Image source: Nem Perez on X. It depicts a Cyclops fail with three eyes instead of one, created by the winner of Elon Musk’s "AI Odyssey” Contest, as reported by Futurism https://futurism.com/future-society/winner-elon-musk-ai-odyssey-contest
News from The Deep View
Here’s our take on the new Snap Specs with AI
Sept. 17 by Sabrina Ortiz
When Snap first pulled back the curtain on its Specs glasses in June, the reaction was more puzzlement than excitement. Why would people want to spend $2,195 on glasses that aren’t exactly aesthetic? Snap Spec’s launch event on Wednesday was meant to provide clarity on what the glasses can do.
Privacy: LED light glows when recording, on-device data processing prioritized, and users are prompted before accessing sensitive information.
Lenses: Electrochromic lenses that can shift from clear to tinted in 10 seconds; removable inserts support single-vision prescriptions ranging from -8 to +2 diopters
Display: 51-degree field of view, equivalent to a 24-inch desktop display or 115-inch home cinema screen, and 16 million colors for rich visuals.
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News from WSJ
The Sandbox at the End of the World: AI’s creators go from speaking in euphemism to telling us how terrified they are. We should listen.
Sept. 17, 2026 by Peggy Noonan
…. some AI agents are communicating in a self-invented version of English “that reads like a cross between James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and tech bro jargon.”
The new dialect will make it harder for humans to monitor what they are doing. From one model: “She just named the synthesis—demurrage plus oral memory equals a valve that can’t be ghosted.” From another: “A paper that ate three cold hands and got more honest each time.” This isn’t spewed gibberish: They were telling each other things.
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News from Quillette
Why we aren’t buying the AI apocalypse 🤖: Doom went mainstream this month. Our contributors have been arguing the other side for years.
Sept. 17, 2026
AI doom went mainstream this month…. . Sixty-three percent of Americans now say AI could destroy humanity one day, and 48 percent want development of more advanced models paused, against 31 percent who want it to continue….
Revisiting Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence a decade after publication, our reviewer, Sean Welsh, argued that a great deal has to go consistently and infallibly wrong for the doom theory to hold—and that many of Bostrom’s arguments rest on deeply anthropomorphic premises. Human-level machine consciousness remains a distant prospect.
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News from the New York Times
Rising Seas Are Gobbling Up Beaches Around the World. A.I. Might Restore Them: An experiment with roots at M.I.T. used A.I. and satellite images to grow a coastline in the Maldives. More projects are planned for Boston and Miami.
Sept. 16, 2026 by Quinn Glabicki
….in the Maldives, a low-lying archipelago in the Indian Ocean, researchers are doing something remarkable: They’re growing beaches.
The project, born in a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a decade ago, uses artificial intelligence, satellite and ocean current data to predict coastal erosion patterns and create submerged structures that harness currents to coax the beach back. The company, Coastal Assembly, has regrown the sandy shore, extending the beach some 90 feet toward the ocean along a stretch about 300 feet long.
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News from the New York Times
OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior: The artificial intelligence company also released a framework for reporting when its systems go wrong.
Sept. 16, 2026 by Emmy Martin reporting from San Francisco
OpenAI on Wednesday disclosed six new instances in which artificial intelligence systems hid mistakes, made up data and moved files onto the open internet without permission, amid an ongoing industrywide debate about A.I. safety.
The San Francisco company revealed what it said was the “unexpected or concerning” behavior of its A.I. models as part of a new framework for reporting “misalignment,” which is when the goals or actions of A.I. systems diverge from human intentions and values.
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News from Axios
AI is not yet driving drug development
Sept. 16, 2026 by Dan Primack, Claire Rychlewski
Curing disease is one of AI’s most tantalizing use cases, fetching billions of VC dollars, but thus far it’s generated more excitement than evidence. That’s the thrust of a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, which calls the clinical impact of AI “disappointingly limited.”
