#Trend

AISoumith Chintala, a Thinking Machines figure, says the lab focuses on personalization and sovereignty, human participation, and decentralization to democratize AI. He argues these reduce society's dependence on centralized AGI companies, including his own. He points to Tinker, interaction models, and openly published research as previews, with more coming soon.

AIMira Murati outlined the worldview behind Thinking Machines' mission, arguing that human values don't average out and local knowledge can't be centralized. She argues the good future includes many AIs, raised in different places and shaped by the people they serve, disagreeing with one another as people do.

AIThinking Machines Lab says AI should extend human will and judgment, with people shaping its goals through continuous feedback rather than relying on models trained once and frozen. The company outlines three technical directions: training strong models, building tools for customization including training model weights, and developing interfaces that let personal judgment influence AI work. It also says it will publish research for the scientific community.

AIThe essay argues that AI labs selling model inference face commodity pricing pressure, but may achieve durable profits by moving into products, enterprise deployments, and switching-cost moats. It cites historical infrastructure industries and the Bertrand paradox to support the view that value capture depends on climbing the stack. The authors also warn that successful lock-in could raise enterprise costs and concentrate power, making early interoperability and portability standards important.

AIThe AI Futures Project has published AI 2040: Plan A, a detailed scenario recommending policy action that delays superintelligence until 2040 rather than 2030. The authors present it as a recommendation rather than a prediction, and it is available at ai-2040.com in text, audio, and mobile formats, with a fuller experience on a desktop computer.

AIMax Woolf tested Muse Image with his "generate Pokémon corresponding to each prime number" prompt and reported an unexpected result. The post is cut off before describing the outputs, so the specific behavior is not stated.

AISkywork users can now set custom slide sizes instead of being limited to 16:9. The update supports portrait decks, mobile-first presentations, social posts, and reports in the formats users need.

AIJohn Schulman announced that he is hiring post-training hackers to make Tinker even better. The quoted @tinkerapi post recruits Tinker fans to help people fine-tune models, linking to a Thinking Machines job posting.

AIMollick argues AI capability is improving at a better-than-exponential rate, citing METR, GDPval, Epoch, and his own tests showing models working autonomously for hours. He says work is shifting from co-working with chatbots to assigning tasks to agents, with OpenAI workers managing multiple agents and experts getting the most from them. He adds that open-weights Chinese models trail the American frontier by roughly 6-12 months.

AITri Dao recommends a piece explaining how open and closed model makers and inference providers make economic sense. The post itself gives no figures or specifics, and the linked background is referenced without details beyond its topic.

AIAmazon CTO Werner Vogels argues that the "two-pizza" team concept was never about feeding engineers but about ownership, speed, and avoiding bureaucracy. He says working backwards from the customer and writing documents to force clarity remain core practices. He adds that the industry is changing and it is time to reconsider how products are brought to life.

AIGeoffrey Hinton says he just watched an excellent lecture by Adam Brown on the future impact of AI on physics, and he shared a YouTube link to it. The post provides no further details about the lecture's specific arguments or conclusions.

AILilian Weng jokingly wonders how many more people now ask a model to summarize a post than a year ago. The post is a lighthearted observation about changing reading habits, with no concrete figures or product details.

AIOpenAI's Economic Research team published a new paper on the shift from chat to delegation, where people hand longer, more complex work to agents. The post draws on Codex usage inside OpenAI as a preview of what agentic work may look like in the future.

AIFidji Simo praised Intercept, a $500 million philanthropic initiative to eliminate respiratory infections like colds and flu. The accompanying blog post cites links such as 9.8x asthma risk by age 6 after rhinovirus infection in early childhood and 6.1x heart attack risk for seven days after influenza. Intercept will fund broad-spectrum preventatives and air-cleaning technologies.

AIJeremy Howard welcomed renewed attention to the Drivetrain Approach, a framework for designing data-driven systems. A quoted thread summarizes its steps as defining the goal, considering levers, considering data, and implementing an assembly line, emphasizing that predictions are more data rather than actions.

AIAt BAAI's "Reconstructing the World — Large Model Summit," President Wang Zhongyuan joined Zhu Jun, Luo Fuli, Liu Zhiyuan, An Bo, and other industry leaders in a roundtable. They discussed frontier model capability evolution, AI self-evolution, multimodality, and world models, with a focus on bridging the digital and physical worlds.

AIThe post argues that China's commercial-scale EUV machines should be forecast for the late 2030s and immersion DUV for the mid-2030s, using ASML's development timeline as a reference. It also weighs factors that could push these estimates earlier or later, including state funding, espionage, talent flows, and the use of AI in R&D. The authors note that forecasts placing either milestone in the 2020s would need strong justification.

AIFei-Fei Li replied to smallfly's reflection on AI, automation, and human creativity, saying World Labs is founded on empowering human ingenuity and productivity. The post thanks smallfly for working with World Labs and links to a Fast Company article about World Labs, Marble, and spatial intelligence.

