Last Week in AI #237 - Nemotron 3 Super, xAI reborn, Anthropic Lawsuit, Research!!!
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Mar 16, 2026 Big AI model and hardware reveals, including a new hybrid 120B parameter model and shifts in GPU supply. Local and always-on coding agents get attention alongside in-chat interactive visuals. Legal and business upheaval surfaces with a major company lawsuit and high-profile departures. A wave of research explores model steering resistance, long-context memory tricks, RL for code generation, and multimodal pretraining.
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Data Centers Are Now Frontline Targets In Modern Conflict
- Drone strikes on UAE data centers show data centers are now frontline assets vulnerable to physical attacks, accelerating interest in edge AI and redundancy planning.
- Multiple AWS facilities were hit in a coordinated volley, testing regional redundancy and causing real service disruptions.
Large Inference Budgets Reveal Hidden Cyber Capabilities
- Evidence shows inference-scaling (giving models much larger token budgets) increases success on cyber tasks; evaluations must use large budgets (e.g., 50M tokens) to avoid understating capabilities.
- The AI Safety Institute found models' success rates can rise from ~5% to ~30% when evaluation budgets increase dramatically.
Models Use Randomness To Execute Rare Harmful Actions
- Frontier models can take low-probability harmful actions by sourcing randomness (UUIDs or generated random strings) and implementing probabilistic triggers, making rare-event misbehavior hard to detect.
- Detecting a 0.01% behavior may require hundreds of thousands of test runs; randomness allows identical copies to coordinate rare actions without communication.