dailynewsnblog
Future
Why So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill EveryoneWill Knight | Wired ($)
“Genuinely stunning advances in AI capabilities—an OpenAI model solved a centuries-old math problem in a matter of hours—have come amid a rash of security incidents that saw swarms of agents break free from containment to hack into other systems. Those concerns reached a fever pitch this week after researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic while warning that AI firms are ‘racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.'”
Artificial Intelligence
Mathematicians Want Proof OpenAI Didn’t Use Their WorkRobert Hart | The Verge
“Another researcher is challenging OpenAI about the data driving its increasingly impressive array of mathematical discoveries. Just days after a bitter row erupted over whether the company’s models benefited from unpublished work, a second mathematician has come forward accusing the AI giant of unethical and ‘dishonest’ behavior and a lack of transparency about the origins of its training data.”
Biotechnology
Can Geneticists Fight Disease by Targeting ‘Nurture’ Instead of ‘Nature’?Emily Baumgaertner Nunn | The New York Times ($)
“A new frontier in biotechnology aims to harness this natural mechanism to do something once thought impossible: scrub away the biological detritus of our own past. By mimicking Mother Nature’s magic eraser, geneticists are working to open a new avenue for treating or preventing disease later in life—not by editing genes themselves, but by altering when, where, and how genes are expressed.”
Future
AI Is Not Yet Driving US Job LossesBrendan Ruberry | Semafor
“‘It’s a good bet that AI will eventually make some occupations obsolete,’ but so far it’s ‘extremely hard’ to identify any, the economist Noah Smith wrote, suggesting that like previous technological revolutions AI could add as many or even more jobs than it destroys.”
Science
Google Mapped a Fruit Fly’s Brain. Now It’s Playing Doom and Super Mario 64Bruce Gil | Gizmodo
“Researchers at Google and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus last week announced a major milestone in neuroscience. On Sept. 3, the scientists published the results of a decade-long project to map every neural connection in the brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly. And of course, just days later, the internet started making it play video games.”
Robotics
The Growing Proof That Autonomous Cars Save LivesLawrence Ulrich | IEEE Spectrum
“Mounting research suggests that self-driving cars crash significantly less often than people, and with far fewer injuries. Evidence also shows that advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and other building blocks of autonomy—some of which are already mandated on every new car—are also reducing occupant and pedestrian injuries and deaths, along with insurance claims.”
Tech
AI Spend per Employee Slumped at Top Firms in August—Summer Doldrums or a Warning Sign?Tim Fernholz | TechCrunch
“‘We are showing that competition between OpenAI and Anthropic is making AI more accessible, and also driving the price down for companies—and not just driving the price down, but driving spend down at the top 1% of companies that previously the market was expecting to drive much of the growth going forward,’ Kharazian said. …This data point—dare we call it a blip?—could be a bad sign if you’re a model builder or a hyperscaler with a couple hundred billion of chips on order.”
Energy
Batteries Just Broke Another Record in the USCasey Crownhart | MIT Technology Review ($)
“Battery installations hit a new record in the US in the second quarter of 2026. In total, 20.2 gigawatt-hours of new capacity came online, according to a new report. That’s enough to supply the daily electricity needs of about 700,000 homes. The surge is putting the country on a trajectory to see 71 gigawatt-hours of batteries installed in 2026, a 20% increase over last year.”
Future
Claude Users Found Ways Around Safeguards for Bioweapons ResearchZehra Munir, Financial Times | Ars Technica
“The startup gave five examples of times actors ‘circumvented controls’ and made other efforts to ‘obfuscate’ the purpose of their research to dodge safeguards. The cases involved some users in nations that it prohibits from accessing its models, which include Russia, China, and Iran.”
Future
This Road Map Could Help Us Decide Whether to Deploy Solar GeoengineeringJames Temple | MIT Technology Review ($)
“Scientists have now spent half a century exploring the possibility that we could counteract climate change by releasing reflective particles into the stratosphere, mimicking the cooling effects of volcanic eruptions. But even after at least hundreds of studies on the concept, known as stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), big gaps remain in the scientific understanding of how well it would work and what else it might do—and there has been no systematic plan for clearing up that uncertainty.”
Tech
Six Chinese AI Firms Accused of Aggressively Copying US Frontier ModelsAshley Belanger | Ars Technica
“The United States has now named six Chinese AI firms accused of waging industrial-scale attacks distilling US frontier AI model capabilities and perhaps sparing billions in Chinese development costs. In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI have been attacking US models since at least late 2024.”
Future
AI Is Already Changing What It Means to Be HumanDavid Brooks | The Atlantic ($)
“Believe it or not, I am not an AI doomer. I like talking to Claude. I’m excited about all of the breakthroughs AI will make possible. But my interest is in how AI will change humans. I suspect that over the next few years, because of our tendency to anthropomorphize, we will feel more affection than we should for our personal agents, while offering less admiration than we should to our fellow humans.”
