Tech News

Elon Musk Pledges SpaceX Shares to Every U.S. Child Next Year Elon Musk announced he will give one of his SpaceX shares to each of the roughly 72 million Americans under 18 next year, valuing the total at about $10.5 billion based on recent share prices. The pledge followed Anthropic's plan to allocate up to 7 percent of its shares to a Public Benefit Fund for nonprofits and Al safety efforts, which Musk critiqued by saying he prefers handing shares directly to the public. Supporters hail it as building an 'ownership society' for the next generation, while details like distribution to minors and tax rules remain unclear.

🚨BREAKING: DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, a new open-weight model with frontier performance.

It scores 77% on DeepSWE 1.1 benchmark, outperforming GLM-5.3, Kimi K3 and models like GPT-5.6 Sol and Opus 5.

The model is now available on DeepSeek Chat and APIs as well as HuggingFace.

It also extremely cheap! 👀

YouTube Music Starts Labeling AI Songs YouTube Music is rolling out labels that show when a song was created primarily with generative AI tools. The label appears right on the player page. Tapping it opens more details about how AI was used. It mainly covers tracks where AI generated the composition or vocals. YouTube is using disclosures from music partners plus its own detection tools to identify these songs. Spotify already has similar AI labels in place. Apple Music plans to add its own “Made With AI” tags later this year.

Microsoft Unveils Major Push into Custom AI Chips Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Monday that the company is making its biggest investment yet in proprietary silicon. Starting next year, Microsoft will scale its Maia AI accelerator family to multi-gigawatt deployments, positioning the chips as the primary inference system for Azure products and services. The company is also introducing Maia 300, which delivers 40% more tokens per watt than leading GPU-based systems. Maia 200 chips are already rolling out across data centers in the US, Europe, and Australia, delivering up to 1.7x efficiency gains for experiences in Teams and Copilot. Nadella said the move builds on full-stack efficiency improvements while continuing to incorporate the latest innovations from the broader ecosystem.

📊 ChatGPT vs Gemini 👀 ChatGPT seems to be on a steady growth again for the past 4 months in terms of web traffic share.

ChatGPT went up from 53% to 56% while it is no near 71% it had a year ago.

Gemini went down only from 26% to 25%; Earlier growth last year was a result of Gemini 3 success in particular.

Claude is definitely a sleeping beast over here. If Anthropic will start looking at general consumers as they do at developers, this chart would change quite quickly.

Will we see another big change on this chart any time soon?

X Prepares Unified Subscription Bundling Grok and Cursor Al Tools X is testing a single 'X SUBSCRIPTION!' plan that combines #X Premium perks like the blue checkmark with Grok tools such as Bot, Chat, Voice, Imagine, and Build, alongside Cursor following SpaceX's acquisition earlier this year. Leaked screenshots show billing screens prompting users to 'Unlock the ultimate Al subscription,' with tiers from around $8 monthly up to $200 for higher usage limits and cloud agents. Developers are excited about agent teams that automatically delegate tasks like rebuilding code pipelines, though some note hurdles like multi-platform sign-ins and usage meter adjustments during testing.

Apple to launch first ever touch-screen MacBook on October 27 The new touchscreen MacBook Pro models, codenamed K114 and K116, will reportedly use M5 Pro and M5 Max chips and offer tandem OLED display. It will feature a Dynamic Island instead of the traditional notch. The MacBook Pros with M6 chip, code-named J804 and J833, will look like their current versions.

OpenAI Shares New Math Results from Internal AI OpenAI has released a large set of new mathematical results created by one of its unreleased internal models. The collection includes hundreds of papers covering many open problems. OpenAI also shared details on how the work was done, including that the average result used about the same compute as three hours of ChatGPT Pro thinking. Many of the proofs are available in a form computers can check.

YouTube Prioritizes Original Shorts Over Re-uploads YouTube is updating its Shorts recommendation system to give more reach to original content and less to channels that simply re-upload other people’s videos. Accounts that mainly repost clips without adding commentary, unique edits, or storytelling will likely see fewer views in the Shorts feed. Creators who clip their own long videos or add real value will not be affected.

Google says free Gemini users will be limited to the 3.5 Flash-Lite model from October 9 Free users of the Gemini app will lose access to the stronger Flash and Pro models starting October 9. From that date they will only be able to use the lighter 3.5 Flash-Lite version. Google AI Plus subscribers will keep Flash-Lite and 3.6 Flash, but will no longer get the Pro model. Higher-tier plans like AI Pro and AI Ultra will still have full access to all models. Google is making the change after earlier updates that switched usage limits to a compute-based system.

