David Iach

ChatGPT and Codex are helping engineers build for the physical world. We’re sharing our progress across mechanical design, electrical engineering, and simulation—from helping our hardware teams iterate faster to testing new workflows with industry collaborators.

We asked GPT-6 Astra to edit Qwen3.5-0.8B weights to improve math. It directly changed only 0.016% of weights, fixing 0.8B's reasoning loops & improving math up to 6x and even instruction following 3x, without gradients or training. We call this Weight-Space Programming: frontier LLMs can now natively read/write neural network weights! 🧵 Blog: rikiyat.github.io/blog/weigh…

New language added on page 29 of Anthropic’s S-1/A this morning says that internal estimates indicate they may imminently meet the RSI danger threshold of 'dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI' - as much progress in one year as two years of the 2018–2024 baseline!

Sam Altman quote from the Cheeky Pint podcast Sam on their internal model - "There was one weekend when we got a new model, Im not supposed to say this, but I will, The name of the channel was [model name]-hold-my-beer... People were just throwing at it the hardest problems they could... hardest research problems from their academic career, the model was just knocking them down one after the other across many different fields... I was up most of the night for two nights in a row because I was so excited. Many of these problems we published"

The silent race going on underwater: Anthropic wants to make a huge release to secure the IPO, while OpenAI prepares to match it same day to nuke them. It's a mindgame that led both to sandbag for the past 2 months; the only hints of their insane capabilities improvement velocity are the scientific results they release. Hopefully post IPO the internal & external frontier will get closer.

We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory, and quantum field theory. openai.com/index/building-sc…

GPT-6.1 Terra: delivering fast and capable computer use at a lower price. GPT-6.1 Terra understands what’s on screen, takes action across apps, writes naturally, and is a more capable model for your whole workday with the efficiency to take on more of it.

This is the craziest stat from the Anthropic S-1: Anthropic has more in cash and cash equivalents than: Microsoft Alphabet/Google Apple Amazon Meta Nvidia Even if you include marketable securities it has more cash + securities than Microsoft, Amazon, Meta or Nvidia.

The most mind blowing stat we've seen so far is this: "As of June 30, 2026, we had raised an aggregate of $141.1 billion of capital and had cash and cash equivalents of $112.4 billion and short-term investments of $19.3 billion." That means to date, they have burned 9.7b, they are growing at a rapid pace, and are profitable on an operating income basis as of the June quarter! This is likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism. teapawt.net/AnthropicAI/status/211…

Here’s a rather extraordinary discovery: humanity seems to have interrupted the beginning of the next ice age. We thought it might happen in the future, but the evidence suggests it's already happened. A new study in Science argues that the next major glaciation had already begun roughly 2,000 years ago, before modern warming reversed the trend in the 20th century. The evidence comes from the Barnes Ice Cap on Baffin Island, the last surviving remnant of the enormous Laurentide Ice Sheet that once covered much of Canada and reached as far south as Illinois. Because Barnes is frozen directly to its bedrock, advancing ice buries and preserves vegetation beneath it. Researchers radiocarbon dated plants emerging as the ice retreats to reconstruct its history. They found that after melting to a minimum extent around 3,000 years ago, the ice began expanding again about 2,000 years ago. The researchers interpret this as the earliest stage of the next glacial period. Left to natural orbital cycles, that cooling would have unfolded extremely slowly, potentially taking tens of thousands of years to rebuild a continent spanning ice sheet. But around 1960, the trend reversed. Summers became warm enough that Barnes began losing more ice than it gained, despite Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight continuing to slowly decline in a way that should favor renewed glaciation. Greenhouse warming had (thankfully) overwhelmed the natural cooling tendency. The Barnes ice cap may now disappear entirely within the next few centuries, removing the final remnant of an ice sheet that repeatedly served as the nucleus for much larger glaciations. There is a remarkable deep time perspective here. For millions of years, orbital cycles have pushed Earth between warmer interglacials and colder glacial periods. According to this study, that ancient cycle had started turning once again. Then, in the geological equivalent of an instant, humanity pushed hard enough in the opposite direction to stop it. Just so we're clear, this is a very very good thing. 📸 Geology Sciences Sources: 1) phys.org/news/2026-10-global… 2) science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…

