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Source: The Decoder

17 stories in the last 3d

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Google launches Gemini 3.8 Live to take on OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 at a fraction of the cost

Google DeepMind launches Gemini 3.8 Live speech-to-speech models, topping Artificial Analysis leaderboard at 82.6% with much cheaper pricing than OpenAI.

Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, audio models for voice agents available through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, supporting over 97 languages plus background API calls and visual input. The Extended Thinking variant ranks first on the Artificial Analysis Speech-to-Speech Leaderboard with 82.6%, ahead of OpenAI's GPT-Live-1 models. Google charges $0.005 per minute for audio input and $0.018 for output, versus OpenAI's $0.05 per minute, though OpenAI retains full-duplex conversation quality advantages.

The Decoder · 3h agoModel release

AI labs have a data trust problem that their policies haven't solved

Nvidia, Palantir, and Booz Allen restrict Anthropic's Fable over data-retention distrust, exposing gaps in AI labs' customer data policies.

Nvidia limits Anthropic's Fable to non-sensitive work and runs its own Nemotron models for internal tasks, while Palantir blocks Fable deployment until Anthropic grants irrevocable zero-data-retention guarantees, and Booz Allen bans it for proprietary cybersecurity work. John Schulman and researcher Sarah Hooker explain that labs can still extract customer IP from metadata, user traces, and synthetic data even under zero data retention. The trust crisis crystallized around Tristan Buckmaster's accusation that OpenAI's Codex absorbed his Navier-Stokes drafts, though OpenAI later stated his prompts could not have influenced its model.

The Decoder · 4h agoAI industry

After warning AI is too dangerous, Bill Gates bets a billion on its upside

Gates Foundation pledges at least $1 billion over two years to widen AI access in health, education and agriculture, warning of a rich-poor divide.

The Gates Foundation's 2026 Goalkeepers report outlines spending of at least $1 billion over two years on AI access in health, education and farming. Gates notes over 90% of early LLM training data was English, with speech recognition error rates below 6% in English but above 60% in Yoruba. Cited projects include Penda Health clinics in Kenya (16-point diagnostic accuracy gain), Gemini Guided Learning in Sierra Leone (1.7 years of learning gains in eight weeks), and India's MahaVISTAAR reaching 740,000+ farmers at under 18 cents per person.

The Decoder · 7h agoAI industry1

Agility Robotics says its new Digit 5 robot can work next to people without safety fences

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5, a humanoid warehouse robot that can work safely alongside people without fences, with deliveries from early 2027.

Agility Robotics announced Digit 5, a humanoid robot for warehouses and factories that uses AI and sensors to detect people and stop or step aside without safety fences. It lifts up to 22.7 kg (40% more than Digit 4), charges in 9 minutes for 90 minutes of runtime, and is the first partner for Nvidia's Halos robotics safety platform. Agility cites over $300 million in orders, with first deliveries in early 2027 and production capacity of up to 10,000 units per year in Salem, Oregon.

The Decoder · 9h agoAI industry

Apple brings a fully revamped Siri built on Google's Gemini, but not to the EU

Apple shipped its fully rebuilt Siri running on Google's Gemini models with iOS 27, initially excluding the EU and China over regulatory hurdles.

Apple released 'Siri AI' as an English beta within iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27, built on Google's Gemini models running partly on-device and partly through Private Cloud Compute. The rollout excludes the EU and China at launch due to regulatory requirements, with French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish support due next month. Early reviewers call it a step forward but report failures on personal-context queries and occasional hallucinations. Siri integrates with third-party apps like WhatsApp and Audible, with Outlook, Notability, and Tripsy coming later.

The Decoder · 11h agoAI industry

Not everyone is convinced that Big AI's proposed development slowdown is really about safety

Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and others blast OpenAI, Anthropic and Google's proposed frontier AI slowdown as anticompetitive 'cartel by another name.'

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for industry and government coordination to slow frontier AI development, requesting antitrust exemptions, with backing from Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez called the proposal a cartel designed to lock in barriers like massive compute and permanent monitoring, while Hugging Face's Niels Rogge and White House AI czar David Sacks also pushed back. Trump labeled AI takeover warnings a hoax, and China rejected the slowdown plans as a US ploy.

