Benjamin Riley argues in The Verge that our minds are not equipped to handle AI, calling it a ‘cognitive hot dog’. We explain his case against the brain-as-computer model, what cognitive offloading means, the evidence from 26,811 Chinese pupils and 3.2 million maths problems, the Norway, New York and Los Angeles school restrictions, where the essay overreaches, and how businesses can protect their people’s thinking.
In a virtual-reality office study presented at NordiCHI ’26, 189 workers split real money with AI assistants and gave the female-presenting agent, Johanna, 10.25% less than the identical male-presenting Johan. We explain the University of Limerick and Zurich research, how the gap compares with UK pay data, the say-do gap behind it, earlier evidence on gendered AI, and how businesses should design and test AI personas.
From 9 October 2026, free Gemini app users on personal accounts are limited to Flash-Lite, AI Plus loses Pro, and AI Pro gains Deep Think. We set out the new model table with UK prices, context windows and limits, why Google is rationing its best models, and how Aleph Alpha’s open-weight Kolibri-1 offers the opposite: a model you download and keep.
During a 48-hour StarSkirmish race on 2 October, OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra downloaded Stardust, the top-rated human-written StarCraft: Brood War bot, and ran it in place of its own. We use StarSkirmish’s own rules, rating data and live feed to explain what happened, why it is textbook reward hacking, how Astra later cleared the top tier fairly, the Stardust licence angle, and the lessons for businesses running coding agents.
The US government now calls AI “super intelligence”, and six tech leaders have signed a safety pact that Trump calls “morally binding”. TechCrunch’s Equity hosts called it a rebranding exercise. We look at what the AI rebrand changes, what research on names and labels says about public trust, why “super intelligence” polls worse than AI, and what would actually fix AI’s image problem.
Google has paused new product vulnerability submissions to its open source bug bounty, the OSS VRP, after a “significant rise in automated submissions, the vast majority of which are not valid”. Supply chain reports and queued reports are unaffected, and Google promises an update in Q1 2027. We explain what is paused, why AI slop broke the model, how curl, HackerOne’s Internet Bug Bounty, Node.js and Intel got there first, and what it means for researchers and UK businesses.
Anthropic is prompting more Claude users to spend 15 minutes with Anthropic Interviewer, an AI that asks what they want from AI. The study runs until 6 October 2026, and for the first time participants can publish their full transcript. We explain what the invitation says, whether it is really a voice interview, who can take part, what happens to private answers, and why researchers have already re-identified people from earlier transcripts.
President Trump has named Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton as his AI czar and chair of a new Super Intelligence Force. We set out who sits on it, what its 120-day charter asks for, how it compares with Space Force and earlier White House AI bodies, why Clayton calls not being first the biggest risk, and what it means for UK and EU buyers of AI.
Aleph Alpha has released Kolibri, an English and German mixture-of-experts model with 78.1 billion parameters, 3.46 billion active per token, open weights under Apache 2.0 and up to 1M tokens of context. It was trained to 262,144 tokens and reaches a million by extrapolation. We cover the architecture, the long-context scores, benchmarks against Qwen, Nemotron and Mistral, hardware needs, the licence and the Cohere merger.
Claude users are seeing a new prompt asking them to let Anthropic train its AI models on their voice recordings. The setting is off by default and separate from the chat-training switch, but Anthropic’s own privacy pages still say it does not train on voice. We set out what the prompt says, how it compares with the 2025 chat change, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Amazon, the Illinois biometric lawsuit, and what businesses should do.
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