and Dataset on Hugging Face. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Did you know? Marktechpost is the fastest-growing AI media platform—trusted by over 1 million monthly readers. Book a strategy call to discuss your campaign goals. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 95k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. The post Teaching AI to Say ‘I Don’t Know’: A New Dataset Mitigates Hallucinations from Reinforcement Finetuning appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Text embedding and reranking are foundational to modern information retrieval systems, powering applications such as semantic search, recommendation systems, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, current approaches often face key challenges—particularly in achieving both high multilingual fidelity and task adaptability without relying on proprietary APIs. Existing models frequently fall short in scenarios requiring nuanced semantic understanding across multiple languages or domain-specific tasks like code retrieval and instruction following. Moreover, most open-source models either lack scale or flexibility, while commercial APIs remain costly and closed. Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker: A New Standard for Open-Source Embedding Alibaba’s Qwen Team has unveiled the Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker Series—models that set a new benchmark in multilingual text embedding and relevance ranking. Built on the Qwen3 foundation models, the series includes variants in 0.6B, 4B, and 8B parameter sizes and supports a wide range of languages (119 in total), making it one of the most versatile and performant open-source offerings to date. These models are now open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, GitHub, and ModelScope, and are also accessible via Alibaba Cloud APIs. These models are optimized for use cases such as semantic retrieval, classification, RAG, sentiment analysis, and code search—providing a strong alternative to existing solutions like Gemini Embedding and OpenAI’s embedding APIs. Technical Architecture Qwen3-Embedding models adopt a dense transformer-based architecture with causal attention, producing embeddings by extracting the hidden state corresponding to the [EOS] token. Instruction-awareness is a key feature: input queries are formatted as {instruction} {query}<|endoftext|>, enabling task-conditioned embeddings. The reranker models are trained with a binary classification format, judging document-query relevance in an instruction-guided manner using a token likelihood-based scoring function. The models are trained using a robust multi-stage training pipeline: Large-scale weak supervision: 150M synthetic training pairs generated using Qwen3-32B, covering retrieval, classification, STS, and bitext mining across languages and tasks. Supervised fine-tuning: 12M high-quality data pairs are selected using cosine similarity (>0.7), fine-tuning performance in downstream applications. Model merging: Spherical linear interpolation (SLERP) of multiple fine-tuned checkpoints ensures robustness and generalization. This synthetic data generation pipeline enables control over data quality, language diversity, task difficulty, and more—resulting in a high degree of coverage and relevance in low-resource settings. Performance Benchmarks and Insights The Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker series demonstrate strong empirical performance across several multilingual benchmarks. On MMTEB (216 tasks across 250+ languages), Qwen3-Embedding-8B achieves a mean task score of 70.58, surpassing Gemini and GTE-Qwen2 series. On MTEB (English v2): Qwen3-Embedding-8B reaches 75.22, outperforming other open models including NV-Embed-v2 and GritLM-7B. On MTEB-Code: Qwen3-Embedding-8B leads with 80.68, excelling in applications like code retrieval and Stack Overflow QA. For reranking: Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B already outperforms Jina and BGE rerankers. Qwen3-Reranker-8B achieves 81.22 on MTEB-Code and 72.94 on MMTEB-R, marking state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies confirm the necessity of each training stage. Removing synthetic pretraining or model merging led to significant performance drops (up to 6 points on MMTEB), emphasizing their contributions. Conclusion Alibaba’s Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker Series present a robust, open, and scalable solution to multilingual and instruction-aware semantic representation. With strong empirical results across MTEB, MMTEB, and MTEB-Code, these models bridge the gap between proprietary APIs and open-source accessibility. Their thoughtful training design—leveraging high-quality synthetic data, instruction-tuning, and model merging—positions them as ideal candidates for enterprise applications in search, retrieval, and RAG pipelines. By open-sourcing these models, the Qwen team not only pushes the boundaries of language understanding but also empowers the broader community to innovate on top of a solid foundation. Check out the Paper, Technical details, Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 95k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. The post Alibaba Qwen Team Releases Qwen3-Embedding and Qwen3-Reranker Series – Redefining Multilingual Embedding and Ranking Standards appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them.  There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website. Many of these have emerged in just the last two months, following in the footsteps of Manus—a general AI agent that sparked weeks of social media frenzy for invite codes after its limited-release launch in early March.  