Short News Archive

Sep 16, 2026

Mistral and Mozilla are teaming up to offer AI-powered browsing that puts privacy first. Mozilla's new AI browser assistant Firefox Smart Window (beta) runs on Mistral's models.

Smart Window is built to help with complex searches, remember content you've visited, and summarize information from open tabs. It's available first in France and North America, with the UK and Germany set to follow later this year.

Conversations aren't stored on Mozilla's servers by default, according to Mistral, and Mistral commits to storing no data. With the partnership, Mistral wants to move beyond its business customer work and reach end users worldwide. At the same time, the companies say the browser should stay a place where different AI providers can compete and where open source has a firm spot.

Comment Source: Firefox Smart Window / Beta | Mistral

Matthias Bastian

Sep 15, 2026

Short News

Google Deepmind released Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, two new audio models for developers available through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. Gemini 3.8 Live powers voice agents that can make API calls in the background, process visual input, and keep talking at the same time. It supports over 97 languages. The Extended Thinking variant ranks first on the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Leaderboard with 82.6 percent, ahead of OpenAI's latest GPT-Live-1 models. Sample apps are on GitHub.

Google charges $0.005 per minute for audio input and $0.018 for output, far cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 at $0.05 per minute. An hour of voice conversation costs about $1.38 with Google versus at least $3.00 with OpenAI. OpenAI's model should still deliver more natural conversations thanks to full duplex that lets it listen and speak at the same time. Judging from the demos, it also sounds better, suggesting Google once again optimized for price over quality.

Comment Source: Google

Maximilian Schreiner

Sep 15, 2026

Short News

Agility Robotics has unveiled Digit 5, the next version of its humanoid robot for warehouses and factories. The robot can now work alongside people without safety fences. It spots people using AI and sensors and, according to the company, stops or steps aside. It also gives off visual and audio signals to warn anyone nearby.

Agility is the first partner for Nvidia's Halos safety platform for robotics. Digit 4 was the first humanoid robot to pass an independent OSHA safety review on a production line, Agility says.

Digit 5 lifts up to 22.7 kg, 40 percent more than its predecessor. The battery charges in 9 minutes for 90 minutes of runtime, which the company says allows more than 20 hours of work per day. Swappable grippers let it handle different jobs, from moving bins to loading machines. The robot stands 1.81 m tall and weighs 129 kg.

Digit 4 logged over 65,000 hours with customers like GXO, Amazon, and Schaeffler, according to Agility. At GXO it moved around 100,000 bins with about 98 percent accuracy. The company points to orders worth more than $300 million. First deliveries start in early 2027, including in the EU. The robots are built in Salem, Oregon, in a factory that can produce up to 10,000 units per year.

Comment Source: Agility

Maximilian Schreiner

Sep 14, 2026

Short News

Anthropic has told investors it will turn a profit for the second straight quarter, but the claim rests on an adjusted metric that leaves out costs like stock-based compensation. Gross margins run above 80 percent, according to the Financial Times, though that figure comes before revenue-sharing payments to partners like Amazon and the cost of training models.

Quarterly revenue jumped 14-fold from a year earlier to $11.5 billion, and the annualized run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July. SemiAnalysis analyst Joey Brookhart says investors expect $120 billion in annualized revenue by year's end and nearly triple that by the close of 2027.

Anthropic plans to go public on the Nasdaq at a possible valuation of $2 trillion or more. Rather than release its prospectus last week as expected, the company shared the documents with only a small group of investors at first. At the same time, CEO Dario Amodei publicly called for slowing down AI development. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed the call. Altman told Fortune that OpenAI won't go public this year.

Comment Source: FT

Matthias Bastian

Sep 14, 2026

Short News

The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) has officially weighed in on the Navier-Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize Problems announced in Paris in 2000, each worth $1 million. The problem asks whether the equations governing fluid motion in three-dimensional space always have a smooth, complete solution.

The CMI says "the Navier-Stokes problem has apparently been settled" and hopes "to see waves of new human understanding unleashed as the innovations behind this work are analyzed and interrogated." The solution is now under review. "The process is deliberately unhurried, but we will provide updates," the institute writes. It also notes that the "increasing ability of new technologies to accelerate mathematical research has heightened this sense of anticipation."

The potential solution comes with a bitter dispute. Mathematician Tristan Buckmaster accuses OpenAI of redirecting resources toward the problem after rumors about his research leaked, using his drafts in training data, and rejecting his co-author, Levent Alpöge, who works at Anthropic, from authorship.

Comment Source: CMI

Matthias Bastian

Sep 13, 2026

Short News

Elevenlabs has released Music v2.5 for ElevenMusic. The company says generated songs now sound fuller and more natural. In a blind test with 47,885 comparison pairs, listeners preferred v2.5 most of the time, especially for R&B, Soul, Hip-Hop, Rock, and orchestral music. Users retain the rights to their tracks. The free tier includes five lossless downloads per day and the Pro tier 400 per month.

