
During a recent discussion, Anthropic's CEO asserted that the company has developed a clear pathway to scaling artificial general intelligence (AGI). This statement comes amidst a backdrop of contrasting narratives regarding AI's future, including concerns about job displacement and the capabilities of competing models. The claim highlights the ongoing competition in the AI sector as companies race to achieve AGI, a milestone that could significantly alter the landscape of technology and employment.
Read originalEarlier coverage that leads up to this article, and what followed. Lines connect each piece to the closest one after it, converging here.
AI Explained · December 19, 2025 · Background
AI Explained · January 28, 2026 · Background
© AI ExplainedSeveral new evaluation benchmarks have been released, including ExploitGym for security vulnerabilities and BenchCAD for design robustness.
© AI ExplainedThis release quietly closes the hardware gap for local inference by adding default support for CUDA 13 and ROCm 10.0 across Linux and Windows. Users with newer NVIDIA GPUs or AMD accelerators no longer need to compile from source to get performance, while Apple Silicon builds now ship KleidiAI disabled by default, shifting the focus back to standard ARM optimizations. The inclusion of Snapdragon support for Linux and Android marks a significant step toward on-device AI beyond the x86/ARM desktop ecosystem. It is less about new features and more about ensuring llama.cpp remains the universal runtime for every available accelerator.
Speculative decoding just got a significant speed boost on NVIDIA GPUs. This release introduces a specialized kernel for 'few-row' matrix multiplications, targeting the small batch sizes typical of verification passes in speculative decoding workflows. By optimizing these specific operations for quantized formats like Q8_0 and IQ4 variants, llama.cpp reduces latency where it matters most during token generation. The change is CUDA-only for now but leverages hardware capabilities from Ampere onwards, making local inference faster without requiring new model architectures or complex configuration changes.
A new METR report assesses the acceleration of AI research and development within Anthropic, analyzing internal model improvements.