OpenAI said that its early testing of its upcoming Astra model may have critical cyber capabilities that may delay its launch. Astra wasn't involved in the Hugging Face incident. OpenAI is implementing stricture security control, pausing Astra internal activities and adding universal monitoring for risky actions.
At Black Hat, OpenAI reconstructed the Hugging Face incident. The video is worth a watch for background.
Anthropic said it updated Claude Fable 5's biology safeguards to reduce false positives by about 85%. These fallbacks would result in users being bumped down to a less capable model over safeguards.
AMD said it will acquire Taalas, which specializes in AI inference silicon. AMD said Taalas' technology will complement AMD's full-stack AI platform, including AMD Helios, AMD Instinct GPUs, AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD ROCm software.
OpenAI said it is updating Chat to GPT-5.6 Sol for Plus and Pro users. Free users will get GPT-5.6 Luna as the default model with unlimited text chats.
CEO confidence rebounded slightly to an index score of 52 in the third quarter, up from 47 in the second quarter, according to The Conference Board. In the first quarter, the CEO confidence score was 59.
The Conference Board in collaboration with The Business Council fielded the survey July 13 through July 27.
CEOs were most concerned about cybersecurity, AI and new technology and geopolitics.
NetApp said it will acquire Jetstream Software, a specialist in VMware disaster recovery and mitigation. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Last month, NetApp acquired DataPelago.
Here’s a parade of earnings decks from Pinterest, Shopify, Caterpillar, Match, Western Digital, HubSpot, Dynatrace, IonQ, Sandisk and Kyndryl. I'm wading through them, but earnings are always better with pretty slides.
Salesforce said in an SEC filing that Srini Tallapragada has decided to step down from his role as President and Chief Engineering and Customer Success Officer. He will be an advisor for a year to assist in the transition of his duties. The move comes as Salesforce appointed Miquel Milano chief operating officer, according to CNBC. Rohan Kumar will become chief platform and engineering officer. Alexa Vignone will be chief revenue officer.
Meta released Muse Code in beta. Muse Code is a coding agent powered by Muse Spark 1.2. The company also offered a lower priced "contributor" tier for Muse Spark 1.2.
Demis Hassabis will step down as Google DeepMind CEO to become its chair and add the title of Alphabet chief scientist. The move comes amid a shakeup at Google DeepMind where four top execs are leaving to form Discovery Loop, an AI startup focused on key industry breakthroughs.
In a note to staff, Hassabis said:
"We have arrived at a pivotal moment in human history. I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand. It’s critical that we collectively get the next steps right to ensure this all goes well for humanity and we usher in an incredible new age of discovery and wonder."
On Uber's second quarter earnings call, CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy said the company is wrangling its token budget for AI. Uber earlier this year said it blew through its entire AI budget in four months. So much for tokenmaxxing.
Krishnamurthy said the company now has its AI vanity metrics under control. He said:
"On AI, we are optimizing token spend by setting better defaults for different use cases, moving certain tasks to lower-cost or open-weight models, and letting employees more clearly understand and manage their spend. As a result, cost per token has declined over the past several months, even as adoption has continued to increase, allowing us to keep overall AI spend broadly stable."
