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.

London Stock Exchange Group agrees to buy credit data firm Octus for $3.54B

The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) agreed to buy Octus, a New York company that sells credit intelligence, data and workflow software, from Permira and Octus' management. The price is $3.54 billion in cash, the Wall Street Journal reports. LSEG says the deal would transform its presence in credit and private markets data.

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.

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.

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.

Meta's Instagram launches an app for Apple TV

Instagram is now available on Apple TV, MacRumors reports. The app is for watching Reels, longer videos and live shows. It had already launched on Fire TV, Google TV and Samsung smart TVs.

Sony patent would show game sounds as on-screen cues for deaf players

A newly published Sony Interactive Entertainment patent application describes turning in-game sounds into visual cues. The system would sort each sound by its purpose, such as building tension or warning of danger, and show an icon, shape or word like "Roar!". Lights around the screen or the DualSense controller's touchpad could show where a sound comes from. The filing says older games could get cues without changes to their code.

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, AP and Reuters report. Folha de S.Paulo reported internal messages in which Meta staff acknowledged Lula's Instagram accounts were hit by restrictions. Meta says the problems were glitches and that any suggestion it favours one side is false.

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