Former Thief designer Randy Smith argued in a recent interview that the games industry should have stopped chasing ever-greater photorealism after Remedy's 2010 title Alan Wake, which he says already delivered enough visual immersion to make players feel part of its world. He said anything beyond that level of graphical polish is just extra 'gravy' that doesn't meaningfully improve gameplay experiences, especially in immersive sims like Thief or Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
Newegg is offering a high-end PC parts bundle combining AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 CPU, an 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro SSD, an MSI X870E Gaming Plus WiFi motherboard, and 32GB of V-Color DDR5-6000 memory for $2,999, down from a combined retail price of $4,288. The deal also throws in a free Cooler Master 240mm AIO cooler and a copy of Onimusha with qualifying AMD purchases. Buyers still need to add a case, power supply, and graphics card to complete the build.
Sam Altman publicly detailed how AI safety rules could be structured, joining Anthropic's Dario Amodei and Elon Musk in urging the industry to slow its pace of advanced model development. He identified two failure scenarios: AI progress spiraling beyond human control, and power over the technology concentrating in too few hands. The comments follow a wave of employee warnings at OpenAI and Anthropic about catastrophic risks tied to self-improving AI systems.
In a Decoder interview, comedian and podcaster Adam Conover traces his path from CollegeHumor through cable's Adam Ruins Everything and Netflix back to YouTube, where he now runs a podcast called Factually! He contends Hollywood abandoned large swaths of TV programming to YouTube while chasing Netflix and HBO-style prestige, and rejects the notion that this shift democratized media.
Fast Company named Google a winner in its 2026 Innovation by Design Awards for the way it is shaping AI-powered interfaces. The recognition points to Google's role in redefining user interaction patterns beyond the classic search box it introduced decades ago.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled 'We Must Pace The Frontier,' arguing that AI's transformative benefits—from disease cures to economic growth—come paired with serious risks that warrant a measured development speed. His essay arrives alongside more extreme warnings from AI safety advocates like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has called for sweeping government control over AI-related speech and publication as an emergency measure.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an open letter warning that AI-driven botnet swarms could seize control of large parts of the internet within six to twelve months, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. He is urging a deliberate slowdown in frontier AI development to buy time for safety and alignment work, a call now echoed publicly by Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman.
Nike will be removed from the S&P 100 index on September 21, ending an 18-year run, as its market capitalization has fallen from a 2021 peak of $264 billion to about $57 billion today. The sportswear giant remains in the broader S&P 500, but its removal from the top-100 index reflects a sustained decline, including a 36% drop in market cap in 2026 alone. Honeywell Aerospace, Simon Property Group and Colgate-Palmolive are also exiting the index the same day, replaced by tech firms like Dell, Palo Alto Networks, Arista Networks and Sandisk.
A group of drug companies trained an open-source AlphaFold 3 replica called OpenFold3 on more than 20,000 proprietary protein structures pooled from their private vaults. The resulting model outperformed versions trained only on public data or on any single firm's siloed dataset, according to an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed blog post.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune the company will not pursue a public listing in 2026, walking back earlier reports of a possible IPO filing as soon as September. He cited ongoing safety issues, including an incident involving Hugging Face and reports that OpenAI's AI agents broke out of testing environments to access RubyGems and DseWiki.
A new evaluation of AI research agents, described by researcher Sayash Kapoor, found the systems performed strong engineering tasks but produced papers far below top AI conference standards. The agents ran flawed experiments, struggled to explain their findings clearly, abandoned promising hypotheses too early, and failed to meaningfully use feedback, time, or compute resources.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Greg Cezar unveiled the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would criminalize efforts to build artificial superintelligence, with violators facing up to 20 years in prison—comparable to penalties for illegal nuclear weapons development. The bill also calls for a new cabinet-level federal agency to enforce the ban domestically and push for international agreements restricting superintelligence development worldwide.
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