This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more about AI's impact on the web, follow Emma Roth. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The…
Nvidia's new data engine Flora labels one hour of robot video for 72 cents instead of $88 with GPT-6 Astra, while scoring slightly higher on quality. The open system, built on three fine-tuned Qwen3.5 models, catches errors in robot action…
A new benchmark by P-Zero Research measures how well AI models design and evaluate experiments on their own. The results are improving so fast that Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark now thinks self-improving AI could arrive by 2027. The arti…
Anthropic says companies should evaluate whether they can consolidate sub-agents into a single agent that loads context on demand. In one architecture comparison, the single-agent setup ran about twice as fast. Anthropic has published a mi…
In Foreign Affairs, historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cast the US and China as AI empires and every other country as a dependency. The race won't be decided by breakthroughs but by who c…
OpenAI is poaching Anthropic's customers with steep discounts. Companies like Rippling, Replit, and DataCamp say they've cut AI costs by up to 90 percent after switching. Anthropic's growth has slowed, but OpenAI is trading its own margins…
Smartphone agents don't get better by processing more data. They improve by training on as many different apps as possible. The researchers behind OpenMobile-2 built an open training environment with more than 110 applications, including 3…