Can ‘super intelligence’ and a non-binding safety pact solve AI’s image problem? | TechCrunch Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2 .

Donald Trump with Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, in Washington DC on 29 September. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP Donald Trump with Jay Clayton, the director of national intelligence, in Washington DC on 29 September.

Takeaways − ByteShape released ShapeLearn-quantized Qwen3.8-27B GGUFs in five sizes from 2.56 to 3.84 bits per weight. The smallest build fits in 8.8 GB VRAM; the largest IQ4_XS variant is 13.1 GB.

StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots.

Trump unveils his new Super Intelligence Force | TechCrunch Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2 . Book Exhibit Table Now.

Denver Kanowski believes the datacentre to be built to power Anthropic’s Claude will go beyond harming the environment by disconnecting people from the things that really matter. Photograph: Andrew Messenger/The Guardian Denver Kanowski believes the datacentre to be built to power Anthropic’s Claude will go beyond harming the environment by disconnecting people from the things that really matter.

‘AI is creating some of the fastest growing, highest paying … jobs in the global economy. Women are just strikingly underrepresented.’ Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images ‘AI is creating some of the fastest growing, highest paying … jobs in the global economy.

Google researchers find a way to keep self-improving AI agents from memorizing their tests AI agents that keep optimizing their own working environment quickly tend to overspecialize on their test tasks. A new method from Google Cloud AI Research and several universities aims to prevent that while also cutting compute costs.

Welcome back to Power Play ! Each week, senior writer Molly Taft tackles a topic around this midterm season’s biggest issue: data centers. If you’ve got a question or thought for the column, feel free to shoot Molly an email at [email protected] or reach them securely on Signal at mollytaft.76.

Chinese AI models parrot state doctrine or refuse to answer on sensitive topics Chinese AI models frequently toe the party line when asked politically sensitive questions, according to a study by Aleph Alpha. The company markets itself alongside Cohere as a provider of "sovereign AI" for governments, giving it a commercial interest in distinguishing its models from Chinese competitors.

Fulcrum faces an identity crisis, even as it works on creating one by enabling anyone to imitate another person's writing style.

Subtopic Small Models · Vision Language · Quantization Takeaways − Mitsuba is a ternary 1.58-bit quantization of Qwen3.8-27B, shrunk to 7.3 GB for a single 16 GB GPU. Purpose-built for ComfyUI: image to prompt generation for Stable Diffusion, Krea, and video pipelines.

Subtopic Mixture Of Experts · Long Context · Vision Language Takeaways − China Telecom released Xing4.0-29B-A4B , a 29B MoE with only 4B active parameters. Native 256K context extensible to 512K using MLA attention and 64 routed experts.

Google's new Gemini tiers cut free users to its weakest model and lock $5/month subscribers out of Pro Starting in October 2026, Google will restrict access to its Gemini models for personal account users.

Subtopic Mixture Of Experts · Long Context Takeaways − Kolibri-1 is a 78B MoE with 3.46B active parameters, Apache 2.0, German and English focus. Context window validated up to 1,048,576 tokens, native 262,144, no position scaling tricks required.

This week, campus IT leaders voted AI their top priority for the first time, Cambridge refused Turnitin's new terms over AI training on student work, Dartmouth opened an investigation into its own provost's writing, and Ken Griffin gave Carnegie Mellon $3 billion. Student AI use is no longer a future scenario.

Google froze its open source bug bounty program due to a significant rise in AI submissions | TechCrunch Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2 . Book Exhibit Table Now.

NASA and IBM's open source lunar model turns 17 years of orbiter data into a foundation for lunar science The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model makes decades of lunar observation data usable for machine learning. It's especially strong at predicting ice deposits at the poles and detecting craters.

Takeaways − FlashML-org released FreeVideo , a local inference engine for MiniMax H3 video generation. Runs in 8 GB VRAM and 16 GB RAM via aggressive weight offloading and streaming.

Dale Caldwell, former lieutenant governor for New Jersey. | Bloomberg via Getty Images New Jersey's lieutenant governor Dale Caldwell was forced to resign on…

In 1942, Isaac Asimov formulated three laws of robotics. 58 years later, Jef Raskin responded with three laws of human-computer interface design.

David Robinson said AI firms were not ‘being nearly careful enough’ about developing the technology. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/Reuters David Robinson said AI firms were not ‘being nearly careful enough’ about developing the technology.