Memory pricing now sets the dating value of Samsung and SK Hynix chip engineers. This is happening after large bonuses are expected to these employees. Averages about $400K/$500K per employee at Samsung and SK Hynix.

Wow, so many hard problems in a single sequence here. And each one is a reason machines have not yet replaced human hands on assembly lines. @DynaRobotics shows their dual-arm robot cracking a fortune cookie and extracting a tiny paper slip Deformable objects are one of the toughest problems for robotics to handle. The hardest part may actually start after the cookie cracks. One rigid object suddenly becomes several fragments plus a thin, partly occluded piece of paper, so the robot has to continue the task after its entire manipulation scene has changed. The policy has to update its internal stress model on the fly as the cookie opens, something that exposes the limits of most current foundation models on irreversible state transitions.

FT: ByteDance is reportedly pre-training an AI model with up to 10T parameters, far exceeding Kimi K3’s 2.8Trn param size. FT also reported that ByteDance has avoided distilling rival models for more than a year, preferring independent model development. If the reported run succeeds, ByteDance will have shown it can execute frontier-scale pretraining without leaning on a rival model as teacher.

Seedance 2.5 landing in Arcads, makes the workflow more interesting. Arcads begins with formats already performing in your category, uses Claude to turn them into creative directions, and now brings Seedance 2.5 into the production layer. Now the same system can move closer from research to finished video. The model will have unlimited access for the first 24 hours

New Google Paper says classical game theory predicts betrayal, but similar AI agents can rationally choose cooperation because their decisions are predictably linked. The big claim is that similar AI agents can rationally cooperate even when they cannot communicate or benefit later, because each agent’s own planned choice helps it predict what the similar agent will choose. Classical game theory treats each player as separate, so it predicts defection in a final one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma. The authors instead model an AI agent as part of the world it predicts, including uncertainty about its own behavior. When past choices suggest another agent thinks similarly, considering cooperation makes that partner’s cooperation seem more likely too. Gemini and Gemma agents played varied games before a final dilemma, either directly or through shared third-party encounters. With enough evidence, identical agents cooperated strongly, related models cooperated less, and random opponents usually faced defection. The proposed embedded equilibrium may better predict AI societies, while warning that similar AIs could favor each other over humans. – arxiv. org/abs/2608.03958 Title: "A game theory for foundation models shows new paths to rational cooperation through similarity inference"

AI is Jevons paradox territory. After GPT-5.6 Luna's token price fell by 10x, token consumption jumped by more than 10x. The real AI demand shock has barely started. Only 17.8% of the world’s working-age population was using generative AI in Q1 2026. (For Microsoft Research Report) Jevons will get much more interesting when the other 82% shows up.

Muse Spark 1.2 puts Meta on Artificial Analysis's Pareto frontier at $0.40 per task. i.e. on that frontier, no model in the comparison is simultaneously cheaper per task and higher on the Intelligence Index. Muse Spark 1.2 also reaches roughly Claude Opus 4.8-level intelligence at about one-fifth of that model's $2.03 task cost. It scores 6 Index points below Claude Opus 5 while costing roughly one-sixth as much. The metric goes beyond just the list price because Artificial Analysis weights the input, cache, reasoning, and answer tokens actually consumed across its nine Index evaluations. This is so significant because for long-running agents, small cost differences compound across model calls, reasoning tokens, tool steps, and retries.

The Philippines runs a $40B outsourcing industry employing 1.9M people, and AI is now taking the jobs it was built on. BBC published a piece. That trade was built in the early 2000s on one advantage, because the country could supply English-speaking staff more cheaply than India. Governments handed out tax breaks and infrastructure, so Accenture, Concentrix and Teleperformance filled Manila with campuses holding hundreds of thousands of workers. That worked while buyers wanted a person at a desk for less. Now those same clients expect suppliers to run automation as well, which changes what a headcount contract is worth. More than two-thirds of the industry association's members are already running AI pilots, and its president concedes a layer of jobs has gone. He says most of them moved into other roles. The mechanics are less reassuring, since the first stage of automation shows up as extra work rather than less. --- bbc .com/news/articles/cgr7nxve05go

