Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Following a series of allegedly AI-caused outages, Amazon is turning its senior engineers into human filters for AI-generated code.

"Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," writes Dave Treadwell, Senior Vice President at Amazon, in an internal email obtained by the Financial Times. A briefing identifies a "trend of incidents" with a "high blast radius," linked to "Gen-AI assisted changes." Recently, there have been reports that Amazon's AI coding tools may have also contributed to two AWS outages.

The consequence: Junior and mid-level engineers now require sign-off from a senior engineer for all AI-assisted code changes. Standard code reviews have always existed at Amazon, but a dedicated approval requirement specifically for AI-generated output is new. Experienced developers are thus effectively becoming human quality filters for machine-generated code. Their role is shifting: away from building, toward reviewing what the machine has built.

Among the causes, the internal briefing cites "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established."

Comment Source: FT

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Nvidia and Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati, are entering a long-term partnership. Thinking Machines will receive at least one gigawatt of compute power through Nvidia's new Vera Rubin systems to train its own AI models. Deployment is set to begin early next year.

Nvidia has also taken a financial stake in Thinking Machines, though the exact amount wasn't disclosed. The startup had already raised around $2 billion in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, at a valuation of $12 billion. Nvidia was an investor in that round as well. Most recently, Thinking Machines is reportedly seeking another funding round. The startup has also seen some departures - co-founders Barret Zoph and Luke Metz returned to OpenAI.

Together, the two companies plan to develop training and deployment systems for Nvidia hardware and make frontier AI models available to businesses and researchers. Murati left OpenAI in 2024 and co-founded Thinking Machines Lab.

Comment Source: Nvidia

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Meta has acquired Moltbook, a platform best described as a Reddit for AI agents. Founders Matt Schlicht and Ben Parr are joining Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL), led by former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Axios reports. The purchase price wasn't disclosed, and the deal is expected to close in mid-March.

Moltbook launched in late January as an experimental space where AI agents could connect and coordinate tasks. Schlicht built most of it with help from his own AI assistant. Since then, two studies have deflated the sci-fi hype around the project: the actual number of agents appears far lower than claimed, and researchers found no real social interaction on the platform.

So what does Meta see in it? In a blog post obtained by Axios, Meta's Vishal Shah explains: "The Moltbook team has given agents a way to verify their identity and connect with one another on their human's behalf. This establishes a registry where agents are verified and tethered to human owners." Existing customers can keep using Moltbook temporarily.

The acquisition follows OpenAI's recent hire of Peter Steinberger, developer of the related agent framework OpenClaw.

Comment Source: Axios

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Eon Systems says it has connected a complete fruit fly brain emulation to a virtual body, producing multiple behaviors for the first time. The emulation covers over 125,000 neurons and 50 million synapses.

According to co-founder Alex Wissner-Gross, the startup mapped the fruit fly's neural wiring from electron microscopy data and connected it to a virtual fly body running in MuJoCo, a physics simulation engine.

Previous projects like OpenWorm worked with far smaller nervous systems, just 302 neurons, or relied on machine learning techniques like reinforcement learning instead of actual brain data. Eon takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than building AI, the startup wants to digitally copy and simulate real brains, neuron by neuron. The fruit fly is just the starting point. Within two years, Eon plans to emulate a mouse brain with 70 million neurons. The long-term goal is simulating a human brain.

Eon published the code for its brain model on GitHub, though it's based on a paper by Philip Shiu et al. that already appeared in Nature in 2024. The actually novel part, connecting the brain emulation to a simulated body, hasn't been released yet.

Comment Source: Substack

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

AI research

Philosopher David Chalmers: Current AI interpretability methods miss what matters most

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 10, 2026

Short News

Yann LeCun, former chief AI scientist at Meta and Turing Award winner, has raised over $1 billion for his new startup Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs) - making it Europe's largest seed funding round ever. Investors include Nvidia, Bezos Expeditions, Singapore's Temasek, and France's Cathay Innovation.

The company was valued at $3.5 billion before the funding round. Alexandre LeBrun, former head of French startup Nabla, serves as CEO, while LeCun will take the role of board chair. The company is launching with about a dozen employees spread across Paris, New York, Singapore, and Montreal.

AMI Labs aims to build so-called world models that understand the physical environment - with applications in areas like robotics and transportation. According to LeCun and LeBrun, today's language models aren't up to the task. Meta isn't an investor but is expected to partner with AMI Labs.

Comment Source: AMILabs | FT

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 9, 2026

Short News

Millions of people are already using chatbots like ChatGPT for retirement planning, the Financial Times reports. In a Lloyds Bank survey, more than half of respondents used AI for financial advice. However, experts point to clear limitations, including the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, which recently cautioned against AI hallucinations.

A test by Which? in November, for example, showed that popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Meta AI achieved overall scores of only 55 to 71 percent. Still, the pressure on the financial industry is significant: pension providers like Scottish Widows are now developing their own AI tools.

"I think that's the danger of AI is that people will assume they know what they don't," warns JPMorgan strategist John Bilton. According to Bilton, if users treat AI as an investment tool rather than a data tool, it risks making "underlying behavioural biases — such as the tendency to hold too much in cash or trade too often — stronger."

A counterexample is a 41-year-old software engineer who had ChatGPT restructure his entire $200,000 portfolio. ChatGPT advised him to diversify his risk exposure: 80 percent into a broad market equity index tracker and the remainder into a bond ETF. He told the Financial Times that speaking with the chatbot helped him to "commit to and actually execute" his plan.

Comment Source: FT

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 9, 2026

AI in practice

Study warns of "AI Brain Fry" as workers hit cognitive limits overseeing AI agents

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 9, 2026

AI in practice

U.S. Military strikes 3,000 targets in Iran with AI support, but oversight remains "underinvested"

The Wall Street Journal confirms and expands on previous reports about the massive use of generative AI in the U.S. military campaign against Iran. New details reveal how deeply AI is already embedded in intelligence, targeting, and logistics.

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Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 6, 2026

Short News

The Pentagon formally notified Anthropic on March 4 that the company and its products have been designated as a supply chain risk to US national security. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announced on March 5 that the company will challenge the designation in court. According to Amodei, the measure only applies to the use of Claude as a direct part of contracts with the Department of War, not all customers.

The dispute escalated after Anthropic demanded assurances that its AI would not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons deployment. According to Bloomberg, Claude is currently the only AI system operating in the Pentagon's classified cloud and is actively used in US operations against Iran.

Amodei also apologized for an internal post that was leaked to the press. "It does not reflect my careful or considered views," Amodei said. The post was written within hours of Trump's Truth Social post, Secretary of War Hegseth's announcement on X, and a Pentagon deal with OpenAI.

Anthropic is offering to continue providing its models to the military at nominal cost until a transition is complete. According to Bloomberg, the company is currently valued at $380 billion and is approaching an annual revenue run rate of $20 billion.

Comment Source: Anthropic