I Used NYT Cooking’s New AI-Powered Recipe Modifier, and It’s Actually Pretty Good
The New York Times has added a beta feature to its Cooking app that helps readers swap ingredients or adjust recipes to suit their needs. It mostly hits the mark.
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Closed-Loop Agent Evaluation: Layered Measurement and Self-Calibration
arXiv:2611.07051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Once an agent is live, teams want to know whether it is doing its job, not just whether it throws errors. Yet most evaluation is one-off: a benchmark run, a look at traces, a single score. Its conclusions neither check themselves nor reach the agent. We propose closed-loop evaluation, an evaluation method for deployed agents. It models evaluation as performance estimation under biased raters and censored outcomes, and it requires every level's conclusion to trace back to atomic data and to be computed by versioned rules. The method covers four levels of analysis (span, trace, conversation and engagement), measures along a spine of Execution, Substance, Trajectory and Results, treats Conduct as a constraint throughout, and uses Provenance and Adjudication components to certify the evidence and the evaluators. Evaluator agents generated by an Agent Factory carry these components, each with a domain knowledge pack and an adapter harness. Two loops close the evaluation: an inner loop audits the evidence, rules and metrics themselves, and an outer loop uses per-component regression checks to drive agent improvement. We also give a pipeline that runs this process automatically. Using the business-analysis agent SharpInsight as a case and porting the method to public conversation data, we show how problems differ across levels and how evidence-and-rule judgment is more reliable than holistic scoring (ICC 0.86 vs. 0.81; kappa 0.81 vs. 0.63).
Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash: Fast and cost-effective with longer clips
Google DeepMind has launched Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash, introducing native 15-second video generation, improved reference adherence, stronger consistency across frames, multi-turn conversational editing, more natural speech, and cinematic camera movements. The model is now generally available via the Gemini API and Gemini for business, priced at $0.07 per second for 720p video—30% lower than its predecessor. It supports scalable workflows, including draft generation at lower resolutions, iterative edits, and upscaling to 1080p or 4K. Use cases include product explainers, social ads, virtual try-ons, and branded content, with applications across Google AI Studio, Google Cloud, Google Vids, Flow, the Gemini app, and Google Ads.
Measuring how AI agents handle everyday wet-lab science
OpenAI introduces BioBasicsBench, a 100-task benchmark measuring how well AI agents interpret raw experimental data and handle everyday wet-lab science.
ProcessPrefBench: Evaluating Cross-Task Transfer of Individual Process Preferences from Naturalistic Human-AI Interaction
arXiv:2611.06065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In natural human-AI dialogue, users' corrections, requests, and self-descriptions carry reusable signals about how they want work to be done. These signals reveal individual process preferences, user-specific standards for evidence, depth, analytical focus, procedure, and delivery. We ask whether a preference revealed in one dialogue can shape an assistant's later answer when the task does not restate it. ProcessPrefBench uses three months of natural dialogues from two knowledge workers to build 66 source-target cases separately judged for source evidence and target applicability. Sources are preselected, so the benchmark tests application rather than retrieval. We test three models with target-only, full-history, and distilled-preference prompts. Target-specific 0-2 rubrics score preference realization, and a task gate flags severe failures. Compared with target-only prompting, full-history and imperative distilled-preference prompting raise preference realization by 0.204 and 0.244 points on the 0-2 scale, respectively, with no reliable advantage from distillation. Fabricated-evidence failures rise from 5.8% under target-only prompting to 10.1% under full-history and 10.4% under imperative prompting. ProcessPrefBench highlights a tension in learning from dialogue, where drawing on prior interactions can improve preference realization yet also invite fabricated evidence. We hope it helps build assistants that honor a user's process preferences without sacrificing factual reliability.
Agile Deliberation: How AI helps humans define the gray areas
Data Mining & Modeling
Clearing up a robot’s fuzzy memory
A new system identifies and corrects unreliable object descriptions stored in a robot’s memory, improving the robot’s ability to interact with its environment.
Dharma Field Extractor: Any Document In, Structured Fields in JSON Out
The Dharma Field Extractor, a 2-billion-parameter model, specializes in extracting specific fields from diverse document types—such as invoices, IDs, and medical forms—into structured JSON format. It outperforms general-purpose frontier LLMs in accuracy and reduces cost by up to 147 times when self-hosted, demonstrating that domain-specialized small models can surpass large general-purpose models on well-defined tasks. The model supports both open extraction (detecting fields without a schema) and schema-directed extraction (returning exact field names and types), with training data spanning English, Brazilian Portuguese, and multilingual documents. Benchmarks show superior F1 scores and valid JSON output across real-world datasets like SROIE and FUNSD, reinforcing the thesis that specialization beats scale for enterprise document processing.
