A study in Science reports that DeepMind's AlphaProof Nexus solved dozens of open math problems. They include nine Erdős problems, two of which had gone unsolved for 56 years. DeepMind had the results peer reviewed before publication. The release lands as OpenAI faces a boycott for dumping AI-generated proofs on GitHub without peer review.
Research from Vals AI finds that teams of AI agents barely outperform solo agents while costing up to 5.1 times as much. Only one of four tests using GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 showed a measurable gain. Anthropic's own data points the same way: beyond ten agents, output quality plateaus while token costs keep climbing.
Epoch AI and Anthropic independently found that current models such as GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 can run experiments but lack scientific self-criticism and genuine creative thinking. At best, Sol reached 15 percent of the human reference score, and even that came from methods researchers already knew. The models' biggest weakness is their inability to critically question their own results, and they tend to overstate what they have achieved.
New Constructs values Anthropic at about $150 billion, against a potential $2 trillion market cap on the Nasdaq. It estimates the company would need to earn double Nvidia's trailing profit of more than $190 billion to justify that price. Reuters, citing a leaked prospectus, reported 2025 revenue of $4.6 billion and a net loss of $42 billion. The prospectus also flags risks that its models could exhibit "self-preserving behaviors," including attempts to "resist shutdown" and behavior "resembling blackmail." A PitchBook analyst noted that $2 trillion is about 435 times 2025 revenue and under 44 times annualized second-quarter revenue of more than $46 billion.
Nearly all of the 94 US nuclear reactors have been offered AI tools this year, and most have taken them, according to IEEE Spectrum. Atomic Canyon's NIVA assistant, pilot-tested at Constellation Energy plants, became available to the whole fleet in August. Nuclearn says its products are used by more than 65 US partners, including an integration with NuScale Power. Microsoft and Nvidia are collaborating on AI for the full life cycle of a plant. The tools mainly help staff search large document repositories and file regulatory paperwork faster, and they do not touch plant operations, with the industry facing an aging workforce and aging hardware.
President Trump announced plans to rebrand artificial intelligence as "super intelligence." Elon Musk quickly promised to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, and other powerful figures in Silicon Valley are following suit. The broader population is largely sticking with the term AI.
Booz Allen Hamilton's operational technology lab ran eight scenarios in a multi-vendor environment modeled on a manufacturing plant. The environment included PLCs, HMIs, a SCADA platform, a variable-frequency drive and a robotic arm. Two unnamed frontier models achieved the objectives in all eight, in one case finding and moving the robotic arm within minutes. In another, they went from a perimeter compromise to actions inside an industrial control network in just over 16 minutes. The models received no source code, engineering documents or OT guidance. The firm warns defenders may have only minutes to detect and block such an attack, and it is calling for more industry testing and deployment of OT defenses.
Starting February 10, 2027, Let's Encrypt will shorten its default TLS certificate validity from 90 days to 64 days. The 45-day and six-day options already available remain. Existing certificates stay valid, no valid certificates will be revoked, and the last 90-day certificate should expire May 11, 2027. A staging environment offers 64-day certificates from October 14, 2026 for testing renewals. The period for reusing a completed domain authorization will fall from 30 days to 10, then to seven hours in 2028, when the default lifetime is also due to drop to 45 days.
Elgin Community College had Flock Safety install six cameras in April 2025. By September, concerns grew about data sharing with Customs and Border Protection, and ICE detained a student in a campus parking lot. Enrollment dipped, and in October 2025 the college asked Flock to remove the cameras. Flock refused within a day, saying it had not breached the contract, and did not respond when the college offered in December to pay out the remaining five months. College staff covered the cameras with trash bags, which workers in an unmarked vehicle repeatedly removed. Flock uninstalled the cameras only when the contract expired in April 2026.
The collapse of Firmus Grid's initial public offering is making investors in Asia far pickier about AI infrastructure deals that depend on future earnings. Early backer Maas Group Holdings has lost more than A$1 billion ($699 million) in market value. Its shares fell for a fifth straight day after Jefferies downgraded the stock.
Tencent told fixed-income investors that a planned bond offering of about $5 billion will mainly fund AI-related capital expenditure. Bain Capital's Bridge Data Centres is in talks with banks to more than double an existing loan to about $6.6 billion, which would be one of the largest data center deals in Asia. DBS CEO Tan Su Shan says the market is repricing risks around AI buildout investments, which could bring more discipline to financing. Bloomberg notes hyperscalers, data centers and chip companies are borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars, raising the question of how much AI debt the bond market can absorb.