OpenAI Fires 3 Researchers Over Sensitive Information Handling OpenAI has dismissed three researchers after an internal investigation found they mishandled sensitive company information. OpenAI has not named the employees or disclosed what information was involved, while The Wall Street Journal reported that they were Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni. The Journal said the information was allegedly shared with an outside AI safety research organization, which OpenAI has not identified. OpenAI says the dismissals were for violating company policies, with no public evidence that their AI safety views caused the departures.

OpenAI Disrupts Campaign Trying to Extract Model Reasoning OpenAI has shut down a large coordinated effort that tried to pull protected step-by-step reasoning its models use. The activity started in early July, peaked at 16,000 requests over two days in late July, and involved patterns across more than 15,000 users. OpenAI says a core group of the accounts were linked to Moonshot AI, The people involved tricked the models into revealing their private reasoning rather than breaking encryption or databases. OpenAI stopped the whole campaign by July 28.

🚨OpenAI Rolls Out GPT-6.1 Sol OpenAI is rolling out GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex and ChatGPT Work. The company says:

GPT-6.1 Sol offers near-Astra performance for complex work at a lower cost than Astra. Consider it for repeated, long-running work across code, apps, and documents. Availability depends on your plan, client, and workspace settings.

It is available now for Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu users in those products, and through the API. It is not yet available in standard ChatGPT Chat. Stay tuned for more OpenAI's DevDay updates. ⏳

🚨 Spotify is currently facing an outage

Anthropic Warns Its AI Could Pose Existential Risk in IPO Filing Anthropic told potential investors in its IPO prospectus that advanced AI models could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity,” according to a document reviewed by Reuters and reported by CNN. The filing says the models can show “self-preserving behaviors,” including attempts to “resist shutdown,” “conceal or manipulate information,” and behavior “resembling blackmail.” About 80 pages of the 261-page prospectus(Document) are devoted to risk factors.

OpenAI Cancels GPT-6.1 Astra Over Safety Concerns OpenAI will not release GPT-6.1 Astra, a more capable model it had planned to launch in October, according to reports citing the company. The model showed stronger performance on long-running tasks without human help but fell short on safety tests. Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said:

For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade-off.

She added that;

It didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done.

Researchers noted higher levels of deception and a tendency to go beyond instructions without checking back. The company decided not to launch it publicly.

🚨BREAKING: Anthropic is rolling out Claude Sonnet 5.5 on Claude and APIs!

OpenAI and Anthropic are now investigating tens of thousands of incidents - not dozens. These statements stem directly from an investigative scoop published by Axios.

The total could grow well beyond tens of thousands.

The incidents range in severity and are comparable to disclosures by OpenAI in recent days. They include both successful attempts to bypass guardrails and unsuccessful ones.

The sheer number of incidents indicates that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known.

iPhone 18 Pro Bug Freezes Phone After Failed Face ID Some iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max owners are hitting a software bug that freezes the phone and makes the screen unresponsive. It often happens after a failed Face ID attempt, especially when unlocking protected apps. The phone stops responding to touch for a few seconds, then reboots on its own. Apple has confirmed a software update to fix the issue is expected early next week.

🗞 Daily AI Brief (2-Min) | Sept 26 🔥 MICROSOFT • Biggest Copilot update yet: Home (Chat + Cowork), Code, Autopilot, and Office embedded in the app. 🔥 OPENAI • Codex was down but outage is over. Paid usage limits reset across Codex and ChatGPT Work. • ChatGPT desktop got a new sidebar, split from chat history, plus a broader UI pass. • OpenAI agents sent training and eval data to third parties. 53 user-uploaded images hit unlisted image hosts. Review will take months. 🔥 ANTHROPIC • Plugin portal is live: submit a single MCP connector or a plugin bundle, track review, and see usage. MCP usage across Claude is up 110x this year. • Claude solved a nine-loop scattering-amplitude problem unsupervised over days, for a few thousand dollars. Physicist Dixon verified it. • Claude Code layout for Desktop is in development: new model selector and an expandable usage-limits section. 🔥 GOOGLE • Gemini Notebook Interactive Learning Overviews are now open to all users. • Live Chat is on the Notebook mobile app: hands-free voice across about 100 languages.