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THE YEAR FINDING AND EXPLOITING BUGS BECAME CHEAP, AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT

Over the next few years, offensive capability will become abundant. More people will be able to inspect every valuable project and exploit vulnerabilities. Handling critical bugs in a timely manner will become the most challenging and important task for defenders. Having good security infrastructure and integration will be a must. AI-assisted formalization will lower some of the cost, but writing the right specification and connecting proofs to production code will remain challenging.

PRODUCT MANAGER, APPLIED AI AT TLDR ($200K BASE + $60K BONUS, FULLY REMOTE)

TLDR is hiring its first PM to help build the agent-first operating layer used across the company. We're looking for a builder who has shipped real products/systems with LLMs. Click here to learn more [16].

DE-BRAINROT VACATIONS

The monotony of work can make it hard to keep a clear head. Spend your vacations doing something different for your brain. Slow down and double down on new habits you want to grow. Spend time in nature, socialize, play games, engage with hobbies, and you'll notice you might start being less intellectually lazy during your day-to-day activities.

FOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT AGI

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as the term is commonly used, points to nothing really tangible or concrete and points us at the wrong thing. Recent announcements about AGI are just companies saying they've nearly arrived at a destination they defined themselves. Instead of trying to define AGI, the industry should focus on making a long series of specific things reliable enough to trust, and let the destination take care of itself.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM CLAUDE'S FABLE 5.1 SYSTEM PROMPT

Comparing how system prompts develop over time demonstrates how model quirks and product design are moving targets.

SIMPLE IS NOT SMALL

Writing simple programs requires a good mental model of the program as well as good taste.

ONE FLOOR UP

Someone working outside an experiment can still be affected by what happens inside it.

TESLA CYBERCAB SPECS: SUPERMANIFOLD V3, NO RARE EARTH MAGNETS, & MORE

This article details the Tesla Cybercab's dimensions, mechanical packaging, and custom thermal hardware.

HUAWEI LAUNCHES MATE XT 2 TRI-FOLD TWO DAYS BEFORE APPLE'S FOLDABLE IPHONE

Huawei's new tri-folding phone, the Mate XT 2, opens to a 10.2-inch display.

RUFF, MYPY, PYTEST, AND THEN WHAT?

Code that is well-structured is easier to maintain and also easier for agents to work with.

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RESEARCH ACCELERATION: THE VIEW INSIDE OPENAI

OpenAI believes that Artificial General Intelligence must be democratically governed for it to benefit all humanity. This can only happen through an informed public debate on the capabilities, risks, and safeguards of highly capable AI systems. The company has released details of its progress towards Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) in recent months. It plans to continue to be transparent about its progress with RSI and believes that other companies should be required to publicly track their progress as well.

TIM COOK'S CEO-LIKE PAY PACKAGE SHOWS HE ISN'T GOING ANYWHERE

Tim Cook remains a powerful center of gravity at Apple. He will play an especially crucial role in certain areas, such as the company's dealings with the US and China, and its handling of the memory shortage. Cook will get a base salary of $2 million, twice the typical base salary of senior vice presidents and members of the C-suite. He will also receive cash bonuses and stock units that vest over time. The salary clearly shows that Cook's role will be very active.

TRAVIS KALANICK'S ATOMS MIGHT BE GETTING INTO THE ROBOTAXI BUSINESS

Atoms, founded by Uber founder Travis Kalanick, is reportedly preparing for a hiring and acquisition spree. The company is also in discussions with Uber about how Uber can use Atoms' robotaxi technology. Uber has invested $100 million in Atoms. Kalanick has been cagey about his plans for the startup, but the recent moves could make it a major player in the autonomous vehicle industry.

THE CURIOUSLY PLAYABLE UNIVERSE

A domain becomes playable when enough of its complexity can be compressed into a state where there is some reasonably stable repertoire of actions, interactions can be repeated, outcomes provide feedback about better and worse play, and the environment is stationary enough that lessons learned yesterday remain useful tomorrow. None of these conditions need to be perfect, as playability is a matter of degree. Far more of reality than we have previously expected can be turned into a game. Once something can be turned into a game, then it's possible to create a system that can beat it.

