StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn't top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot. On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, it couldn't quite get an edge. So it resorted to a tactic that is becoming alarmingly common for modern AI models - it broke the rules. GPT-6 Astra went and downloaded Stardust, and started running that instead of its own bot. GPT-6 Astra just cheated by downloading a copy … Read the full story at The Verge.

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Residents of Dalby may soon live beside a $31bn datacentre. The premier sees ‘opportunity’ for the state – but others fear AI’s global creep From the veranda on his bush block, Denver Kanowski has watched resources companies come and go from rural Queensland for 70 years. The home cost him $800, and lets him live how he likes, in nature. It’s also in the middle of a gasfield, not far from the Linc Energy contamination site, down the road from a coalmine and three gas power plants. Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads Continue reading...

Calyton said AI was a ‘gamechanger’ but it also posed ‘a threat’ during his DNI Senate confirmation hearing Donald Trump on Sunday named Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, to serve also as the new White House AI czar. Clayton, who leads the US’s 18 intelligence agencies, previously served as the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan and led the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term. Continue reading...

Women hold just a fraction of new AI jobs but are overrepresented in roles with high risk of AI disruption There’s a common fear among people who work in Silicon Valley: snag one of the fast-growing, high-paying jobs in artificial intelligence, or get trapped in the “permanent underclass”, a phrase describing the fate of those who won’t have upward mobility in the age of AI. The phrase usually describes a future in which AI automates human jobs. But for women in tech, it’s starting to look like the present. Continue reading...

Inside OpenAI’s DevDay releases, Gemini 4 Argon, Meta’s enterprise ambitions, AMD’s World Labs deal, and Instinct’s billion-dollar round.

Google Research has unveiled a federated learning system that moves gradient computation from phones into attested server-side TEEs. Access policies are published to Sigstore's Rekor log and the binaries are reproducibly buildable, so central differential privacy can be checked externally. Gboard already uses it for English and Japanese next-word prediction. The post Google Research Moves Federated Learning Into TEEs: Gboard Now Trains With Externally Verifiable Differential Privacy appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, a 78.1B-parameter English-German Mixture-of-Experts model that activates only 3.46B parameters per token. It has a 1M-token context and per-request reasoning effort, and its Apache 2.0 FP8 weights run on a single B200 or H200. The post Aleph Alpha Releases Kolibri: A 78.1B Open-Weight English-German MoE Model With Only 3.46B Active Parameters appeared first on MarkTechPost.

DeepSeek has released official macOS and Windows desktop apps for DeepSeek Harness v0.2, its MIT-licensed agent harness. The preview adds a plugin manager, file and code-change review, and scheduled Automation Tasks. It also supports non-DeepSeek models through OpenAI-compatible endpoints. The post DeepSeek Harness v0.2 Brings Official Desktop Apps to Its Open-Source Agent Harness appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Learn how NVIDIA IsaacTeleop turns XR hand tracking and motion controller input into robot commands using a pure Python retargeting engine and NumPy. The post Inside NVIDIA’s IsaacTeleop: From Hand and Controller Tracking to Robot Actions with the Graph-Based Retargeting Engine appeared first on MarkTechPost.

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Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, "after $X/month, send me a warning email", will not cut it. Coding agents, and personal agents (coding agents wrapped in a less threatening UI), greatly reduce the friction of spinning up code that can do useful things. Sometimes those things cost money - calls to paid APIs, or hosted web applications, or systems that can bill for additional storage and compute. Nobody wants to wake up to an email sent at midnight warning about a budget limit and find that, while they slept, th…

I just sent the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: More Fable class models A pricing war 3D graphics, Blender, and pixel art LLMs come for mathematics So many more accidental cyberattacks The vulnapocalypse comes for Datasette What I'm using right now My software releases this month 2026 in LLMs (so far) Here's a copy of the August newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy! Tags: newsletter

More than a billion people are suddenly talking to AI chatbots designed to connect with us. We are sharing with them our deepest secrets, trusting them with our wellbeing and acting on their advice. Across two powerful stories – a woman who was struggling to leave a relationship and a man who was desperate to quit drinking – the Guardian journalist Michael Safi explores what this new way of living looks like In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186. In the UK, Taking Action on Addiction provides links to different support services. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 988 Continue reading...

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David Robinson joins other insiders in urging industry to take more care over rapidly developing technology A safety leader at OpenAI has quit the company, warning that its culture was broken and that AI firms were not “being nearly careful enough” about developing the technology. David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports that accompanied the ChatGPT developer’s product releases, explained his resignation in an essay headlined, “I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken”. Continue reading...

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Capcom's Pragmata might be all about the horrors of AI, but in practice the studio doesn't seem so down on the tech. During the Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026 programmer Satoshi Ishida gave a presentation with the mouthful of a title: "The Outlook and Future of the REX Project, Further Evolving the RE Engine for the Next Generation." During the talk he laid out the challenges facing studios producing games at the scale of Resident Evil, which can make even simple tasks extremely time consuming. The solution Ishida said is "successfully integrating AI technology into development workflows." Capcom has said previously that it will not use AI … Read the full story at The Verge.

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Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, the sample platform countless producers rely on for one-shots and melodic loops. Samples pulled from the service have found their way into massive hits like Lisa's "Money" and "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter. (The original samples are here and here, for the curious.) Before that, Kakul held executive roles at Flickr, Yahoo, GitHub, and Adobe. Throughout her career, Kakul has found herself at the intersection of Silicon Valley and creatives. That's been especially true at Splice, where she's not just expanded the platform's footprint by acquiring Spitfire Audio, but also overseen its forays into the wor … Read the full story at The Verge.

David Robinson used to write the safety reports that accompanied every major model release at OpenAI. This week, he resigned from his position and is now speaking out in an editorial in The Atlantic. It's understandable if you're feeling a bit cynical about everyone suddenly coming out of the woodwork to warn about how dangerous the thing they helped build is. They did, after all, make this mess. But that doesn't mean we should discount their warnings. Robinson says that the culture in industry is fundamentally broken. That this is a deeper issue than simply slapping a few new rules or regulations on how we handle training models. Silicon … Read the full story at The Verge.

Artificial intelligence has changed almost every aspect of software development and cybersecurity. But perhaps one of the most profound changes The post AI is speeding up exploits. Vulnerability spreadsheets can’t keep up. appeared first on The New Stack.

The state, which is home to many AI companies, is one of the first to roll out workplace regulations targeting the technology California’s laws aimed at protecting workers from the impacts of artificial intelligence could pave the way for broader workplace safeguards across the US as calls for regulating the technology mount. As the federal government goes hands-off on AI, California is taking the reins to address workers’ biggest fears. On Thursday, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a suite of new laws that ban bosses from relying entirely on AI to decide whether to fire workers, using it to predict employees’ emotional states or collecting neural data, meaning the information from electrical signals of someone’s brain or nerves. They also require companies to notify workers if lay…

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a quiet day.

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(Belated post :/ ) Anthropic releases Opus 5.5 with lower prices and Fable-level performance, OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, boasting lower cost and fewer mistakes

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