Meta paper: small AI models that read raw letters may beat token-based ones

A Meta paper, summarised on Reddit's r/LocalLLaMA, trained small models of about 1 billion parameters to read raw bytes, roughly one letter at a time, instead of tokens. They learned partly by copying a bigger model, Llama 3 8B. With little training the token models won easily. With more training the token models levelled off while the byte models kept improving, and needed about 6 times less text to reach the same level.

Moonshot's new AI model Kimi K3.1 Pro faces claims of undisclosed paid promotion

VentureBeat reports that the debut of Kimi K3.1 Pro, from Chinese AI company Moonshot, is drawing scrutiny. The allegation is that influencers were asked to promote the model without disclosing a commercial relationship with Moonshot. The model scores highly on third-party benchmarks, according to both Moonshot and outside testers.

Nvidia's CEO floats a $2,000 yearly fee per chip for its AI agent software

At GTC Berlin on October 22, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said licensing is about $2,000 per GPU per year to run the Nvidia software that runs agents on what he calls AI factories. He said software licensing will become an increasingly major part of the business. Tom's Hardware notes that 5 million paid licenses would bring in $10 billion a year, a scenario outlined by FourWeekMBA. Nvidia has not said when the fee would apply, which software it covers, or whether it is a standard price. Its AI Enterprise platform is already listed at $4,500 per GPU per year.

AMD says new software makes its MI355X AI chip write text up to 3.3x faster

AMD is open-sourcing tuned ways to run three AI models, Qwen3.8-27B, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next and GPT-OSS-120B, on its Instinct MI355X data-centre GPU. It combines several techniques: running a model's whole step as one long-lived GPU program, letting a small model guess tokens ahead, lower-precision numbers, and keeping data next to each of the chip's two dies. AMD reports about 1,100, 750 and 1,470 tokens per second for one request at a time, 1.9 to 3.3 times faster than its comparison setups.

Modders unlock up to twice the AI speed on older Nvidia gaming graphics cards

Modders have shown unlocks that lift limits on Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 and RTX 40 cards, which use the same chips as Nvidia's professional GPUs, TechPowerUp reports. On an RTX 4090, one kind of AI maths went from 165.6 to 331.6 TeraFLOPS. The RTX 3090 Ti got up to 80% faster at a maths format used by nearly all neural networks. An update says RTX 20 cards can also be unlocked for about 2x. The cards use the same 450 W of power before and after, and run with stock Nvidia drivers.

Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro due Wednesday with a reworked Mac interface, report says

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, citing sources, reports that Apple's touchscreen MacBook Pro with an OLED screen arrives on Wednesday. Apple reportedly changed macOS for it, with an interface that adapts depending on whether touch or the trackpad was used last. The report also says Apple is rolling out a tool in its retail stores to reduce wasted inventory.

Teardowns of Apple's folding iPhone Duo look for why its screens crack

iFixit has opened up Apple's folding iPhone Duo and found details on how Apple may hide the crease on the folding screen. It gave the phone a 5/10 repairability score. Separately, a YouTuber dissected a Duo and thinks he found the cause of reports of screens breaking. Users on social media and the iPhone Duo subreddit report that the hinge seems to catch, then audibly cracks and breaks the screen, sometimes within hours.

Reddit's open-source forum bans projects that use AI, and users revolt

The moderators of r/opensource posted new submission rules on Saturday evening. The post says: "If your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource." The rules also exclude non-English speakers over concerns about AI translation, The Verge reports. The new rules have sparked a revolt among users.

YouTube plans to stream in the new AV2 video format on the web from early 2027

In an update from the Alliance for Open Media, the group behind the AV1 video format, YouTube engineering director Des Keane said AV2 streams will be available on the web as soon as early 2027. AV2 is the royalty-free successor to AV1, and the alliance says it compresses video about 30% better. Google says AV2 playback has been shown working in Chrome, but has not said which version will get it. Netflix and Prime Video are exploring the format without a timeline.

Brazilian court orders Meta not to interfere in the presidential runoff

Bloomberg reports that Meta has become a target in the closing stretch of Brazil's presidential election, whose runoff is on October 25. President Lula da Silva alleges that Meta restricts his content, and a judge at Brazil's top electoral court ordered the company to treat both candidates equally, with a fine of 500,000 reais per day if it fails to comply. Two groups, Sleeping Giants Brasil and CTRL+Z, sent the court examples from Instagram and WhatsApp search and Meta AI that they say favour Flávio Bolsonaro, while saying they have not proven bias. The judge warned the daily fine could rise to 1 million reais. Meta says the problems were glitches and that any suggestion it favours one side is false. A report from Pan American Dispatch, widely shared on Hacker News, claims Meta has ignored the order.

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