Matthias Bastian

Sep 16, 2026

Nearly one in five AI researchers already expected an extinction scenario from AI back in 2024

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon sparked an intense debate about existential AI risks with a single tweet. OpenAI researcher Daniel Selsam warns of a “ticking time bomb,” and a former Deepmind researcher says AI could kill us all. In a survey of more than 1,500 leading AI researchers, the average estimated probability of an extinction scenario was 18 percent. That was in 2024. The number keeps climbing.

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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

Matthias Bastian

Sep 15, 2026

Plus AI in practice

AI labs have a data trust problem that their policies haven't solved

Matthias Bastian

Sep 15, 2026

AI in practice

Not everyone is convinced that Big AI's proposed slowdown is really about safety

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google want to slow down frontier AI development, citing safety concerns. But critics from across the industry and politics are pushing back. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez calls the initiative a “cartel by another name” designed to shut out competitors, and the White House and Trump himself are opposing the move.

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Matthias Bastian

Sep 14, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI has hundreds of contract workers reading your ChatGPT conversations

OpenAI has hundreds of contract workers reading real ChatGPT conversations and rating them on a scale of one to seven, partly to reduce flattery and human-like behavior, 404 Media reports. The prompts are anonymized but can still contain sensitive data. Users who don’t want their chats reviewed by humans have to actively disable the “Improve the model for everyone” setting, which is on by default.

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Matthias Bastian

Sep 14, 2026

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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 14, 2026

AI and society

China fires back at U.S. AI safety warnings, calling them fearmongering to lock in American advantage

Matthias Bastian

Sep 14, 2026

AI in practice

Sam Altman is doubling down on his call to pump the brakes on AI, at least a little. He wants a uniform, nationwide safety framework for advanced AI but says the industry shouldn't wait for lawmakers, even though international coordination needs U.S. government support. To that end, OpenAI now sets explicit safety protocols before training runs that could bring major capability jumps, and Altman hopes other companies "will learn from our approaches and propose their own." He also makes clear that "pacing" doesn't mean "stopping." Progress will "continue to be" rapid, just not as fast as it could.

Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.
Sam Altman, OpenAI

Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, former Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk all backed better-controlled AI development. According to The Information, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have been talking for months about self-regulation through an independent oversight body. Smaller players like Cohere worry this could turn into a cartel.

Comment Source: The Information

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