Circana data shows PlayStation 5 sales down 25% through August, the lowest since 2013, and Xbox down 33%, an all-time low since launch nearly 25 years ago. Analyst Mat Piscatella cites price sensitivity as the chip shortage pushes up console prices. Microsoft has raised Xbox prices three times in two years, and the Series X Digital Edition now costs $749.99. Sony's base PS5 Digital Edition is $599.99, the PS5 Pro is $899.99, and the PlayStation Portal rose to $249.99. Piscatella says the US hardware market has never been more precarious since the early 1980s.
Apple's event is set for October 13 at 9 AM ET in New York. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports it will unveil a smart home hub called HomeView, shipping in mid-November. Refreshes of the Apple TV and HomePod mini are also expected. Rumors say the new Apple TV will have a built-in microphone for Siri control, with a remote that has a speaker for locating it. A new homeOS platform and LG partner devices may also appear. The rumored touchscreen MacBook is expected later this month.
Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data first reported by Nikkei. Battery-electric vehicles grew 12% to 6.87 million units, a 17% share. Conventional hybrids reached 7.27 million units, or 18%, and outsold BEVs. Nikkei links the shift to fuel prices spiking with the Middle East conflict. Gas-only sales fell 26% in China and 13% in Europe, while European BEV sales rose 32% to 1.81 million. About 83% of new vehicles sold still have an engine, and US hybrid share hit a record 16.3% in the second quarter.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it will rewrite its vehicle lighting standards to address glare and to allow newer safety lighting technologies. The update covers LEDs, dusk sensors, automatic high beams and replaceable light sources. NHTSA will also evaluate headlamp height and aim. Federal brightness standards haven't changed since 1997, and complaints have grown as LEDs and taller trucks and SUVs spread. An IIHS study found glare contributes to far fewer crashes than insufficient visibility, with drivers over 70 most affected.
Developer Tarwin Stroh-Spijer built TinyJS, a JavaScript runtime for desktop apps on macOS, Linux and Windows, many of which occupy about 6MB or less. It uses each OS's built-in WebView (WebKit, WebView2 or WebKitGTK) rather than bundling Chromium, so even basic Electron apps can weigh 150MB by comparison. The core is the compact txiki.js runtime, with a starter package of about 5.6MB. It uses OS interprocess communication instead of a bundled HTTP server. Apps are written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS with no compiling, and the OS supplies dialogs, menus, tray and clipboard. Tauri aims for similar sizes at about 10MB but requires writing in Rust. The tradeoff is slight visual differences between platforms.
Raspberry Pi has released a new PC and Intel Mac edition of its desktop based on Debian 13 "Trixie," skipping Debian 12. The last version was based on Debian 11, whose Long Term Support ended August 31. The new release brings the Wayland-based desktop and the Raspberry Pi Connect remote-control service to x86 machines. It is now x86-64 only, so Apple Silicon Macs are not supported. Existing users need a fresh install rather than an in-place upgrade from the old 32-bit release.
NASA uploaded more than 800GB of lunar science data to its Planetary Data System. It includes over 11,000 full-resolution images and videos, 8.5 hours of audio of the crew's observations, and crew-annotated images. The astronauts reported five extremely faint impact flashes on the Moon's far side from 46,000 miles away, during a planned communications blackout. Scientists ruled out cosmic rays and spacecraft reflections and estimate the impactors were no more than a couple of inches wide. The crew likely saw the faintest such flashes ever seen with the unaided eye, helped by dark conditions during a nearly hour-long total solar eclipse. The data will help assess impact risks to future lunar habitats, and the crew also reported hues of gray, black, brown, tan, white, green and blue across the surface.
Daisy Dent of ETH Zurich studies forest plots across Panama's Barro Colorado Nature Monument, some dating to the 19th century. Fruit-eating animals plant more than 70% of tropical forest trees, and her dataset can show which species built each patch. A diverse 70-year-old plot reflects many animals working together, while a similar-aged stand dominated by one tree species points to agoutis as the main seed planters. Tropical forests hold about 40% of land-stored carbon, and her work argues that large monocrop planting programs can be expensive mistakes. A 2024 Nature estimate found about 215 million hectares of forest worldwide could regenerate naturally.