The Brutalist Report

Techmeme

David Robinson, who worked on OpenAI's Safety Systems team and had previously led policy planning, left OpenAI last week (Stephen Council/Business Insider) [35d]
Leaked Slack messages show OpenAI employees' pushback in June to Greg Brockman's Leading the Future ties, contributing to Brockman reneging on a $25M donation (Garrison Lovely/Semafor) [35d]
Amazon says it has stopped using NDAs with county officials for data center projects and acknowledges community backlash is leading to data center moratoriums (Molly Taft/Wired) [35d]
Nvidia announces a version of DGX Spark with 64 GB of unified memory for $4,999, or $1,000 more than the 128 GB version at launch (Michael Kan/PCMag) [35d]
Apple releases an update for iPhone 18 Pro Max devices on AT&T to address cellular failures; units that already lost service require hardware replacement (Chance Miller/9to5Mac) [35d]
Meta announces Muse Gadgets, providing an open source ESP32 microchip firmware and a Linux SDK to let users bring Muse to their hardware, like Raspberry Pi 5 (Karissa Bell/Engadget) [35d]
Meta says it is letting go of employees it hired from AI safety startup Virtue AI four months after they joined the company, citing clashing work styles (Ashley Gold/Semafor) [35d]
Memo: the US Army is creating an autonomous systems command, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Meridian and Agincourt robotic warfare projects (Colin Demarest/Axios) [35d]
TypeSafe CEO Diogo Almeida says Jev is in use by ~25% of Fortune 500 companies and "we were at a trillion tokens per day about a week ago" (Elias Schisgall/Wall Street Journal) [35d]
Tavus unveils Griffin, the "first Human Interaction Model", which it says passed the "video Turing test", with 48% of users thinking it was human in live chats (@tavus) [35d]
Apple says it is adding additional controls around "Full Disk Access" on macOS as AI agents have increased "the risks associated with this level of access" (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) [35d]
Anthropic launches the Claude Frontier Academy with a $100M commitment to train 10K Frontier Deployed Engineers by 2028, starting with Accenture, Bain, others (Anthropic) [35d]