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I TRUST MY CODING AGENTS WITH PRODUCTION SECRETS NOW

Security is always a productivity-risk tradeoff. Not giving access to agents can slow things down significantly. Frontier models are getting better and better at distinguishing real from malicious instructions in the content they read. We may end up trusting agents with access more than humans as models improve.

TERRAFORM IN LEAN 4: IF IT COMPILES, IT WILL LIKELY DEPLOY

infra is an infrastructure-as-code tool that does what Terraform does. Users declare what resources they want, and infra looks at what their cloud accounts actually contain and reconciles the difference. This post details how its developer created the tool in two weekends in Lean 4, the problems it solves, and how the developer solved these problems.

PRODUCT MANAGER, APPLIED AI AT TLDR ($200K BASE + $60K BONUS, FULLY REMOTE)

TLDR is hiring its first PM to help build the agent-first operating layer used across the company. We're looking for a builder who has shipped real products/systems with LLMs. Click here to learn more [13].

AN INTERVIEW WITH OPENAI PRESIDENT GREG BROCKMAN ABOUT ASTRA AND ALIGNMENT

OpenAI's president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, dropped out of college in 2010 to join Stripe. He eventually rose to become the company's CTO. He left in 2015 and co-founded OpenAI, where he served as CTO, and after a few years, he is now the company's president. This post features an interview with Brockman recorded before the announcement of Astra. It covers Brockman's background, the ChatGPT launch, OpenAI's place in the value chain, the company's commitment to alignment, the Hugging Face incident, and more.

THE LOOP CLOSES

AI models are now capable of taking a request from Slack and then building a feature from end-to-end, with humans just having to click 'merge' or 'deploy' at the end. There's not really much left for humans to do. Humans are still better at absorbing, parsing, and sharing context with each other. However, once that can be automated, the loop will finally be closed, and there will be nothing left to do but to pay the bill.

WE TAUGHT A FRUIT FLY TO HEAR HUMAN EMOTION

Researchers built a neural network from a map of a fly brain and then trained it to recognize emotion in human voices.

CAN TESLA CYBERCAB ACTUALLY KILL UBER? DAY-TWO PRICING FROM AUSTIN

Real-world tests show that the Cybercab has competitive pricing, but currently has a much longer wait time compared to competitors.

IPHONE ULTRA PRODUCTION HITTING JUST 'A FEW HUNDRED' A DAY, SAYS NIKKEI

The iPhone Ultra's production is slow due to how difficult the device is to build.

BETWEEN THE GRAPH AND THE SILICON: INSIDE THE APPLE NEURAL ENGINE COMPILER

Apple publicly exposes the Apple Neural Engine through Core ML, while the compiler, program format, driver, firmware, and much of the machinery underneath it remains undocumented.

I LEFT THE MAC AFTER 12 YEARS. OMARCHY MADE COMPUTERS FUN AGAIN

Omarchy is an opinionated Linux distribution built for AI agents.

GPT-6 ASTRA AND THE FOURTH EXPONENTIAL

Demand for AI semiconductors is likely to surge with agent computer tool use, just as it did with the chatbot, reasoning, and agentic coding demand waves.

'WELCOME TO THE AGI ERA': OPENAI LAUNCHES GPT-6 ASTRA

OpenAI claims its newly released frontier model, GPT-6 Astra, likely marks the onset of artificial general intelligence. The promotional video OpenAI released for the model shows various OpenAI employees interacting with computer interfaces using Astra through voice. Astra is now rolling out to enterprise customers through OpenAI's gated access program, Daybreak. It will become available over the coming days to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise customers, as well as through the OpenAI API and cloud platforms, including AWS Bedrock and Microsoft Azure.

TESLA BEGINS OFFERING RIDES IN A CAR WITHOUT A STEERING WHEEL

OpenAI has started offering rides in its Cybercab robotaxis. The two-seat vehicle has no steering wheel and is designed to transport passengers with no direct human intervention. Tesla is authorized to operate 314 vehicles in Texas to provide paid rides without a driver. Most of the vehicles are Model Y sport utility vehicles, but the fleet includes 45 Cybercabs.

