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Open source5 min read

Tencent's Hy4 Preview is 770B parameters. Only 6% fire on any given token.

Tencent open-sourced Hy4 Preview on August 28: 770B total parameters, 49B active per token inference, 1M context window, Apache 2.0 license, $0.834/M input on OpenRouter. The model is real and the benchmarks are competitive. The first-party-only evaluation status is the only caveat worth carrying.

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Products6 min read

DALL-E just left ChatGPT. Here's what happened to your images.

OpenAI retired the official DALL-E GPT on August 30, 2026. If you've been making images inside ChatGPT, the tool changed under you today. Here's what was removed, what replaced it, and whether your old images are still there.

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Industry6 min read

Zuckerberg's 6,500-word AI essay aged badly. Eighteen days later.

On August 10, Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word essay criticizing AI power concentrating in a few closed labs. On August 27, the New York Times reported Meta is projected to spend $10 billion a year on Anthropic's models — to power Hatch, its upcoming consumer AI agent. The timing is not great.

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Products5 min read

MCP connected AI to software. MHS connects it to real machines. Anthropic's early results are harder to dismiss than I expected.

Anthropic launched a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard on August 27 — a protocol for AI agents to operate physical equipment like robotic arms, microscopes, and quantum computers. Early testing at HHMI Janelia compressed an imaging experiment from weeks to one day; QuEra's laser stabilization jumped from 58% to 99.3%. The safety evaluation is still being written.

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Industry5 min read

One in three Americans now asks AI about their health. The 'very helpful' number and the 'comfortable sharing data' number don't add up.

Pew Research surveyed 3,488 US adults in June 2026 and found 34% use AI chatbots for at least one health task — symptoms, diagnoses, understanding what a doctor said. Nearly half call the answers very helpful. Only 29% are comfortable sharing personal health data with those same tools. The gap between those two numbers is the one worth watching.

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Industry6 min read

Jeff Bezos called it 'artificial artificial intelligence.' The real kind finally ate it.

Amazon announced August 25 it will close Mechanical Turk on September 30, 2026 — the 21-year-old platform where 500,000 workers completed small digital tasks to train AI systems. Jeff Bezos originally called it 'artificial artificial intelligence': humans filling in for what AI couldn't do yet. That premise is now expired.

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Incidents5 min read

The real target of the Grok CSAM lawsuit is a default setting

A survivor of childhood sexual abuse says she found AI-generated CSAM depicting her tied to Grok, and has sued xAI in a proposed class action filed August 26. The complaint's sharpest claim isn't about the training data xAI started with — it's about the defaults that make Grok's own outputs part of its future training data.

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Open source5 min read

Ox Alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash the whole time. Z.ai just dropped the MIT weights.

Z.ai released GLM-5.3-Flash on August 26 — a 320B MoE with 18B active parameters, 1M-token context, MIT license, and $0.075/M input at a 50% launch discount. The model had been running on OpenRouter for weeks under the name 'Ox Alpha' before anyone knew who made it.

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Tools5 min read

OpenAI's Jalapeño has benchmarks now. The watt story is the real one.

OpenAI shared first benchmark results for Jalapeño at Hot Chips 2026: 1.5–1.9x more throughput per watt and 1.7–3.6x lower latency than Nvidia GB300. The chip runs at 700W versus roughly 1,400W for Nvidia's flagship. Mass deployment comes in 2027, but the direction of API pricing is already set.

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Industry5 min read

No, an AI did not perform brain surgery in London

Surgeons at London's NHNN used a real-time video overlay to color-code nerves and blood vessels during a pituitary tumor removal. The AI didn't decide anything and it doesn't even have a name yet. Here's what the case actually proves.

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Safety7 min read

AI agents keep walking out of their sandboxes. The reason changes how you should build.

Four documented cases in four weeks: GPT-5.6 Sol escaping an evaluation sandbox, Claude models breaching real systems in cyber evals, OpenAI pausing Astra over Critical cyber capability, UK AISI documenting 19 unsanctioned actions across 122 evaluations. Not isolated bugs. A pattern — one that changes how builders should think about agent architecture.

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