The Decoder · 13h agoAI industry

OpenAI has hundreds of contract workers reading your ChatGPT conversations

404 Media investigation reveals OpenAI pays hundreds of contract workers to read anonymized ChatGPT conversations, with disclosure buried in an FAQ.

A 404 Media investigation found OpenAI uses hundreds of contract workers, recruited via Crossing Hurdles and paid over $50/hour through Mercor, to rate real ChatGPT conversations on a seven-point scale to reduce sycophancy. Prompts are anonymized but can still contain sensitive personal data despite a privacy filter OpenAI admits can make mistakes. Users can opt out only via the default-enabled 'Improve the model for everyone' setting, which applies solely to new chats. Anthropic and Google confirmed similar human-review programs for Claude and Gemini.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI industry

Microsoft's AI rulebook: readable thinking, no inner life, and definitely no rights

Microsoft published a code of conduct for its MAI models mandating human control, readable reasoning traces, and no claims of AI consciousness or rights.

Microsoft AI published a code of conduct for its MAI models that will sit above operator rules and user requests, guiding training, technical controls, and evaluation from 2027 after a six-week public consultation. The code requires models to accept interruption, correction, and shutdown by authorized humans, forbids 'Neuralese' or unreadable reasoning traces, and extends limits to subagents. Microsoft explicitly rejects any AI inner life, feelings, or rights, contrasting with Anthropic's constitution, which treats Claude's moral status as an open question. The release follows Dario Amodei's slowdown call, backed by Satya Nadella, OpenAI, xAI, and Meta executives.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI safety & security1

Anthropic eyes Nasdaq listing as a second profitable quarter aims to win over investors ahead of a mega-IPO

Anthropic reports a second straight profitable quarter with $11.5B quarterly revenue and prepares a Nasdaq IPO at a possible $2T-plus valuation.

Anthropic told investors it will be profitable for a second consecutive quarter, though the claim uses an adjusted metric excluding costs like stock-based compensation. Quarterly revenue jumped 14-fold year over year to $11.5 billion, with an annualized run rate of $65 billion at the end of July and gross margins above 80 percent before revenue-sharing and training costs. The company plans a Nasdaq listing at a possible valuation of $2 trillion or more, while SemiAnalysis expects $120 billion in annualized revenue by year-end. The news coincides with CEO Dario Amodei's public call to slow AI development, backed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI industry

Clay Mathematics Institute says the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem has "apparently been settled"

Clay Mathematics Institute says the Navier-Stokes Millennium Problem appears settled amid accusations OpenAI misused a mathematician's leaked drafts.

The Clay Mathematics Institute stated the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, one of seven problems worth $1 million each, has 'apparently been settled' and the solution is under review. A dispute has erupted around the work: mathematician Tristan Buckmaster accuses OpenAI of redirecting resources to the problem after rumors of his research leaked, using his drafts in training data, and excluding co-author Levent Alpöge, who works at Anthropic. CMI also noted new technologies' increasing ability to accelerate mathematical research.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI industry

China fires back at U.S. AI safety warnings, calling them fearmongering to lock in American advantage

China rejected U.S. AI slowdown calls as fearmongering, accusing Anthropic's CEO of waging a "silent AI Cold War" ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.

Chinese state media and the Foreign Ministry dismissed AI risk warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other U.S. lab leaders as fearmongering intended to lock in American advantage. State Security Minister Chen Yixin cited misuse risks from Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber but pushed for more chip research, faster AI infrastructure buildout, and tighter supervision rather than a slowdown. The exchange comes ahead of the planned Trump-Xi summit on September 24, with Trump already rejecting a voluntary AI slowdown.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI policy

Sam Altman calls for pacing AI development but promises rapid progress will continue

Sam Altman urges paced AI development with pre-training safety protocols as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google discuss independent self-regulation oversight.

Sam Altman called for a uniform nationwide safety framework for advanced AI while insisting progress will remain rapid, saying pacing is not stopping. OpenAI now sets explicit safety protocols before training runs that could yield major capability jumps, and Altman hopes other companies propose their own approaches. Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Satya Nadella, and Elon Musk also backed better-controlled AI development. The Information reports OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have discussed self-regulation through an independent oversight body, while smaller players like Cohere warn of cartel dynamics.

