Tech TipsPromptfoo is an open-source CLI (24.1k GitHub stars) that treats LLM prompts as testable code using YAML test cases and assertions. OpenAI announced it was acquiring the company on March 9, 2026, committing to continue the open-source project. This guide covers installation (Node.js 22.22.0 or newer, Node 24 recommended), scaffolding a first eval with npx promptfoo@latest init, choosing assertion types by cost tier, guarding cost and latency, RAG and agent evals, CI gating strategy, the red teaming half of the tool, and three honest limits of eval suites.
Aug 10, 2026 · 8 min read 
ReviewsAtlaso is a cross-tool AI memory layer from Atlaso Labs that installs into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Claude Desktop, OpenCode and Antigravity via a single shell command, capturing decisions after each turn and injecting the top five relevant memories before the next one. Its published four-judge study on LongMemEval-S (n=500, shared Qwen 3.5-9B reader) shows Atlaso beating mem0 by 9.8 to 14.8 percentage points, and also documents an 11.5-point loss to mem0 on the adversarial LoCoMo subset plus a failure to reproduce mem0's headline 93.4 percent figure. The shipped product lags the research: supersede logic is not triggered automatically, injected memories are invisible from the terminal, and there is no team memory or self-hosting. Free covers one device and one tool; Pro is 10 dollars a month and Build is 25.
Aug 7, 2026 · 8 min read 
AI NewsMeta Superintelligence Labs released Muse Code, a beta terminal coding agent for macOS and Linux powered by the new Muse Spark 1.2 model, on August 5, 2026. Meta reported 82.9% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 but placed behind Claude Opus 5 on all three coding charts it published, and both figures come from Meta's own harness with no verified leaderboard entry. Meta's previous model published 80.0 and verified at 76.2% when the Terminal-Bench team ran it. The genuinely notable engineering is an append-only event log that makes runs replay-exact and restart-safe, plus persistent async background agents. The most consequential detail is pricing: a contributor tier at $0.10 per million input and $0.20 per million output tokens, 12.5x and 21x cheaper than standard, in exchange for Meta training on your prompts.
Aug 6, 2026 · 8 min read 
AI NewsDeepSeek upgraded its deepseek-v4-flash API to the 0731 public beta on July 31, 2026 — an API-only post-training update that leaves the 284B/13B MoE architecture, 1M context window and $0.14/$0.28 pricing untouched. Artificial Analysis measures a 10-point Intelligence Index jump to 50 and a GDPval-AA v2 rise from 1189 to 1559 Elo, with Cost per Task roughly 60% below GPT-5.6 Luna. Accuracy on AA-Omniscience is unchanged at 37%, and the 0731 weights are not open — only the April 24 checkpoint is on Hugging Face under MIT.
Aug 5, 2026 · 6 min read 
Deep DivesSpeculative decoding accelerates LLM inference by having a cheap drafter propose several tokens that the target model verifies in one parallel forward pass, with a rejection-sampling step that makes the output distribution provably identical to the target model's. The landscape runs from separate draft models through Medusa (2.2-3.6x) and EAGLE-3 (up to 6.5x) to DeepSeek's co-trained MTP heads (85-90% second-token acceptance) and model-free n-gram lookup. The catch: speculation spends surplus compute to save memory bandwidth, so gains shrink as batch size rises and can go negative once the GPU becomes compute-bound.
Aug 5, 2026 · 10 min read 
AI NewsAlibaba released Qwen3.8-Max on August 3, 2026, a 2.4-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a 1M-token context window, multimodal (text/image/video) input, and $2/$6 per-million-token pricing. Benchmarks are self-reported and lead on multimodal and agentic tasks while trailing the frontier on pure software engineering. Open weights for the flagship and a deployable 27B checkpoint are promised the following week.
Aug 4, 2026 · 4 min read 
AI NewsDeepSeek released V4 as two open-weight mixture-of-experts models: V4-Pro (1.6T total / 49B active) and V4-Flash (284B / 13B active), both with a 1M-token default context and 384K max output. A novel token-wise compression plus DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) makes the long window affordable. API pricing is aggressive (V4-Flash $0.14/M input, $0.28/M output; V4-Pro $0.435/$0.87), and the old deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner endpoints were retired after July 24, 2026. Reported ~80.6% on SWE-bench Verified.
Aug 1, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsPoolside released Laguna S 2.1 on July 21, 2026, a 118B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts coding model activating ~8B params per token, with a 1M-token context and a permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license. First-party benchmarks show 78.5% on SWE-Bench Multilingual, but independent verification is still pending. Day-one FP8/NVFP4/INT4 and GGUF builds make it genuinely self-hostable.
