Ben's Bites
·
1 week ago
SpaceX AI and Cursor released Grok 4.5, an Opus-class model that performs between Claude Opus 4.7 and 4.8 while costing 6 times less than Opus models and 3 times less than GPT-5.5. The model processes tokens at a lower cost per unit while maintaining comparable performance, with availability through Cursor with increased limits and via API. This pricing structure makes it a competitive alternative for developers seeking cheaper inference costs without sacrificing model capability.
IEEE Spectrum AI
·
1 week ago
Large tabular models (LTMs) are a new class of AI foundation models designed to handle structured data in spreadsheets, where traditional LLMs fail due to their sequential nature and lack of deterministic outputs. Fundamental launched its LTM called NEXUS on February 5, 2026, with $275 million in funding and achieved adoption by Amazon Web Services, with competitors including Google's TabFM and research models like FlexTab also emerging. This shifts enterprise data analysis away from legacy machine learning algorithms like XGBoost toward pre-trained foundational models that require minimal task-specific engineering.
Google Research
·
1 week ago
Google researchers developed SensorFM, a foundation model trained on over one trillion minutes of unlabeled wearable sensor data from five million participants to create a general-purpose representation of human physiology. The model achieved 31% lower reconstruction loss than smaller variants and outperformed supervised baselines on 34 of 35 health prediction tasks spanning cardiovascular, metabolic, sleep, and mental health domains. This approach enables a single reusable model to adapt across diverse health outcomes rather than requiring separate bespoke models for each condition.
