A new State of Open Source AI report from Mozilla, shared with Ars ahead of its September 15 release, finds that top open-weights models from Chinese developers now perform nearly on par with closed frontier models from US firms like Anthropic and OpenAI. It cites Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 scoring only three points below Anthropic's Fable 5 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, despite costing roughly 30 percent as much to run.
OpenAI's charitable foundation, which holds a 26% stake in OpenAI worth up to $250 billion, has given $500,000 to nonprofit 1Day Sooner to acquire biological research datasets from companies that have gone bankrupt. The group's leader says such datasets could often be obtained for only tens of thousands of dollars, and the funding is meant to test whether this rescue model works at scale. This grant is part of the foundation's broader push to ramp up giving, including a $100 million donation earlier this year for hepatitis C treatment access.
A 404 Media investigation reveals OpenAI runs an internal effort called Project Lily, employing hundreds of contractors paid roughly $50 an hour to read anonymized ChatGPT conversations and rate the quality of the bot's answers. Reviewers check for issues like overly robotic phrasing, sycophancy, and improper anthropomorphizing, following guidelines described as inconsistent and frequently changing.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science fabricated nanoscale optical structures based on the Smith hat monotile, the shape that solved the Einstein aperiodic tiling problem in 2023. When laser light hit these silicon nitride structures, it produced pinwheel-shaped diffraction patterns showing chirality not seen in typical quasicrystals.
Following a weekend of AI executives calling for slower development and stronger oversight, President Trump publicly rejected the idea of new guardrails, saying only a capable president is needed to control AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had proposed embedding independent evaluators and setting cross-government safety standards after two safety researchers resigned citing existential risk concerns, a position echoed by OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk.
Optimization developer OptiProjects has built OptiCraft Heritage Edition, a native C++ recreation of Minecraft Java 1.2.5 that runs on the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii. The PS2 version manages 15-30 fps within just 32MB of RAM by limiting draw distance to two chunks, while the Wii version reaches up to 60 fps with four-chunk rendering and even supports online play on Java servers.
NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster alleges OpenAI's announcement that its Astra model solved the century-old Navier-Stokes problem came suspiciously soon after he and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge developed their own solution using AI tools. Buckmaster says OpenAI scientists approached him to jointly announce the finding and allegedly suggested refusing could hurt his career, while declining to confirm whether their model had access to his research. OpenAI credited Astra with the proof and denied using customer data directly, though it admitted it could not rule out use of anonymized data to improve its models.
Fujifilm has unveiled the Instax Pal 2, a successor to its palm-sized Instax Pal camera, adding an optical viewfinder and a 1.3-inch LCD screen missing from the original. The camera uses a small sensor paired with an f/2.2 28mm lens to shoot up to 10-megapixel images and will launch in the US later this month for $169.95.
Investors are increasingly scrutinizing whether the massive data center buildout tied to Anthropic and OpenAI's growth can continue at its current pace, given uncertainty around future AI model progress. Companies like Oracle, GE Vernova, Caterpillar, Vertiv, Nebius, CoreWeave, Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have all made major bets tied to sustained AI infrastructure demand.
A viral clip shows ChatGPT's Voice feature confidently miscounting the letter 'e' in 'seventeen,' claiming there are three when there are actually four. When the user, a content creator called Husk, corrected it, the chatbot repeatedly refused to concede the point even after spelling out the word itself. An OpenAI employee later clarified the voice assistant was running on an older model, GPT-Live-1, not GPT-6 as the bot itself claimed, and that it failed to delegate the query to a more capable model.
At the launch event for GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI president Greg Brockman claimed the company's new model marks the start of the 'AGI era,' referencing systems capable of matching or exceeding human performance across nearly all cognitive tasks. Independent AI researchers dispute this framing, arguing that Astra's strong benchmark scores do not constitute proof that artificial general intelligence has actually been achieved.
Apple's new AirPods 5 lineup starts at $129, with a $149 version including a wireless charging case, both undercutting the $179 AirPods 4 with ANC by at least $30. Unlike the previous generation, both new models include active noise cancellation, adaptive audio, transparency mode, and an IP57 rating, while the pricier version adds swipe-based volume controls on the stem for the first time on non-Pro AirPods.
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