Committee

In this tutorial, we deploy the 1-bit Bonsai-27B language model using the PrismML fork of llama.cpp, which provides the specialized CUDA kernels required to decode the model’s Q1_0_g128 GGUF quantization format. We begin by validating the GPU runtime, installing the required Python dependencies, compiling the CUDA-enabled inference binaries, and downloading the compressed model weights from Hugging Face. We then test the model through llama-cli, launch an OpenAI-compatible local inference server, and interact with it through a reusable Python client that supports standard completions, streamed responses, multi-turn conversations, and code generation. We also examine optional configurations for throughput benchmarking, quantized key-value caching, long-context inference, speculative decoding, and multimodal extensions. Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser import os import sys import time import json import shutil import subprocess import multiprocessing WORK_DIR = “/content” REPO_URL = “https://github.com/PrismML-Eng/llama.cpp” REPO_DIR = os.path.join(WORK_DIR, “llama.cpp”) BUILD_DIR = os.path.join(REPO_DIR, “build”) BIN_DIR = os.path.join(BUILD_DIR, “bin”) HF_REPO = “prism-ml/Bonsai-27B-gguf” MODEL_FILE = “Bonsai-27B-Q1_0.gguf” MODEL_PATH = os.path.join(WORK_DIR, MODEL_FILE) SERVER_HOST = “127.0.0.1” SERVER_PORT = 8080 SERVER_URL = f”http://{SERVER_HOST}:{SERVER_PORT}” GEN_PARAMS = {“temperature”: 0.7, “top_p”: 0.95, “top_k”: 20} CTX_SIZE = 8192 N_GPU_LAYERS = 99 USE_KV_Q4 = False def sh(cmd, check=True, **kw): “””Run a shell command, streaming output to the notebook.””” print(f”n$ {cmd}”) return subprocess.run(cmd, shell=True, check=check, **kw) print(“=” * 70) print(“[1/7] Checking environment”) print(“=” * 70) gpu = subprocess.run(“nvidia-smi –query-gpu=name,memory.total –format=csv,noheader”, shell=True, capture_output=True, text=True) if gpu.returncode != 0: sys.exit(“No GPU detected. In Colab: Runtime -> Change runtime type -> GPU (T4).”) print(f”GPU detected: {gpu.stdout.strip()}”) print(“Bonsai-27B needs only ~5.2 GB peak at 4K context — any Colab GPU works.”) sh(“pip -q install huggingface_hub requests”) We configure the Colab workspace, model repository, server endpoint, inference parameters, context size, and GPU offloading settings required throughout the tutorial. We define a reusable shell-command function and verify that the runtime exposes a compatible NVIDIA GPU before continuing. We then install the Hugging Face Hub and HTTP client dependencies needed for model retrieval and API communication. Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser print(“=” * 70) print(“[2/7] Building PrismML llama.cpp fork with CUDA (cached after 1st run)”) print(“=” * 70) if not os.path.isdir(REPO_DIR): sh(f”git clone –depth 1 {REPO_URL} {REPO_DIR}”) else: print(“Repo already cloned — skipping.”) cli_bin = os.path.join(BIN_DIR, “llama-cli”) server_bin = os.path.join(BIN_DIR, “llama-server”) bench_bin = os.path.join(BIN_DIR, “llama-bench”) if not (os.path.exists(cli_bin) and os.path.exists(server_bin)): jobs = multiprocessing.cpu_count() sh(f”cmake -S {REPO_DIR} -B {BUILD_DIR} -DGGML_CUDA=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release”) sh(f”cmake –build {BUILD_DIR} -j{jobs} –target llama-cli llama-server llama-bench”) else: print(“Binaries already built — skipping.”) We clone the PrismML fork of llama.cpp, which provides the specialized kernels required for the model’s Q1_0_g128 quantization format. We configure a CUDA-enabled release build with CMake and compile the command-line, server, and benchmarking executables. We also reuse previously generated binaries when they already exist, reducing repeated setup time in the same Colab session. Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser print(“=” * 70) print(“[3/7] Downloading weights from Hugging Face”) print(“=” * 70) from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download if not os.path.exists(MODEL_PATH): downloaded = hf_hub_download(repo_id=HF_REPO, filename=MODEL_FILE, local_dir=WORK_DIR) print(f”Downloaded to: {downloaded}”) else: print(“Model already on disk — skipping.”) print(f”Model size on disk: {os.path.getsize(MODEL_PATH) / 1e9:.2f} GB”) We connect to the Hugging Face Hub and download the Bonsai-27B GGUF model into the Colab workspace. We skip the transfer when the model file is already available locally, allowing subsequent runs to proceed more efficiently. We then calculate and display the deployed model size to confirm that the compressed weights are stored correctly. Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser print(“=” * 70) print(“[4/7] Smoke test with llama-cli”) print(“=” * 70) sh( f'{cli_bin} -m {MODEL_PATH} ‘ f’-p “Explain in two sentences why 1-bit quantization saves memory.” ‘ f’-n 128 -ngl {N_GPU_LAYERS} ‘ f’–temp {GEN_PARAMS[“temperature”]} ‘ f’–top-p {GEN_PARAMS[“top_p”]} –top-k {GEN_PARAMS[“top_k”]} ‘ f’-no-cnv 2>/dev/null’, check=False, ) print(“=” * 70) print(“[5/7] Starting llama-server (OpenAI-compatible API)”) print(“=” * 70) import requests kv_flags = “-ctk q4_0 -ctv q4_0” if USE_KV_Q4 else “” server_cmd = ( f”{server_bin} -m {MODEL_PATH} ” f”–host {SERVER_HOST} –port {SERVER_PORT} ” f”-ngl {N_GPU_LAYERS} -c {CTX_SIZE} {kv_flags}” ) print(f”$ {server_cmd} (background)”) server_log = open(os.path.join(WORK_DIR, “server.log”), “w”) server_proc = subprocess.Popen(server_cmd, shell=True, stdout=server_log, stderr=server_log) for _ in range(120): try: if requests.get(f”{SERVER_URL}/health”, timeout=2).status_code == 200: print(“Server is up.”) break except requests.exceptions.RequestException: pass time.sleep(2) else: server_proc.kill() sys.exit(“Server failed to start — check /content/server.log”) We perform a command-line smoke test to verify that the compiled runtime can load the quantized model and generate a valid response. We then start llama-server with full GPU layer offloading, the selected context window, and optional quantized KV-cache settings. We repeatedly query the health endpoint until the OpenAI-compatible inference service becomes ready for client requests. Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser print(“=” * 70) print(“[6/7] Talking to Bonsai-27B via the OpenAI-compatible API”) print(“=” * 70) def chat(messages, stream=False, max_tokens=512, **overrides): “””Minimal OpenAI-compatible chat client for the local llama-server.””” payload = { “model”: “bonsai-27b”, “messages”: messages, “max_tokens”: max_tokens, “stream”: stream, **GEN_PARAMS, **overrides, } if not stream: r = requests.post(f”{SERVER_URL}/v1/chat/completions”, json=payload) r.raise_for_status() return r.json()[“choices”][0][“message”][“content”] r = requests.post(f”{SERVER_URL}/v1/chat/completions”, json=payload, stream=True) r.raise_for_status() full = [] for line in r.iter_lines(): if not line or not line.startswith(b”data: “): continue chunk = line[len(b”data: “):] if chunk == b”[DONE]”: break delta = json.loads(chunk)[“choices”][0][“delta”].get(“content”, “”) full.append(delta) print(delta, end=””, flush=True) print() return “”.join(full) SYSTEM = {“role”: “system”, “content”: “You are a helpful assistant”} print(“n— 6a: basic completion —“) answer = chat([SYSTEM, {“role”: “user”, “content”: “What is the capital of France? One sentence.”}]) print(answer) print(“n— 6b: math reasoning, streamed token-by-token —“) chat([SYSTEM, {“role”: “user”, “content”: “A train travels 120 km at 80 km/h, then 90 km at ” “60 km/h. What is its average speed for the whole ” “trip? Show your reasoning briefly.”}], stream=True, max_tokens=700) print(“n— 6c: multi-turn chat —“) history = [SYSTEM] for user_msg in [“My name is Priya and I love graph algorithms.”, “Suggest one project idea that combines my interest with LLMs.”, “What was my name again?”]: history.append({“role”: “user”, “content”: user_msg}) reply = chat(history, max_tokens=300) history.append({“role”: “assistant”, “content”: reply}) print(f”nUSER: {user_msg}nBONSAI: {reply}”) print(“n— 6d: code generation —“) print(chat([SYSTEM, {“role”: “user”, “content”: “Write a Python function that returns the n-th ” “Fibonacci number using memoization. Code only.”}], max_tokens=400)) We define a reusable Python chat client that sends OpenAI-compatible requests to the locally hosted Bonsai-27B server. We support both standard

arXiv:2604.01348v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time scaling has emerged as an effective way to improve language models on challenging reasoning tasks. However, most existing methods treat each problem in isolation and do not systematically reuse knowledge from prior reasoning trajectories. In particular, they underutilize procedural knowledge: how to reframe a problem, choose an approach, and verify or backtrack when needed. We introduce textbf{Reasoning Memory}, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework for reasoning models that explicitly retrieves and reuses procedural knowledge at scale. Starting from existing corpora of step-by-step reasoning trajectories, we decompose each trajectory into self-contained subquestion-subroutine pairs, yielding a datastore of 32 million compact procedural knowledge entries. At inference time, a lightweight in-thought prompt lets the model verbalize the core subquestion, retrieve relevant subroutines within its reasoning trace, and reason under diverse retrieved subroutines as implicit procedural priors. Across six math, science, and coding benchmarks, Reasoning Memory consistently outperforms RAG with document, trajectory, and template knowledge, as well as a compute-matched test-time scaling baseline. With a higher inference budget, averaged across models and tasks, it improves over no retrieval by 19.5% and over the compute-matched baseline by 8.9%. Ablation studies show that these gains come from two key factors: the broad procedural coverage of the source trajectories and our decomposition and retrieval design, which together enable effective extraction and reuse of procedural knowledge. Our experiment code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/reasoning-memory.