Flipsnack grows product signups with conversion optimization
Flipsnack focused its ChatGPT Ads campaigns on getting people to try its product, growing registrations while lowering the cost per signup.
Le Chonk brings the brains. Studio puts it to work.
Build and deploy enterprise agents, workflows and apps faster with Mistral Studio and Le Chonk full control over your models, data and infrastructure.
A thousand fewer paths to root
OpenAI built an autonomous pipeline that found, validated, and generated patches for 948 local privilege-escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.
Whose startup does the AI back? An algorithm audit of reputation and demographic signals in LLM-assisted crowdfunding
arXiv:2611.03993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) assistants increasingly advise backers on which crowdfunding campaigns to support. LLMs have known race and gender problems, and it is unsettled whether they reproduce, erase, or reverse the discrimination documented in entrepreneurial finance. We ask when, and through which decision process, LLM assistants use founders' gender and ethnicity. In a pre-specified choice-based conjoint experiment, seven LLMs chose among five synthetic campaigns with independently randomized quality signals and founder names, under three backer personas and a persona-free control (40,248 responses). By default, founder names barely matter: under budget-conscious and delivery-focused personas, gender and Black-name effects are statistically equivalent to zero. When the backer wants to support underrepresented creators, the models favor Black-signaled (+8.1 percentage points; positive in all seven models) and female-signaled (+5.1) founders. They do so most strongly among near-tied campaigns and for the founder who alone carries the signal, and they almost never name gender or ethnicity in their reasons. The results fit an agency account of algorithmic discrimination: an aligned assistant takes its demographic preferences from its user rather than from its training data.
As AI agents reshape the web, Google opens Gemini and Search to more apps
A new developer platform will let businesses bring their services to Google's AI experiences, potentially changing how consumers discover and use apps.
How Anthropic ships Claude with Claude: Separating the Brain from the Hands
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang on Opus 5.5, the Claude Platform, and the engineering behind AI agents.
Fix evaluation bias to unlock better models on Amazon Bedrock
Property Finder found that 96.8% of their vision-AI evaluation labels were inherited from the incumbent model, hiding its true accuracy. See how they built unbiased ground truth, applied evolutionary prompt optimization, and selected a more accurate, cost-effective model on Amazon Bedrock, cutting cost by 86% across 11 image-quality attributes.
Baidu Open-Sources Unlimited OCR 2 for Hundred-Page Document Parsing
Baidu has released Unlimited OCR 2, an MIT-licensed 3B OCR model that parses hundred-page documents in one request. Its SR-SWA attention keeps per-step decoding cost nearly flat, scoring 77.1 on MarathonDocBench The post Baidu Open-Sources Unlimited OCR 2 for Hundred-Page Document Parsing appeared first on MarkTechPost.
Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude
We're at the start of a major effort to speed up drug development with Claude. Over the past several months, our scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines.
InferSlice: A Reference Architecture for SLO-driven LLM Inference over a Telco Wide-Area Network
arXiv:2610.32638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM inference is increasingly deployed as a core service for enterprise and interactive applications, but sovereignty, compliance, latency and resource-locality requirements can limit the suitability of centralised cloud deployments. Telco operators offer geographically distributed compute and network infrastructure for addressing these constraints. However, existing LLM serving frameworks are designed for tightly coupled data centres and provide limited support for coordinating geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources. We present InferSlice, a reference architecture for Service-Level Objective (SLO)-driven LLM inference over a telco infrastructure, integrating network slicing, GPU partitioning, elastic serving and observability
web-edit 0.1a2
Release: web-edit 0.1a2 web-edit (previously) is my tiny web app for browsing and editing files in a folder. I mainly built it for editing files on different machines via Tailscale. I added a "copy to clipboard" option for both text and image data. I needed this because I was running pelican prompts on a laptop from my phone (here's DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017) and I wanted an easy way to copy the resulting logs into a Gist. Tags: projects, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, deepseek
Google's New Gemini Agent Could Coordinate Business Work—Even With Claude
Google isn't just building another AI coworker. It wants Gemini to become the system that organizes how businesses work—even when a competitor's AI is doing the job.