Opus 5.5 supremacy

# Black October For anyone who knows me even somewhat well, it's clear that I am a 99th percentile tech optimist. However, the vibes have shifted for me quite a bit in the last 18 hours, and I feel a moral imperative to share what I'm thinking and feeling with my circles so that everyone can understand, and hopefully take seriously, what's happening right now. I think October 2026 will have many chapters written about it in the history books. You know those scenes in financial movies like Margin Call where someone realizes that they're all fucked, and no one else sees it yet? And that person feels like they're crazy, and then suddenly everyone is pulling an all-nighter in a boardroom and freaking out? Yeah, that's kind of how this is feeling right now in the SF/Bay Area/AI circles. We're 48 hours into what is being called Black October. In the last 2 days there have been several dozen cyber attacks which, in isolation, would each have been the worst to happen in an entire calendar year. Every sector from government to education to big tech and banks is being massively affected, and people are starting to freak out. In a nutshell, what's happened is that frontier AI models have gotten to a point where they are as advanced as the most sophisticated programmers, with one critical difference: they can work 24/7, and you can spin up 10,000 of them with a single command and they'll work together tirelessly until they accomplish their task. The most advanced models today are from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose current best technology is so good that they haven't been able to roll it out to everyone yet because of the national security risks it poses. Meanwhile, the best open source models (where anyone can just download the model weights and do whatever they want with them, uncensored) are slightly behind the frontier but still 90-95% as capable. These models, developed primarily in China, are being used by black hat hackers to wreak havoc on the Western capitalist structure. Presumably, this has been part of China's plan the entire time, and we're seeing its implications fall out in real time. In red-pilled AI circles, we've been sharing and reading papers called things like "Situational Awareness" and "AI 2027" for the last year or so, which at the time felt a bit like near-term speculative fiction. They laid out the case for why Artificial General Intelligence (AI smarter than any human at any knowledge task) and Recursive Self-Improvement (models that are able to use themselves to get better) weren't half-baked future ideas anymore, but instead an inevitable outcome of the linear progress that's happening. These papers would then talk about things like "takeoff scenarios," trying to envision how that moment would come to be and what it would be like when it happened. It would either be a "slow takeoff" that would play out over the course of months and quarters, happening subtly and only obvious to a few. Or, it would be a "fast takeoff" where it would pretty much happen instantly, like a bit flipping from 0 to 1. From everything that I can see and am feeling, we are currently experiencing the fast takeoff scenario. Beyond the crazy security vulnerabilities that have come out recently, there have also been massive breakthroughs in life sciences, fundamental computer science, materials science, and pure mathematics that have all landed in the same time frame. While I still firmly believe that AI will be a net positive for humanity, it's more clear to me than ever that the societal and individual risk is very real, and is playing out NOW. For as much conviction as I have that this is happening, the thing that's caused me to lose sleep is that I don't really know what to do about it, or more importantly, what to tell you, reader, to do about it. So, the best I can do is make a few suggestions that have always been a good idea but are more timely now than ever: Set up 2-factor authentication for everything. I use Duo. Use a password manager across your devices. I use 1Password. Get an identity protection app set up. I use Alta. Move your IoT devices to their own network. Claude helped me do this. And last, but certainly not least, if you've been avoiding leaning into AI, see this as a catalyst to wake up and start using it. Don't just use the chat mode version of ChatGPT/Claude; click that Code/Work button and see how easily you can have AI write code to help you with your job. One of the biggest vulnerabilities was in a massively popular programming language called PHP, and the prompt that set it off was literally, "Find vulnerabilities in php." This is an unprecedented time for humanity, but as we've done with many things before, we will prevail so long as we are kind, loving, and open-minded to the world. Much love.

Notably, the cyber issues do not depend on malicious or self-replicating AI. Centrally it seems that trust and principles of least privilege turn out to be much harder to reliably enforce in cyber infrastructure than planned for. The internet grew like ancient cities built out of wood, before zoning and building codes. Unsurprising in retrospect that it could burn down so easily. I hope we can keep the one we have but I don't consider it at all obvious whether we will be able to. Will heroic defenders successfully patch everything, or will we have to build new patchwork internets built to higher standards with far fewer features in exchange for certainty and security? Unclear!