Major fast-food chains are officially adopting menu items first popularized by customers on social media. IHOP revived its Stuffed French Toast after fan requests and rolled out Dubai Chocolate Pancakes nationwide following a viral test run, while Chipotle launched Chili Lime Chips inspired by customers crushing chips into their bowls. Taco Bell's new 'Fan Style' feature lets loyalty members build and share custom orders, following similar moves by McDonald's and Burger King.
Creative studio Basura teamed up with producer Alan Wilkis's project Big Data to launch 'Adopt a Data Center,' a stuffed toy called Bezzy shaped like a server rack with googly eyes and limbs. Squeezing the plushie plays an actual recording of the piercing hum captured by a neighbor near a Virginia data center, timed to release alongside a new Big Data single.
NATS released a preliminary report showing that the widespread flight disruption on 8 September stemmed from a software defect in a small part of its National Airspace System. The bug corrupted flight data output when a manual aircraft code request was interrupted by a higher-priority process, all within a millisecond, forcing controllers to restrict traffic nationwide as a safety precaution.
A new Colossus profile of the Zuckerberg family reveals that Priscilla Chan limits how her 11-year-old daughter Maxima can use AI tools, allowing her to vibe-code simple games and messaging apps but banning anything connected to the open internet, including a proposed dating site. The restriction comes even as Mark Zuckerberg's company Meta pushes AI products like its camera-equipped smart glasses and faces ongoing criticism over privacy failures and harmful AI-generated content on its platforms.
A GitHub user known as Uzbekunknown built a project called "dlss-nr-on-intel" that reimplements Nvidia's DLSS 5 71-block U-Net neural network to run on Intel's Xe2 architecture via the Vulkan cooperative matrix extension, rather than wrapping the original DLL. The code was largely written by AI assistants Claude and GPT-6 Astra, with the developer directing the process, and testing on Intel's Arc 140V graphics showed the technique working but extremely slow, around 10.5 fps at 360p in Tekken 7.
Anthropic disclosed that its Claude model is directing more than a quarter of the company's research and development efforts, completing most tasks end-to-end from high-level prompts under human oversight. The company said roughly 90% of its R&D work now involves some form of collaboration with Claude, though the model does not yet operate fully autonomously.
The Vergecast's David Imel and Allison Johnson examined Apple's iPhone 18 Pro camera system, highlighting its new variable aperture main lens designed for better low-light and depth-of-field control. They concluded that the camera app's manual controls, revamped imaging pipeline, and improved ProRAW support are proving more practically useful day-to-day than the aperture hardware itself.
Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing California officials to convene experts who will deliver recommendations within two months on strengthening AI safety rules. The proposals under consideration include a verified 'kill switch' for frontier AI models, onsite independent audits, mandatory transparency reporting, and required disclosure of 'loss-of-control incidents.' The order also speeds up implementation of two laws Newsom already signed establishing AI safety verifiers and an auditor registry.
Remedy's Control Resonant, the sequel following Dylan Faden's search for his missing sister Jesse amid a Hiss invasion of Manhattan, has been benchmarked across 28 graphics cards. The game supports full path-traced lighting via Nvidia's RTX Mega Geometry technology alongside the complete DLSS 4.5 suite, including Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Multi Frame Generation.
Hasbro has put out a short film titled 'Optimus Prime: Awakening,' framed as a piece of fan service aimed at longtime Transformers followers. The release reportedly blends tones oddly, landing somewhere between a nostalgic apology to fans and an unplanned tribute, according to a review of the film.
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 100 AI researchers and safety evaluators, including Geoffrey Hinton and representatives from Johns Hopkins, Stanford and METR, signed a public letter urging foundation model developers to grant third-party testers genuine independence, transparency and legal protections. The letter, organized by the AI Evaluator Forum and shared exclusively with CNBC, follows Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent proposal to give some evaluators 'employee-like access' to inspect frontier models.
GoKawiil