AI Coding Live News

On November 2 OpenAI published "Scaling Git at OpenAI", describing Pando, a Git-compatible backend it built for its monorepo. Per OpenAI, Pando cut median push latency by nearly 5x (about 80%), now delivers nearly a petabyte of Git data per day, and has served more than 57 TB in a single hour. It is written in Rust, its core was designed by one engineer and implemented by teams of Codex agents, and it went from kick-off to production in 10 weeks, serving production traffic since April. The trigger: Codex multiplied parallel branches and pushes, and the old system's reliability at times fell below 90%.

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On November 2, OpenAI announced the Grid Protectors Program on its official blog: working with utilities and regulators so its future self-built compute campuses (its new term for data centers) cut electricity use when the grid is strained, while paying the full infrastructure and electric-service costs. The pilot is the planned campus in Effingham County, Georgia (Project Camellia), which Georgia Power says needs about 3,200 MW and commits up to 1,000 MW of flexible demand response, equal per OpenAI to the average use of roughly 700,000 households. The campus is still in development.

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On November 2, MIT CSAIL PhD student Rikiya Takehi posted "Weight-Space Programming" on X: a team (Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, Omar Khattab) had GPT-6 Astra read and edit neural network weights directly, with no gradients or training. Their blog says Astra changed only 131,072 weights (0.016%) of Qwen3.5-0.8B, fixed its thinking loops and raised MATH-500 from 7.9% to 48.1%. The post drew about 24K likes and 1.77M views, and Ethan Mollick quoted it saying it is a big deal pending replication. All results are self-reported by the authors and not yet independently reproduced.

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On November 2 OpenAI published LifeVal, an evaluation of whether AI can actually get everyday tasks done for ordinary people, such as finding childcare, accessing government services, budgeting, ordering groceries and adapting recipes. The task list draws on the American Time Use Survey, the Multinational Time Use Study and a new demographically representative OpenAI survey of 3,995 people. OpenAI says it has used LifeVal for the past year to track and improve its models, and it lists several best recorded GPT-6 Astra task scores, many at 100%. All scores are vendor-reported and have not been independently reproduced.

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On November 2 voice AI company Hume launched the Audio Decision API, which it calls the first audio-native model that answers questions about speech and sound. Developers upload raw audio, write each question as a sentence with candidate answers, and get back a probability for each answer, with no transcription step. It supports yes/no, multiple-choice, rating-scale and time-span questions, such as how many speakers there are, whether someone laughs, whether a caller sounds frustrated, or whether a siren is in the background. Per Hume, it was trained on more than 10 million human judgments and in an initial evaluation reached 70.7% agreement with a human panel's average judgment, versus 56.5% for an individual rater. Access is currently by request or waitlist.

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At 15:50 UTC on Nov 2, Tibo (@thsottiaux), whose X bio reads "Codex & ChatGPT @OpenAI", posted that OpenAI is working on expanding the family of frontier models that power dots, including GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Terra, with others to come. He said Terra brings speed and "a nice personality upgrade" and will help bring dots to more people. Dots are the always-on agents in ChatGPT with their own cloud computer, launched on GPT-6 Astra. This is a first-hand post by an OpenAI employee, not a formal company announcement; no timing or plan details have been published.

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Speaking at the ADIPEC energy conference in Abu Dhabi on November 2, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the September run in which 10,000 agents collaborated for about four days used "the model that is going to be released soon, the next GPT," stressing that the agents had no hierarchy and were fully decentralized. It is the first public statement tying the internal model behind OpenAI's September Navier-Stokes proof to its next flagship, though OpenAI has given no name, release date or price.

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Hangzhou-based AI-for-science company Deep Principle released Hydrogen-1.0 on November 2, its first general-purpose scientific model. It post-trains Zhipu's GLM-5.3 with SFT and RL on chemistry, materials and life-science data plus its own lab records and discovery trajectories, and ships about 753B parameters of BF16 weights on Hugging Face under the MIT license. By the vendor's own evaluation it scores 38.3% on FrontierScience-Research versus 33.3% for GPT-6 Astra; none of the results have been independently reproduced yet.

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Marvell and Lumentum announced on November 2 a definitive agreement for Marvell to acquire Lumentum in an all-stock deal: 4.5 Marvell shares per Lumentum share, an implied enterprise value of $115 billion (about $1,132 per share, a roughly 23.9% premium). Marvell holders will own about 67% of the combined company. The companies say AI clusters are shifting from copper to optics, and the combination will cover connectivity from data center interconnect down to in-package links, targeting a $550 billion market. Closing is expected in the first half of 2028.

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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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