MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Your thermostat may not look like a power plant. Neither does your electric vehicle, home battery, or HVAC system. But utility and energy companies increasingly want to treat them like one. A virtual power plant, or VPP, is a collection of household devices (such…
In the final week of August 2026, Alibaba's Qwen team open-sourced the 2.4-trillion-parameter Qwen3.8-Max, while Zhipu AI's Z.ai revealed that the mysterious "Ox Alpha" model on OpenRouter was actually GLM-5.3-Flash. The twin releases highlight contrasting open-source strategies, a 26-fold inference cost gap, and a shared bet on coding and agent workloads.
A federal judge has called the Department of Defense’s designation of Anthropic as a national security supply-chain risk “illegal and baseless.”
On August 27, 2026, Google DeepMind released the world's first double-blind evaluation pilot report for frontier AI models, using a cryptographic black-box trusted execution environment to keep external test banks and model weights mutually isolated and prevent benchmark contamination.
Standardized driver interface aims to let devices talk to AI and each other.
At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the AI Stage is back to dig into the single hottest topic in the community for the past few years, presented by Google for Startups.
xAI accused of training Grok on real and AI-generated child pornography.
This week on “Uncanny Valley,” senior writer Will Knight talks his recent visit to China and the future of AI collaboration.
Zhipu AI officially open-sourced GLM-5.3-Flash (320B-A18B) on August 26, 2026, confirming it was the anonymous model "Ox Alpha" that topped call-volume rankings on OpenRouter and OpenCode within six days. Matching Claude Opus 4.8's frontier score at roughly one-fortieth the price, the model completed its entire anonymous testing phase on domestic Chinese chips.
Skild AI has released the S1 robot foundation model, which learns multi-step physical tasks of up to 10 minutes from a single human demonstration video—without fine-tuning or post-training—achieving a 66% success rate on unseen tasks versus 9% for language-prompted VLA models. The approach treats video demonstrations as programs, leveraging trillion-scale simulation pretraining for in-the-wild generalization.
Tech industry is perplexed by Trump’s plan to win AI race by taxing data centers.
I knew I’d officially become a ‘longevity influencer’ this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about—and even receive—their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1-Generation. This wasn’t just any antiaging treatment, either. A company fact sheet says that it…
Zoph, who co-founded Thinking Machines Lab alongside Mira Murati and also served as the startup's CTO, led a brief stint at OpenAI and is now at Google.
Nvidia is nabbing critical infrastructure for open models as interest grows.
GPT-5.5's main leaderboard score in today's Smoke evaluation fell from 95.01 to 85.93, down 9.1 points. The material constraints dimension plunged 16.5 points, while engineering judgment surged 25 points.
GPT-o3's main leaderboard score in today's Smoke evaluation fell from yesterday's 100.00 to 89.92, a decline of 10.1 points, primarily driven by the material constraint dimension dropping from 100.00 to 77.60.
On 2026-08-28, the YZ Index Smoke quick test covered 11 models, with Claude Opus 4.7 ranking first at 93.54 points. Single-day scores should be treated as monitoring signals given the small sample size, and notable fluctuations among mid-tier models warrant cautious interpretation.
Code reviewed by WIRED reveals the company is developing a feature that enables Codex to continue working proactively until it is “put to sleep.”
Some of the world's largest tech companies and AI startups have come together to decry the current state of cybersecurity and to advertise a new solution that they say can ward off a new generation of cyber threats.
The potential for AI to automate scientific research and manufacturing must be balanced with new risks, Anthropic says.