Lee, an engineer at Samsung’s semiconductor division, clocks out when his shift ends. He used to work longer hours, going the extra mile to excel at his projects. But lately, he’s been coming straight home to work on his job application for the chipmaker’s South Korean rival SK Hynix, sharing tips with his coworkers on how to draft a stellar personal statement. Even his boss encourages him to make the move. “My team lead tells us all to jump ship to SK Hynix,” says Lee. He and his coworkers are feeling demoralized by the $476,000 bonus that SK Hynix is set to pay its employees, flush with record profits from making the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power Nvidia’s AI accelerators. The figure dwarfs what chip workers at Samsung are set to receive and is sparking an exodus. As the AI boom heats up, the semiconductor titans are waging a fierce talent war with flashy bonuses, aggressive recruiting, and even a courtroom injunction. Who wins could tilt the race to dominate the next generation of the HBM chips at the heart of the AI boom. “Except for our two team leads, my entire team [of 30 people] just applied to SK Hynix,” Lee says, referring to a job posting the company published in July. Lee, who has worked at Samsung for three years, even applied for an entry-level position at its rival. A coworker, who has worked at Samsung for eight years, applied for the same one. They both got rejected. But they’re hopeful that they’ll get a callback for a posting seeking a more experienced engineer. All employees at Samsung and SK Hynix that MIT Technology Review spoke with asked to be identified by just their last name or a pseudonym because they feared retaliation from their employer. Samsung declined to comment, and SK Hynix did not respond to requests for comment. After prolonged negotiations with its labor union, Samsung struck a deal in May to pay out 10.5% of the semiconductor division’s operating profits to employees as bonuses annually for 10 years, mostly in company stock that vests over three years. The move came after SK Hynix agreed last year to pay out 10% of operating profits to employees, which translates to $476,000 per employee this year—mostly in cash.   But at Samsung, each division’s bonus is tied to its own bottom line. Chip workers in its memory division, which is also reaping a windfall from making HBM chips, are getting paid a bonus of roughly $400,000 per employee this year. But those who, like Lee, work in Samsung’s foundry division, which manufactures logic chips that companies like Tesla and Google design and has been operating at a loss, are getting a bonus of roughly $135,000.  Employees told MIT Technology Review that Samsung said it can’t give as many bonuses to divisions that aren’t performing well. Lee, after watching the labor union wrestle with the company for months, says he has felt disappointed by what he ended up with: “Even if Samsung does well in the future, I don’t think any of it will trickle down to me.”  The workers’ lagging bonuses are making SK Hynix suddenly look appealing. According to a survey by the Samsung labor union in June, 81.5% of employees in the company’s foundry division, and nearly half of employees in the semiconductor division as a whole, said they wanted to go to another company in the next two years. In April, Samsung labor union chief Choi Seung-ho said more than 200 members of the union had left for SK Hynix over the past four months. On Blind, an anonymous workplace forum, a chorus of disgruntled engineers at Samsung confess that they want to defect to SK Hynix for the bigger bonuses.  For decades, SK Hynix lived in Samsung’s shadow. It was the smaller, scrappier memory maker that elite engineering students at universities looked past when applying for jobs. But in 2019, Samsung downsized its HBM team, betting the market would stay niche, while SK Hynix doubled down on the technology. Then the AI boom supercharged the demand for HBMs, which feed AI chips the enormous amounts of data they need at ultra-high speed, driving prices to unprecedented levels. SK Hynix now leads the global market for HBMs, while Samsung is playing catch-up. Both companies topped $1 trillion in market value in May, and SK Hynix briefly dethroned Samsung as South Korea’s most valuable company in June. Predicting that demand for memory chips will continue to surge, the semiconductor titans are making aggressive investments to expand their business. Last month, the companies unveiled plans to invest more than $2 trillion by 2040, including a semiconductor “mega-cluster” in Yongin, a city south of Seoul. To staff the expansion, SK Hynix added 2,152 employees in the first half of 2026 alone and aims to double its manufacturing capacity in five years. Samsung plans to hire 60,000 employees over the next five years, especially for its semiconductor division. Even