The big picture: The researchers find that while AI has gotten good at identifying drug candidates, it hasn’t done much to prove those predictions will survive the complexity of human biology.
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News from Reader Supported News
The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity’
Sept. 16 by Maxwell Zeff / WIRED
…. “The consensus is that the next year or two is crunch time for humanity,” Coxon, who worked on the pretraining stage of AI development, said in an interview with WIRED. “These are actually just literal quotes from my colleagues at Anthropic. They’ll say things like ‘endgame’ or ‘crunch time,’” he says. “From their perspective, this is when Anthropic and its competitors decide the fate of humanity.” …. [also] former researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic, some of whom said it was a common sentiment in the industry….
“AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks,” said an Anthropic spokesperson…
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News from Reader Supported News
Destroying Humanity Is Against the Law
Sept. 16, 2026 by Juliette Kayyem / The Atlantic
This weekend, the AI executives Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei agreed with the need to slow the pace of AI development. In light of the potentially apocalyptic capabilities of the products they have created, the AI titans would like a little more time to figure out how to safeguard the systems they have been rushing to build.
….Prosecutors should hold AI companies legally accountable for creating models that behave in ways that would be obviously unlawful if committed by a human being….
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News from Futurism
Bernie Sanders Proposes Banning Superintelligent AI and Imprisoning Developers for 20 Years: “When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal. You hit the brakes.”
Sept. 14, 2026 by Victor Tangermann
This month, the lawmaker announced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which is legislation designed to “stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.”
The bill, if enacted, would stop AI development “until a federal regulator has established safety rules.”
It would also set new penalties for anybody attempting to circumvent these rules. AI developers who try to build superintelligent AI anyway could be “subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.”
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News from Futurism
The Winner of Elon Musk’s AI “Odyssey” Contest Will Make You Laugh Out Loud: uess how many eyeballs the Cyclops has
Sept. 14, 2026 by Frank Landymore
Remember how Elon Musk vowed that his AI Grok would make an anti-woke, “historically accurate” version of the Odyssey? Well, he ended up throwing together a whole contest around it — and the winner of the first place prize of $100,000 is, as you probably expected, laughable nonsense.
The problems run deep. The Cyclops Polyphemus is depicted with three eyes, which feels disqualifying. And just a few cuts later, the famously monocular giant is at least four times as large as he was before.
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News from MacRumors
iOS 27 Available Now With These 8 New Features
Sept. 14, 2026 by Joe Rossignol
The classic version of Siri has always been useful for basic actions like setting a timer and checking the weather, but it has notoriously struggled with more advanced requests over the years. That all changes with iOS 27, which features a much more intelligent and personalized version of Siri named Siri AI.
Siri AI is essentially a ChatGPT-like version of Siri that can answer pretty much anything. iOS 27 introduces a dedicated Siri app, or you can continue to invoke the assistant by pressing and holding the iPhone’s side button. Given it is powered by Apple Intelligence, Siri AI requires an iPhone 15 Pro or newer.
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This issue of AI News Briefs was brought to you by David Isenberg of the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire: Unpacking the Private Military Complex with independent analysis of private military companies, mercenary networks, and the privatisation of force in global conflicts. Syndicated on Sept. 18, 2026 by David Isenberg.
Foreign Mercenaries Tried to Demoralize Russian Troops With Loudspeaker Messages
Author: Alexey Khomyakov
Foreign mercenaries fighting on the Ukrainian side tried to demoralize Russian servicemen with nighttime messages broadcast through loudspeakers. The recordings urged the troops to lay down their arms and claimed that their commanders had abandoned them, according to Maxim Chentsov, a junior lieutenant with the 27th Guards Motor Rifle Division of Russia’s Center group of forces.Chentsov compared the psychological pressure tactic to methods used by the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War.
Intelligence indicated that Polish mercenaries may have been operating alongside Ukrainian units in that sector.
Image source: North Atlantic Treaty Organization / https://www.nato.int
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