SenseNova-U1 just dropped — native multimodal gen/understanding in one model, no VAE, no diffusion

What’s new: Text rendering in images actually works. Diffusion models scramble text because they don’t have a language understanding pathway. U1 does — because it’s natively multimodal. Posters with long titles, slides with bullet points, comics with speech bubbles — all clean. Infographics & dense visual output — posters, annotated diagrams, multi-panel layouts. Diffusion models …

Adaptive Thinking: Large Language Models Know When to Think in Latent Space

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) test-time computing have introduced the capability to perform intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning (thinking) before generating answers. While increasing the thinking budget yields smooth performance improvements at inference time, the relationship between LLM capability, query complexity, and optimal budget allocation remains poorly understood for achieving compute-optimal inference. To address …

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Extracting contract insights with PwC’s AI-driven annotation on AWS

This post was co-written with Yash Munsadwala, Adam Hood, Justin Guse, and Hector Hernandez from PwC. Contract analysis often consumes significant time for legal, compliance, and procurement teams, especially when important insights are buried in lengthy, unstructured agreements. As contract volumes grow, finding specific clauses and assessing extracted terms can become increasingly difficult to scale. …

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The founder’s AI foundation: The top announcements for startups from Next ‘26

The momentum is undeniable: the world’s fastest-growing AI startups are building with Google Cloud. Instead of stitching together fragmented point solutions, founders are building their businesses here because we offer the entire AI stack in a single, open environment. And, as we saw at Next ‘26 last week, we continue to advance the models, infrastructure, …

Evolving AI may arrive before AGI and create hard-to-control risks

Evolutionary biology holds clues for the future of AI, argue researchers from the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research, Eötvös Loránd University, and the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. In a new Perspective published April 20 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team warn that evolvable AI (eAI) …

Local Mechanisms of Compositional Generalization in Conditional Diffusion

Conditional diffusion models appear capable of compositional generalization, i.e., generating convincing samples for out-of-distribution combinations of conditioners, but the mechanisms underlying this ability remain unclear. To make this concrete, we study length generalization, the ability to generate images with more objects than seen during training. In a controlled CLEVR setting (Johnson et al.,2017), we find …