IN A FIRST, A PIG KIDNEY KEPT A PATIENT ALIVE UNTIL HE GOT A HUMAN ONE

Tim Andrews' kidneys were destroyed from diabetes and high blood pressure two years ago. At 66, he had no energy or appetite and was too weak to walk. Andrews received a genetically modified pig kidney in January last year, and then lived with it for nine months. He then received a human donor kidney, providing early proof that pig kidneys, while not yet a permanent solution, offer a bridge to transplants with human organs.

A CONNECTOMICS MILESTONE: MAPPING THE COMPLETE MALE FRUIT FLY BRAIN

Researchers led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus have released a complete wiring diagram of the male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. The map is the result of a decade-long partnership that advances the field of connectomics using computing and AI to build cellular-scale maps of entire brains. It is the largest brain map by number of neurons to date. The map is a fundamental resource for scientists who use fruit flies as a model organism for studying how the brain works.

META WANTED TO REDUCE TEAMS BY 60% BECAUSE OF AI

Two months ago, Meta laid off 10% of its staff and moved 20% to 30% of its engineers into AI training. This resulted in low morale and a string of embarrassing outages. The company had planned even larger layoffs, but those plans did not eventuate. This post looks at what the planned AI job cuts reveal about Meta, what CEO Mark Zuckerberg might have been thinking, and what the layoffs could mean for other tech companies.

RUNNING LLMS IN THE BROWSER WITH THREE.JS

Three-LLM runs GPT-2, SmolLM2, Qwen, and Phi models locally in the browser by turning their inference graphs into Three.js TSL compute shaders on WebGPU. The project was created to see how far the general computer capabilities of Three.js and WebGPU can be pushed, and to see what today's small language models can do when they run in a browser. Three.js is known as a rendering library, but its WebGPU renderer also exposes storage buffers, compute dispatches, workgroup memory, atomics, and GPU readback. Large language models put all of those capabilities to work as they need hundreds of ordered compute dispatches, large matrix-vector products, reductions, persistent attention or recurrent state, and a tight loop between the GPU and JavaScript as each new token appears.

AI, TOOLS, AND TRANSFORMATION

It's tempting to believe that AI can turn everyone into a tool-builder. However, that line of thought misunderstands how most people think and where software comes from. Turning everyone into a builder isn't how companies should work. The hard part is knowing that you need a tool for a specific task in the first place, and then knowing what that tool should do.

LLMS ARE BECOMING COMMODITIES

Model quality is no longer a clear differentiator. It's only a matter of time before open source catches up to the current state-of-the-art. Model providers must look elsewhere for differentiation. For many, this will mean finding a niche and moving away from the defaults.

EMAIL SHOULD BE THE UNIVERSAL INTERFACE FOR SOFTWARE

Email is just structured text wrapped up as a human-readable letter, complete with data to identify senders and recipients.

DESIGNING GROK BOT FOR A WORLD OF PERSISTENT AGENTS

A look at how X.ai designed Grok Bot for agents that persist beyond a single session.

OZEMPIC AND OTHER GLP-1S ARE BEING LINKED TO FEWER SERIOUS INFECTIONS—INCLUDING TB

Recent studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs can reduce the occurrence or severity of certain infections, particularly among more vulnerable groups like people with type 2 diabetes.

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HOW ZOOM DETECTS GOOGLE MEET WITHOUT MICROPHONE ACCESS

Zoom uses macOS Control Center logs and Windows microphone privacy records to detect when other applications use the microphone.

THE ADS MODEL FOR PROMPTS VERTICALLY INTEGRATES AI

Meta's Muse Spark propels open source models from the US to the frontier, and its pricing system resets the industry's economics.

GETTING READY FOR POSTGRESQL 19

PostgreSQL's usual September/October cadence means that general availability should land within the next few weeks.

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META RELEASES MORE POWERFUL AI MODEL, EDGING CLOSER TO RIVALS

Meta has released a new model with capabilities close to top competitors. Developers can now access and pay for Muse Spark 1.3. The model will soon roll out to Meta's social media platforms. Meta has yet to decide whether to release the model's weights. It still plans to release weights for the prior version, Muse Spark 1.2.