These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions.  China could take the lead on building these kinds of agents. The country’s tightly integrated app ecosystems, rapid product cycles, and digitally fluent user base could provide a favorable environment for embedding AI into daily life.  For now, its leading AI agent startups are focusing their attention on the global market, because the best Western models don’t operate inside China’s firewalls. But that could change soon: Tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent are preparing their own AI agents that could bake automation directly into their native super-apps, pulling data from their vast ecosystem of programs that dominate many aspects of daily life in the country.  As the race to define what a useful AI agent looks like unfolds, a mix of ambitious startups and entrenched tech giants are now testing how these tools might actually work in practice—and for whom. Set the standard It’s been a whirlwind few months for Manus, which was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. The company raised $75 million in a funding round led by the US venture capital firm Benchmark, took the product on an ambitious global roadshow, and hired dozens of new employees.  Even before registration opened to the public in May, Manus had become a reference point for what a broad, consumer‑oriented AI agent should accomplish. Rather than handling narrow chores for businesses, this “general” agent is designed to be able to help with everyday tasks like trip planning, stock comparison, or your kid’s school project.  Unlike previous AI agents, Manus uses a browser-based sandbox that lets users supervise the agent like an intern, watching in real time as it scrolls through web pages, reads articles, or codes actions. It also proactively asks clarifying questions, supports long-term memory that would serve as context for future tasks. “Manus represents a promising product experience for AI agents,” says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular, a startup based in Palo Alto, California, that’s building computer use agents, AI agents that control a virtual computer. “I believe Chinese startups have a huge advantage when it comes to designing consumer products, thanks to cutthroat domestic competition that leads to fast execution and greater attention to product details.” In the case of Manus, the competition is moving fast. Two of the most buzzy follow‑ups, Genspark and Flowith, for example, are already boasting benchmark scores that match or edge past Manus’s.  Genspark, led by former Baidu executives Eric Jing and Kay Zhu, links many small “super agents” through what it calls multi‑component prompting. The agent can switch among several large language models, accepts both images and text, and carries out tasks from making slide decks to placing phone calls. Whereas Manus relies heavily on Browser Use, a popular open-source product that lets agents operate a web browser in a virtual window like a human, Genspark directly integrates with a wide array of tools and APIs. Launched in April, the company says that it already has over 5 million users and over $36 million in yearly revenue. Flowith, the work of a young team that first grabbed public attention in April 2025 at a developer event hosted by the popular social media app Xiaohongshu, takes a different tack. Marketed as an “infinite agent,” it opens on a blank canvas where each question becomes a node on a branching map. Users can backtrack, take new branches, and store results in personal or sharable “knowledge gardens”—a design that feels more like project management software (think Notion) than a typical chat interface. Every inquiry or task builds its own mind-map-like graph, encouraging a more nonlinear and creative interaction with AI. Flowith’s core agent, NEO, runs in the cloud and can perform scheduled tasks like sending emails and compiling files. The founders want the app to be a “knowledge marketbase”, and aims to tap into the social aspect of AI with the aspiration of becoming “the OnlyFans of AI knowledge creators”. What they also share with Manus is the global ambition. Both Genspark and Flowith have stated that their primary focus is the international market. A global address Startups like Manus, Genspark, and Flowith—though founded by Chinese entrepreneurs—could blend seamlessly into the global tech scene and compete effectively abroad. Founders, investors, and analysts that MIT Technology Review has spoken to believe Chinese companies are moving fast, executing well, and quickly coming up with new products.  Money reinforces the pull to launch overseas. Customers there pay more, and there are plenty to go around. “You can price in USD, and with the exchange rate that’s a sevenfold multiplier,” Manus cofounder Xiao Hong quipped on a podcast. “Even if we’re only operating at 10% power because of cultural differences overseas, we’ll still make more than in China.” But creating the same functionality in China is a challenge. Major US AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic have opted out of mainland China because of geopolitical risks and challenges with regulatory compliance. Their absence initially created a black market as users

Dublin AI startup Solidroad raises $6.5M from First Round Capital to transform customer service training with AI that coaches human agents and improves satisfaction scores.Read More