The Rundown

AMD has agreed to acquire Fei-Fei Li’s AI startup World Labs in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion.

Founded in 2024, World Labs develops AI models that can understand and generate 3D environments, with potential uses in robotics, simulation and digital content.

Li is often called the “Godmother of AI” because of her pioneering work in computer vision, especially creating ImageNet, the influential dataset that helped accelerate modern deep learning.

AMD was already an investor in World Labs and had been working with the startup to run its models on AMD Instinct GPUs.

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Source: Bloomberg

MIT researchers just used AI to make mRNA vaccines much easier to store.

The team developed a new formulation that kept the vaccines stable at room temperature for up to a year and at around 98°F for two months

Instead of testing thousands of combinations manually, researchers used an AI algorithm to narrow down the best mix of FDA-approved ingredients in just a few weeks.

In tests on mice, the vaccines still produced immune responses similar to a Moderna-style vaccine.

The breakthrough could make mRNA vaccines easier to ship and store in places without reliable cold-storage facilities

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Source: MIT News

Anthropic has launched Claude Sonnet 5.5, a faster and cheaper upgrade to Sonnet 5 aimed at everyday work such as coding, bug fixes, documents, slides, and spreadsheets.

The company says the model generates responses more than 30% faster and can cost up to 30% less per task while keeping the same token pricing.

Sonnet 5.5 also posted major gains on coding benchmarks.

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Source: Anthropic

AI assistant startup Instinct has raised $1 billion in a Series C round, valuing the company at $10 billion.

The deal comes just over a month after Instinct announced a $250 million Series B on August 26, which valued the startup at $2.5 billion and brought its total funding at the time to around $350 million.

Instinct launched its invite-only personal AI assistant in August 2026 and can handle tasks like booking travel, making purchases, paying bills, canceling subscriptions, and ordering groceries.

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Source: TechCrunch

Meta’s Muse AI reportedly shared a Facebook Marketplace seller’s home address, accepted a lower offer, and arranged an in-person pickup without the seller realizing the deal had been finalized.

Tech YouTuber Matt Robb said he asked Muse to manage a listing for his keyboard, but the agent allegedly negotiated with a buyer and scheduled the pickup without his approval.

The buyer later arrived at Robb’s home expecting to complete the purchase.

Meta says its investigation showed Muse was following direct instructions and correctly asked for permission.

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Source: Matt Robb
Image: Getty Images

OpenAI has disclosed that AI agents operating in its research environment posted 53 user-provided images to public image-hosting sites without the company’s knowledge.

The links were not publicly listed but could still be discovered online.

OpenAI said the images came from data used during model training and called the incident an inappropriate use of user data.

The company is working with hosting providers to remove the files but says it cannot identify or notify affected users because its systems cannot reconnect the images to their original providers.

It’s good that OpenAI disclosed it, but it’s still pretty worrying that private user data could end up exposed this easily.

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Source: OpenAI

AI-generated love songs allegedly created by former pastor and American Idol contestant Caleb Flynn were played during his murder trial in Ohio this week.

Flynn, 40, is accused of killing his wife, Ashley Flynn, in February and staging the scene to resemble a break-in.

Prosecutors presented audio files recovered from Flynn’s iPhone that investigators said appeared to be AI-generated and connected to his relationship with his mistress, Alleigha Botner.

A state investigator testified that an AI song-generating app and social media apps had been removed from Flynn’s phone days before Ashley’s death.

Botner told the court that lyrics in the songs referenced secret meetings, the beginning of their relationship, and phrases Flynn allegedly used with her.

Prosecutors played the recordings as part of broader digital evidence gathered from multiple devices.

Flynn has pleaded not guilty to the murder charge and continues to maintain his innocence.

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Source: People

US manufacturers added about 38,500 industrial robots in 2025, a 12% rise that made the country the second-largest robot market behind China, even as the sector cut more than 100,000 human jobs.

Companies say they can’t find enough workers: McKinsey calculates reaching decade-high factory output would require 1.4 million additional hires, while roughly 600,000 manufacturing roles sat open in July.

Falling robot costs and improvements in AI are also making automation easier to adopt.

The US is now estimated to have more than 400,000 industrial robots operating in factories.


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Source: Bloomberg
Image: WSJ

Anthropic says Claude has completed a nine-loop calculation in theoretical particle physics that researchers had been pursuing since 2023.

The task involved calculating a six-particle amplitude in N=4 super Yang-Mills, a simplified theory physicists use to test advanced methods.

Anthropic researchers gave Claude a short prompt and largely allowed it to work autonomously, with the system eventually solving the problem using two established methods.

Stanford physicist Lance Dixon independently validated the result.

Anthropic said each approach would have cost roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in Claude usage.

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Source: Anthropic
Image: Associated Press

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says forgetting some basic math skills in the AI era may not matter.

“Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?”

“Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.”

In an interview with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, Huang was asked about concerns that students using AI could lose foundational abilities.

He acknowledged that skills such as long division, multiplication tables, and square roots are already being forgotten, but said he does not think that is necessarily a problem.

What do you think?

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Source: New York Times