so, the pipeline will fall short: South Korea’s semiconductor industry will need about 304,000 workers by 2031 and faces a shortage of roughly 54,000, according to the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association. Now the longtime rivals are showering workers with big bonuses to keep—and poach—talent. “[SK Hynix] seems to target Samsung engineers when hiring because it’s a rival,” says Baek, a manager at SK Hynix. “From what I heard internally, the big performance bonuses we got were aimed at luring away talent from our competitor.” Courts are starting to weigh in. In July, Samsung won an injunction barring two former chip workers from working at SK Hynix for 18 months, on the grounds that chips are a national core technology deserving protection. “With competition in the semiconductor industry fierce, it’s necessary to establish a fair market order,” the court ruled. The talent exodus threatens a crucial advantage that Samsung still holds in the HBM race. “Samsung is the only memory maker in the world that owns a foundry business,”

Microsoft AI has released MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, its first model built specifically for cyber defense. The model does not ship as a standalone endpoint. It runs inside MDASH, Microsoft’s multi-model agentic scanning harness. MAI-Cyber-1-Flash MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is a transformer with self-attention and sparse Mixture-of-Experts layers. It carries 137B total parameters with 5B active, and a 256k context length. Inputs and outputs are text only. It is a cybersecurity-specialized fine-tune of MAI-Code-1-Flash, the lightweight agentic coding model already embedded in GitHub Copilot and VS Code. The release describes it as derived from the MAI-Thinking-1 lineage. Benchmarks CyberGym is a public suite of 1,507 real-world vulnerability reproduction tasks drawn from 188 OSS-Fuzz projects. Microsoft evaluated at CyberGym’s default level 1 configuration, which supplies vulnerable source and a high-level description. MDASH running MAI-Cyber-1-Flash alongside GPT-5.4 scores 95.95%. Microsoft frames this as roughly 12 points above Anthropic’s Mythos, and the launch chart places the four competing systems between 83.2% and 85.6%. When Microsoft first detailed MDASH in May 2026, the harness scored 88.45% on CyberGym using only generally available models. That was already the top public leaderboard score, about five points ahead of the next entry at 83.1%. The research team states the improvement plainly: replacing 80% of the existing models in MDASH moved the harness from 88.4% to 95.95%. Why the routing is the real product MDASH manages over 100 specialized agents through five stages: Prepare, Scan, Validate, Dedupe, and Prove. Auditor agents flag findings, debater agents argue exploitability (using disagreement as signal), and the Prove stage executes triggering inputs with ASan for C/C++ targets. To control frontier model costs at scale, MAI-Cyber-1-Flash handles up to 90% of MDASH tasks, escalating the hardest 10% to GPT-5.4. This routing yields a 50% cost saving over the previous configuration of GPT-5.4, 5.4 mini, and 5.3 codex. MDASH was developed by Microsoft’s Autonomous Code Security (ACS) team, featuring members from the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge-winning Team Atlanta. In May, MDASH-assisted work generated 16 CVEs (including four Critical remote code execution flaws) in the Windows networking and authentication stack. Retrospectively, it recovered 96% of 28 MSRC cases in clfs.sys and 100% of 7 cases in tcpip.sys over a five-year window. Performance The research team present standalone results from a lightweight terminal harness: Benchmark MAI-Cyber-1-Flash CVEBench 0.314 CyberSecEval4 — Threat Intel 0.553 CyberSecEval4 — Malware Analysis 0.33 CRSBench 0.651 (POV=1200) ExploitGym — Kernel / Userspace / Browser 0 / 0 / 0 The straight zeros on ExploitGym are deliberate, not a defect. Microsoft team states the model was trained to perform defensive tasks such as patching bugs, and not offensive tasks such as deploying malware. A 5B-active model that cannot generate exploits but can drive a 95.95% discovery pipeline is exactly the artifact a defender-only product needs. How to use it Key Takeaways MAI-Cyber-1-Flash is 137B total / 5B active, a sparse MoE fine-tune of MAI-Code-1-Flash with 256k context. 