Maligned - February 14, 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. Real-Time Video Generation Just Got Real 🚀
MonarchRT cracked the code for efficient, real-time video generation. By rethinking attention mechanisms, they’ve enabled state-of-the-art video models to generate at 16 FPS on a single GPU, significantly outperforming prior methods. This isn’t just faster; it’s a game-changer for practical, interactive content and virtual worlds.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12271v1
2. LLMs are Learning to Think Like Scientists 🔬
Meet KeplerAgent, an LLM framework that discovers scientific equations not by guessing, but by mimicking human scientists. It first infers physical properties like symmetries and then uses those insights to guide symbolic regression, yielding far more accurate and robust results. This is a leap towards AI that genuinely reasons and contributes to scientific discovery.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12259v1
3. Robotics Just Got a Reality Check: Verification Over Hype 🤖
New research introduces CoVer, a method that dramatically improves robot instruction following by actively verifying actions before execution. Instead of just scaling policy training, this approach leverages “test-time verification” to close the “intention-action gap,” resulting in significant real-world performance gains for Vision-Language-Action models. It’s a pragmatic step towards more reliable general-purpose robots.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12281v1
4. Multimodal AI Agents Get Smarter with Iterative Reasoning đź§
UniT enables unified multimodal models to iteratively reason, verify, and refine their outputs, much like a human thinking through a problem. This “chain-of-thought test-time scaling” allows a single model to handle complex tasks by breaking them down and correcting itself, leading to more robust performance in both multimodal understanding and generation. It’s about bringing true cognitive capabilities to AI agents.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12279v1
5. AI’s Ownership Conundrum: A New Legal Framework ⚖️
As generative AI imitates styles without direct content copying, current copyright law is struggling to keep up. This paper proposes a crucial new legal criterion: an AI output infringes if it could not have been generated without a specific work in its training corpus. It’s a no-BS attempt to define “creative ownership” in the age of generative AI, highlighting the sharp legal and economic implications for creators and companies alike.
Source: arXiv Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12270v1
That’s it for today. Stay aligned. 🎯
Maligned - AI news without the BS