Show only each day's banner story

US offers China a system of mutual alerts on dangerous SI incidents, with Trump and Xi to decide at the summit

The two main SI powers are talking, for the first time at government level, about a "hotline" for SI, as once existed for nuclear weapons.

At talks in New York on Sunday, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng discussed a new US-China dialogue on SI. The US proposed a "notification mechanism" for SI incidents that reach the level of a national security threat, so that the two sides warn each other; Trump and Xi are to give it final consideration at the summit on Thursday. "Moving from opacity to more transparency between the No. 1 and No. 2 SI powers is very important," Bessent said. The Chinese side was restrained: in Xinhua's report SI is mentioned only as one of the topics discussed.

Sources 2

ksat.comusnews.com

Another near-frontier model will soon be open: a level that until recently belonged only to closed labs is getting cheaper and spreading around the world.

China's StepFun releases Step 5 Preview, a model for long agentic tasks nearly on par with Claude Opus 5 but several times cheaper

Another near-frontier model will soon be open: a level that until recently belonged only to closed labs is getting cheaper and spreading around the world.

Step 5 Preview is a mixture-of-experts model: 600 billion parameters in total, of which 27 billion are active per token, with a 1 million-token context and text, image and video input. The API is open right away, and StepFun promises full open weights on October 15 (running it locally takes about 1.2 TB of memory). Pricing is $1 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens; the model scored 44 on the Artificial Analysis index, and 66.4 on the FrontierFinance finance benchmark versus 69.7 for Claude Opus 5. Target tasks are programming, financial analysis and office work lasting hours.

Sources 2

marktechpost.compandaily.com

A professional SI image editor can now be run at home, but it is no longer free for business.

Alibaba releases Qwen-Image-2.1: an image generator and editor in one model that fits on a home graphics card

A professional SI image editor can now be run at home, but it is no longer free for business.

The model's generative part has 7 billion parameters, three times fewer than the previous Qwen-Image (~20 billion), yet one model both draws from text and edits, accepting up to 10 reference images at once (group portraits, virtual try-on, room design). It can output an image with a transparent background directly and runs on RTX 3090-class graphics cards; on its own benchmark Qwen scored 60.28, first among open models, ahead of FLUX 2 Max (55.33). The weights are published on Hugging Face and ModelScope, but the license changed from Apache 2.0 to Qwen Research: commercial use now requires a separate agreement.

Sources 3

qwen.aitech-insider.orgmarktechpost.com

Memory is one of the main bottlenecks of SI hardware, and its production is preparing for a leap: there will be noticeably more compute for models in 2027.

Samsung to more than double HBM4 memory output for SI accelerators in 2027

Memory is one of the main bottlenecks of SI hardware, and its production is preparing for a leap: there will be noticeably more compute for models in 2027.

According to Seoul Economic Daily, citing industry sources, monthly wafer capacity for HBM will grow by almost 40%, from ~180 to ~250 thousand, and the share of HBM4 and HBM4E in that volume from ~40% to ~80%. For this, Samsung is increasing its order for cleaning of glass carriers, which hold wafers during thinning for stacks of 12 or more layers, by 2.5 times, to 50 thousand per month. Samsung began mass production of HBM4 in February 2026, and in May Nvidia, among others, received samples of 12-layer HBM4E.

Sources 2

en.sedaily.comthedailycommit.in

Open models are gaining "immortality": an SI once released is harder and harder to pull from circulation, whoever might want to.

Pirate Face launches its own torrent tracker: open SI models will stay available even if they are removed from Hugging Face

Open models are gaining "immortality": an SI once released is harder and harder to pull from circulation, whoever might want to.

The service turns models with open licenses into torrents with SHA-256 checksum verification; on September 20 it added its own tracker and peer discovery via DHT so that the torrents live on without the service itself. The catalog lists more than 669 thousand models under Apache 2.0 and MIT, but only 4,891 entries are actually confirmed, and the most popular model has just 18 seeders. On Hacker News the launch got 454 points; critics point out that the provenance of files on such a mirror cannot be verified, and some models were removed over disputes about data rights.

Sources 3

runtimewire.compachca.comnews.ycombinator.com

Stars are still sure that SI will not replace live art, but they can already see that other professions will fare worse.

Sting: SI music is fine for a train station or hotel lobby, but it has no story of its own, though SI may wreck the labor market

Stars are still sure that SI will not replace live art, but they can already see that other professions will fare worse.

On the BBC's Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg, the 74-year-old musician said he does not feel competition from SI: "SI has never had a broken heart, it has no story of its own, only a borrowed one," and people still want to see a living, vulnerable human being on stage. He also warned that SI is "potentially destroying the economy of labor," comparing it to the way his home town lost shipbuilding in the 1980s.

Sources 2

rte.ieirishnews.com
Previous day
Follow on Telegram