Breaking news, AGI updates, and analysis of the intelligence revolution.
📰 News MiniMax M3.1 Flash prices agentic AI at $0.15/1M tokens — 70% cheaper than its predecessor. But an unverifiable 'query sniping' claim and a 93% hallucination rate on incorrect answers have turned the launch into a referendum on what benchmarks are worth.
📰 News Eka Robotics closed a $150M Series A at a $1.45B valuation, betting that robots should learn force instead of imitating human video. Its gripper picks 1,500 objects an hour at over 95% accuracy — and the lab-to-line leap is still ahead.
📰 News NAB's 2,500-role restructure arrives with an A$300 million charge, union consultation and no AI disclosure. Helen Bird says the bank must come clean about technology replacing administrative and oversight roles.
📰 News Documents released under the Official Information Act show police used the vetted Whisper AI outside its approved scope — including te reo Māori translation — and ran unsecured workarounds while arguing restrictions would 'hinder effectiveness'.
📰 News The Ann Arbor team behind a Nature cover on autonomous-driving safety is stress-testing physical AI inside simulations reconstructed from the real world — and argues general-purpose robots have the thinnest safety evidence base of all.
📰 News Kodama's hybrid autonomy-plus-teleoperation stack is already running in production logging: 100,000 tons moved, manual-machine productivity matched, and a path to doubling working hours by covering the dark shift too.
📰 News DeepSeek cut task cost with the price unchanged, radiologists earn US$400 an hour training models, and a rehiring correction is underway. The stable number underneath is the price of judgement — and that is where NZ can compete.
📰 News The UC team's robot solved the 4×4 in 9.806 seconds on 16 October — the existing robotic record was 45 seconds and the human record 15. Every stage, from colour sensing under changing light to axis access at speed, was solved in Christchurch.
📰 News The Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act order excludes Hangzhou DeepSeek's products from federal procurement and requires removal from agency systems, citing data transfers to China. It reaches third-party services built on DeepSeek models.
📰 News The first developed economy to openly rebuild the bottom rung of the career ladder in response to AI: year-long, state co-funded internships for 3,000 students, against a PM warning the ladder's bottom rung is broken.
📰 News Part charity vehicle, part valuation hedge: the fund grows 2% for every 50% jump in the company's worth, arrives just before what could be history's largest IPO, and lands in the same week Anthropic asked Congress for the narrowest possible federal AI rules.
📰 News The ex-Perpule founder's startup says its OG-1 robot finishes walls up to three times faster than humans — a claim still awaiting independent verification — and plans 150 robots on sites by the end of 2027.