A New York Times investigation found multiple harassment and rape allegations connected to Silicon Valley hacker houses, including AGI House in Hillsborough, where police logged 37 incidents since 2022, at least 17 tied to parties. In one December case, a woman called police at 2 a.m. from a Lyft saying a male resident had tried to force her into sex before she escaped by climbing a gate. AGI House founder Jeremy Nixon, who also founded an earlier house called Genesis, previously described his vision of housing 20 AI hackers together for three months.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-23
Merriam-Webster has officially added roughly 1,400 new words to its dictionary, including AI-era terms like AGI, the noun form of 'compute,' and 'uncanny valley.' The additions reflect how deeply artificial intelligence terminology has entered everyday language.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-21
A hobbyist project called Mini-AGI has been shared on Hacker News as a byte-level language model that builds its own architecture and trains from scratch on a single consumer GPU with 8GB of VRAM. Rather than keeping all parameters in memory, it stores weights as disk files and loads them as needed, letting it expand or prune capacity while it continuously reads and learns from a text corpus without forgetting prior knowledge. The creator says it's currently a toy-scale demonstration, not a competitive model, and weights won't be released until the current training pass over its corpus finishes in a few weeks.
github.com
· 2026-09-21
Bilal Chughtai, a former Google DeepMind research engineer who left in July 2026, publicly warned that AI could kill everyone and that time may be running out, echoing similar statements from Anthropic's Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger, who put the odds of AI causing human extinction within a decade above 10%. Separately, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said each AI company should be responsible for its own model's safety rather than backing calls for industry-wide coordination, citing legal liability as sufficient incentive and pointing to Meta's delayed release of its Muse AI agent as proof of self-regulation.
slashdot.org
· 2026-09-18
Google DeepMind has created the DeepMind Institute, led by managing editor Shane Legg alongside directors Demis Hassabis and James Manyika, to host differing perspectives on artificial general intelligence from within Google and the wider research community. Its first release includes four essays addressing economic disruption from AGI, keeping AI reasoning interpretable, principles for human flourishing, and how to evaluate frontier models. Notably, Hassabis proposes a U.S.-based standards body to assess advanced AI systems, starting with voluntary reviews before release.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-17
In a discussion on WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast, hosts Brian Barrett, Zoë Schiffer, and Leah Feiger debated the growing focus on 'recursive self-improvement' (RSI), the idea of AI systems autonomously building successive, increasingly uncontrollable AI models. Schiffer argued that RSI appears to be replacing AGI as the industry's go-to buzzword once AGI began to seem less achievable, serving more as a marketing and geopolitical narrative than a rigorous technical concern.
wired.com
· 2026-09-17
OpenAI published an analysis arguing that as AI systems approach or exceed human-level cognitive performance, policymakers need to prepare economic tools now rather than waiting for disruption to occur, as happened during past technological shifts like the Industrial Revolution. The piece frames AGI as fundamentally different from past automation waves because it could automate intelligence itself rather than just routine tasks, potentially affecting a much broader swath of jobs and industries simultaneously.
institute.deepmind.com
· 2026-09-17
Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas told CNBC's Jim Cramer that his confidence in reaching $2 billion in revenue for the company's new AGI CPU has increased since the July earnings call. Arm first flagged $2 billion in demand visibility in May, double its earlier $1 billion estimate, but had held off raising guidance while working to secure sufficient manufacturing capacity.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-16
Researchers from Google and Google DeepMind have created the DeepMind Institute (DMI), a platform meant to publish speculative, research-driven essays about a future shaped by artificial general intelligence. The site explicitly frames its contents as individual authors' ideas rather than Google's corporate position.
institute.deepmind.com
· 2026-09-16
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, which the company describes as its safest and most capable model yet, trained on roughly 100,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs. Nvidia's Jensen Huang publicly declared that AGI has been achieved, while OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki offered a more cautious framing, likening the model to an 'alien mind' that only simulates aspects of human behavior rather than replicating it. Independent benchmarks place Astra roughly on par with rival Fable 5.1, though reportedly cheaper to run per task.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-09
Jensen Huang has for the second time this year proclaimed that artificial general intelligence has been achieved, this time tying his claim to OpenAI's newly launched GPT-6 Astra model. He highlighted that Astra was trained on more than 100,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips, with 400,000 more coming online soon, even as independent benchmarks show Astra trailing rival Claude in some tasks.
techspot.com
· 2026-09-09
In a personal blog post, the author details how their views on AI evolved from cautious optimism to deep concern, focusing first on economic disruption. They argue that while past automation created more wealth and leisure, a truly general AI that outperforms humans in every domain could eliminate the human economic role entirely, leaving society dependent on universal basic income.
borretti.me
· 2026-09-07
GoKawiil