Skip to content
AI NEWS JOURNAL
AI, IN PERSPECTIVE

Search AI news

Search headlines, summaries and articles to connect the dots.

Newest first

Exclusive: FormAssembly overhauls its platform to expand into AI-powered process automation

FormAssembly Inc., a provider of online data collection and workflow automation software, today announced a complete platform overhaul that expands its capabilities beyond building forms to automating complex business processes using artificial intelligence. The new platform, which the company said took seven months to develop, combines form creation, workflow automation, integrations and compliance management in […] The post Exclusive: FormAssembly overhauls its platform to expand into AI-powered process automation appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

How I Fight AI Brain Fry

Article URL: https://sergeykuhne.com/blog/fighting-ai-brain-fry Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50416363 Points: 83 # Comments: 56

Pdb or Not to Be: Comparing Debugging Interfaces With Pass$_{X}$@$k$

arXiv:2611.08666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive debuggers are indispensable to human software development, yet coding agents overwhelmingly rely on edit-execute-observe loops, using common bash tools, test scripts, and print statements to debug via repeated shell commands. Stepping through a debugger provides live access to runtime state, which may enable different problem-solving capabilities. However, prior work typically introduces the debugger as an additional tool or through a new subagent, making its individual contribution difficult to isolate from the associated scaffold changes. To address this, we compare a debugger-only agent against a bash-only agent on all 500 SWE-bench Verified instances, holding the rest of the scaffold fixed. We evaluate both architectures on two models, GPT-OSS-120B and Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B, with three independent runs per architecture $\times$ model configuration. Crucially, to distinguish interface specialization from expanded coverage under repeated sampling, we introduce pass$_X$@$k$, a cross-agent pass@$k$ that provides an unbiased estimator of the probability that at least one of $k$ agents is successful. Although the bash and debugger agents solve partially disjoint subsets of the benchmark in any single pair of runs, our pass$_X$@$2$ estimator reveals that this is largely due to run-to-run variance rather than tool complementarity. Across both models, we find that two bash rollouts outperform the combination of one bash and one debugger rollout. Our findings highlight the importance of accounting for stochastic variance in evaluating agent and tool diversity, and we hope that pass$_X$@$k$ will serve as a useful framework for the community.

ReKV: Overlapping Quantized KV Transfer and Suffix Recomputation

arXiv:2611.08770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prefill--decode disaggregation moves a prompt's key--value (KV) cache between workers before the first token can be generated. Reducing this handoff to either cache compression or recomputation misses a useful choice: which layers to transmit, at what precision, and which layers to execute again on the decode worker. ReKV transfers a quantized prefix KV cache and one BF16 boundary state, then reconstructs a contiguous suffix while the prefix is in flight. In a model-shaped synthetic benchmark on cross-node H100s, the Q8 configuration meeting separately evaluated quality criteria reduces 8K handoff latency by $2.36\times$, $2.84\times$, and $3.65\times$ over BF16 transfer for Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen2.5-3B, and Qwen3-8B. It is also faster than the best measured transfer-only or recompute-only action at those points. A separate real-weight BF16 recomputation experiment reduces prefill-to-token-return time by $1.16$--$1.63\times$. The preferred action changes with prompt length and link bandwidth.

ResServe: Accurate and Efficient FP4 LLM Inference with Residue Compensation

arXiv:2611.08713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block-scaled 4-bit floating-point (FP4) quantization reduces large language model inference costs but can degrade task quality. Higher-precision computation can mitigate this loss at the expense of some of the efficiency gains from FP4 inference. Narrow matrix computations common in decoding often leave spare hardware capacity for low-cost precision recovery. ResServe combines an FP4 activation base with an FP4-quantized residue representing information lost during quantization. It uses this spare capacity to compute the residue's contribution and combines results on-chip, avoiding extra result transfers. We apply this principle to linear layers and decode attention, while selective compensation limits added work when processing input prompts. On NVIDIA B200, compensated linear kernels using the NVFP4 format improve numerical precision while retaining latency close to uncompensated execution for the evaluated operations with few rows. In the evaluated NVFP4 inference configurations, ResServe adds at most 3.4% request-latency overhead over W4A4 and reduces request latency by 22.4-53.3% relative to W4A8. Across five models, code-generation accuracy improves over same-format uncompensated inference, with mean relative gains of 15.04% for NVFP4 and 53.57% for MXFP4.

