Maligned - January 16, 2026
AI news without the BS
Here’s what actually matters in AI today. No fluff, no hype - just 5 developments worth your time.
Today’s Top 5 AI Developments
1. Tiny Titan: Open-Source Multimodal AI Outperforms Giants 🚀
Forget the massive models; STEP3-VL-10B, a compact 10-billion-parameter open-source model, is outperforming proprietary giants like Gemini 2.5 Pro. It achieves this by deeply integrating vision and language during a unified pre-training and then supercharging performance with scaled reinforcement learning. This is a game-changer for deploying powerful AI without immense compute, making frontier multimodal intelligence more accessible and efficient.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09668v1
2. LLMs Learn to Prune Themselves Smartly đź§
Traditional LLM compression often kills factual knowledge, but new research shows foundation models can intelligently prune other LLMs. This agent-guided pruning preserves critical information and drastically reduces performance degradation by adaptively selecting which layers to remove. It means we can get leaner, more efficient LLMs without sacrificing accuracy or requiring expensive retraining.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09694v1
3. Agentic AI Cuts Supply Chain Disruption Monitoring from Days to Minutes 📦
Supply chain disruptions are complex, but a new agentic AI framework can now autonomously monitor, analyze, and recommend solutions across deep-tier networks. This system reduces response times from typical multi-day human assessments to mere minutes, costing pennies per disruption. It’s a massive leap towards proactive, resilient supply chains, finally giving companies visibility beyond Tier-1.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09680v1
4. Real-Time Video Generation Gets 40x Faster 🎥
Generating high-quality video from diffusion models is a notorious compute hog, but a new method called SRENDER offers a 40x speedup for static scenes. It generates sparse keyframes with diffusion and then uses 3D rendering to fill in the gaps, maintaining visual fidelity and temporal stability. This is a practical breakthrough for real-time applications like embodied AI or VR/AR, making complex video synthesis viable.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09697v1
5. LLMs Finally Learn Basic Math with “Value-Aware” Tokens 🔢
LLMs often stumble on basic arithmetic because they treat numbers as mere symbols, not values. New “value-aware” numerical representations explicitly inject magnitude information into their token embeddings, making them much more robust. This simple yet effective approach significantly improves fundamental numerical understanding and accuracy, crucial for reliable quantitative reasoning in critical applications.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09706v1
That’s it for today. Stay aligned. 🎯
Maligned - AI news without the BS