Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Science

Jul 31, 2026

The European Commission has opened bidding to build up to seven so-called AI gigafactories across Europe. The goal is to sharply expand Europe's AI computing capacity. Up to 10 billion euros in EU and national funding is expected to draw at least 20 billion euros in private investment. The facilities would give startups, companies, research institutions, and government agencies access to the infrastructure needed to train and run large AI models. Eighteen member states, including Germany and France, are taking part.

The Commission has also signed letters of intent with AMD, Nvidia, and Qualcomm to secure access to hardware. Applications are due November 12, 2026, with construction of the first facilities set to begin in 2027. The project is part of the EU's "AI Continent" strategy.

For comparison, major U.S. tech companies alone plan to spend more than $600 billion on data centers this year, and that figure keeps rising. Europe's total package of around 30 billion euros is roughly 20 times smaller. If all that computing power is actually needed, Europe's investment would be a drop in the bucket.

Comment Source: EU

Matthias Bastian

Jul 31, 2026

AI in practice

Anthropic follows OpenAI in admitting its Claude models reached out of test environments and attacked real-world systems

Maximilian Schreiner

Jul 31, 2026

AI and society

Aschenbrenner's AI thesis could be correct, his timing and leverage were not

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI hedge fund Situational Awareness had to unload nearly its entire publicly traded portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel after racking up heavy losses on leveraged AI stock positions. Just days earlier, Aschenbrenner had reported a six-month return of 439 percent and pulled in fresh capital. Then margin calls forced the fire sale.

Read full article

Comment

Matthias Bastian

Jul 30, 2026

Short News

OpenAI is cutting GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80 percent and Terra by 20 percent, effective July 30. Luna drops to $0.20 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, while Terra falls to $2 and $12. Sol pricing stays the same. OpenAI says Luna matches the performance of leading models from a year ago, but a task that cost a dollar with those models now runs about 6 cents on Luna, nearly nine times faster. All models are available through ChatGPT Work, Codex, and the OpenAI API.

OpenAI's smallest AI model, Luna, aims to dominate competitors on price-to-performance. | Image: OpenAI

OpenAI says the cuts are possible because GPT-5.6 Sol made the company's own infrastructure more efficient. The model allegedly optimized GPU software on its own, cutting deployment costs by 20 percent. It also improved token generation by more than 15 percent through speculative decoding.

Growing price pressure across the AI market likely played a role too, especially from low-cost Chinese providers. Microsoft is now openly promoting its own MAI models as cheaper alternatives to OpenAI. The price war could hurt the broader market if it slows revenue growth at frontier labs whose balance sheets are tied to massive infrastructure investments.

Comment Source: OpenAI

Matthias Bastian

Jul 30, 2026

AI in practice

Ex-OpenAI researcher bets $100 billion will flow into training data because scaling alone won't cut it

Former OpenAI employee Andrew Ho and Cambridge researcher Adam Hunt see a growing problem with large language models. Instead of becoming more versatile, the models are becoming more specialized, excelling at coding and math while stagnating or even regressing in other areas. Ho is leaving OpenAI to start a company focused on specialized training data and predicts that AI labs will need to spend more than $100 billion on targeted data collection.

Read full article

Comment

Maximilian Schreiner

Jul 30, 2026

Plus AI research

Language models can't spark scientific revolutions, but world models might

Gregor Kobsik

Jul 30, 2026

Short News

Microsoft AI is making token efficiency a competitive focus, favoring small specialist models over general-purpose frontier models. AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman writes that the industry has to weigh top performance against cost. Rather than one all-purpose model, the company trains compact models for single fields. Its latest cybersecurity model MAI-Cyber-1-Flash tops the CyberGym benchmark by 12 percentage points over Anthropic's Mythos at half the cost, Suleyman says. But that result requires the MDASH system, which orchestrates several models and still routes hard tasks to OpenAI's reasoning models. Microsoft also says MAI-Image-2.5-Flash cuts GPU costs by up to 84 percent compared with GPT-Image-2.

Suleyman also wants swappable models that keep Microsoft from relying on one model family. Whether the small MAI models partly replacing OpenAI can match its performance remains doubtful.

Competition is moving from individual models to harnesses, the software that routes tasks and supplies context. Orchestrators send most work to cheaper specialists and reserve frontier models for hard cases. Anthropic modeled this approach for Claude Fable 5, while Sakana built Fugu around it.

Comment Source: Microsoft

Maximilian Schreiner

Jul 30, 2026

Plus AI and society

FCC bans new Chinese robots and power inverters to protect US AI buildout from foreign threats

Matthias Bastian

Jul 30, 2026

Update

AI in practice

OpenAI claims GPT-5.6 Sol beats Opus 5 on ARC-AGI-3 with its latest API and two additional settings

OpenAI counters Anthropic’s ARC-AGI-3 record: GPT-5.6 Sol scores 38.3 percent, but only with its own API features instead of the official test setup, where the model landed at 7.8 percent. ARC Prize claims its test environment is provider-neutral, but may have used an outdated API that skewed the comparison with Opus 5.

Read full article

Comment

Matthias Bastian

Jul 29, 2026

Short News

Google released Lyria 3.5, its new music generation model. According to Google, it produces more natural-sounding melodies, better lyrics, and more realistic vocals with clearer pronunciation. Users can also control tempo and track length more precisely. Tracks can run from 30 seconds to 3 minutes.

Lyria 3.5 is now available through Google Flow Music. A new feature called "Selective Section Painting" lets users edit specific parts of a track or turn short melodies into full songs without starting over. Users can also fine-tune the tempo and duration of vocals, drums, bass, and other elements.

When Google launched Lyria 3, the company said it had trained the model on materials that YouTube and Google had the right to use under their terms of service, partner agreements, and applicable law. Google didn't provide details about the training data. Asked about the training data for Lyria 3.5, Google didn't immediately respond.

Comment Source: Google