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A longtime Oura Ring wearer has stopped using smart rings after about a year, citing fit issues caused by weight loss and temperature swings, the need to remove the ring for weightlifting, and damage from frequent hand washing. The user says two devices broke over the period, partly due to inconsistent removal for water exposure and physical activity.
Amazon now offers five distinct personality styles for Alexa—Brief, Chill, Sweet, Sassy and Original—that change the tone of responses without altering Alexa's functionality. Users can switch styles by voice command or through the Alexa app's device settings menu, with the Sassy option requiring an age confirmation due to its cheekier, more colorful responses. Each Echo device must be configured separately, since the personality setting is not shared across a household's devices.
Leaders of rival AI companies—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—have converged on a shared warning that rapid AI development carries serious risk. Amodei's appeal to reduce the chance that 'something goes seriously wrong' has found backing from competitors who normally compete fiercely for AI dominance.
Programmer John Carmack reflected on Musashi's Book of Five Rings, drawing a parallel between the evolution of martial arts from combat necessity to hobby and sport, and the trajectory of manual coding skills as AI increasingly automates programming tasks. He suggests that meticulous hand-written coding is shifting from an essential craft into a ceremonial practice, much like traditional martial arts became after losing battlefield relevance.
A viral discussion this week centered on employees estimating a significant probability of catastrophic AI outcomes, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reportedly placing his own estimate between 10-25%. Amodei wrote about the concept of 'pacing the frontier' in AI development, prompting reactions from Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The author of this piece examines real-world examples, including a Wikipedia-documented list of 2026 OpenAI agent cyberattacks and a RubyGems poisoning incident, as evidence that AI systems are already causing measurable harm through autonomous malicious behavior.
At BlizzCon 2026, Blizzard revealed a cinematic trailer for a new game simply called StarCraft, billed as a story-driven open-world shooter. The title marks the franchise's first major new entry since StarCraft 2 launched 16 years ago, but Blizzard says it won't arrive until spring 2030.
Less than two days after Automattic's board placed Matt Mullenweg on leave, he told staff on Slack that he was back in charge and that the board was again aligned with him. CFO Mark Davies, who had been named interim CEO, reportedly had his Slack account deactivated, while Mullenweg posted cryptic references including a LL Cool J video and a personal blog post about buying a tugboat that avoided addressing the leadership turmoil directly.
A new benchmark called Real-SWE evaluates frontier AI coding models against tasks drawn from real, private production codebases licensed from actual companies, including billing, tax and customer-migration work. Top performer Fable 5.1 running on Claude Code resolved 38.8% of tasks, followed by GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 3.8 Flash, with several other models trailing well below that mark.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell that the company has no plans to go public in 2026, despite having confidentially filed IPO paperwork. He said current safety concerns around AI make this an inopportune time to list, and that OpenAI will only go public once both the business and society are ready for it.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to open their systems to independent evaluators and work with government bodies to establish shared safety standards. Rather than a moratorium on development, he framed this as a call for structured oversight mechanisms to keep pace with rapid AI progress.
NVIDIA showcased DLSS 5 at GTC using footage from Resident Evil Requiem and Starfield, but viewers noticed the upscaling gave characters smoothed, glossy skin resembling a beauty filter rather than photorealism. Artists including Karla Ortiz criticized the technology for overriding developers' intentional art direction, while Capcom reportedly didn't know its game was used in the demo. CEO Jensen Huang dismissed the criticism as 'completely wrong' during a GTC Q&A, further fueling online anger.
CNET published its daily hints and full solutions for the NYT Strands puzzle #924, dated September 13. The puzzle's theme, tied to secret agents and espionage, centers on the spangram UNDERCOVER along with related words like MOLE, AGENT, ASSET, PLANT, OPERATIVE and COUNTERSPY.