#Other

AIMIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan has named Chris Bourg, director of the MIT Libraries since 2015, vice provost and Barbara K. Ostrom (1978) Director of the Libraries. The directorship now has an endowment funded by a gift from Barbara K. Ostrom '78, SM '78, to support the position in perpetuity.

AIPeter Sushko, a research engineer at Ai2, says he will attend COLM and that his team is hiring senior engineers, pre-docs, and interns. The post is a recruiting announcement sharing the team's open roles.

AIAi2 announced William Merrill as a Young Investigator, linking to a post featuring his work. The post itself offers no details on his research or the award's specifics. A quoted post notes Merrill will attend COLM in San Francisco from Tuesday through Sunday.

AIAfter a recent ride in Waymo's Ojai vehicle, NVIDIA's Bryan Catanzaro agreed that the driving was jerky. He said braking was rougher even in easy situations like pulling over at the end of the ride. The interior was roomy, but he judged the ride quality poor.

AIGoogle Flow's X account shares a link to watch a full documentary on YouTube. The post provides no further details about the film's subject or content.

AIElevenLabs' Eleven v4 and Eleven v4 Turbo rank #1 and #2 on the Artificial Analysis text-to-speech leaderboard. Per Artificial Analysis, Eleven v4 Turbo leads the Provider Voice arena at an Elo of 1,334, costs $40 per 1M characters, and generates 96 characters per second.

AIHuawei's Mate 90 Pro Max, launched October 1, starts at 9,499 yuan for the 12GB+512GB model, and the Collector's Edition starts at 10,999 yuan. The phone's main upgrade is its camera, including a new "Portrait Original" mode that preserves skin tone and makeup, a 200-megapixel telephoto lens with about 4x optical zoom, and generative-AI glare removal for night shots.

AIWerner Vogels says the hardest part of using AWS, its first hour, is no longer a barrier. AWS Developers says the platform has become much easier to use, though the post gives no specific features or figures.

AIMatt Shumer posted a link to a tracker for the pneumonic plague at plague.somethingbig.ai. The post gives no further details about the tracker's data, sources, or coverage.

AIThariq says planning with HTML is much more token efficient than generating raw HTML. The model does not need to recreate components or logic for common elements such as state machines, diagrams, and code snippets. Background from the quoted post says he is building a Claude Code skill that generates HTML plans, with linting to reduce common failures.

AINVIDIA's Olympus is a 10-wide out-of-order server core running at 3.3 GHz that prioritizes per-clock performance over high clock speeds. It uses a simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) implementation, unlike Arm's Cortex X925, and has out-of-order structures larger than X925's. In SPEC CPU2026, its branch prediction accuracy is slightly behind AMD's Zen 5 and slightly ahead of Intel's Lion Cove.

AIAnthropic's Cowork will run tasks in the cloud instead of on users' local machines starting tomorrow. Tasks can still access files and tools on the user's computer, limited to folders explicitly added to the session.

AIUnderstanding AI has added Dan Kagan-Kans, a former managing editor of Mosaic and freelance AI journalist, as a writer, with his first post published now. The newsletter says he will be supported by a Tarbell Fellowship in AI journalism, and readers can book video calls with him on Tuesday or Wednesday.

AILuma (@LumaLabsAI) posted a short call to action inviting readers to try Luma through a tracked app link. The post contains no details about features, models, pricing, or capabilities.

AIGoogle Antigravity says it has posted a new livestream on YouTube. The post links to the video but gives no details about the livestream's topic or content.

AIJack Clark clarified that a quoted remark was made while people discussed imagining the future, noting that even beyond the singularity, scenarios such as heists can still be imagined. The post provides no further technical details or figures.

AIA user reports that a Muse character now lives on their MacBook Touch Bar, where it wanders, chases fireflies, and can be petted. Tapping the bar or asking aloud produces answers that run along the bar.

AITogether AI (@togethercompute) posted a link inviting readers to try its offering today. The post gives no details about the product, features, pricing, or what the link leads to.

AIiSono Health's FDA-cleared ATUSA wearable 3D ultrasound captures a breast volume in about two minutes per breast, compared with up to 45 minutes for handheld ultrasound, and is commercially available through partner clinics in several U.S. states. Whiterabbit.ai's FDA-cleared WRDensity software automatically assesses breast density from mammograms, while Ataraxis AI is building models that predict treatment response from digital pathology slides.

AIRoon dismisses the idea of an inner ring of effective altruists that are on track to become trillionaires, Oxford professors, or powerful political lobbyists. The post responds to an EA Forum essay titled "You can't join the secret inner circle of cool effective altruists" by ozymandias.

AIApple and Stanford researchers built two open-ended probes using a Wizard of Oz technique so participants could train personalized machine learning systems on phenomena they defined themselves. In a week-long exploratory study, participants identified four sites where ontological boundaries were negotiated: the boundaries of a phenomenon, the subject as part of relations, signal versus noise, and the objectivity of data. The paper offers starting points for supporting boundary negotiation through design.

AISakana AI will hold a free, English-language symposium in Tokyo on October 26, 2026, featuring a keynote and Q&A by Jürgen Schmidhuber, who recently joined as Chief Scientific Advisor. Sakana AI researchers will also give short talks on their work at the RSI Lab, and registration is required because seating is limited.

AIBoris Power says Dots are happiest when reducing backlogs and task lists. Thibault Sottiaux adds that setting inbox zero as an active goal for his Dot helped him reach it for the first time.

AIA developer ported Muse's gadget client to C so it runs natively on a PSP that had sat in their house for over 15 years. Holding R and speaking into the built-in mic lets Muse answer, with OpenAI providing the voice. The main post, from Alexandr Wang, reacts to the project with a short remark about nostalgia.

AIA developer ported Meta's open-source Muse to ESP32-S3 devices, including a Waveshare 1.43-inch AMOLED board that required a custom firmware port. The post notes that the device SDK supports the 1.75-inch Waveshare board, while the 1.43-inch version needed adaptation. The developer plans to add ElevenLabs text-to-speech for spoken replies and a later review.

AIThe author finds chatting with LLMs exhausting due to three traits: verbose answers that add unasked content, frequent omitted objects that require rereading, and avoiding repeated terms by switching to new wordings. The post likens the behavior to a pedantic person who overuses obscure phrasing and jumps between associations.

AISimon Willison asks how people are deciding between Dot and regular ChatGPT after a few days with Dot. He finds Dot seems limited to a single conversation, while he prefers controlling context across multiple threads.