TechCapsules

On September 17, 2026, Figure AI announced that its Helix 2.5 neural network successfully completed 56% of 420 household tasks in 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen before, using a single pretrained checkpoint from the Index dataset. The same architecture trained from random weights achieved only 9%. The experiment involved three tasks—living‑room tidying, towel folding, and bed making—without any data collection or fine‑tuning on the new environments. The results demonstrate a sixfold improvement attributable solely to [...]

The article argues that large language models, while often viewed as divisive, may unintentionally foster political consensus by shaping how people learn. It traces polarization’s roots to media fragmentation, noting how the 1970s cable boom and the internet’s rise created echo chambers that eroded shared narratives. The piece contrasts this with earlier broadcast eras, where a handful of neutral anchors like Walter Cronkite provided a common informational baseline. By highlighting AI data centers as a potential bridge, [...]

Anthropic announced that its flagship model, Claude, now leads approximately 26 percent of the company’s research and development activities, a sharp rise from zero earlier this year. The figure reflects tasks where Claude can execute most of the work from high‑level instructions while human researchers supervise and set objectives. Anthropic maintains that Claude remains non‑autonomous, with humans deciding research goals and evaluating outcomes. The company disclosed the metric to provide transparency on AI involvement in its own development [...]

Vals, a San Francisco AI‑benchmarking startup founded in 2024, raised $40 million in a Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz after an earlier seed round from 8VC and Bloomberg Beta. Co‑founder Rayan Krishnan, a former Palantir intern and Stanford AI lab student, says the company was created to address outdated public benchmarks that can be gamed by model developers. Vals offers private, industry‑specific tests—covering law, finance, coding and emerging areas such as mental‑health, cybersecurity and the law of armed [...]

The media sector is undergoing a rapid AI‑driven transformation, with personalization emerging as its core catalyst. A recent PwC report projects AI will dominate content creation, distribution and user‑experience design by 2030, reshaping how audiences engage with media. Professionals cite AI’s impact across production efficiency, cost reduction, advanced CGI, and virtual production, while AI‑enhanced cameras now automatically track athletes during live sports, delivering dynamic close‑ups. Fraud‑detection algorithms combat ad fraud and copyright violations in real time, safeguarding [...]

President Donald Trump used his Truth Social platform on Saturday to launch a public poll asking Americans to choose a new term to replace “artificial intelligence.” He criticized the existing label as “inaccurate” and “very ineloquent,” proposing three alternatives: Super Intelligence, Extreme Intelligence, and Supreme Intelligence. The post referenced the 1955 origin of the term by Stanford professor John McCarthy and noted Trump’s frequent use of AI for his own social‑media content. The poll appears amid heightened industry [...]

In a new filing, The New York Times alleges that OpenAI copied millions of copyrighted articles without permission while training its AI models, accusing the firm and its partner Microsoft of “transgressive and deceptive” methods to bypass paywalls. The lawsuit, part of a broader wave of copyright actions against AI developers, seeks billions in damages and argues that OpenAI’s data collection was driven by commercial motives, citing a 2017 statement by co‑founder Greg Brockman about financial rewards. The [...]

SK Holy Name in Sarawak has announced a 2027 goal to become a recognized School of Technology, aiming to develop at least five tech‑based products and broaden student engagement in robotics, innovation, and artificial intelligence. Headmaster Albert Bujon highlighted projects such as an Air Pollutant Index monitoring device and participation in regional robotics and AI contests. The initiative received a RM10,000 grant from Assemblyman Billy Sujang, supporting student competition entry. The plan aligns with the school’s National [...]