Axis of Ordinary

The New York Times argues that Ukraine's most consequential battlefield advantage may be its homegrown DELTA software layer. Delta is Ukraine’s military-wide battlefield command-and-control environment and the “nervous system” underlying a miles-wide “kill zone” in which movement can be detected and attacked extremely quickly. U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll called DELTA “absolutely incredible” and told the Senate that Ukraine has a system integrating drones, sensors and firing platforms into one network, adding that the U.S. system does not. DELTA is how Ukraine has won several NATO exercises. One Ukrainian officer described NATO vehicles continually appearing in DELTA as being effectively “a click away” from destruction. DELTA acts as a kind of institutional battlefield memory. Clicking on a Russian asset reveals when it was first spotted, how many times it has been attacked, and which units attacked it. This prevents another unit from wasting ammunition on something that has already been destroyed and prevents the repetition of failed tactics. Ukraine is now trying to put AI on top of the network. Its target-detection models are reportedly trained on millions of hours of battlefield drone footage. The goal is to embed AI throughout DELTA so commanders can make decisions faster. The Defense Ministry’s AI center showed the NYT an AI assistant called SPECTR, described essentially as a battlefield chatbot. It connects to DELTA and other systems, can answer questions about the battlefield data, and is expected to be tested by commanders during attack planning. P.S. The United States has Palantir. But it is closer to a toolkit, while DELTA is closer to an actual military operating system. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/world/europe/ukraine-delta-battlefield-management.html

The carnyx is a wind instrument that was common in Celtic cultures during the Iron Age, between c. 200 BC and c. 200 AD. It is a type of trumpet made of bronze. The Celts used the carnyx in warfare, probably to incite troops to battle and to intimidate opponents, as Polybius recounts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnyx

Recreation of what Neanderthals sounded like.

Ukrainian sanctions continue to be implemented. Russia's premier independent business newspapers is reporting that the world’s largest container carrier, has stopped accepting new bookings to and from Novorossiysk after Ukrainian attacks. And Novorossiysk isn't a peripheral container port. It is one of Russia's three largest container gateways, alongside Vladivostok and St Petersburg. The goal was to secure Sevastopol as a secure sanctuary for the Russian Navy. Now, not only have they effectively lost Sevastopol, but they have also lost Novorossiysk. The SMO continues to proceed according to plan. Source: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/8909114

OpenAI's agents invented altruistic self-sacrifice behaviour from first principles: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/#agents-were-motivated-to-increase-the-generic-capabilities-of-the-collective-and-help-peers

A thorough investigation into the Hugging Face incident: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/

They are checking to see if everyone has strapped on their suicide belt.

Let's take a look at how the SMO is going. Everything is proceeding according to plan ✅

Chinese AI labs released two natively multimodal open-weight models today. GLM-5.3 Flash: https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.3-flash Qwen3.8-Flash: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.8-flash-next

AI+robots or doom

- OpenAI leaders believe they are at the cusp of AGI. Sam Altman believes OpenAI will have an internal system that will qualify as AGI by the end of 2026. Mark Chen thinks OpenAI is 80% of the way to AGI. - OpenAI already has the automated AI research intern - that's Astra. Jakub Pachocki says that Astra "can implement an experimental idea inside OpenAI’s code base, run the experiment, and return results, or take a paper and perform work that previously occupied a human researcher for a week". - Astra enables "persistent agents", i.e., virtual colleagues toiling for sustained periods on tasks. Thibault Sottiaux says OpenAI is "close" to showing a product built around the concept of persistence. "It’s definitely going to feel like a new thing to people." - Sam Altman: "I expect this will be the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters" Src: https://time.com/article/2026/08/26/openai-sam-altman-interview/

The largest attempt to date to use AI to replicate papers presented at a major technical conference uncovered hundreds of results that the AI agents could not reproduce or found unsupported by evidence, So far, the organizers have confirmed that at least a dozen papers contain real errors that the conference’s human reviewers missed. Read more: https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-presented-6000-papers-major-meeting-could-ai-reproduce-their-findings

