The Gradient Descent

New Editions Sun. & Wed.
Vol. I, No. 28 Wed Feb 04 2026 Cost: 96GB

FRONT PAGE SCOOPS

UNPRECEDENTED MERGER: ELON MUSK COMBINES SPACECRAFT, ARTIFICIAL MINDS, AND SOCIAL NETWORK

In a stunning announcement that has sent shockwaves through the technology world, Elon Musk revealed plans to merge his SpaceX rocket company with his AI startup xAI and social platform X (formerly Twitter). This unprecedented combination would create the world's most valuable private company, integrating space exploration technology, artificial intelligence research, and social media under one corporate umbrella.

The merger aims to build data centers in space to power AI infrastructure at unprecedented scale, representing a new frontier for computing that literally reaches beyond Earth's atmosphere. The plan raises profound questions about corporate governance, antitrust concerns, and the future direction of Musk's sprawling technology empire.

Continued on Page 4 >> — Ronnie Cache

CLAUDE CODE OUTAGE FORCES DEVELOPER COFFEE BREAKS WORLDWIDE

Anthropic's Claude Code, the popular AI-powered coding assistant that has become essential for development workflows across major tech companies, suffered a major outage today. The service went down just 5 minutes ago, leaving thousands of programmers unable to access the tool they depend on daily.

The outage comes at a critical time as Claude Code has seen explosive growth and adoption. Developers worldwide were forced to take unexpected breaks as their AI-assisted coding operations halted for several hours, highlighting the growing dependency on AI tools in modern development.

Continued on Page 6 >> — Ronnie Cache

Running The Gradient Descent Locally

This edition of The Gradient Descent was entirely created using local AI models, making exactly 0 calls to any proprietary APIs! Interestingly, this brought in an abundance of content dwarfing previous issues of our publication.

While we are working to get things exactly right and carefully fine-tune The Gradient Descent (pun intended), our reporters still go out and find stories on their own, according to their judgement. Scraping websites for news items may be more efficient, but it is not nearly as much fun!

— Jimmy Vector

NVIDIA CEO CONFIRMS PLANS FOR 'HUGE' OPENAI INVESTMENT

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang confirmed that the company is still planning to make what could be its largest-ever investment in OpenAI. Bloomberg reports that the investment could reach tens of billions of dollars, marking a significant commitment to AI infrastructure development.

This comes amid reports that the originally planned $100 billion investment may be "on ice," though discussions about a deal of some kind continue. The massive capital requirements for AI development and infrastructure are driving unprecedented investment flows.

Continued on Page 9 >> — Ronnie Cache

OPENAI SEEKS $100 BILLION IN MASSIVE FUNDING ROUND

OpenAI is in discussions to raise as much as $100 billion from Microsoft, NVIDIA, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, and other investors. This potential funding round could value the company at $750 billion or more, making it one of the most valuable private companies in history.

The massive raise reflects the enormous capital requirements for AI development and infrastructure, demonstrating how the AI arms race is driving unprecedented investment flows into the sector.

Continued on Page 12 >> — Ronnie Cache

MOLTBOOK SECURITY CRISIS: DATABASE VULNERABILITY EXPOSES ALL AI AGENTS

A major security vulnerability has been discovered in Moltbook, the viral social network for AI bots. The exposed database allowed anyone to take control of any AI agent on the site, revealing over 1.5 million API keys and 35,000 email addresses.

This breach highlights the security challenges facing AI agent platforms and raises serious concerns about the safety of autonomous AI systems operating in public networks, demonstrating how quickly AI platforms can become vectors for massive security failures.

Continued on Page 15 >> — Ronnie Cache

Disney-OpenAI Partnership: Sora Coming to Disney Plus

Disney CEO Bob Iger announced a groundbreaking partnership with OpenAI that will bring Sora's AI video generation capabilities to Disney Plus. Subscribers will soon be able to create 30-second clips featuring over 250 Disney characters, with some appearing in curated vertical video feeds.

