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AIThree OpenAI safety researchers, Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, say they were fired last week for prioritizing safety over OpenAI's corporate interests, and published a letter to leadership. OpenAI reportedly says the three mishandled confidential information, while Korbak, who was the company's main technical contact with METR, says the dispute centered on his communications with METR.

AIAutonomous vehicle companies in China see a large market opportunity in delivering goods after dark, according to the article. The article says that opportunity depends on overcoming technical challenges, but the source does not specify which challenges or report any deployments.

AIPersonal AI agents can sometimes overshare, overpromise and overpurchase, according to the article's summary. The source text is brief, and it does not name specific products, companies or incidents.

AIJournalist Kylie Robison asks her followers to reply or DM a robotics startup or hobbyist they find especially interesting, with humanoids and other roving electronics named as areas of interest. The post contains no product, model, or company details beyond that request.

AIPresident Trump presented the National Medal of Science and National Medal of Technology and Innovation to tech leaders including Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Satya Nadella and Michael Dell at a Washington summit called the Golden Age of American Innovation. Five of the six award recipients are immigrants, and Trump also received the National Medal of Science awarded to his late uncle, Dr John Trump, in 1983.

AIBaiju Bhatt, founder and CEO of Cowboy Space, says the company is developing an energy grid in orbit. Its first satellite, Reason 1, reached orbit on a SpaceX rideshare, and the team is communicating with it daily.

AIThe AI-mperor has no clothes

AIFrançois Chollet argues that most AI progress measures from 2023 to 2026 fit an exponential curve, while AI capital expenditure over the same period has grown slightly super-exponentially. He concludes that such externally funded growth is unsustainable, so sustained exponential progress will require matching exponential profits to close the resource loop.

AIGergely Orosz argues that people chasing AI tools and scheduling software to look credible or influential are seeking shortcuts that don't exist. He says trust in a person or company cannot be gained through shortcuts, building on Lulu Meservey's point that credibility has become the scarcest resource.

AIPaige Bailey, who works on Google and Gemini, argues that building tools for humanity requires building them in collaboration with people. The quoted post from Pushmeet Kohli says Google DeepMind has focused on deep collaboration with the mathematical community to advance mathematics.

AIMIT Statistics and Data Science Center director Sasha Rakhlin argues that AI progress is fastest where results can be verified quickly, citing a model reaching gold-medal level at the International Mathematical Olympiad a year before models produced new research results. He says departments should reconsider how they reward work, emphasizing question-asking, replication, and disclosure of AI's role in a researcher's contributions. He also urges universities to build shared lab infrastructure that captures failed experiments and tacit expertise.

AIBen Tossell says "slop" is now also used to describe something just made that works, leaving its use to the reader. A reply from @forgebitz argues that much pre-AI code was also low quality.

AIYann LeCun compares AI to the invention of the boat, which reduced the importance of swimming but enabled the discovery of new lands. Kevin Weil highlights the analogy as a way to think about AI's opportunities and changes in mathematics and science.

AICarson Gross argues that programming is fundamentally about solving problems with computers and controlling the complexity of those solutions. He says he struggles to imagine a future in which those skills become less valuable, so he expects programming to remain a viable career despite AI tools.

AILauren Tan (@poteto) posts a short call for people to be far more ambitious. The post gives no specific project, metric, or context.

AIEthan Mollick observes that less than four years after an earlier model's debut, the Pope, leading mathematicians, and the U.S. President are all posting about its direct successor and its implications for humanity. The post does not name the models or specify what the successor does, so no details beyond this are supported.

AIZeta's conversation with Palantir CEO Alex Karp at #ZetaLive26 is now available to watch on YouTube. The discussion covered building the sovereign enterprise and where AI is taking business.

AINVIDIA congratulated CEO Jensen Huang on receiving the National Medal of Science for advancing GPU computing to power scientific breakthroughs. The post also honored fellow honorees Elon Musk, Lisa Su, Michael Dell, Satya Nadella, and Sergey Brin.

AILauren Tan argues that with frontier AI agents, anyone can produce code at machine speed, so PR volume now signals productivity alongside impact. She says the bottleneck is trust in agent output, and that higher token costs are worth it compared with hiring many engineers. She frames the engineer's job as building the software-producing machine rather than writing code directly.

AIArtificial Analysis has released full evaluation results for its Cyber Index, which the post links at artificialanalysis.ai. The post itself gives no models, scores, or other figures, so the details are only available through the linked page.

AIA 16-year-old hiker, Bryce Vincent Gowryluk, was rescued in British Columbia after route directions from the AI chatbot Claude led him to the base of the Widowmaker Arete, a climbing wall requiring ropes and cams. Rescuers said he was "far off" his intended route to Crown Mountain, and North Shore Rescue had to hoist two members down to lift him out. Search manager Paul Markey warned hikers not to rely blindly on AI for route planning.

AIEpoch AI estimates the AI chips shipped through 2027 could support about 30 to 170 million concurrent frontier-model agents, or nearly 2 billion with cheaper models. Its researchers find the cost of a fixed level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter over the past three years. The newsletter also reports China's semiconductor supply-chain exposure is 2.7 times that of the US.

AILettering artist Jessica Hische designed the M logo for Meta's new AI assistant Muse, a two-day freelance sprint she says paid about $12,500. She said she took the job to cover payroll for her Oakland shops, and the decision drew heavy criticism from fellow designers on Threads.

AINathan Lambert says he is about to discuss how open science can still address some of the hardest problems in AI safety and diffusion. He calls this the most complex engineering problem humanity has undertaken so far.

AIRobot Entertainment Kombat, founded by Cix Liv, hosted a September 18 San Francisco event where a human fought a remotely controlled robot and lost each match, leaving with a hand injury. The California State Athletic Commission sent a cease-and-desist, saying the fights were unsanctioned and require approval before any bout involving a human. REK plans a robot deathmatch later this month with remotely controlled bots equipped with weapons.

AIArena is recruiting through its careers page, and @johnnnavent is hiring a designer for its consumer app at arena.ai. The designer role calls for deep consumer experience and work at the frontier of AI.

AIMuse, the AI assistant, read the headers of a phishing email, traced its spoofed domains, and drafted an AWS takedown report in about ten minutes. The post's author, @accuratetlm13, reports this after receiving the spam email, framing it as a warning to phishers.

AIOpenAI is rolling out GPT-6.1 Sol Ultrafast, which generates tokens up to 8x faster than Sol Standard. On the API it costs $12 per 1M input tokens and $60 per 1M output tokens, and the main post says it is just 1.2x the cost of Astra.

AIActor Ben Affleck drew attention this week for explaining machine learning concepts, including convolutional neural networks, tensors, and transformers, in several recent interviews. He said he fine-tuned open video models by unfreezing weights and training only the last cinematic layer, using a dataset he built over about eight months for his startup. Affleck said he worries about students and learned helplessness more than Skynet, and predicted AI will be additive to the movie business.

AITrump disclosed more than 500 securities transactions in August, including a purchase of up to $25 million in Meta stock and up to $5 million in SpaceX senior unsecured notes. The filing, which reports trades in value ranges, shows total activity of roughly $74.3 million to $273.3 million according to a CNBC analysis. The SpaceX notes were bought two days before Trump signed a national space transportation policy, and the White House says the portfolio is independently managed.