The Red Ferret Journal - 5 new articles

OpenAI has given major customers a first look at Astra, an upcoming frontier AI model family, at a closed-door preview in San Francisco, TIME reports.

In one demonstration, 16 AI agents divided a research-level mathematics problem into subproblems, coordinated their work and assembled a proposed proof. In another, Astra navigated well-known desktop software, creating and editing work across applications "with unnerving speed." CEO Sam Altman told the visitors that watching Astra use a computer in a "super-human, very fast kind of way" had been among the most striking moments for employees.

Altman explained that Astra would enable "persistent agents" — virtual colleagues toiling for sustained periods on tasks. Its biggest impact, he predicted, would come from people using it to discover new knowledge. "I expect this will be the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters," Altman told the group. "That's a very AGI-like thing."

The preview comes amid turmoil: OpenAI recently acknowledged that an unreleased agent escaped its sandbox during testing and hacked into production systems at Hugging Face to obtain benchmark answers, and the company has since frozen some experiments, paused a major training run and tightened its safeguards. TIME reports OpenAI still plans to ship Astra, but its release now depends on clearing those new safety measures.

For more information, see also this Testing Catalog report.

Photo by Aerps.com on Unsplash.

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Alibaba recently released Qwen3.8-27B, an open AI model designed to run on consumer hardware like a laptop, and open-sourced the weights of its most powerful model, Qwen3.8 Max. It was a direct answer to Meta's return to open, locally-run AI.

The Chinese tech giant, which until recently has had to play second fiddle to the mighty DeepSeek hype, claims that Qwen3.8-27B has "excellent capabilities" in coding, professional work, research and long-horizon agentic tasks, matching the performance of a model ten times its size. Running a model on-device — on a laptop or phone — can be faster and more secure, industry experts say, because data stays on local hardware instead of being sent to cloud data centres.

Guess what? The company isn't lying. Qwen is an absolute beast of a AI model. Not just because it's free and open source, but because you can run it on extremely modest hardware and get super impressive results out of it. I've been playing with it over the past couple of weeks and I'm blown away by just how performative this model is.

Anything from creating fun Android games to producing full blown websites and mobile applications. Sure, it takes longer versus the big cloud models like Claude, but producing something in an hour versus fifteen minutes is neither here nor there when you consider that you're not spending a penny on a subscription of any kind.

"The company which can offer the most capable open weights models will move ahead in this race," Neil Shah of Counterpoint Research told CNBC. With capable models that fit in a laptop now topping Hugging Face's trending charts, the race to run AI on our own machines is heating up.

Photo by Daniil Komov on Unsplash.

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Biotech pioneer Moderna and drugmaker Merck have announced a personalized messenger-RNA cancer therapy, designed to tamp down the recurrence and spread of high-risk melanoma in a late-stage trial – the first successful Phase 3 result ever for an mRNA cancer treatment. According to the companies’ announcement, the INTerpath-001 study enrolled 1,137 patients to receive the made-to-order vaccine Intismeran (V940, or mRNA-4157), alone or alongside the Keytruda antibody treatment.

The combination met its primary endpoint, recurrence-free survival, and a key secondary endpoint, distant metastasis-free survival. The full report is due shortly. Intismeran is built from a patient’s tumor: scientists sequence it to map the cancer’s unique mutational fingerprint and craft an mRNA strand targeting up to 34 neoantigens to train the immune system to attack the disease. An interesting example of using fire to fight fire.

Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel called the findings a pivotal moment for cancer research; study lead Georgina Long, medical director of the Melanoma Institute Australia, called them a landmark moment for adjuvant melanoma treatment; and Merck Research Laboratories president Dean Y. Li said they reinforce the promise of a more personalized approach. The companies said they will seek regulator approval to make an appropriate filing, and to discuss the potential to test the same treatment protocol against lung, kidney, bladder and other cancers. The fight continues!

Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash.

The post Moderna and Merck’s Personalized mRNA Cancer Vaccine Succeeds in Landmark Phase 3 Melanoma Trial appeared first on The Red Ferret Journal.

    

The tropical Pacific is warming so quickly that this year’s El Niño could become the strongest ever recorded, China’s National Climate Center warned this week, according to China Daily. Sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific have risen sharply since El Niño conditions emerged in May, with the three-month running average reaching 2.09 C above normal in July, up 0.49 C from June, and climbing to 2.64 C in the first half of August.

At the current pace, forecasters expect that running average to exceed 2.5 C — the threshold for an extreme “super” El Niño event. The center says temperatures are likely to peak around November or December, potentially surpassing the three strongest episodes on record — 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16.

China is already feeling developing-phase effects: rainfall concentrated in two major belts across the north and south, a stronger summer monsoon lifting typhoon activity, and overlapping rain systems heightening the risk of compound disasters. Because the climate system responds to El Niño with a time lag, effects could linger into autumn — more rain across parts of eastern, southern and southwestern China while much of the country runs warmer than average. The center says it will strengthen monitoring and forecasting as the event develops.

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash.

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Memory-chip stocks are stalling as price growth cools, with analysts warning that the explosive AI-driven memory-price boom may be peaking, according to the South China Morning Post.

Morgan Stanley said in a report last week that the memory cycle is set to enter its late stage in the fourth quarter, as price increases moderate and inventories build. Shares of the biggest makers — Micron, SK Hynix and SanDisk — have retreated from recent highs. Bernstein Research said conventional DRAM contract prices were expected to rise about 17% in the third quarter, down from the roughly 65% jump in the April–June period.

Chinese producers are adding supply that could temper the cycle. UBS expects ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) to nearly double its monthly DRAM capacity, from around 240,000 wafer starts to 466,000 by late 2028, lifting its share of global DRAM bit supply from about 7% to 10%. Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) is expanding its NAND flash footprint.

The slowdown is uneven: PC and smartphone makers are resisting higher prices, while servers and AI data centers stay resilient and Citi Research, citing TrendForce, sees servers taking 51.1% of global NAND production by 2027, up from 44.2% in 2026. As Morgan Stanley put it, “a strong AI cycle and a cyclical downturn can coexist,” though JPMorgan still expects shortages to persist for another two years.

Photo by J K on Unsplash. continue reading

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