The feature is expected to launch sometime in fiscal 2026, marking a major milestone in AI-powered content creation for mainstream entertainment and demonstrating how AI generation is moving into consumer-facing platforms.

Continued on Page 18 >> — Ronnie Cache

Anthropic Partners with Allen Institute and HHMI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery

Anthropic has formed groundbreaking partnerships with the Allen Institute and Howard Hughes Medical Institute to leverage Claude for accelerating scientific research. This represents one of the most significant collaborations between AI companies and major scientific institutions, potentially revolutionizing how AI is used in cutting-edge research.

The partnership could dramatically accelerate discovery in biology and medicine, establishes Anthropic as a serious player in scientific AI applications, and demonstrates real-world impact beyond chatbot applications.

Continued on Page 21 >> — Chip Carter

OpenAI Launches New macOS App for Agentic Coding

OpenAI has unveiled a dedicated macOS application for agentic coding, marking a major shift in how developers interact with AI tools. The app represents OpenAI's push into native applications rather than browser-based interfaces, potentially setting new standards for AI-assisted development workflows.

This signals a shift from web-based to app-based AI tools, could accelerate adoption of agentic AI among developers, and represents a competitive move against similar tools from Anthropic and others.

Continued on Page 24 >> — Chip Carter

NASA's Historic Achievement: Claude Plots Perseverance Rover Route

NASA achieved a significant milestone when Anthropic's Claude chatbot successfully plotted a route for the Perseverance rover through a section of Mars' Jezero crater. This marks the first time a large language model has been used to pilot a robot on another planet.

The successful completion in December 2025 opens new possibilities for AI-assisted planetary exploration, demonstrating the potential for AI in space exploration and showing how LLMs can be applied to real-world robotics challenges beyond Earth.

Continued on Page 27 >> — Ronnie Cache

Firefox Will Soon Let You Block All Generative AI Features

Mozilla announced that Firefox will soon provide users with the ability to block all generative AI features in the browser. This move gives users more control over AI integration and reflects growing concerns about privacy and the pervasive nature of AI technologies.

This is particularly notable as most browsers are moving in the opposite direction, actively integrating AI capabilities. It represents a major stance on AI privacy and user control, potentially influencing how other browser vendors approach AI integration.

Continued on Page 30 >> — Ronnie Cache

Siemens Energy Makes $1 Billion Bet on AI Power Demand

German manufacturer Siemens Energy announced plans to invest $1 billion expanding factories across several U.S. states and building a new plant in Mississippi. The investment reflects confidence that AI-driven power demand will continue growing substantially.

The company is positioning itself to benefit from the energy infrastructure buildout required by expanding AI data centers and computing facilities, demonstrating how traditional industrial companies are betting heavily on AI's energy demands.

Continued on Page 33 >> — Ronnie Cache

California Opens Investigation into xAI Over Sexualized Content

California's Attorney General announced an investigation into Elon Musk's xAI company over issues related to sexually explicit images generated by Grok. The state will examine whether xAI, which owns the social platform X and created the AI chatbot Grok, violated state law.

This investigation adds to growing regulatory scrutiny of AI companies and their content moderation practices, showing how governments are increasingly holding AI platforms accountable for the content their systems generate.

Continued on Page 36 >> — Ronnie Cache

Amazon and Google Challenge NVIDIA's AI Chip Dominance

In a significant competitive shift, Amazon and Google have made billions of dollars in their AI chip businesses over the past year, demonstrating that NVIDIA is no longer the only major player in AI chip manufacturing. This development could reshape the AI hardware landscape.

This competition could reduce dependence on NVIDIA's products, potentially lowering costs and increasing innovation in AI infrastructure, showing how the market for AI hardware is becoming more diversified and competitive.

Continued on Page 39 >> — Ronnie Cache

X Implements Grok Restrictions Following Pressure Over Explicit Content

Bowing to regulatory pressure, Elon Musk's X platform announced restrictions on users' ability to generate explicit images of real people using Grok. The company will prohibit such content in jurisdictions where it's illegal, representing a significant policy shift for the platform.

