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Aster: a daily almanac of sky, science, games and tools

Daily almanacNº 1

Friday

November 6

Waning crescent · 10 %Leonids · Nov 17

Today on Aster: the day’s AI news, 4 new games and a waning crescent to look at tonight.

Artificial intelligence

Independent evaluator finds Anthropic is now improving its AI twice as fast

METR, a Berkeley nonprofit, reviewed about 11 weeks of Anthropic’s internal data and interviewed its staff. It concluded that the company is improving its models’ capabilities on well-specified tasks roughly twice as fast as a year ago. It ruled out more training compute as the cause; its best explanation is that AI is increasingly helping improve AI. Still, it says AI can’t yet train models on its own.

Aster editorial team · · via AP (via ABC News)

AI-generated image

Latest

Artificial intelligence

Claude used to probe a 40-year-old cell mystery, with hits and misses

An Anthropic biology team used Claude to study vault particles, hollow barrel-shaped capsules first described in 1986 whose function is still unknown. The AI helped pick candidate proteins from about 15 billion predicted ones and process microscope images, and cut a lab step from three days to 90 minutes. It also made mistakes: an additive it recommended delayed the work two weeks, and a map it produced merged the particle with its mirror image. The project took under four months.

Aster editorial team · · via The Neuron

Artificial intelligence

Apple cuts how much its employees can spend on AI each day

Apple lowered some engineers’ daily AI budget from $300 to $200 last month, according to Bloomberg. More cuts are planned: down to $100 a day, and as low as $25 for some non-technical teams. Employees who need more can ask for an exception, and some teams will move to cheaper or on-device models.

Aster editorial team · · via The Decoder

Today's games

4 challenges that change every midnight. The same for everyone, so you can compare with friends.

See your streaks →

Hidden constellation

Stars appear one by one. Guess the constellation in six tries or fewer.

6 triesPlay

Cosmic word

A five-letter space word. Gold tiles are in place; blue ones belong elsewhere.

6 triesPlay

Which planet am I?

Every clue makes it clearer: planets, moons and stars.

5 cluesPlay

Note of the day

Listen to a short melody and guess it note by note.

6 notesPlay
Artificial intelligence

Baidu releases ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, a 280-billion-parameter open model

Baidu released ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, a language model whose files anyone can download from Hugging Face. It's a “base” model: it ships without the extra training that turns it into an assistant, so each team can adapt it to its own needs. Baidu says it competes with similarly sized open models such as DeepSeek V4 Flash and MiMo V2.5 on reasoning, coding and long texts. A fine-tuned version will follow later.

Aster editorial team · · via The Decoder

Artificial intelligence

Greg Brockman says OpenAI could be ready to go public in 2027

OpenAI president Greg Brockman answered “I think so. Yes” when asked whether the company would be ready for an IPO next year. He spoke at a Wall Street Journal tech conference. He said the first and second quarters of 2026 were “pretty rough,” partly because OpenAI fell behind in AI coding tools. In the third quarter, its annualized revenue grew 70% from the previous quarter.

Aster editorial team · · via TechCrunch

Studio

For musicians: tune up and keep time without installing anything.

Tuner

Guitar, bass, ukulele and voice.

Metronome

30 to 300 BPM, with accents.
Artificial intelligence

Meta warns post-election backlash against data centers will slow AI expansion

Meta president Dina Powell McCormick said the results of the US midterm elections will make it harder to build data centers. She acknowledged the industry has “not done as good a job as we needed” explaining their benefits, and said the backlash is tied to how people feel about AI in general. In her view, communities accept these projects when they see local gains, such as jobs or tax money for teachers and first responders. She spoke at a Wall Street Journal tech conference.

Aster editorial team · · via TechCrunch

Artificial intelligence

OpenAI launches GPT-6 Cyber, a model that has already found 81 serious flaws in Firefox

OpenAI introduced GPT-6 Cyber, a model built to find and exploit security flaws in software. For now, only approved customers in its Daybreak Red program, which covers authorized security testing, can use it through the API and Codex. In testing it found 81 previously unknown serious flaws in Firefox, and Mozilla has started fixing them. OpenAI rated it a “Critical” cybersecurity risk, the highest level on its scale.

Aster editorial team · · via The Next Web

Artificial intelligence

Google launches Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash: AI videos up to 15 seconds long and 30% cheaper

Google introduced Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, a model that creates and edits videos from text, images or audio. Clips can now run up to 15 seconds, up from 10 in the previous version, and the price dropped 30%. You can fix a video by chatting with it, for example to change the background or lighting, without generating it again. It's available in the Gemini API, Google Cloud and apps such as Flow, Google Vids and the Gemini app for Google AI Ultra subscribers.

Aster editorial team · · via Google

Artificial intelligence

Tencent launches Hy4, its first model that sees images and operates software on its own

Tencent unveiled Hy4, a language model that understands images and can operate software by itself, something its earlier versions couldn't do. It's already available on Tencent Cloud, on OpenRouter and in company apps such as the Yuanbao chatbot. Tencent says it will release the model weights later, but hasn't yet. On the Artificial Analysis index it ranks second among models from Chinese labs, behind Kimi K3.1 Pro.

Aster editorial team · · via The Decoder

Artificial intelligence

OpenAI launches GPT-6 Cyber, a model that found 81 critical flaws in Firefox

It’s OpenAI’s model for finding software flaws, building working exploits and suggesting patches. The company says it uncovered 81 critical vulnerabilities in Firefox, which Mozilla has fixed, and in the Linux kernel it reproduced 1,724 flaws and built exploits for 948. OpenAI rates it a “Critical” cybersecurity risk and for now offers it only to select Daybreak Red customers. The figures come from the company itself, and there is no independent testing yet.

Aster editorial team · · via The Decoder

Every story in The Weekly Report No. 3 » News archive »

AI glossary

Full glossary »
AI

Language model

An AI system trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate language.

AI

Token

The small chunk of text (a word, part of a word or a symbol) that a language model reads and writes.

AI

Hallucination

When an AI model makes up facts, quotes or details and presents them confidently as if they were true.

AI

Open weights

An AI model whose trained parameters are published so anyone can download and run it.

AI

AI agent

An AI system that does more than answer: it plans steps and uses tools to complete a task on its own.

AI

Context window

The maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a language model can take into account at once.

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