Government
US military officials in Ukraine for talks on ending war
Senior Pentagon officials have arrived in Ukraine to discuss efforts to end the war with Russia, the US military has said. The team, led by US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, is expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Thursday when he returns from a trip to Turkey. Reports began surfacing on Wednesday that the US and Russia had prepared a new peace plan, containing major concessions from Ukraine. Neither Washington nor Moscow has officially confirmed the plan. Earlier in the day, at least 26 people were killed in a Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine's western city of Ternopil, officials there said.
Long-form factuality in large language models Jerry Wei 1 Chengrun Y ang 1 Xinying Song 1 Yifeng Lu
To benchmark a model's long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT -4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning 38 topics. We then propose that LLM agents can be used as automated evaluators for long-form factuality through a method which we call Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (SAFE).
New NASA images confirm comet 3I/ATLAS is not aliens
The fast-moving comet likely comes from a solar system that is older than our own. This image shows the halo of gas and dust, or coma, surrounding comet 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar object ever detected by astronomers as it passes through our solar system. The image was taken on Oct. 9, 2025, by an instrument onboard NASA's MAVEN spacecraft, which has been studying Mars from its orbit since 2014. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Today, NASA released the most detailed images yet of 3I/ATLAS .
The US Needs an Open Source AI Intervention to Beat China
Depending on foreign-made open models is both a supply chain risk and an innovation problem, experts say. Since 2022, America has had a solid lead in artificial intelligence thanks to advanced models from high-flying companies like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and xAI. A growing number of experts, however, worry that the US is starting to fall behind when it comes to minting open-weight AI models that can be downloaded, adapted, and run locally. Open models from Chinese companies like Kimi, Z.ai, Alibaba, and DeepSeek are now rapidly gaining popularity among researchers and engineers worldwide, leaving the US as a laggard in an increasingly vital area of AI innovation. "The US needs open models to cement its lead at every level of the AI stack," Nathan Lambert, founder of the ATOM (American Truly Open Models) Project, tells WIRED.