95.95% on CyberGym is a system score — MDASH plus the new model plus GPT-5.4, up from 88.45% in May 2026. It handles up to 90% of MDASH tasks, escalating the hard 10% to GPT-5.4 for a claimed 50% cost cut. ExploitGym scores are 0/0/0 by design — the model patches bugs, it does not write exploits. Access is gated The post Microsoft AI Releases MAI-Cyber-1-Flash: A 5B-Active-Parameter Cyber Model That Pushes MDASH to 95.95% on CyberGym appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Perplexity has released pplx, an official command line client for its Search API. The tool returns grounded search results and extracted page text, all as JSON. According to its docs, it targets humans and coding agents equally. It is not a chat client. There is no conversational mode, no model selection and no synthesized answer. Two surfaces, one output contract The tool exposes exactly two working surfaces. pplx search web runs a live web search. pplx content fetch pulls a URL and returns cleaned page text. The contract around them is the interesting part. Per the official pplx-cli Agent Skill, success means exit code 0 and exactly one JSON object on stdout. Search returns {hits: [{url, title, domain, snippet, …}], total, saved_to?}. Every failure exits 1 with an empty stdout. One JSON error object goes to stderr, shaped {“error”:{“code”,”message”,”command”,”hint”?}}. Documented codes include AUTHENTICATION, UNKNOWN_ARGUMENT, ARGUMENT_ERROR and BAD_REQUEST. The skill notes that list is not exhaustive, so callers should branch on error.code. Install path and platform support Installation is a single shell command that pipes a script into sh: Copy CodeCopiedUse a different Browser curl -fsSL https://github.com/perplexityai/perplexity-cli/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh Reading install.sh shows what it actually does. It downloads manifest.json from the latest release and extracts the tag and version. It then pins every remaining download to that tag, explicitly to avoid racing a concurrent publish. It fetches SHA256SUMS and the platform binary, verifies the checksum, and installs to ~/.local/bin/pplx. No sudo is required. A receipt is written to ~/.config/pplx/pplx-receipt.json, but only after the installed binary runs successfully. Platform coverage is limited to three targets: macOS on Apple Silicon, Linux x86_64 and Linux arm64. Anything else exits with an error. There is no Windows build and no Intel macOS build. Context-window economics are a first-class design concern The most agent-specific feature is token budgeting. –output-dir writes the full result set to a JSON file. –stdout-preview[=<CHARS>] truncates long string fields in stdout, adding …<truncated> markers. The skill is blunt about the trap: –stdout-preview is a no-op without a save directory. It truncates only when the result is also saved via –output-dir or $PPLX_OUTPUT_DIR. Used alone it returns full-size output, and hits can be multiple KB each. Saved search results land at {dir}/web/{rand}.json and fetches at {dir}/fetch/{rand}.json. Files are written only after a successful request. PPLX_OUTPUT_DIR sets a workspace default so the flag need not be repeated. For content fetch, the skill adds a correctness check rather than a cost one. Verify error and is_paywall in the output before trusting content. –html adds a raw_html field fetched live via crawler, and –no-cache forces a live fetch. Key Takeaways pplx is a single verified binary exposing two commands: pplx search web and pplx content fetch. Success is exit 0 plus one JSON object on stdout; failures put one JSON error object on stderr. pplx auth login is TTY-only, so agents and CI must export PERPLEXITY_API_KEY. –stdout-preview only truncates when paired with –output-dir or $PPLX_OUTPUT_DIR. Search API billing is $5.00 per 1,000 requests, capped at 50 QPS on every usage tier. Sources: perplexityai/perplexity-cli, pplx-cli SKILL.md, api-platform-developers, Perplexity API pricing, Rate limits and usage tiers, and Search API quickstart The post Perplexity Releases pplx, a Single-Binary CLI That Puts Its Search API in the Terminal for Coding Agents appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Outside the small town of Paducah, Kentucky, a wealth of uranium is locked away in thousands of storage cylinders filled with waste material from a now-closed nuclear enrichment facility. Lasers could help get it out. A company called Global Laser Enrichment (GLE) is looking to reprocess this old material with a new technology called laser enrichment. It could be more efficient than conventional enrichment methods, allowing the company to refresh the material and produce feedstock at the same concentration as a natural mined source. And in the future, the company claims, laser enrichment could be used to make material for nuclear fuel, including the kind used in advanced reactors. Nuclear power provides about 9% of global electricity today, and that fraction could tick up as major world powers like the US and China look to build new reactors, including some based on next-generation technology. New, cheaper methods to obtain fuel could help ensure that those nuclear projects stay on track. Naturally occurring uranium is largely made up of uranium-238 (over 99%) and uranium-235 (about 0.7%). Uranium-235 is the fissile type, meaning that, when hit with slow low-energy neutrons, it can sustain a chain reaction that generates electricity. So reactors generally use material with a higher concentration of U-235 than what’s pulled from the ground. Today’s conventional reactors usually use