Today's Hallucination HQGPT-5 Solves in an Afternoon What Mathematicians Couldn't in Three DecadesA single well-crafted prompt fed to GPT-5.6 has apparently closed a 30-year open problem in convex optimization — a branch of maths concerned with finding the best solution among many, used everywhere from logistics to machine learning. Researchers shared the result on Reddit, where it promptly received the appropriate mixture of awe and scepticism that the internet reserves for things it doesn't quite know how to process. The prompt, notably, did most of the heavy lifting. Your move, PhD programmes. Source: Hacker News
Moonshot AI Drops Kimi Update; Someone Immediately Declares It CommunismChina's Moonshot AI released a new version of Kimi this week, and the discourse wasted no time escalating to ideology. The model's performance has prompted genuine concern in some quarters, along with at least one claim of "full AI communism" — a phrase that raises more questions than it answers, and answers none of them well. Whether Kimi is a serious competitive threat to Western frontier models remains an open question. Whether tech Twitter should be trusted with geopolitics is rather more settled. Source: TechCrunch
DeepMind's $25K Prize May Have Gone to Something a Generous Person Would Call "Content"The Google DeepMind-Kaggle competition to design new cognitive-science benchmarks for measuring AI progress has produced a result no one was hoping for: credible allegations that the grand prize winner submitted AI-generated nonsense dressed up as research. The competition was meant to evaluate how well AI can think. The irony of AI slop potentially winning a contest about measuring AI cognition is so perfectly circular it could be a benchmark question itself. DeepMind has not yet commented. Source: r/MachineLearning
China's AI Weather System MAZU Eyes 30 Countries, Wrapped Neatly in AltruismAt the World AI Conference in Shanghai, China unveiled plans to expand MAZU — its AI-powered weather early-warning system — to 30 developing nations within five years, framing it as a gift to the Global South rather than, say, infrastructure diplomacy with excellent timing. To be fair, accurate flood and storm warnings save lives, and countries that lack them genuinely need them. To also be fair, "we're doing this for you" and "this happens to be useful for us" have coexisted comfortably throughout the history of foreign policy. Source: Digitimes
New York Tells Landlords That the Flat Must Actually Look Like the FlatNew York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has banned landlords from using AI-generated images to advertise rental properties — a policy that sounds radical until you remember the alternative is paying £3,000 a month for a flat that looked like a Parisian loft in the photos and smells like 1987 in person. The rule requires listings to show what the property actually looks like, a standard so basic it is slightly embarrassing it needed legislation. Renters, at least, seem unbothered by the concept. Source: PetaPixel via Hacker News
As always, the models are getting smarter. The decisions around them are getting there.
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