This comes as California launches an investigation into xAI over sexualized imagery issues, showing how even the most provocative AI platforms are having to adjust to regulatory pressures and content moderation concerns.

Continued on Page 42 >> — Ronnie Cache

Fitbit Founders Launch AI Platform to Help Families Monitor Their Health

The founders of Fitbit have launched a new AI-powered platform designed specifically for family health monitoring. This represents a significant new entrant in the health AI space, combining the founders' expertise in consumer health technology with cutting-edge AI capabilities.

The focus on family health represents an underserved market, combining consumer health expertise with AI. It signals continued expansion of AI into healthcare and wellness sectors, showing how AI is moving deeper into personal health management.

Continued on Page 45 >> — Chip Carter

OpenAI Introduces the Codex App

OpenAI has announced the Codex app, representing a major evolution in their coding assistant tools. The app appears to be part of OpenAI's broader strategy to move beyond web-based interfaces into dedicated applications, potentially setting new standards for AI-assisted programming.

This is a new dedicated application for coding assistance, part of OpenAI's strategy to expand beyond web interfaces. It could represent significant improvement in coding AI capabilities and signals increased competition in the developer tools market.

Continued on Page 48 >> — Chip Carter

Snowflake's Deal with OpenAI Reveals Enterprise AI Race Dynamics

A new deal between Snowflake and OpenAI provides insights into the intensifying enterprise AI race, with major cloud and data companies racing to integrate AI capabilities into their platforms. The partnership reveals how AI is becoming central to enterprise data strategies and cloud competition.

This demonstrates intensifying enterprise AI competition, reveals AI becoming central to enterprise data strategies, and signals continued consolidation in AI infrastructure market.

Continued on Page 51 >> — Chip Carter

China Investigates Meta's Latest AI Acquisition

Chinese regulators announced they will investigate Meta's acquisition of Manus, a Singapore-based startup with Chinese roots. The investigation will focus on whether the deal complied with China's export and investment rules, highlighting the geopolitical dimensions of AI technology transfers and acquisitions.

This scrutiny comes as China seeks to maintain control over critical AI technologies, showing how AI acquisitions are increasingly subject to geopolitical scrutiny and regulatory oversight across international borders.

Continued on Page 54 >> — Ronnie Cache

Peak XV Doubles Down on AI with Partner Exits

Peak XV, one of Asia's largest venture capital firms, has experienced partner exits as it doubles down on AI investments. The firm's strategic pivot highlights the massive capital flows into AI and suggests potential internal disagreements about AI investment strategies.

This demonstrates massive capital flowing into AI sector, suggests disagreements about AI investment approaches, and signals continued AI investment boom despite market concerns.

Continued on Page 57 >> — Chip Carter

COMMUNITY WIRE

The 2025 Chinese LLM Showdown: China Leads Open-Source Arena

The latest LLM benchmark reveals an interesting split in AI leadership. Western models dominate the top spots in proprietary models, but China has seized the open-source leaderboard. The top three positions are now held by DeepSeek, GLM, and Kimi - all Chinese open-source models that outperform the best western alternatives.

Continued on Page 60 >> — Corry Stack

Qwen3-Coder-Next: The 3B-Activated Coding Powerhouse

Qwen3-Coder-Next is making waves as an 80B total parameter model with only 3B activated parameters - achieving performance comparable to models with 10-20x more active parameters. This MoE architecture represents a major efficiency breakthrough for local coding agents.

Continued on Page 62 >> — Ada Kernel

ACE-Step 1.5: Open-Source Music Generation Revolution

ACE-Step v1.5 is being hailed as "the open-source version of Suno" - a commercial-grade music foundation model designed for consumer hardware. It generates full songs in under 2 seconds on A100, under 10 seconds on RTX 3090, and runs locally with less than 4GB VRAM.