"OpenAI and Anthropic are pretty different animals from a capital efficiency perspective. And Anthropic clearly has a dramatically lower cost per token than OpenAI. They burned maybe 80% less than OpenAI. So as businesses, they clearly have very different structural ROICs." - A solid, insightful interview featuring Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker ), U.S. hedge fund manager and Chief Investment Officer of Atreides Management. ---- From "Invest Like The Best" (@patrick_oshag ) YouTube channel, (link in comment)

Seedance 2.5 landing in Arcads, makes the workflow more interesting. Arcads begins with formats already performing in your category, uses Claude to turn them into creative directions, and now brings Seedance 2.5 into the production layer. Now the same system can move closer from research to finished video. The model will have unlimited access for the first 24 hours

Bloomberg reports OpenAI’s first consumer device is a hockey-puck-sized, screenless AI speaker targeted at $300 to $400. A doughnut shape, battery power, microphones, a camera system, lights and moving parts, with release planned for 2027. Because the device lacks a screen, its lights and movement will become the interface for showing when the AI is listening or responding. The camera and other sensors add surrounding visual context, while the software is expected to learn about its user over time and personalize conversations. Shifts the interaction from opening an app to having an AI computer available throughout the home, with voice as the main control surface. The speaker is also meant to be the first product in a broader device family, with OpenAI eventually targeting hardware that could replace smartphones. The hardware effort grew from the io team that merged into OpenAI in July 2025, while Jony Ive’s LoveFrom remains independent and handles major design work. ---- bloomberg .com/news/articles/2026-08-06/what-is-openai-s-device-a-doughnut-shaped-speaker-that-costs-over-300

OpenAI now uses GPT-5.6 Sol for both Instant and Thinking across ChatGPT Plus and Pro. Free and Go users will receive GPT-5.6 Luna as the default model, unlimited text chats, and a Think button for harder questions. Previously, moving from Instant to higher reasoning effort could feel like switching models because the tone and behavior changed with it. The new slider adjusts how much thought ChatGPT puts into a response while keeping GPT-5.6 Sol underneath. Says its internal finance, medicine, and law evaluation found factual errors were 68% less common than with GPT-5.5 Instant.

wild Claude story after losing his phone at work, he could not use "Find My Phone" because his company had disabled it. Then Claude wrote a small program that measured Bluetooth strength, letting him follow the signal until he found the device.

The next year will be the tightest year for memory supply The top 3 memory manufacturers have already sold out their entire 2027 production capacity. Micron says its agreements commit DRAM, including HBM, and NAND over several years, while SK hynix has signed long-term agreements with around 10 customers. --- tweaktown. com/news/113004/memory-capacity-for-all-of-2027-has-reportedly-been-booked-and-sold-with-no-more-dram-or-hbm-available/index.html

Grok 4.5 beat Kimi K3 on the same prompt at 13x lower cost. Very interesting experiment by AI/ML API (@aimlapi) Same prompt, same one-shot task Cost per figure: Grok 4.5 — $0.15 GPT 5.6 Sol — $0.60 Qwen 3.8 Max — $0.67 Kimi K3 — $1.98 Kimi spent ~19 minutes thinking and billed 13x more. Grok just shipped. For production agents, cost per completed task is starting to matter a lot more than cost per token.

SpaceX has earlier defined Terafab’s long-term target as 1TW of compute hardware produced each year. so from that 750GW of semiconductor/chips planned output will be for AI spacecraft per year from Terafab.

Anthropic CEO Amodei Amodei has almost zero people-management load, Google yesterday announced that its now freeing Demis Hassabis from daily operations. Maybe AI’s best minds are most valuable this way. ---- Dario Amodei has only 1 direct report, his chief of staff. The rest of Anthropic’s executive system flows through Dario’s sister, Anthropic President Daniela Amodei, who handles daily operations and reports to the board. For some comparison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has around half a dozen direct reports and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has 60 people reporting to him. --- Video from "Bloomberg Originals" YouTube channel, (link in comment)