Featherless AI

Today we're announcing our $20 M Series A, co-led by @AMDVentures and @AirbusVentures, with @BMWiVentures, @Kickstartph, @PanacheVC, and @Wavemaker_VC. We're building the neutral layer for open models — so the future doesn't run on a few labs, a few chips, or a few clouds. THE FUTURE CAN’T BE BLOCKED. Any Model. Anywhere. Anyone. Yours.

50+ teams, 36 hours, and real challenges from Raiffeisen Bank Romania, @stripe and QA DNA at the NEXXT AI Hackathon in Bucharest! Nobody was building for the sake of a demo. Teams went after real business problems in growth, operations and embodied AI, and a lot of them got surprisingly far in a very short time. Our very own @GFarauanu took the stage to introduce Featherless AI to the local community. With our team spread across the US, Europe, Singapore and Australia, it’s not often we get to show what we build in his home city. The short version for anyone who missed it: we run 50,000+ open-source models behind one API, built in partnership with @AMD, which is how we keep costs at a fraction of what most providers charge. George is back tomorrow for mentorship sessions. If any team wants to keep building on open models after the hackathon, his DMs are open!

October 2026 might be the month math AGI was achieved -- we've compiled some of the highlights you should know about: Oct 6: OpenAI publishes 722 math manuscripts from an unreleased model, across 17 fields Oct 8: DeepMind’s AlphaProof Nexus lands in Science, solving 9 open Erdős problems, two of them open for over 50 years Oct 15: Shanghai AI Lab’s Intern-S2 and a human team prove the 3D case of the Ghys conjecture (open since 1995), checked in Lean Oct 21: Microsoft Research, with AI agents exploring ~100 research paths, proves the KLS conjecture (also open since 1995) Oct 26: OpenAI announces three results across math, CS and physics, including a refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis Oct 26: Anthropic reveals a Claude research model refuted the ETH independently, finding it the same day as OpenAI’s Oct 26: Physical Superintelligence posts five open quantum problems, each with a Lean proof Oct 27: Axiom formalizes the Classification of Finite Simple Groups, 15,000 pages, 43M lines of Lean in 24 days, and finds errors in a 1986 proof along the way These are just the results that have been made public. Meanwhile, mathematicians are pushing back. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and AI is calling on OpenAI to release its Yang–Mills outputs now.

Another standout line from Anthropic’s S-1: “...considerations relating to model safety, interpretability, alignment, and welfare may lead us to limit or delay the deprecation of older models.” Should a model’s welfare decide when it gets retired?

Last week we said MiniMax M3.1 Flash was built for agentic work. Turns out that includes oil painting! This demo writes every brushstroke as code for an oil-paint simulator, checks the canvas, and fixes what it doesn’t like. This is 12 passes of that: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. Simulator by @aliceisplaying: github.com/aliceisjustplayin… @MiniMax_AI's M3.1 Flash is live on Featherless!

Anthropic’s S-1, in their own words: open-weight models “may capture a portion of the market… exert pricing pressure… lead certain customers to adopt open-source alternatives.” And one paragraph earlier: competition “could increasingly depend on access to large-scale compute rather than on model development capability.” In short: open source is good for everyone.

We’ve seen people still running Llama 2 in 2026. Too many teams have no idea what models they’re actually running, what they’re paying for them, or why they chose them. That’s why our CEO @picocreator took the stage at @aiDotEngineer NYC with a workshop on exploding token bills, and how to get yours back under control. Full talk below! youtube.com/watch?v=Ti-BmGU1…

Space Bunny is here! Congrats to @MiniMax_AI on the launch of MiniMax M3.1 Flash 🚀 It’s the best open-weights model on @ArtificialAnlys’ AutomationBench, and it costs a fraction of what closed models charge per task. Open models keep getting better and cheaper. The weights drop on Oct 23, live on Featherless the same day: featherless.ai/model-pages/m…

The Featherless team is LIVE at @aiDotEngineer NYC! Join us as @picocreator delivers a talk on Tokenomics -- how to grab back your out-of-control token spending!

Today in AI: Can frontier language models control a robot? The answer is, to some extent, yes! None of these models were trained to drive a robot arm. They're writing "hello world" with a pen, zero-shot. Our prediction: the next major upcoming frontier for open source AI is robotics, it is simply just bottlenecked by the physical world. Robots need models that run locally, cheaply, and that you can fine-tune on your own data, which is where open source models fit perfectly.

Today, we are announcing Featherless. It is here: featherless.ai/

Today in Open Source AI: Step 5 Preview! - 600B parameters total - Only 27B active per token, about 4.5% of the model being activated any time - 1M tokens in and out - About 1/8 the cost per task of Claude Opus 5 (per Artificial Analysis) Check it out 👀