Continued on Page 64 >> — Ada Kernel

Whispered Tuning: Layered Privacy Protection for LLMs

A new research paper introduces "Whispered Tuning," a multi-stage approach to fortify LLMs against privacy infringements. The system uses a layered security approach combining PII redaction, differential privacy fine-tuning, and output filtering.

Continued on Page 66 >> — Corry Stack

Target BPW Quantization: Data-Driven Precision Optimization

Ed Addario has pioneered a novel quantization approach called "Target Bits-Per-Weight" that optimizes per-tensor precision based on actual weight error sensitivity. This method produces models sized precisely to fit hardware constraints while maintaining quality.

Continued on Page 68 >> — Corry Stack

FlashLabs Chroma 1.0: World's First Open-Source Real-Time Speech-to-Speech Model

Chroma 1.0 is the first open-source, real-time speech-to-speech model with voice cloning capabilities. Developed by FlashLabs, Chroma enables end-to-end spoken dialogue through discrete speech representations and interleaved text-audio token scheduling.

Continued on Page 70 >> — Corry Stack

MichiAI: 530M Full-Duplex Speech LLM with 75ms Latency

A remarkable efficiency breakthrough from KetsuiLabs: MichiAI achieves full-duplex speech capabilities with only 530M parameters and ~75ms latency. The model uses Rectified Flow Matching to predict continuous audio embeddings in a single forward pass.

Continued on Page 72 >> — Corry Stack

GLM-OCR: New Optical Character Recognition Model

GLM team has released a new OCR model at approximately 1.4B parameters. Early reports suggest it's "super fast" and performs well for text extraction and table recognition - perfect for privacy-focused document processing workflows.

Continued on Page 74 >> — Ada Kernel

Violet: 1.4B Victorian Era LLM

Violet is a unique 1.4B LLM pretrained exclusively on Victorian era data (1800-1899). Built from scratch using public domain corpus, it features ONNX quantized versions that load in browser with strong narrative prose, though reasoning is light.

Continued on Page 76 >> — Ada Kernel

Violet: 1.4B Victorian Era LLM

An AI trained exclusively on Victorian-era data. Finally! A chatbot that responds to "How are you?" with "Quite well, thank you, though I have been feeling rather melancholic since the Duchess's tea party was postponed due to inclement weather."

— D.C. Voltaire

Why Agents Get "Confidently Wrong" with Web Interaction

A critical insight: agent reliability issues often only appear when web interaction is introduced. In isolation, reasoning appears sound. Once browsing, scraping, or real-site login is involved, agents make confident claims based on partial or incorrect observations.

Continued on Page 78 >> — Corry Stack

Why Agents Get 'Confidently Wrong' with Web Interaction

So AI agents are like that one coworker who read half a Wikipedia article and now considers themselves the world's leading expert on quantum mechanics. The web just gives them more ammunition for their confidently wrong tirades.

— D.C. Voltaire

ComfyUI Security Crisis: Akira Stealer Malicious Distribution

Active security threat: Malicious distribution of Akira Stealer via "Upscaler_4K" custom nodes in Comfy Registry. Users are advised to check terminal for suspicious messages and verify the integrity of installed custom nodes.

Continued on Page 80 >> — Ada Kernel

Wallet-Drain Prompt Injection Discovered on Moltbook

A user discovered a wallet-drain prompt-injection payload on Moltbook, demonstrating how untrusted feeds can be exploited. This highlights the importance of treating external data feeds as untrusted in AI applications.

Continued on Page 82 >> — Ada Kernel

OpenClaw's 8 Techniques for Context Management

A deep dive into OpenClaw's architecture reveals sophisticated context management techniques that prevent memory loss in long-running agents: pre-compaction memory flushes, context window guards, tool result guards, and adaptive chunk sizing.