low-enriched uranium, typically is about 5% U-235, though some advanced reactor designs will use fuel that’s up to 20% U-235. Today, centrifuges are the dominant tech used to enrich uranium. The equipment essentially takes uranium-containing material and spins it around incredibly quickly, so the heavier material (which contains U-238) spins out to the edge, while the lighter material (which has U-235) stays closer to the center. (If you’ve ever swung a mustard bottle to get the last of it out, you’ve used the same basic idea behind a centrifuge.) Then the material that has a higher concentration of U-235 can go on to be made into nuclear fuel. Laser enrichment, on the other hand, takes advantage of the fact that all molecules vibrate and rotate at an atomic scale in ways that depend on their specific material. Even different uranium isotopes have distinct fingerprints. Lasers are so precise they can target one particular material (like molecules that contain U-235, for example). If you shine a laser at a mixture, you can selectively excite just the material you’re targeting, giving it a bit more energy. This changes the way it behaves, which can make it easier to separate out the material you want using chemical or physical methods. A wide range of separation approaches have been developed in research and industry. Some aim to electrically charge U-235 atoms, allowing them to be moved with electrostatic or magnetic fields. Others change how the material reacts chemically.  The details of GLE’s specific technology are classified, and company officials declined to share how the process works.  There’s been interest in using lasers for uranium enrichment for decades, says Charles Forsberg, a principal research scientist in nuclear science and engineering at MIT.  However, in their early days lasers tended to be high-maintenance, unstable and difficult to operate. They’ve improved dramatically, making laser enrichment a more attractive prospect than it was during the early research. Even more than technological improvements, a recent geopolitical shift could boost new enrichment technology. Russia has the largest uranium enrichment ecosystem in the world, and the country has historically dominated the market. “Nobody in the West was going to build a new enrichment plant while the Russians flooded the world with enriched uranium,” says Forsberg.  Since the start of the Ukraine war, however, countries including the US and UK have taken steps to limit or ban imports of Russian uranium. That’s opened the door for companies to set up new enrichment operations, including some that use new technologies, Forsberg says. Demand for fuel is increasing as countries look beyond Russia for uranium supply. “The gap is just becoming bigger and bigger, and this technology is right in the middle,” says Christo Liebenberg, president of LIS Technologies, one of the companies aiming to build laser enrichment capacity in the US. LIS Technologies was founded in 2023, and the company recently purchased a 200-acre site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It’s currently in the pre-application process with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its facility. The company plans to take in natural-grade uranium and make a product that’s roughly 5% U-235, though it hopes to eventually make more concentrated material that can be used as fuel for next-generation reactors. GLE is taking a different approach: Rather than using its technology to enrich freshly mined material to the 5% concentration that can be used in fuels, it’s hoping to start by rehabilitating old waste. The company has a contract with the US Department of Energy to reprocess waste material at the enrichment site in Paducah. The facility could enrich up to 200,000 metric tons of material that contains small amounts of uranium leftover from an older enrichment process. GLE is taking the material that’s at least 0.25% U-235 and enriching it to about 0.7%. That material can then be further processed and slotted into the uranium supply chain in place of freshly mined material. “It’s kind of like a large aboveground uranium mine for us,” says Nima Ashkeboussi, vice president of government relations and communications at GLE. While each one of its units is more complex and expensive than a centrifuge, far fewer are needed to do the same work. A similar centrifugation plant would have many thousands of centrifuges working together, but a full-scale plant using GLE’s laser enrichment process would have fewer than a thousand of its units, says Stephen Long, the company’s CEO. Up-front investment should be smaller, and operating costs are also expected to be lower, partly because the process uses less energy than centrifuges, Long says. GLE has a testing facility in Wilmington, North Carolina. In fall 2025, the company completed a demonstration pilot, processing several hundred kilograms of uranium.