not much happened today

**Microsoft** released the detailed technical report for **MAI-Thinking-1**, a generalist reasoning model trained without third-party distillation, achieving **97% on AIME 2025** and outperforming Sonnet 4.6 in human preference tests. The report was praised for transparency, revealing no synthetic data use, a unique scaling ladder recipe, and detailed training data composition including **50% code** and **17.5% STEM**. Microsoft also introduced **Frontier Tuning** for workflow-specific model adaptation, claiming efficiency gains up to **10×** and GPT-5.4-level quality in Excel tasks, alongside new models like **MAI-Image-2.5** and **MAI-Code-1-Flash**. Meanwhile, **Google** launched **Gemma 4 12B**, an Apache 2.0 multimodal model with an innovative encoder-free architecture designed for on-device use with **16GB VRAM**, collapsing vision and audio encoders into the LLM backbone, receiving positive community feedback and immediate tooling support.