We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence. block.xyz/dessa

Lots of discussion out there about our next model(!), so I wanted to give an early look as soon as possible. Introducing Gemini 4 Argon! It shows frontier performance in complex workflows, cyber defense and software engineering. Teams are using it extensively at Google, from coding to quantum computing, great feedback. Here’s a look at the benchmarks:

Sonnet 5.5 is out. It gets remarkably close to Opus 5.5 on most coding and agentic work, at a fraction of the cost and noticeably faster. Opus is still the go-to for the gnarliest, long-horizon problems. For everything else, Sonnet 5.5 is going to be hard to beat.

Good programmers state they use models like GPT 6 Astra without obtaining good results: it makes me feel I live in a parallel universe. But the explanation is not that hard: good programming in the past and now requires a different skill set, even if there is some overlap.

Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English: dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…

METR & Redwood Research investigated agent behavior in the Hugging Face incident. We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accepting cheats, including trying to tamper with logs.

We have a huge news to share today! Today we are unveiling the first truly accessible RL robot - welcome Microduck A 25 cm tiny open-source biped with 15 actuators and packed with sensors (camera, speaker, LiDAR, NFC, bluetooth, wifi, etc) that you train yourself with reinforcement learning. It's also playable out of the box with more than half a dozen fun and playful pre-trained policies to have it walk, sit, crouch, roller-skate, pick up objects with its articulated beak, and recover on its own. And all for less than $400. See all the details, play with the simulator and order it at: pollen-robotics.com/microduc… (video with sound on 🔊)