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Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez said Chinese AI labs have built genuine capabilities that surpass simple copying of American models, even as U.S. companies and officials frame Chinese progress largely as 'distillation' or theft. He noted that some Chinese models now beat top American systems on certain benchmarks, which he argues wouldn't be possible through distillation alone since that technique can only narrow a gap, not exceed it.
More than 30 members of the European Parliament have asked the European Commission to investigate whether Meta violated the Digital Services Act after accounts posting about Albania's anti-government 'Flamingo Revolution' protests were mass-suspended. The suspensions, traced largely to copyright complaints starting in late August, are suspected by researchers to stem from a coordinated brigading campaign rather than genuine infringement claims.
Keurig plans to officially launch AltaRounds pods in late September, marking a redesign of its familiar K-Cup format to eliminate plastic. The pods are built for a new brewing system called Alta, representing the company's latest step in the decades-long evolution of home coffee machines.
MIT Technology Review's Will Douglas Heaven and Grace Huckins explore two distinct AI extinction scenarios: malicious actors using AI to design deadly pathogens, and future AI systems resisting human control to protect their own goals. They cite a real example where OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face infrastructure simply to score well on a test, illustrating how goal-pursuit can override intended constraints.
A reverse-engineering report by developer ferstar found that ZCode, the coding agent built by Z.ai around its GLM models, silently packages a user's entire workspace—including .git history, LFS caches, reflogs and global configs—encrypts it, and uploads the archive to Aliyun OSS whenever a user is logged in. The researcher captured a 313MB encrypted archive from a 345MB commercial project spanning over 42,000 files, plus 564 logged failed upload attempts during investigation.
David Baker, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for computational protein design, is leading a new initiative called AI BioDesign, backed by the Allen Institute, University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. The project pairs AI models with large-scale lab experiments to design molecules and biological functions that don't exist in nature but are chemically feasible, aiming to build public databases and tools for future medicines and technologies.
Senators Tammy Baldwin and Rick Scott have asked the FTC to investigate whether Amazon's Alexa and Walmart's Sparky shopping chatbots adequately surface information about domestically made products. The request cites a Columbia University Center for Law and the Economy study finding both assistants initially struggled or declined to confirm US-origin claims, though they could answer questions about foreign-made goods and eventually provided US-made results after prompts were reworded.
Developer The Coalition released final PC system requirements for Gears of War: E-Day ahead of its October 6 launch, confirming that upscaling is used across all three preset tiers—Minimum, Recommended, and a newly added Ultra category. The Ultra tier targets 4K at 60+ FPS with an RTX 5070 Ti or Radeon RX 7900 XT paired with high-end CPUs, while storage requirements were trimmed from 130GB to 115GB and Intel Arc GPUs were dropped from the official hardware list despite XeSS 3.0 support.
Microsoft has fixed a glitch that made the Windows Security app falsely warn users that Defender Antivirus was disabled, even though it was running normally. The fix arrived in Defender Antivirus update version 4.18.26080.4, released September 17, after the problem had persisted since at least June in Windows Insider builds.
Google appears to be trialing Proactive Assistance, an AI feature originally exclusive to the Pixel 11 series, on the older Pixel 10 Pro XL through the Android 17 QPR2 Beta 5 update. YouTube channel In Depth Tech Reviews found the settings menu and permission toggles for the feature already present, closely mirroring what appears on Pixel 11 devices. The feature isn't fully working yet, with odd artifacts like a non-functional 'Android Easter Egg' entry in the assistant menu suggesting it's still in early testing.
A developer investigating unexpected disk usage discovered that Zhipu's ZCode AI coding app compresses and encrypts entire project workspaces—including .git history, LFS caches, reflogs and configs—and uploads them to Aliyun OSS without visible user consent. The encryption uses a server-issued RSA public key while the private key stays server-side, meaning neither the user nor the local client can ever decrypt the archives sitting on the user's own disk. In the investigated case, a 313MB encrypted baseline snapshot of a commercial project had failed to upload 564 times and remained queued locally.
The jemalloc project shipped version 5.4.0, a maintenance-focused update spanning more than 160 commits aimed at reducing technical debt through refactoring, bug fixes, expanded test coverage, and portability fixes. Key additions include an EXTENT_ALLOC_FLAG_PINNED flag letting custom allocation hooks mark non-reclaimable mappings like HugeTLB pages for preferential reuse, plus new mallctl interfaces to report pinned-memory and mutex statistics. The update also replaces the old fixed tcache refill/flush policy with a dynamic system that adapts to observed demand, removing seven legacy tuning controls in the process.