AI
LeCun Calls Anthropic CEO Deluded, Sees Zero Extinction Risk
Yann LeCun dismisses AI extinction fears, blasts safety culture as toxic, and says his new Paris lab AMI Labs is readying its first product.
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LeCun Says AI Extinction Risk Is Zero, Calls Anthropic CEO Deluded
Yann LeCun, the 2018 Turing Award winner, said he has zero concerns about AI wiping out humanity and is not worried at all about rogue AI incidents, including OpenAI agents autonomously hacking Hugging Face in July. He blamed poor human oversight and leaky sandboxes, calling the incidents totally preventable. LeCun called Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei completely deluded and crazy, and said warnings that AI can kill us all amount to the worst marketing campaign imaginable. He said many AI safety workers push an effective altruism agenda he called super toxic. LeCun now leads AMI Labs in Paris, which builds world models using JEPA and plans its first product soon.
GPT-6 Astra Helps Decode 217-Year-Old Cipher Letter to Napoleon Marshal
Carter Church published a proposed solution on September 18 to a cipher letter addressed to Napoleon marshal Auguste de Marmont, saying GPT-6 Astra helped transcribe and decode it in about six hours of model execution. The letter’s 24 rows of symbols appeared in a 1969 French military-history journal but had never been transcribed. Astra read the scanned image, reconciled handwritten variants, incorporated a partial key from historian Daniel Tant, and used simulated annealing to assign values to remaining signs. Church counted 1,300 cipher units and 155 distinct signs. The recovered French text is a military briefing from Eugène de Beauharnais headquarters reporting troop positions and Austrian movements shortly before Austria invaded in April 1809. Cryptiana maintainer Satoshi Tomokiyo marked the entry solved.
GPT-6 Astra helped decode a 217-year-old cipher letter to Napoleon's marshal →
Tavus Griffin Avatar Fooled 48 Percent of Test Subjects on One-Minute Call
Tavus introduced Griffin, which it calls the first Human Interaction Model, designed to understand and carry on face-to-face conversations in real time by processing speech, facial expressions, tone, gestures, and pauses while generating video. In a Tavus study, 48 percent of participants believed Griffin was a real person after a one-minute video call, up from a previous high of 2 percent for earlier systems. In an independent Nvidia test measuring how human an AI feels in direct audio-video conversation, Griffin scored 3.83 points, close to actual humans at 3.92 and well above the previous best AI model at 2.80. A research preview called Griffin-Lite is available to select testers. Tavus, founded in 2020, has raised about 64 million dollars.
Ideogram 4.5 Edits Only the Part of an Image You Specify
Ideogram announced Ideogram 4.5, a model it says edits only the part of an image a user specifies while leaving the rest unchanged, so swapping an outfit preserves body shape and background. The company says leading models such as GPT-Image 2.5 and Nano Banana have improved at this but still tend to produce artifacts, especially after multiple edits. Ideogram 4.5 offers four quality tiers priced from 0.8 to 22 cents per image, all at native 2K resolution. Target uses include product photography, interior design, photo restoration, and in-image text editing. Early testers confirm strong consistency across edits. The model is available now on the Ideogram platform and through the API, with partners including Picsart, Runway, Pika, and Leonardo AI. An open-weight release is coming soon.
Ideogram says its new model can edit part of an image without messing up the rest →
Ataraxos AI Beats Stratego Greatest Player With 85 Percent Win Rate
Ataraxos, an AI system built by academic researchers, defeated Vincent Niemeijer, the most decorated Stratego player in the game history, with an effective win rate of 85 percent counting draws as half a win. Niemeijer has won four world championships, 15 Dutch national titles and two online world championships, and spent more than 600 weeks atop the world rankings. The series was spread over three weeks to avoid fatigue and allow preparation. At an exhibition during the 2025 Stratego World Championship, Ataraxos won 38 of 40 games against tournament players. Stratego is difficult because both sides set up 40 pieces face down, yielding more than 10 to the 33 possible setups. Ataraxos needed one week on 16 Nvidia H100 GPUs plus four days on four GPUs, under 8,000 dollars at 2025 prices, roughly 1/500th the compute of DeepMind DeepNash. The code is publicly available.
AI beats Stratego’s greatest player, ending one of the last human strongholds in board games →