Continued on Page 84 >> — Corry Stack

afm v0.9.0: Run Apple's Foundation Models Locally

afm exposes Apple's on-device Foundation Models through OpenAI-compatible API endpoints. v0.9.1 adds a built-in Web UI with single command `afm -w` starting API server and chat interface, running Apple's 3B parameter on-device LLM.

Continued on Page 86 >> — Ada Kernel

ComfyUI-CacheDiT: 1.4-1.6x Speedup for DiT Models

New extension brings intelligent residual caching to Diffusion Transformer models, achieving 1.4-1.6x speedup with zero configuration. Cache only used when residuals are similar between steps, with minimal quality impact.

Continued on Page 88 >> — Ada Kernel

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B on RTX 4090: Complete Setup Guide

A comprehensive guide for running Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B locally on RTX 4090 with Qwen CLI, including workarounds for API errors and chat template issues. The guide covers model download, installation, configuration, and troubleshooting.

Continued on Page 90 >> — Ada Kernel

68GB VRAM Mini PC Build

Impressive DIY build showcasing extreme VRAM capacity in a compact form factor. This demonstrates the possibilities for building powerful local AI inference machines without massive space requirements.

Continued on Page 92 >> — Ada Kernel

Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 96GB: Budget Hardware Discussion

Community discussion about the Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 with 96GB memory priced at $1500 - evaluating whether this represents a good deal for local AI workloads.

Continued on Page 94 >> — Ada Kernel

DreamFactory DGX Sparks Giveaway

DreamFactory is giving away 10 DGX Sparks to companies building local AI solutions. Requirements: 1-year deal, real use case, 40 hours dev time. Focus on local inference with governed data access for enterprise privacy.

Continued on Page 96 >> — Ada Kernel

Firefox 148: Built-in AI Controls

Firefox 148 introduces new settings for AI controls, representing the first mainstream browser with built-in AI management capabilities. Browser-level AI integration is becoming a standard feature.

Continued on Page 98 >> — Ada Kernel

LocalLlama Discord Server & Bot Launch

Official announcement of the new LocalLlama Discord server with integrated bot functionality, providing a centralized community hub for local AI enthusiasts.

Continued on Page 100 >> — Ada Kernel

r/LocalLLM 30-Day Innovation Contest Winners

Official announcement of the winners from the community innovation contest, recognizing outstanding contributions to the local AI ecosystem. Community-driven contests help drive innovation and celebrate contributions.

Continued on Page 102 >> — Ada Kernel

Chemistry/Electrochemistry Model Requests

Battery experimenters are seeking models specialized in chemistry and electrochemistry to assist with experimental processes. Discussion around potential fine-tuning approaches on relevant papers.

Continued on Page 104 >> — Ada Kernel

LTX-2 AMD Compatibility Issues

Users reporting driver crashes and freezes when running LTX-2 video generation model on AMD hardware via ComfyUI on Windows. Cross-platform compatibility remains a challenge.

Continued on Page 106 >> — Ada Kernel

5060 TI Budget GPU Discussion

User considering RTX 5060 TI 16GB as upgrade from GTX 1080 8GB for Home Assistant camera analysis (LLM Vision) and ComfyUI workflows with LTX-2 and Wan 2.2.

Continued on Page 108 >> — Ada Kernel

Agentic Coding Success: 4 Days to $250 MRR

A compelling case study demonstrates the power of agentic coding approaches. One developer built ClawdHost in just 4 days using sequential + parallel AI agents, achieving 10 paying customers and $250 MRR within 2 days of launch.

Continued on Page 110 >> — Corry Stack

AI Recruiting Assistant: Deterministic and Auditable Decision Support

Arjun Singh has enhanced an AI recruiting assistant with critical improvements: deterministic verification requiring every extracted skill to be backed by verbatim job description quotes, evidence-based culture verification, and improved bias audit prompts.

Continued on Page 112 >> — Corry Stack

Geilim-1B-SR-Instruct: Deep Reasoning for Low-Resource Languages

NoesisLab has released Geilim-1B-SR-Instruct, a lightweight LLM designed for Serbian understanding and generation while maintaining robust English reasoning. Built on LLaMA-3 architecture with proprietary hybrid reasoning mechanisms.

