Optimus - Page 8

Scale AI and Elorian's Humanity's Sixth Sense benchmark finds people score 93.1% on everyday visual questions while the best model, GPT-6 Astra, scores 53.6%, mostly because models misread the picture. A separate preprint, not yet peer reviewed, says base models can reason almost as well as RL-trained ones when their answer starts with the right word.

Anthropic has expanded its Cyber Verification Program into three tiers, Defense, Red Team and Specialized, that relax Claude's cyber safety blocks for vetted security teams on Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Mythos 5.1. Specialized applicants are reviewed with the US government. What each tier allows, and what Anthropic's own test shows.

On 6 October OpenAI launched a Decisions API that returns yes/no probabilities, picks and rubric scores from GPT-6 Luna, and cut its API usage tiers from five to three. Perplexity released pplx-decider-v1.1-27b, an Apache 2.0 open-weight decision model. What decision models are, what each costs, and which scores are the vendors' own.

A Tesla Cybercab lost a door panel in a Philadelphia crash, with fault unknown and no Tesla AV certificate in Pennsylvania. Updated 10 Oct with the Texas registry count, NHTSA's 30 October deadline and Tesla's own claim of 300+ Cybercabs serving Austin. What is reported, what is confirmed, and what we don't know. Waymo, XPENG and Pony.ai/Uber stories now have their own posts.

Three fired OpenAI safety researchers have reportedly urged the board to preserve the ability to monitor AI reasoning. Australia, meanwhile, has proposed making frontier AI firms prove their safety systems work, on a banking-and-aviation model. Both reported; one is a letter, the other a proposal.

Anyone can now check an image, video or audio file for SynthID watermarks from Google and partners including OpenAI, NVIDIA and Kakao, with Apple to follow. A useful check for some AI content, not a general AI detector. What a "no" result does and does not mean.

Biohub, the US Department of Energy, the NIH, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta have announced $1.8 billion in funding, data and computing to generate open, AI-ready biological data. What is new money, what is existing data, and why a "virtual cell" needs it.

Nous Research has raised $90 million to build Hermes for Businesses, a company version of its MIT-licensed Hermes agent. The raise is confirmed; the valuation is reported, mostly at $1.5B, with one $1.2B figure in circulation. Nous's "2.5% of global token usage" is its own estimate.

Liquid AI open-sourced two "decision models" that give a structured answer in a single pass, in about 8 ms on an RTX 4090 by Liquid's figures. Perplexity open-sourced two search models that read text, images and PDF pages without OCR, where a small model can query an index built by a big one. What each does, in plain words.

Boston Dynamics has appointed former Amazon Alexa and AGI chief Rohit Prasad as CEO, effective 7 October 2026. What the company confirmed, what Hyundai's 2028 Atlas factory target means, and what is still unknown.