Jul 31, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsClaude Opus 5, released July 24, 2026, is Anthropic's new default model: near-Fable 5 capability at $5/$25 per million tokens (half Fable 5's price, flat vs Opus 4.8). It leads on Anthropic's own runs of Frontier-Bench, OSWorld 2.0, AutomationBench, ARC-AGI-3 and GDPval, but loses on DeepSWE, HLE, a legal benchmark and HealthBench. It posts Anthropic's lowest misalignment score (2.30), ships with no default data retention, and adds beta tool-swapping and safety-filter model routing.
Jul 26, 2026 · 7 min read 
AI NewsEtched, a startup building the transformer-only Sohu inference ASIC, has booked over $1 billion in contracts and reached a $5 billion valuation, with reports of new rounds valuing it up to $20 billion. Sohu hard-wires the transformer graph into silicon on TSMC N4P with 144GB HBM3E, and Etched claims an 8-chip server exceeds 500,000 Llama 70B tokens/sec. No independent benchmarks exist yet.
Jul 25, 2026 · 5 min read 
Deep DivesGRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) is a critic-free reinforcement learning algorithm introduced in the DeepSeekMath paper (arXiv 2402.03300). Instead of training a separate value model like PPO, it samples a group of responses per prompt and computes each response's advantage relative to the group's mean and standard deviation. It powered DeepSeek-R1's emergent reasoning and is the central baseline for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards in 2026, spawning variants like Dr. GRPO, DAPO, and GSPO.
Jul 22, 2026 · 6 min read 
AI NewsMoonshot AI released Kimi K3 on July 16, 2026, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open Mixture-of-Experts model that activates 16 of 896 experts, ships native vision and a 1M-token context, and leads benchmarks like SWE Marathon, BrowseComp, and OmniDocBench while trailing Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol overall. Weights release July 27 under a Modified MIT license.
Jul 17, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsCognition released SWE-1.7 on July 8, 2026, a software-engineering model built by reinforcement-learning on top of Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.7 base and served through Cerebras at ~1,000 tokens/second inside the Devin agent. It scores 42.3% on FrontierCode 1.1 and 81.5% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, trailing Opus 4.8 by a few points at roughly $1.97 per task, positioning it as a near-frontier option at a fraction of frontier cost.
Jul 14, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsMeta released Muse Spark 1.1 on July 9, 2026, opening its reasoning model to developers via a paid API priced at $1.25/M input and $4.25/M output tokens, undercutting Grok 4.5 and Anthropic's Opus. Meta claims wins over older rival models and Google's latest Gemini, but did not compare against the newest flagships, and a bigger model code-named Watermelon is still in training.
Jul 13, 2026 · 6 min read 
AI NewsGrok 4.5, released July 8, 2026, is xAI's coding-focused model. It ranks 4th on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (score 54), wins SWE Marathon (29%), and prices at $2/$6 per million tokens with 4.2x better token efficiency than Opus 4.8. Not yet available in the EU.
Jul 12, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsOpenAI made its three-tier GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, Luna) generally available on July 9, 2026 after government safety review. Pricing runs from Luna at $1/$6 to Sol at $5/$30 per 1M tokens, with a Sol Fast option at $12.50/$75 on Cerebras. The release adds Programmatic Tool Calling in the Responses API (63.5% fewer tokens, 50.1% fewer turns) and longer prompt caching, but Sol's 64.6% on SWE-Bench Pro still trails Claude Mythos 5 (80.3%).
Jul 11, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsGoogle released Gemini 3.5 Flash on May 19, 2026, at Google I/O. The Flash-tier model beats Gemini 3.1 Pro on coding and agentic benchmarks (76.2% Terminal-Bench 2.1, 83.6% MCP Atlas, 1656 GDPval-AA Elo) while running 4x faster and costing $1.50/$9 per 1M tokens, 40% below 3.1 Pro. It trails Pro on academic reasoning (Humanity's Last Exam, ARC-AGI-2) and dense long-context recall. It powers Gemini Spark, Antigravity 2.0, and is now the default model for the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search.
Jul 7, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsClaude Fable 5, Anthropic's Mythos-class model, was suspended June 12, 2026 under a U.S. export-control directive and restored July 1 after Anthropic made security commitments. It leads coding benchmarks at 80.3% SWE-Bench Pro (vs 69.2% for Opus 4.8) and 29.3% FrontierCode. A grace window counts it toward 50% of weekly usage through July 7; credits billing follows.