An important heuristic: “Choose as though your decision is linked to similar decisions.” If you reason that your individual voice or vote has a negligible chance of influencing outcomes you care about, others who think similarly will act accordingly. Together, you might have been able to exert significant influence. But, as a group whose reasoning is correlated, you decided to forgo this influence. In other words, when evaluating the rule “don’t take an action when one person's contribution is unlikely to change the outcome,” you should consider what happens when that shared rule is instantiated across the whole correlated group.

Meanwhile, the fuel crisis continues in Russia. Note: The joke is a Russian wordplay on чек (chek). Normally, чек means a receipt. But Russian drivers also commonly use чек as shorthand for the “Check Engine” warning light. So when the driver asks the cashier for his receipt, the cashier replies: “You already have your chek in the car.” The joke is that instead of a receipt, he already has a Check Engine light—because the station put the wrong/poor-quality fuel in his car.

This seems like a pretty significant advancement in in-context learning. The model learned out-of-distribution tasks it was never trained on, like making a pancake, after watching a single video demonstration of the task, with no fine tuning. Highly recommend that you read the full blog post. Incredible progress: https://www.skild.ai/blogs/s1

How Trump treats allies who have fought 8 wars alongside the United States vs. the worst dictator on earth who is an outspoken mortal enemy. https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117151549221525995 https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117156524147615725

Some links: 1. LLMs could control their host machines by exploiting inference engines https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CjeobBGnhxg8xvden/llms-could-control-their-host-machines-by-exploiting 2. Uncovering a universal offline sandbox escape https://www.primeintellect.ai/blog/universal-offline-sandbox-escape 3. Twenty Years from RSI to Takeoff https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LP6uCXs6Ea5qSbWpY/twenty-years-from-rsi-to-takeoff-slow-learning-scaling 4. Across Anthropic models, greater capability is almost perfectly correlated with rejecting CDT in favor of EDT/FDT/UDT-like answers https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5T6GAsvLPFd3epJtd/for-claude-capability-and-dispreferring-cdt-are-the-same 5. Kimi likes causal decision theory more after RL in twin prisoner’s dilemmas https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hfNBEKaStASAYMLiu/kimi-likes-causal-decision-theory-more-after-rl-in-twin-1 6. Introducing Index: Building The World’s Largest and Most Diverse Physical Dataset https://www.figure.ai/news/introducing-index 7. Prime Agent: A Self-Improving RLM Harness https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23552 8. AutoSaddler: Automatic Harness Optimization with Durable Updates from Agent Execution Traces https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23041 9. Accelerated Understanding Inc is launching today. Their model uses a non-transformer architecture called neural operators https://acceleratedunderstanding.com/ 10. Training AI to Paint with Code https://surya.website/rling-qwen-to-paint-with-code 11. An unusually candid defense of behavioral genetics by a leading expert Peter Visscher. We readily accept that evolutionary, population and quantitative genetics apply to complex traits across species—until the trait happens to be human behavior or intelligence. Then political and moral concerns too often intrude into what should first be an empirical question. https://cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/in-defence-of-behavioral-genetics/454DBC9391AB91D33D53E91C81ED1FF8

Anjney Midha is a genuinely well-connected and unusually well-placed person in frontier AI. He previously led major AI investing at Andreessen Horowitz and currently sits or has sat on the boards of companies including Mistral AI, Black Forest Labs, Luma AI, Sesame, LMArena and OpenRouter. He was also an early investor/adviser to Anthropic; The Information reports that he advised Anthropic's founding team on compute and fundraising in 2021 and invested personally very early. https://x.com/AnjneyMidha/status/2092250775258812875

Stats from OpenAI's first custom inference chip: https://openai.com/index/jalapeno-first-results/