Artificial intelligence
Models, services and practical uses of AI without the marketing noise
Journal topics
Microsoft discloses $101.9 billion in Azure revenue. Why GitHub left the metric
Microsoft is replacing three reporting segments with two. GitHub Cloud moves from Azure to Microsoft 365, while LinkedIn services split between enterprise businesses and advertising.
GPT-6 Astra: a million-token context with a long-request surcharge
Astra accepts over a million tokens, but higher rates start above 272,000. Caching makes repeated reads cheaper while the request stays in the long-context price bracket.
Gemini 3.8 Flash and GPT-6 Astra have a 13-fold gap in base rates
Google kept the previous Flash price but warned that token consumption may rise. The new model can reason for longer and call tools more often.
Anthropic will keep Claude activity logs in the customer’s cloud. What EFS changes
The architecture is intended to combine company control of activity data with misuse detection. It will roll out in phases this fall and does not turn Claude into an offline, locally operated system.
Five and a half hours of barely audible speech. Why Whisper large-v2 beat newer models
Six recordings, dozens of trials, and a sentence that appeared after 86 seconds of silence. We sought a modern open model for local transcription, but an older Whisper delivered the best result.
GLM-5.3 moved closer to the frontier. It still does not lead in coding
Z.ai’s release table shows a large gain over GLM-5.2, but it does not prove outright leadership. We examine what was measured, where vendor evidence ends, and how to test the model on a real repository.
The model that filled the queue: why Kimi K3 matters beyond its records
Demand forced Moonshot AI to pause new subscriptions. The more consequential event came later: the company released the weights of a model that had moved close to the strongest closed systems.