Jul 3, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsClaude Sonnet 5, released June 30, 2026, is Anthropic's most agentic mid-tier model. It beats Sonnet 4.6 on every published benchmark (63.2% SWE-bench Pro, 80.4% Terminal-Bench 2.1, 81.2% OSWorld) and edges Opus 4.8 on GDPval-AA v2 knowledge work. Intro pricing is /0 per million tokens through Aug 31, 2026, then /5. A new tokenizer can raise token counts up to 1.35x, and xhigh effort can cost more than Opus 4.8.
Jul 1, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsGrok 4.3 is generally available on Amazon Bedrock with a 1M-token context window, $1.25/$2.50 pricing, and a top hallucination-rate score.
Jun 29, 2026 · 4 min read 
AI NewsZ.AI released GLM-5.2 on June 16, 2026: a 753B-parameter MoE model under an MIT license with a 1M-token context. It tops open-weight coding benchmarks, beating GPT-5.5 on SWE-bench Pro, FrontierSWE and PostTrainBench at roughly one-sixth the cost.
Jun 26, 2026 · 5 min read 
Deep DivesTest-time compute spends extra computation during inference, not training, to improve answers. It powers reasoning models like OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Two strategies exist: sequential scaling (longer chains of thought, e.g. the s1 paper's budget forcing) and parallel scaling (Best-of-N, majority voting). More thinking is not always better, overthinking degrades accuracy, and hidden reasoning tokens are billable. Match compute to task difficulty.
Jun 17, 2026 · 8 min read 
AI NewsMiniMax M3 is an open-weight model pairing a 1M-token context and revived sparse attention with frontier coding benchmarks at 15x lower cost than Claude Opus 4.7.
Jun 16, 2026 · 6 min read 
Deep DivesSpeculative decoding speeds up LLM inference 2-6x by having a small draft model propose tokens that the target model verifies in parallel via rejection sampling, guaranteeing lossless output. EAGLE-3 and Medusa reduce or remove the separate draft model. Gains are largest at low batch sizes.
Jun 15, 2026 · 7 min read 
AI NewsMoonshot AI's Kimi K2.7-Code is an open-weights, OpenAI-compatible coding model (1T-param MoE, 32B active, 256K context) claiming a 30% cut in reasoning tokens and a narrow win over Claude Opus 4.8. But all published benchmarks are Moonshot's own proprietary suites, with no independent results yet, so the efficiency claims remain unverified.
Jun 14, 2026 · 5 min read 
Deep DivesDiffusion language models (dLLMs) abandon left-to-right autoregressive generation, instead refining masked noise into text over a few parallel denoising steps. Inception Labs' Mercury Coder runs at 1,100+ tokens per second on H100s versus 50-200 for autoregressive models, and LLaDA 8B's bidirectional design breaks the reversal curse. They still trail the best models on hard reasoning benchmarks, but the one-token-at-a-time assumption is no longer a law of nature.
Jun 12, 2026 · 8 min read 
AI NewsMicrosoft launched MAI-Code-1-Flash on June 2, 2026, a lightweight, agentic coding model built end-to-end in-house and rolling out to GitHub Copilot users in VS Code. It outperforms Claude Haiku 4.5 across four coding benchmarks (including 51.2% vs 35.2% on SWE-Bench Pro) while using up to 60% fewer tokens, signaling Microsoft's push for AI independence from OpenAI.
Jun 6, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsOn May 22, 2026, DeepSeek made its 75% promotional discount on V4-Pro permanent rather than letting it expire May 31. New permanent rates: $0.435/M input, $0.87/M output, $0.003625/M cache hit. That puts V4-Pro output roughly 34x cheaper than GPT-5.5 and 17x cheaper than Claude Opus 4.7, while landing within 3-7 points on coding and reasoning benchmarks. The underrated detail is the cache-hit price, which can cut input cost ~88% for agents with stable prefixes. Teams should re-run their build math and route the easy majority of traffic to V4-Pro.
Jun 1, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsAnthropic released Claude Opus 4.8 on May 28, 2026, 41 days after Opus 4.7. It scores 69.2% on SWE-Bench Pro, emphasizes calibrated honesty and longer autonomy, adds Dynamic Workflows for hundreds of parallel subagents, runs fast mode ~2.5x quicker, and holds pricing flat from 4.7.
May 30, 2026 · 4 min read 
AI NewsGemini 3.5 Flash outperforms the Pro tier on agent benchmarks with superior speed and efficiency.
May 28, 2026 · 5 min read 
AI NewsMeta Muse Spark, from Superintelligence Labs, marks a strategic AI reset with top benchmarks and medical reasoning.
Apr 9, 2026 · 5 min read 