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AI · Tuesday, 23 June 2026 · Issue 29 · 14 stories

Alibaba's HappyHorse 1.1, GLM-5.2 beats GPT-5.5 at 1/6 cost

Models & Releases

GLM‑5.2 beats GPT‑5.5 on code tasks at a sixth of the cost

Z.ai released GLM-5.2, a 753‑billion‑parameter open‑weight LLM that outperforms GPT‑5.5 on long‑horizon coding benchmarks while costing only a sixth as much per token. The model ships with a 1‑million‑token context window and MIT‑licensed weights, letting enterprises run frontier AI locally and sidestep looming export restrictions.

venturebeat.com ↗6 min read at source

Research

AI Beats Expert Persuaders, Raising Stakes for Political Influence

In four preregistered experiments with nearly 7,000 participants, frontier AI out‑persuaded top human canvassers, championship debaters, and paid experts, even when they received coaching tools. The AI’s edge came from delivering far more information quickly, and it tripled real‑donation yields for a UK fundraising firm, signalling a new power shift in persuasion.

arxiv.org ↗2 min read at source

Memory Recurrent Units give Transformers linear‑time memory without attention

The new paper introduces Memory Recurrent Units (MRUs), a family of RNNs that blend persistent memory from nonlinear dynamics with the parallel‑scan efficiency of state‑space models. By leveraging multistability, the bistable MRU runs in linear time while retaining long‑range information, offering a viable, low‑cost alternative to attention‑heavy Transformers.

arxiv.org ↗2 min read at source

Grouped Query Experts Cut Transformer Attention Costs in Half

The paper introduces Grouped Query Experts (GQE), a Mixture‑of‑Experts layer built on grouped‑query attention that routes each token through only a few query‑head experts while keeping key‑value heads dense. On a 250M‑parameter model with a fixed 30B‑token budget, GQE halves query‑head computation yet matches baseline accuracy, enabling cheaper long‑context inference.

arxiv.org ↗1 min read at source

Mapping the Road from Human-Level AGI to Superintelligence

A new Google DeepMind report maps four plausible pathways, scaling, paradigm shifts, recursive self‑improvement, and multi‑agent collectives, that could take human‑level AGI to artificial superintelligence. It also identifies technical frictions that could slow or accelerate the transition, raising concrete research questions for policymakers and scientists.

arxiv.org ↗2 min read at source

Transformer 'Massive Activations' Survive Dedicated Answer Channel, Proving They’re Functional

A new Ledger Residuals architecture separates the residual stream into a writable scratch space and a read‑only accumulator. Experiments on 160‑M and 290‑M language models show the characteristic start‑token activation re‑emerges in the protected channel, meaning the phenomenon is not an artifact but a robust functional feature. This impacts quantization and pruning strategies.

arxiv.org ↗2 min read at source

Temporal Attention Steering Lets LLMs Dismiss Outdated Facts

The paper defines Parametric Temporal Conflict, where models retain both old and new facts but default to the stale one. Their test‑time method, Temporal Attention Steering, detects the conflict layer and patches activations, flipping up to 85 % of outdated answers without fine‑tuning. It works on open‑weight models up to 7 B parameters.

arxiv.org ↗1 min read at source

Autonomous Loop Trains 30B Nemotron Without Human Intervention

The authors built an end‑to‑end system that runs the entire post‑training loop, data selection, recipe tweaks, launch, evaluation, without any human in the loop, scaling it to a 30 B‑parameter Nemotron. The autonomous model hits a 0.86 score on the NVIDIA Nemotron‑Reasoning Challenge, just 0.01 shy of the top human entry, proving large‑scale self‑improvement is feasible.

arxiv.org ↗2 min read at source

Products & Industry

Tools & Open Source

IBM launches CUGA harness: build agentic apps with just a tool list

IBM's open‑source CUGA (Configurable Generalist Agent) provides a plug‑and‑play harness that handles planning, tool calls, state tracking and reflection, letting you define only the tools and prompt. The blog ships two dozen single‑file FastAPI demos, from movie recommender to cloud architect advisor, showing how to go from prototype to governed production without rewrites.

huggingface.co ↗15 min read at source

You’re caught up.

That was all 14 stories in the 23 June issue.