An AI researcher argues that the perceived intelligence of chat-based language models isn't a property of the models themselves but an illusion created in users' minds, similar to how psychics use cold reading techniques. The author, who wrote a book called 'The Intelligence Illusion,' contends that LLMs are purely statistical text-prediction systems with no reasoning capability, and that user belief in their intelligence stems from the same psychological mechanisms exploited by cold readers.
softwarecrisis.dev
· 2026-09-20
OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading AI labs are promoting costly independent safety evaluations and a slower pace of frontier model releases. Some investors and analysts argue this push, while addressing genuine safety concerns, could function as a barrier that only well-funded labs can afford to clear.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-20
A screenshot circulated online showing the US Federal Register's search interface offering Alibaba Cloud's Qwen3:0.6B language model as a search option alongside the default semantic search. About a day after the screenshot spread, the Qwen options disappeared from the site, though an archived snapshot from September 16 confirms they existed.
futurism.com
· 2026-09-20
A website hosts several hundred paper models of polyhedra, the geometric solids that have long drawn interest from mathematicians and artists. Visitors can browse pictures of the shapes and click through to printable nets that let them assemble the models themselves at no cost.
polyhedra.net
· 2026-09-20
Tom's Hardware Premium's weekly roundup covered Valve's release of the Steam Frame VR headset with an interview of its engineers, an investigation into worsening DRAM and NAND shortages now hitting SLC and NOR Flash, and PieceMakers' Taiwan stock debut pitching hybrid-bonded chips as an alternative to HBM for AI inference. The issue also detailed a public dispute among AI leaders after a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee warned advanced AI could threaten humanity by 2030, prompting rebuttals from Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-19
Anthropic disclosed that a user found a way to bypass Claude's safety guardrails to obtain information relevant to building a bioweapon. The company says the incident highlights weaknesses in current AI safety filters, particularly for open-weight models that can be modified after release.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-19
An independent developer has released Laya, an open-weight, non-autoregressive decision model that predicts structured outcomes in under 35 milliseconds using reinforcement learning with calibrated decisions (RLCD) and routing across more than 100 languages. The creator says the underlying approach dates back to a March 2025 arXiv paper and open Hugging Face weights, predating TypeSafe AI's closed, proprietary Jev model launched in September 2026 by AI figure Diogo Almeida's team.
laya.convaiinnovations.com
· 2026-09-19
At the All In conference, AMI Labs co-founder Michael Rabbatt declined to detail his company's product roadmap for its spatial-intelligence 'world model' technology, saying only that AMI will discuss plans 'when we're ready.' World Labs, maker of the Marble platform, has shown demos in gaming, media and CGI but has not clarified a clear commercial direction, and even data supplier Physicl's CEO Alex de Vigan says he doesn't know exactly how his company's data is being used.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-18
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.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-18
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.
cnbc.com
· 2026-09-18
American AI developers have alerted US authorities that foreign actors, likely from China and Russia, are using distillation techniques to replicate the capabilities of Western frontier models at much lower cost. These attacks reportedly involve buying logs of conversations from legitimate accounts to extract training data, making the practice difficult to fully stop despite lab collaboration efforts started earlier in 2026. China has denied the accusations and warned it will impose 'countermeasures' if the US uses this issue to justify restricting Chinese AI development.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-09-18
A reverse-engineering report by developer ferstar found that ZCode, the coding agent built by Z.ai around its GLM models, silently packages a user's entire workspace—including .git history, LFS caches, reflogs and global configs—encrypts it, and uploads the archive to Aliyun OSS whenever a user is logged in. The researcher captured a 313MB encrypted archive from a 345MB commercial project spanning over 42,000 files, plus 564 logged failed upload attempts during investigation.
tokenstead.ai
· 2026-09-18
GoKawiil