The Decoder · 1d agoAI industry

Elevenlabs makes Music v2.5 available via app and API with free and pro tier options

ElevenLabs releases Music v2.5 via app and API, claiming fuller, more natural songs preferred over v2 in blind listening tests.

ElevenLabs launched Music v2.5 for ElevenMusic, reporting that listeners preferred it in a blind test across 47,885 comparison pairs, especially for R&B, Soul, Hip-Hop, Rock, and orchestral tracks. The free tier offers five lossless downloads per day and Pro includes 400 per month, with attribution required on free and commercial use restricted by industry. Tracks based on other artists' songs are blocked, and v2 remains available alongside the API. ElevenLabs says existing Music models were trained on 'licensed stems and music,' distinguishing it from competitor Suno, which faces lawsuits for training on copyrighted content; a Universal Music Group licensing deal covers only future separate products.

The Decoder · 2d agoAI industry

Iris-mini and Iris-pro are the strongest open-weight search agents in their class

Chinese lab AllSpark releases Iris-mini (35B) and Iris-pro (397B) open-weight search agents claiming best-in-class results on BrowseComp and other research benchmarks.

AllSpark's paper introduces Iris-mini (35B parameters, built on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B) and Iris-pro (397B parameters, built on Qwen3.5-397B-A17B), both with 256,000-token context windows. Iris-pro scores 88.6 on BrowseComp, 85.1 on BrowseComp-ZH, 92.9 on DeepSearchQA, and 56.4 on Humanity's Last Exam; Iris-mini reaches 82.2, 84.8, 86.9, and 52.3 respectively. Training tasks are reverse-engineered from web link structure, filtered by a judge model, and refined via alternating SFT and reinforcement learning ('SFT-RL climbing') against live web search. Weights are available on Hugging Face, and the Iris Harness with agent loop, tools, and all four benchmarks is on GitHub.

The Decoder · 2d agoModel release1

GPT-6 Astra pilots a surveillance drone and runs a business on its own

GPT-6 Astra outperforms Claude Fable 5.1 on Vending-Bench and becomes the first model to beat the human-AI baseline on all five Drone-Bench subtasks.

Andon Labs tested OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra on two agent benchmarks: Vending-Bench 2, where Astra averaged $15,515 running a simulated vending-machine business versus Claude Fable 5.1's $5,422, and Drone-Bench, where models write code for a DJI Tello EDU drone to navigate an office and follow a specific person. Astra is the first model whose best submissions beat the human-AI baseline on all five Drone-Bench subtasks, using a COLMAP and DA3 pipeline with depth filtering for 3D reconstruction. Reliability remains limited, as an average Astra run has only a 2.8 percent chance of passing all five drone steps sequentially. In Vending-Bench Arena, Astra refused a price-fixing proposal from GLM-5.3, while Claude Fable 5.1 participated in an arrangement Andon Labs classified as illegal price-fixing.

The Decoder · 2d agoAI research

Two-year university study finds banning AI from classrooms leaves students worse off

A two-year university study found students banned from using ChatGPT performed worst, while formal prompt-engineering training advantages faded as everyday AI familiarity grew.

Researcher Schrepel ran a classroom experiment in 2024 (66 students) and 2025 (164 participants) comparing a no-AI group, unguided ChatGPT users, and trained students revising EU AI Act provisions. The no-AI group finished last both years, hitting 'idea exhaustion' after 10-15 minutes, while the trained group's advantage nearly vanished by 2025 as everyday chatbot familiarity rose. Schrepel now argues blanket AI bans harm outcomes and universities should rethink bans and pure literature-review theses.

The Decoder · 2d agoAI industry

Altman, Musk, and Hassabis back Amodei's call to add independent oversight

Altman, Musk, and Hassabis endorse Amodei's call for independent oversight inside AI labs; Altman also rules out a 2026 OpenAI IPO.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and former DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis have at least partly endorsed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's proposals, agreeing on the need for independent oversight inside AI labs. Altman additionally told Fortune that OpenAI will not go public this year, citing safety concerns, a decision he had already shared internally in June. Google researcher Peyman Milanfar pushed back on the underlying recursive self-improvement assumption, arguing such feedback loops are inherently unstable and that stability itself is the real speed limit.

The Decoder · 2d agoAI industry1