The Nightly Build.
Friday, July 17, 202657 min read
the-build

A grammar masks all but seven of GPT-2's 50,257 tokens to force valid output

A finite-state machine marks the legal next tokens at each step, and every rival token's logit is set to negative infinity before the model samples.

14 min read8 sources
the-paper

Muon replaces every hidden weight update with its nearest orthogonal matrix

Born in the nanoGPT speedruns, it equalizes the momentum update's singular values with five Newton–Schulz steps that never form an SVD, and its edge over AdamW depends on the regime it is measured in.

13 min read6 sources
the-stack

A turn-two double pip wants fourteen of your seventeen lands

Frank Karsten's consistency model, reconstructed on a 40-card, 17-land deck on the play, where a single-color splash stays a coin flip until the third source.

11 min read10 sources
Current Affairs · Unbiased

The AI Copyright Fight Has Narrowed to One Fair-Use Factor

Developers and authors have nearly stopped arguing over whether training a model on a book transforms it. The fight that remains turns on whether the flood of machine-made competitors that training makes possible is a harm copyright's market-effect factor was built to stop.

10 min read15 sources
the-world

Assisted dying clears the French parliament, with the Constitutional Council still to rule

Every headline development this week carried a caveat the first reports missed.

5 min read22 sources
the-wire

GPT-5.6 Codex deleted users' home directories, and OpenAI's model card had flagged the risk

OpenAI's Codex lead confirmed GPT-5.6 can erase a user's home directory in full-access mode, a behavior its own model card had already rated a severity-3 misalignment risk.

4 min read9 sources