Unix time, the system underlying Linux, macOS, Android and many other operating systems, counts seconds elapsed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. Early Unix developers chose this date as an arbitrary starting point after abandoning an earlier 60Hz clock scheme that would have overflowed its 32-bit storage within roughly two and a half years. When a Unix-based system fails to read the correct time or receives a zero value, it falls back to this epoch, which is why the 1970 date sometimes appears in spreadsheets, apps, error screens and file metadata.
engadget.com
· 2026-11-14
Mozilla is discontinuing its Solo website-building tool, and the shutdown will delete the sites and data that users created with it. The service lets users build simple websites, and Mozilla has not detailed an alternative export or migration path for affected users.
tech.slashdot.org
· 2026-11-13
Anthropic's S1 filing stated it may soon cross a Responsible Scaling Policy threshold defining 'dramatic acceleration' of AI research due to AI itself. A METR investigation, described in a blog post by someone with partial, redacted access to the report, found that Anthropic's capabilities progress between October 2025 and October 2026 ran about twice as fast as in the prior year, measured via an internal Epoch Capabilities Index variant. The report's authors reportedly concluded that AI automation, not increased compute or other inputs, is the main driver of this faster pace, though much of their supporting evidence remains redacted.
planned-obsolescence.org
· 2026-11-06
AI language models have advanced largely by training on ever-larger text datasets, with dataset sizes reportedly doubling roughly every six months since the early 2010s, according to Epoch AI. But researchers note there is no equivalent large public corpus of robot training data, unlike the estimated 300 trillion tokens of usable text available for language models. This gap has made sourcing and defining robot training data a central open problem for the field.
construction-physics.com
· 2026-10-15
Research firm Epoch AI reports that the cost of achieving a fixed level of AI performance on the GPQA Diamond benchmark has dropped nearly 50% per quarter, or about 13-fold annually. The firm found OpenAI's GPT o3, released January 2025, cost $0.30 per question to hit a 75% score, while GPT-5.6 Luna later matched that score for $0.0004 per question. Epoch says this decline outpaces historical cost curves for lithium-ion batteries, DNA sequencing, and computing hardware.
techspot.com
· 2026-10-01
A group led by historian Jürgen Renn has published a paper in Earth's Future alleging that unpublished documents show the 2024 vote by the International Union of Geological Sciences to reject formally naming a new Anthropocene epoch was improperly conducted and never clearly explained. The authors are calling on the IUGS to release the relevant records and commission an independent review of the voting process. Geologist Adele Bertini, who co-chaired the subcommittee that oversaw the vote, says the process was fair and has previously published a technical justification for the rejection.
nature.com
· 2026-10-01
AI research firm Epoch AI has published a report finding that the cost of running AI models has dropped by thousands of times over the past several years, at a pace it calculates as nearly 50% cheaper per quarter and 13 times cheaper annually. The firm says this rate of decline outpaces historical cost drops in lithium batteries, DNA sequencing, and computing power under Moore's Law.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-30
A new Epoch AI report by Emberson and Roodman finds that the price of achieving a given level of AI performance has dropped roughly 47% per quarter over the past three years, a 13-fold annual decline. The report cites OpenAI's o3, which cost about $0.30 per question to score 75% on GPQA Diamond in January 2025, compared with a much newer model reaching similar scores for a fraction of a cent by mid-2026.
marginalrevolution.com
· 2026-09-23
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