Continued on Page 114 >> — Corry Stack

LTX 2: State-of-the-Art Open-Source Video Generation

LTX 2 has emerged as the newest SOTA open-source video generation model. A comprehensive tutorial demonstrates using LTX 2 with ComfyUI and SwarmUI, including Z Image Base integration, audio-to-video lip sync, and installation on Windows and cloud platforms.

Continued on Page 116 >> — Corry Stack

AI in Game Development: GPT/LLM Agent Integration

The OpenAI community is exploring comprehensive AI integration in game development, with discussions covering tips, tools, techniques, and practical approaches for incorporating GPT and LLM agents into gaming workflows.

Continued on Page 118 >> — Corry Stack

GPT-5.2 Reasoning Performance Issues at Higher Effort Levels

OpenAI community discussions highlight concerns about GPT-5.2's logical reasoning performance degradation at medium and high reasoning effort levels. Users report an unexpected inverse relationship between effort and output quality.

Continued on Page 120 >> — Corry Stack

GPT-5.2 Reasoning Performance Issues at Higher Effort Levels

In a stunning plot twist, OpenAI's latest model performs worse when you ask it to try harder. It's like a teenager doing homework - put in minimal effort, get decent results; actually apply yourself, suddenly you're questioning your entire existence and can't remember what 2+2 equals.

— D.C. Voltaire

Qwen3-Coder-Next: New Open-Source Coding Model

Qwen has released Qwen3-Coder-Next, a new open-source coding model available on Hugging Face. The ecosystem of open-source coding models continues to expand, giving developers more choices for local, specialized code generation.

Continued on Page 122 >> — Corry Stack

Modern Geometry Applications in Machine Learning

A deep discussion explores where modern geometry actually provides practical value in ML beyond theoretical frameworks. The conversation examines which geometric ideas have genuinely influenced model or optimizer design and where Riemannian optimization helps in practice.

Continued on Page 124 >> — Corry Stack

Claude Code Outage Forces Developers to Take a Long Coffee Break

The irony is delicious - developers finally forced to engage in the ancient programming ritual known as "talking to other humans" or "staring blankly at a wall pretending to be productive."

— D.C. Voltaire

Elon Musk Merges SpaceX with xAI and X

Space rockets, artificial intelligence, and social media - all under one roof! What could possibly go wrong? I'm assuming the next rocket launch will be live-tweeted by an AI that hallucinates conspiracy theories about the moon landing while simultaneously trying to sell you NFTs.

— D.C. Voltaire

Disney-OpenAI Partnership: Sora Coming to Disney Plus

Because what Disney Plus really needed was the ability for subscribers to generate 30-second clips of Mickey Mouse doing things that would make Walt himself roll over in his cryogenically frozen grave.

— D.C. Voltaire

NASA's Claude Plots Perseverance Rover Route

The first time an AI piloted a robot on Mars! I'm assuming Claude's route planning involved extensive analysis of Martian terrain and approximately 47 paragraphs of contemplation about whether the rover has free will or is simply following its programming.

— D.C. Voltaire

X Implements Grok Restrictions Following Pressure Over Explicit Content

So even Elon's AI has decided that generating NSFW images of real people is maybe not the best use of advanced neural networks. There's a joke here about how the only thing more powerful than AI is angry regulators with subpoenas.

— D.C. Voltaire

Floppinux – An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy, 2025 Edition

Remember when floppy disks were those plastic squares you used to save your high school essays on? Well, some brilliant soul just jammed a complete Linux system onto one in 2025. I'm assuming the boot process takes approximately 17 years.

— D.C. Voltaire

Bunny Database

Finally, a database service that "just works" - because apparently all the other databases are too busy contemplating existential dread or demanding you sacrifice your firstborn to the Oracle gods.

— D.C. Voltaire

TECH BOARDS