Semantic Conditional Similarity (SCS): A Formal Mathematical Framework

arXiv:2611.08778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) operates on document pairs, returning a single scalar per comparison. In a multi-document setting where several sources may have contributed to one or more targets, pairwise STS cannot disentangle each source's marginal semantic contribution from their shared vocabulary. In this paper, Semantic Conditional Similarity (SCS) is introduced as a conditional form of STS that computes similarity between two documents after eliminating semantic elements shared with a third via set-theoretic operations. SCS makes four contributions: 1) it introduces directionality, partitioning pairwise relations into lateral (inter-source) and vertical (source-to-target) classes; 2) conditioning induces role-dependent asymmetry by extending the comparison domain from unordered pairs to ordered, conditioned triples of a target, a reference, and a conditioning document; 3) SCS introduces inter-document conditioning by subtracting shared content from a third document, complementing the intra-document conditioning in recent C-STS work; and 4) the set-theoretic decomposition achieves threshold-free partitioning of shared and residual content, requiring no arbitrary similarity cutoff. Although developed for the $n \to 1$ configuration, the framework extends to $1 \to n$ via vertical role reversal and to $m \to n$ via independent composition of source- and target-side conditioning. With the established $1 \to 1$ case, these span the full spectrum of document cardinality. SCS scores should be interpreted ordinally, as rankings of marginal contributions rather than absolute measurements. The broader implication is that metric space axioms commonly assumed in similarity formalizations constrain expressiveness in role-differentiated multi-document settings, and that extending the domain to conditioned triples can recover information that pairwise-symmetric comparisons suppress.

Show HN: FELF – AppImage-like single binaries without FUSE, root, or a runtime

Hello HN!I've always had a bad time redistributing programs that use shared libraries, AppImage in my opinion does too much, and a container is an overkill - not always integrates smoothly.I've moved to nix since long ago, but redistributing between nix and other distros or vice versa it's still a pain in the ass, more so if you want to run an alien app in nix or a nix app without the package manger in any other distro.For that, with the help of Claude, I've implemented a format that deduces at pack-time all the shared libraries a program needs, puts them, together with its own glibc and a patched dynamic linker into a single executable.This means that you don't actually need a runtime nor any special capability, it can run inside a FROM SCRATCH docker, alpine linux etc... And it also supports coreutils-like multiple programs accessible via symlinks, so it is a good fit for that purpose.You can just use:> felf pack $(which git) --output git.felfand you'll have already a git binary that works everywhere, no matter which distro you are building this from. This only packs the binary and their dependencies.Essentially, the effect is similar as if you LD_PRELOAD's all the libraries that it requires.In the end, we have been fighting these demons since long long ago, chroots/docker/appimage/flatpack/nix etc...So this xkcd applies: https://xkcd.com/927/I'm happy to share the project, I hope it inspires new discoveries/tools in this regard! Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50415219 Points: 2 # Comments: 0

Show HN: Open-source customer-facing agents

Hi, Dmitri from Radioso here, an open-source platform to design AI agents for customers and visitors in any channel, in the style of Fin/Ada/Decagon. The repo is https://github.com/radioso-ai/radioso and our website is https://radioso.aiToday, your choices are:1. Buy a very expensive service for your vertical (usually starting with $$ five figures monthly) 2. Get a cheap off-the-shelf chatbot that mostly answers FAQs 3. Build your own, and then also build the inbox, human handoff, audit trail and integrations around itAt Radioso we wanted an open-source option that combines the best of all 3. You can integrate it with your own software via API/SDK or your CRM, or run it standalone, either self-hosted or in our cloud.The engine runs multi-step interactions and takes actions: calling your APIs, updating records, booking things. Maybe you’ve tried Parlant; Radioso is the alternative “with batteries included”: RAG, audit trail, customer service inbox, and integrations like Slack and email.Under the hood it’s plain TypeScript + PostgreSQL, works with OpenAI/Anthropic/other models, and is licensed under Apache 2.0 which includes all features (The only thing we keep under EE license is the multi-tenant layer we use to run our own cloud).We have existing customers running it for technical Q&A, course booking, online product recommendations and goods returns, among others, some reaching 92% of conversations automated. We’re currently working on voice support so we can offer a call center.Our ambition is to be “the WordPress of customer-facing AI” :), where people can contribute their favorite plugins and benefit from the ecosystem.Longer term, we think browsing the web will mostly mean talking to your own agent, and when you need a service or a purchase, your agent will talk to the vendor’s agent to get things done. For this, Radioso already publishes an A2A Agent Card and we’re working on the rest. Your Radioso services are also callable over MCP, for customers who already use it.Thanks for your attention. We’d especially love to hear which integrations you’d want, whether you’d self-host it, and what’s stopped you from deploying a customer-facing AI agent so far. Tell us what you think. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50423820 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Show HN: Pgxio – a tiny PostgreSQL layer inside Nginx

I built the first version of this stuff a decade ago as ethanolus (c2h5oh). And I've used it for most of my projects as a backend layer since then.The main motive is to eliminate unnecessary complexity from backend layers.How it works: a rust nginx module calls postgresql functions via non-blocking libpq io. There is an optional patch for libpq. It provides zero-copy for nginx-chained memory buffers - to avoid request body copies between nginx and libpq.Pgxio supports http2 and websockets. Realtime listen/notify updates from postgres without polling.How to try - code on github. Tested on Debian - FreeBSD validation in progress.It's alpha - so any feedback is welcome. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50425203 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

Show HN: Record, branch, and compare command runs in stdlib-only Python

Hi, this is a package I developed for keeping track of short toy-model development cycles and explaining what changed between runs.The core idea: commands run through the package, and their declared parameters (or injected parameters with --substitute) and outcomes go into a dependency-free ledger stored in the project. Because that ledger lives in the project directory, it has worked well for passing context between different agents. I’ve also found some use for it in CI work. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50417782 Points: 3 # Comments: 0