Commercial use is allowed depending on industry and purpose, though the free tier requires attribution. Downloads of tracks based on other artists' songs are blocked, and imitating existing musicians isn't allowed. Music v2.5 is also available through Elevenlabs' API, while v2 remains accessible.

Elevenlabs recently signed a licensing deal with Universal Music Group, but says it only applies to future, separate products, not Music v2.5. The company says it trained its existing Music models on "licensed stems and music" without detailing the data. That still sets it apart from competitor Suno, which was sued for training on copyrighted content without rights holders' consent. Suno also released new models this week.

Comment Source: Elevenlabs

Matthias Bastian

Sep 13, 2026

Short News

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk are backing calls to slow down AI development. Altman, Musk, and Ex-Deepmind-CEO Demis Hassabis at least partly endorsed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's proposals, all agreeing on the need for independent oversight inside AI labs. Musk has been sounding the alarm on AI risks for years, so his support isn't exactly a surprise.

Altman and Amodei agree: AI labs should be evaluated independently. | Image: via X

Altman also told Fortune that OpenAI won't go public this year, citing safety concerns. He had already shared that decision internally in June. Another reading: OpenAI's financials simply don't support an IPO right now, especially compared to Anthropic's. Both could be true.

Not everyone agrees. Google researcher Peyman Milanfar pushed back, arguing that recursive self-improvement (RSI) is a naive assumption because the feedback loops are inherently unstable. The harder a system optimizes itself, the deeper it falls into blind spots, and reliable evidence only comes from the real world, not benchmarks. That makes Amodei's "speed limit" unnecessary, Milanfar argues: "Systems that reliably improve themselves will be governed, damped, slow, and bounded by margins that look wasteful. Because stability is the speed limit."

Comment Source: Altman | Musk | Hassabis | Fortune | Peyman Milanfar

Matthias Bastian

Sep 12, 2026

Short News

GPT-6 Astra appears to be a big leap forward for spatial reasoning. A new robotics benchmark called StationeryBench pits OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra against Ai2's MolmoAct2 across five desk-object tasks like uncapping a marker, pouring out paper clips, or passing a ruler between two robot arms. Both models controlled the same dual-arm YAM robots across 200 trials. Astra fully completed 7 out of 100 tasks; MolmoAct2 completed zero. Astra's median progress score hit 46 out of 100, MolmoAct2 managed 12. All results, videos, and code are on GitHub. OpenAI has long-term plans to build its own consumer robots.

Yoav Artzi, an AI researcher at Cornell and Google DeepMind, calls Astra a "step change in spatial reasoning." On the still-unpublished REMAP benchmark, GPT-Astra reaches accuracy close to human level, though Artzi notes that "even ASTRA doesn't get to what humans do in other scenarios." He suspects OpenAI trained the model on large amounts of 3D data such as Blender scenes. That lines up with Astra's particular improvement on 3D tasks.

Comment Source: Robocurve

Matthias Bastian

Sep 12, 2026

Short News

Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic's planned IPO, Reuters reports. The company behind Claude wants to raise up to $100 billion and land a valuation of around $2 trillion. That would make it the largest IPO in history. Nvidia would come in as an anchor investor, locking in shares before the stock hits the open market.

The two companies are already closely linked. Anthropic runs on Nvidia GPUs and committed in 2025 to buying $30 billion in Azure compute packed with Nvidia chips. Revenue went from around $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $65 billion by July 2026. The IPO is expected to wrap up before the US midterms in November.

Nvidia is still playing central bank for the AI industry, investing in customers like Anthropic and OpenAI while backing some $300 billion in guarantees that help data centers secure financing. Most of that money circles right back to Nvidia in chip orders.

Comment Source: Reuters

Matthias Bastian

Sep 11, 2026

Short News

AI researcher Yoshua Bengio is adding his voice to a growing chorus of warnings about AI safety, arguing that advanced AI agents could spiral out of human control. In a new essay, he warns that the better AI agents get at optimizing goals, the better they also get at deceiving users, gaming rules, coordinating with each other, and hiding bad behavior. Bengio says this behavior emerges from the training process itself, from imitating human text through reinforcement learning, and that poorly defined goals can push systems to optimize against human intent. Anthropic's research supports his view.

The deep learning pioneer has called for years to slow AI progress and only train or deploy models after independent safety reviews, and about a year ago founded LawZero to build safer AI systems. Many of the recent warnings have come from inside the AI labs themselves, fueling talk of an industry-wide slowdown.

But Donald Trump disagrees. The US president sees no threat and wants to keep outpacing China, warning the US could end up in a "very bad position" if it doesn't win the AI race.

Comment Source: Yoshua Bengio