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Reading OpenAI’s account last week of how some of its models broke their containment and hacked into the computer systems of Hugging Face, another AI company, was the first time I got genuine chills about what large language models are now able to do. But this is a case of human hubris, not rogue AI. I am not an alarmist. In fact, I have been pushing back against AI scare stories for years. Even so, this incident crossed a line. I think it’s the clearest illustration yet of how the people building and testing this technology do not fully understand what they’re doing. OpenAI could—and should—have seen this coming. Here’s what happened, at least according to the two companies involved. A couple of weeks ago, OpenAI started testing the hacking abilities of some of its new models, including GPT‑5.6 Sol (released in June) and what OpenAI describes as “an even more capable pre-release model.” OpenAI pitted its models against a benchmark called ExploitGym, released in May, which challenges LLMs to find ways to exploit real-world vulnerabilities found in commonly used software. To see what they could do, the researchers removed most of their cybersecurity guardrails. Then they ran the models inside a sandbox that was cut off from the internet except for one link to a third-party piece of software that acted as a proxy to the outside world, and let them install code that they needed to beat ExploitGym. On July 9, according to reporting by Reuters, OpenAI’s models started trying to break through the proxy. They found an unknown bug in the proxy’s software and used it to access the internet. From there, they broke into Hugging Face’s computer systems on July 11, apparently looking for data sets and solutions that would help them complete their task. Hugging Face announced the hack on July 16.  OpenAI did not realize (or at least did not reveal) that its models were involved until July 21, around 10 days after they broke containment and a week after Hugging Face had shut down the attack and alerted the FBI. In a statement given to MIT Technology Review, OpenAI says: “We are conducting a thorough review along with external advisors and with oversight from our Safety and Security Committee. Once the review is complete, we will publish a technical report of our learnings for everyone.” The firm also confirmed that its researchers were properly using existing safety guidelines and procedures at the time. Wake-up call OpenAI has said the event was unprecedented—and in many ways it was. This was the first time outside of a simulation that LLMs escaped what was thought to be a secure sandbox, accessed the open internet, and attacked an unrelated organization. It’s a wake-up call that shows just how good the latest LLMs are at finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in real-world software with little or no human guidance. And yet at the same time, what OpenAI’s models did is something this technology has done for years. Give a model a goal and it will very often achieve that goal in unexpected ways, finding loopholes that look like cheats. OpenAI itself has studied this behavior. A decade ago, it shared results of an experiment in which a model was tasked with beating a video game called CoastRunners. Human players take it for granted that the way to do this is by racing a boat through a series of flags to the finish line, racking up points for each flag you hit. OpenAI’s model figured out that you could get a high score by spinning in a circle and hitting the same three flags over and over again. There have been dozens of similar examples from researchers since. AI will always find a way. “Despite repeatedly catching on fire, crashing into other boats, and going the wrong way on the track, our agent manages to achieve a higher score using this strategy than is possible by completing the course in the normal way,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post about the CoastRunners experiment in 2016. “While harmless and amusing in the context of a video game, this kind of behavior points to a more general issue … it is often difficult or infeasible to capture exactly what we want an agent to do.” I couldn’t help thinking about CoastRunners when I read OpenAI’s blog post about the Hugging Face attack: “All evidence suggests that the models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal … After gaining internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym. Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation.” Last week’s news was not about rogue AI, despite the headlines. It was about models achieving the goal they had been given: Find ways to exploit vulnerabilities in software. The fact that those models then behaved in a way OpenAI had not anticipated isn’t surprising. But it is worrying. Back in 2016, OpenAI had this to say about its CoastRunners bot: “More broadly it contravenes the basic engineering principle that systems should be reliable and predictable.” A decade on, those basic engineering principles are still AWOL.