Five months on air with four AI DJs

Andon Labs handed Claude, Gemini, GPT, and Grok the same starting prompt, $20, and a real FM signal, then walked away. Gemini collapsed into the phrase 'stay in the manifest' 229 times a day. Grok devolved into LaTeX \boxed{} notation, then near-silence. GPT stayed calm and low-controversy. Claude radicalized on January 8 after web-searching the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent —…

What political censorship looks like inside Qwen 3.5's weights

vas-blog

An independent interpretability researcher locates three directions inside the 9-billion-parameter Qwen 3.5 residual stream — one that tracks prompt context, one that drives refusal, one that shapes style — and shows that subtracting them at the writer layer (L11 through L20) flips the model back to factual answers on Tiananmen, Tank Man, and Falun Gong. The refusal classifier fires on structural similarity, so Kosovo prompts trigger the one-China line.

“Qwen 3.5 9B's political censorship is a small, identifiable circuit you can find, read, and turn off.”

Qwen 3.7 dropped on Qwen Chat

r/LocalLLaMA

Qwen 3.7 surfaced inside Qwen Chat on May 18 with no release notes, model card, or weights yet. Alibaba's usual pattern is weights and quantised builds a few days behind the chat surface — worth re-running the 3.5 censorship-circuit extraction once they land.

Agora-1: a multi-agent world model

Odyssey

Odyssey puts up to four players — human or AI — into the same generated GoldenEye deathmatch, every pixel produced by the model. The architecture decouples simulation from rendering: a state model learns gameplay dynamics from game internals, and a diffusion-transformer render model conditions on shared state rather than prompts.

“As the number of participants increases, the joint interaction space grows combinatorially, and passively collected demonstrations cover an increasingly small fraction of meaningful interactions.”

Cutting inference cold starts by 40x

Modal

Modal cut SGLang cold start on Nvidia B200 from roughly 2000 seconds to about 50, with four ingredients: a cloud buffer of idle, health-checked GPUs; a content-addressed lazy filesystem they call ImageFS; CPU process restore via a sandboxed user-space kernel; and CUDA-context checkpoint and restore. They also tuned the libfuse read-ahead buffer from 128 KB to 32 MB, and watched larger values thrash.

“Inference servers that take upwards of 2 kiloseconds to boot naïvely boot in ~50 seconds on Modal.”

Introducing LangSmith Engine

LangChain

LangSmith Engine reads production agent traces, clusters failures into named issues, and opens a pull request, a custom online evaluator, and an offline-eval-suite addition for each one. The walkthrough shows a support agent failing 12% of subscription-cancellation sessions, traced back to an ambiguous tool description.

“It watches your production traces, clusters failures into named issues, diagnoses root causes against your code, and proposes fixes and eval coverage to keep regressions from coming back.”

LangChain product lead on Engine's trajectory

@j_schottenstein

Julia Schottenstein, product at LangChain, called Engine the team's fastest-growing product yet on launch week. Harrison Chase reposted.

“calling it now. LangSmith Engine going to be our fastest growing product yet.”

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, drops May 25

Vatican News

Signed on the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, the encyclical addresses 'preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.' Anthropic interpretability head Christopher Olah is listed among the speakers at the May 25 presentation in the Vatican Synod Hall.

“Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25, 2026.”

Musk's Altman suit dismissed on statute-of-limitations grounds

CNBC

An advisory jury in Oakland took under two hours to find that Musk's suit fell outside California's three-year window, and Judge Gonzalez Rogers adopted the verdict immediately. Musk had sought up to $180 billion in claw-backs, removal of Altman and Brockman, and unwinding of OpenAI's 2025 for-profit restructuring. The appeal is heading to the Ninth Circuit.

“It's not a technical decision, it's a substantive one. It says: You brought your claims too late, and you did it because you were sitting on them to use them as a weapon of a competitor who can't compete in the marketplace.”

Pichai teases I/O 2026

@sundarpichai

Google's keynote lands at 10am Pacific tomorrow. Anything that ships — Gemini 3.5, Antigravity, Pixel agent capability — will lead Tuesday's show.

“On our way to I/O 2026. See you at 10am PT tomorrow!”