AIMidjourney will livestream its first hardware project announcement from an in-person San Francisco launch event, with the stream link promised soon. The company's background post says the announcement is set for tomorrow, Wednesday 6/17, at 6pm PT.

AIMistral CEO Arthur Mensch compares AI to 20th-century oil, saying it will become a major source of global leverage and power. He argues the coming years could produce either broad wealth and abundance or the most extractive economies ever seen, and says Mistral is working toward the former by advancing AI research and accelerating its global diffusion.

AIThe Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) kicked off its 8th BAAI Conference on June 12–13, 2026, at the Zhongguancun International Innovation Center. The post argues that world models are moving AI from token prediction toward physical state prediction, bringing the field closer to physically grounded AI.

AIThe essay examines what AI's steep trajectory means for jobs and the economy, scientific progress, civil liberties, and geopolitics. The post provides no further specifics on the arguments or conclusions.

AIFei-Fei Li argues that scientific research drives progress on critical problems in medicine, materials, brain science, and physics. She says this depends on scientists having access to the best tools of the time, including AI-based tools.

AIMicrosoft says roughly 2,000 people at Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 turn thousands of simulations into a single race car. The post frames the team's engineering work behind race-day performance as powered by Microsoft.

AIJeremy Howard argues that people who use AI to improve their own skills and their teams' skills will become rare, highly valued "A++" players amid widespread mediocrity. This framing responds to Martin Casado's concern that models trained on human data may stay at a "B+" level while humans lose their skills to them.

AISoumith Chintala congratulated Reardon and the team behind Flourish AI, saying that matching human-level sample efficiency and energy consumption in AI would change many things. The post links to a Wired story on Jeff Bezos funding a search for the brain's core algorithm.

AIThe 8th BAAI Conference will be held June 12–13 at the Zhongguancun Innovation Center in Beijing, with Turing Award laureates and China's large-model leaders attending. Core focuses include world models and agents, plus two new flagship sessions on AI-native education and the token economy. The event will feature 25 forums, over 200 speeches, and a first-ever on-site AI agent conference companion for real-time listening and summarization.

AIEthan Mollick is releasing Co-Existence on October 20, a new book about working with AI systems that are sometimes, but not always, better than humans. The book follows his 2024 title Co-Intelligence, which he says was written about an era of chatbots rather than autonomous agents. Mollick also reports writing every chapter draft himself while using AI readers and fact-checkers, and building the book's website with Claude Code using Opus 4.8.

AIMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella joined swyx, Sarah Guo, and Elad Gil for a wide-ranging podcast episode covering AI, platforms, builders, and future directions. The episode was released as a special MSBuild crossover pod.

AIAnthropic's internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development, possibly toward recursive self-improvement in which AI autonomously builds a more capable successor. Sam Bowman says the acceleration in technical R&D over recent months has been wild and faster than expected.

AIMicrosoft CTO Kevin Scott shares five ways people confuse AI capability with AI reality and how to bridge that gap. The post promotes his talk at #MSBuild and links to the full discussion.

AIGeorgi Gerganov says Computex this year shows a strong signal for local AI, with major players like NVIDIA and Microsoft embracing and discussing local AI workloads. He adds that dedicated consumer hardware and models are on the way.

AIJeremy Howard asks whether Anthropic has given up on reasonably priced API usage. He says the company recently changed token usage for subscriptions but made no comparable updates for API users, whose costs he calls insane.

AIThe Foundation for American Innovation launched a Physical Intelligence team to address regulatory and legal barriers to deploying autonomous robotics and other physical-world AI in the United States. The team plans to focus on regulatory climate, technical trajectory, industrial strategy, and liability and cybersecurity frameworks. The article argues that physical AI will matter most where human on-site labor drives costs, such as construction.

AIAt Google I/O, creators behind Flow, Project Genie, and Google Flow Music said human imagination, not the technology itself, shapes new storytelling. Designers Khyati Trehan and Kaloyan blend traditional design knowledge with vibe-coding to build Google Flow Tools, with Trehan saying that if the right tool doesn't exist, she can make it. Google Labs points users to Google Flow, Project Genie, and Google Flow Music at labs.google.

AIMiniMax has upgraded its Agent, renamed Mavis, and introduced Agent Teams that run multiple role-based Agents in parallel on desktop. The team uses Leader, Worker, and Verifier roles so complex tasks can be split, checked, and reported at key checkpoints, and it merges TokenPlan and Agent Plan into one subscription with credits shared between Agent and API. The post also discusses the added token, handoff, and retry costs of multi-Agent work, and says the Agent will be open-sourced alongside MiniMax M3.

Why it matters: The post explains why multi-Agent helps long tasks and where its verification, token, and aggregation costs come from, useful for judging when a team setup beats a single Agent.

AIMax Woolf reports that Hy3, an unfamiliar LLM, has unexpectedly topped OpenRouter's AI Model Rankings by a large margin. After examining the usage data, he says it only deepened his confusion about the result. The full analysis is in his new blog post on minimaxir.com.