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Barret Zoph, a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, has left the startup to join Google as a vice president of research. Zoph had previously spent time at OpenAI before helping start Thinking Machines Lab.
Linum has begun detailing its work on Linum v3, the successor to its open-weight text-to-video model released in January, in a new blog series. The company says its focus is on three goals: improving how well outputs follow prompts, speeding up training and inference, and making generated physics more consistent, while arguing that most recent progress in image and video generation comes from better data practices rather than new model architectures.
LAION has published LAION-BVD, a large open video dataset intended to support multimodal research on video, audio, and image models. The organization says the release is meant for non-commercial, academic use only, aimed at improving reproducibility and transparency in a field increasingly dominated by proprietary corporate datasets.
Sentelabs.ai has launched Open Executive, an open-source AI system designed to act as a virtual executive suite for companies. It coordinates eight specialist AI agents—covering strategy, finance, HR, legal, operations, marketing, product, and board communications—through an orchestrator built on Claude Sonnet, presenting all responses through a single unified executive voice.
Nvidia has been negotiating to buy Hugging Face, the open-source AI model-sharing platform, in a deal that would value the startup at more than $13 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. No agreement has been reached and talks could still collapse. Microsoft had also explored a deal with Hugging Face but those discussions are no longer active.
Meta has agreed to roll out new safety restrictions for teen accounts on Instagram and Facebook within six months, as part of an $18 billion settlement reached with 48 states. The agreement follows scrutiny over how the platforms have handled minors' safety and mental health concerns.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang defended the company's expanding financial backing of AI startups and data center projects, arguing critics misunderstand the unprecedented capital needs of building and deploying AI. He spoke on CNBC after Nvidia posted stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings, noting the firm has invested in model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic and backed massive compute projects, including a $105 billion Ohio campus and a $500 billion Wall Street financing partnership.
A partial lunar eclipse will unfold Thursday night into early Friday, with Earth's shadow covering roughly 93 percent of the moon's disk and giving it a reddish or orange tint. The partial phase lasts about three hours and 18 minutes, with the Americas offering the best viewing conditions since the peak occurs after dark there, while European observers will only catch a limited glimpse near dawn.
An unidentified free model called Ox Alpha appeared on OpenRouter and quickly drew massive usage from developers who couldn't determine its origin, sparking days of speculation about which lab built it. Z.ai revealed the model was actually its own GLM-5.3-Flash, running entirely on Chinese chips, and priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 50 cents per million output tokens, with a launch discount cutting that in half through September 9.
A tech roundup recommends external displays for buyers of Apple's newly released Mac mini and Mac Studio, highlighting Apple's own Studio Display and the newer Studio Display XDR as standout choices. The Studio Display offers a 27-inch 5K panel, a 12MP Center Stage webcam, True Tone technology, and Thunderbolt 5 ports, while the XDR variant adds mini-LED technology and a 120Hz refresh rate.
Instinct, founded last year by 23-year-old Noah Shinn under parent company Spear Street Technology, has closed a $250 million Series B round led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. The deal pushes the young startup's total funding to $350 million and its valuation to $2.5 billion, driven by buzz around its AI assistant that manages users' schedules, purchases and subscriptions through texts and calls.
A new emulator called Afterglow lets users run original After Dark screen saver modules, including Flying Toasters and Fish, directly on modern macOS. Unlike previous methods that required emulating vintage Macintosh hardware or classic Mac OS, Afterglow runs the original 68k module code natively without needing ROMs or an emulated operating system. The project was built as a software preservation effort to keep these 1990s animations usable and accessible.