OpenAI's Brad Lightcap departs after eight years
The former chief operating officer, who moved into a special projects role in April, is leaving to start something new, extending a run of senior exits at the AI lab this year.
AI & Models
AI & Models
AI & Models
ChatGPT and Gemini both cross 1 billion monthly users
Google's Gemini app reached the milestone CEO Sundar Pichai called its fastest growth ever, matching the mark ChatGPT hit in June and putting two consumer AI assistants on equal footing with the biggest platforms in tech.
Google's Gemini app reached 1 billion monthly users, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on X Tuesday, matching a milestone ChatGPT reached in June, TechCrunch reported. Continue reading
Anthropic will watermark Claude's text and files worldwide
The move complies with European Union transparency rules that took effect Aug. 2, but Anthropic is applying the watermarks globally and cautions they are not proof of authorship.
Today's Briefs
Original reporting summaries by our newsroomRiver AI raises $1.1B to let developers own their models
The two-month-old startup from xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin sells reinforcement learning infrastructure for fine-tuning open models, pitched as an alternative to prompting a model you don't control.
Google argues Go is built for the AI coding era
The company's developer blog says the bottleneck in AI-assisted coding has shifted from writing code to reviewing it, and that Go's enforced formatting, static types and standard library fit that shift better than more flexible languages.
MiniMax releases an open-weight model that generates video with synced audio
H3-Base is a 33 billion parameter model that takes text, image, video or audio input and outputs up to 15 seconds of 2K video with stereo sound, released under MiniMax's own community license.
Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
llama.cpp
OpenAI launches ChatGPT desktop app for Linux
OpenAI is finally bringing a dedicated ChatGPT desktop app to Linux operating systems.
Tim Gowers: What sort of maths are LLMs good at?
ChatGPT and Gemini both just passed 1 billion users
That’s a lot of people chatting with their AI friends all day. | Image: Google For the 14th time, a Google product has hit 1 billion users. Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X that a billion people are using Gemini...
India’s Yulu raises $93M as quick-commerce boom fuels e-bike demand
Yulu aims to have a fleet of 200,000 bikes in the next two years and faster electric two-wheelers, aiming at new logistics use cases.
AI code-testing startup Blacksmith’s valuation jumps almost 10x in less than a year
Blacksmith says revenue has grown more than tenfold over the past year.
Sector Snapshot: Fitness Startup Funding Is Rebounding, But Investors Want AI And Data, Not Treadmills
Venture investors seem to be more upbeat than they have been in years about the future of fitness and wellness. Startup investment in those categories totaled more than $3.6 billion in the first half of this year,...
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni reportedly knew Phia was ‘cookie stuffing’ for months
Phia, the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, is once again under fire for its alleged business practices.
Accel closes oversubscribed $550M India fund within weeks, 19 months after its last
The U.S. VC firm still has more than 55% of its previous $650 million India fund available for deployment.
What’s Scaleup Europe, the $5.7B fund that just backed satellite company ICEYE?
Scaleup Europe, a public-private fund with a $5.7 billion target, made its first investment by backing Finnish satellite company ICEYE.
Builders & Vibe Coding
Agentic coding, dev tools and how software gets built now.All Builders & Vibe Coding →Launch HN: Discovered Materials (YC P26) - AI agents to discover new materials
[AINews] How to steal a Reasoning Trace
Speculative Decoding by any other name would distil as sweet
datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0
Release: datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0 This plugin has been around for a while - it lets users upload a brand new SQLite database to a hosted Datasette instance, at which point that database will start being served by that...
From coder to orchestrator: How agents shift the role of a developer
Developers are owning more of the delivery system around code, not just code itself. Join us during GitHub Universe to meet other devs, learn something new, and explore what's next. The post From coder to orchestrator:...
Thinking of ACE? We Can Do It with Fewer Tokens
Anthropic is turning Claude Code’s auto mode on by default
Programming with Claude Code will soon require even less human oversight.
- MIgHTy-alIeN/ai-trader-bot An arbitrage bot is a smart contract connected to an external automation script that controls its operation.
- trycompai/crm Comp AI CRM is an open source, CRM designed for AI agents. Agentic-first CRM.
- kvcache-ai/AgentENV AgentENV (AENV) is a distributed platform for running agent environments at scale.
- yc-software/qm Multiplayer agent harness for work
- synthetic-sciences/openscience The open-source AI workbench for scientific research
- genspark-ai/genoffice Free, open-source AI office suite for macOS, Windows & Linux - Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx), PowerPoint (.pptx), PDF and Markdown editing with built-in AI agents.
- Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation
- microsoft/skill-recorder Desktop app that records your on-screen work session and uses the GitHub Copilot CLI to reconstruct it as an intent + ordered steps, then builds a reusable Skill or Automation for Microsoft Scout, Microsoft Copilot Cowork, or Copilot Studio.
- Zeejay0/gathered-scenes-zine-skill
- Prism-Shadow/penguin-harness 🐧 Harness for RSI. AI Build Better AI
ConVAWG: A Retrieval-Grounded Framework for Controlled Synthetic Dialogue Generation in Violence Against Women and Girls
Synthetic dialogue generation offers a way to study conversational dynamics in sensitive domains where real data are difficult to access, release, or annotate. The underlying abuse may occur online or offline: threats...
Agentic Configuration Management (ACM): A Reference Configuration Model for Governed Agentic Systems
Agentic systems are increasingly composed of heterogeneous agents, prompts, tools, models, skills, composite subsystems, policies, and execution workflows whose configurations evolve across frameworks and runtime...
sLTN: Structural Logic Tensor Networks
Logic Tensor Networks (LTN) provide a neurosymbolic framework in which first-order logic is interpreted through tensor operations, enabling logical constraints to be integrated with differentiable learning. However, the...
Surgical WAM: A World-Action Model for Data-Efficient Surgical Robot Learning
Learning reliable surgical manipulation policies is bottlenecked by the scarcity of action-labeled demonstrations: teleoperated surgical robot (e.g., dVRK) trajectories with synchronized kinematics are costly to...
Beyond a Bag of Features: Set-Level Instability in Sparse Autoencoders
Shani et al. (2026) show that LLM representations broadly recover human category boundaries, while failing to reflect fine-grained typicality structure. Their analysis uses cosine similarity over dense model...
Long-Horizon AI Research for Grothendieck Constant: A Case Study in Human-AI Mathematical Collaboration
AI agents are increasingly used in mathematics research, but it is often unclear how to use them effectively. Towards this, we present an extensive case study of how AI was used to improve bounds on the Grothendieck...