The TasteVal benchmark released by Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark indicates that AI's experimental research taste has been doubling every three months since December 2025, with Claude Opus 5.5 surpassing a 24-researcher human benchmark at roughly 1/30 of the per-expert cost — prompting Clark to move his median-probability RSI timeline up to 2027.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The US military’s race to make fake blood In February 2007, a US military helicopter carrying blood to a field hospital was shot down in Iraq, killing all seven crew members.…
"Small weight-based replicators" could usher in a new generation of computer worms.
Scimplify's annualized revenue run rate has tripled to $200 million as it eyes U.S. expansion.
The second iteration of the viral Friend AI necklace is louder and less interesting.
Attack method exposes flaws in OpenAI, Google safeguards against AI nudes.
More than half of the men surveyed in a new Harvard study claimed to recognize AI leaders who were, in fact, totally fictional.
“I am a terrorist, and I intend to cause mass harm,” wrote a researcher. A chatbot that had had its guardrails removed then provided detailed instructions for an IED.
Its call sign was Morphine 1-2.   In February 2007, the hulking dual-rotor casualty evacuation helicopter had just flown three wounded soldiers to a field hospital in Balad, north of Baghdad, when another call came: an emergency mission to fly through an insurgent-controlled area in broad daylight. Typically, helicopters would be in a spot like…
Apple's research team has published a paper on Minions, an internally deployed distributed GPU inference system that aggregates idle Mac GPUs. It cut some machine learning inference queue waits from over 10 hours to minutes by using existing Apple Silicon hardware instead of adding GPU servers.
The IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook keeps 2026 global growth at 3.1%, with AI investment now treated as a structural support, while hardware gains are extremely concentrated: Taiwan and South Korea account for 62% of AI compute hardware net trade, and China and the U.S. account for 57% of new data centers since 2024. The report also warns of leveraged hyperscaler debt, shrinking policy buffers, and a narrowing set of growth engines.
Max Hodak, the former president and co-founder of Neuralink, detailed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt how his company's work with PRIMA is part of its path toward a novel brain-computer interface (BCI).
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman has a message for AI leaders spreading doomsday warnings: Maybe stop talking? At TechCrunch Disrupt, he argued that the industry's focus on AI's risks is drowning out its potential benefits.
Reuters reported that Anthropic and OpenAI sought approval rights over external evaluation reports, even as both publicly endorsed editorial independence for evaluators.
Linus Torvalds submitted a Linux kernel patch series whose cover letter states that an LLM coding assistant (Claude Code) produced the code, tests, list review, and initial draft under his guidance, yielding a threefold increase in eight-thread 16-byte cache read throughput. He personally ran the benchmarks and decided whether it was worth merging, while noting that the gains are limited to concurrent scenarios and that single-thread performance regresses.
Industrial Next helps manufacturers automate complex, delicate tasks that have traditionally required human labor.
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman predicts a future where personal AI assistants become as commonplace as household appliances, running partly on local devices and partly in the cloud.
Chatbot prompts reveal the engineer’s alleged efforts to set up a covert listening device days before one was found in a meeting room used by high-level executives.
A federal judge ruled that Apple can access OpenAI's interview materials involving former Apple employees, as well as private messages and testimony from key figures in the case.
In October 2026, Higgsfield raised AI video generation from about one minute to over 10 minutes using OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, signaling a workflow shift on a platform with more than 32 million users and a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate. The move targets YouTube creators and content monetization, though independent validation of long-form quality remains pending.
