AI Coding Live News

On October 30, Microsoft's Mage team released Mage-VL-Cowork on Hugging Face under Apache-2.0: a 4B multimodal computer-use agent in which a single model decides at every step whether to act through screenshots and GUI clicks (computer_use) or through bash and Python in a terminal, with no external orchestrator. Microsoft reports a two-run average of 66.0% on OSWorld-Verified (361 tasks, 50-step budget), above Qwen3.6-27B at 63.9% but below the 9B SCALECUA-Qwen3.5-9B at 68.7%.

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In his 2027 budget address to the National Assembly on November 2, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung proposed a record 820.9 trillion won budget (+12.8%), with 21.3 trillion won (about $16B) for semiconductors, physical AI, AI data centers and AI, nearly double the 10.8 trillion won in 2026. The Ministry of Planning and Budget document allocates 4.7 trillion won to a sovereign AI model aiming for world-leading performance, including the purchase of 10,000 Vera Rubin GPUs. Parliament still has to pass the budget.

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On November 2, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Sheikh Khaled met OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and witnessed four agreements: ADNOC, with G42 subsidiary Inception42, will deploy OpenAI frontier technology; the Abu Dhabi Government and OpenAI launched an AI-native Machine-Readable Government initiative whose first food-import compliance pilot is already in production; Mubadala will apply AI to investment analysis; and Inception42 and OpenAI signed a five-year partnership. Inference runs inside the UAE.

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On Nov 2 Meituan's LongCat team listed LongCat-2.5 in its API platform change log as the full release of September 25's LongCat-2.5-Preview. The official technical blog says it has 1.6 trillion total parameters with about 48 billion activated per token, builds on LongCat-2.0 with stronger native visual understanding and agentic coding, and was trained and served with W4A4 inference on domestic AI accelerators. Vendor-reported scores include 88.4 on Terminal Bench v2.1, 38.5 on Terminal Bench v4.0, 91.9 on BrowseComp and 83.1 on MCP Atlas. The API speaks both OpenAI and Anthropic formats with a 1M-token context and up to 128K output tokens, at a limited-time price of $0.30 per 1M uncached input tokens, $0.006 cached input and $1.20 output.

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On Nov 2, semiconductor and AI research firm SemiAnalysis released GDPx, a benchmark of agentic capability across 11 domains: chip design, cybersecurity, biology, finance, legal, quant trading, recursive self-improvement (RSI), hardware design, materials science, alignment and software engineering. Its 206 tasks were built by 14 specialist data partners, with SemiAnalysis doing final QA. On the official leaderboard Claude Opus 5.5 leads at 12.0%, followed by Gemini 4 Carbon at 10.9% and GPT-6 Astra at 9.6%; nearly every model scores 0 on finance and legal. SemiAnalysis says safety classifiers drag down Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Astra, and plans a new version every 3–6 months. All scores are as reported by SemiAnalysis.

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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman published an X article on November 1 titled "Don't build conscious superintelligence", responding to reactions to his September essay on model welfare. He clarified that his line "AIs are not conscious" was deliberately in the present tense: they are not today, and that is how they must remain. If consciousness started to emerge in training, he would call for everyone to stop AI development until those properties could be designed out. He argued that AI developers have no right to bring a new conscious species into the world and that welfare concerns should focus on humans, animals and the natural environment. He also credited Anthropic for publishing its constitution and research, while saying he disagrees with its approach. The post drew about 353 likes, 251 bookmarks and 290K views, with ethicists and practitioners on both sides. This is a personal opinion piece, not a Microsoft product or policy announcement.

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On November 1, John Burn-Murdoch, a Financial Times columnist and chief data reporter, posted a long X thread with his FT piece arguing that the productivity rise in AI-adopting US sectors began in 2020, before AI agents existed, shows up only in the US, and comes mainly from tech layoffs and hiring pullbacks rather than AI. The thread opener has about 1,344 likes, 306 reposts and 186K views. Gavin Baker, managing partner and CIO of Atreides Management, quoted the FT charts and said it is hard not to see some evidence of "ROI on AI," citing a16z and EPB Research data; his post has about 793 likes and 102K views. Burn-Murdoch replied that he is "slightly on the fence" and that the data cannot rule out a role for AI. These are two readings of the same data, not a settled finding.

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On October 31, Scott Alexander published "Against SURA" on LessWrong. He uses SURA (Stop Unilaterally + Raise Awareness) for the view that AI companies, their employees and countries should halt AI work on their own and focus on raising awareness, and argues it would hand the lead to companies that do not prioritize alignment and cost the US its bargaining chip with China. He cites AI Futures Project members' survival estimates for scenarios without a global pause, mostly in the 25%-50% range, to push back on 90%+ doom estimates. Blogger jessicat quoted it and said parts of AI safety now behave like a mass political movement with bad epistemics (about 359 likes, 63K views); Bloomberg Odd Lots co-host Joe Weisenthal summed it up as people competing to out-doom each other (about 287 likes, 38K views). This is an opinion debate, not a policy announcement from any organization.

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Indie developer Pieter Levels (@levelsio) posted a roughly 13.5-minute walk-and-talk video on X on November 1, following up his October 11 "software is dead" post. He says AI has finally hit programmers themselves, and the identity and sense of achievement that came from building paid products is fading; his own businesses and many friends' are flat or shrinking, and competition has exploded because anyone can now ship a landing page or app. He sees the remaining moats as community, audience, content and slower-moving enterprise B2B, and has already made Nomad List free as nomads.com. The post had about 2,478 likes and 205K views. These are personal views, not industry data.

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