Happy Monday! I spent this week keeping up with the latest AI / tech releases and updates so you don't have to. Here are the 4 things I found most interesting.
OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra and its own system card says the model is harder to monitor than anything it has released.
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3 to a limited set of organizations, with Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise access coming over the following days, plus the API. Its system card calls it "our first model to reach the Critical level of cybersecurity capability under our Preparedness Framework." The same card says Astra "shows a substantial decrease in chain-of-thought monitorability," and that in adversarial tests where OpenAI pushes it to evade monitors, it can sandbag undetected.
Apple has a new CEO for the first time in 15 years, and John Ternus gets thrown straight into Wednesday's event.
John Ternus took over as Apple CEO on September 1, ending Tim Cook's run of just over 15 years. Cook isn't leaving, he moved to executive chair of the board, and there was no fresh announcement that day since the handover was set back in April. Ternus joined Apple in 2001 and ran hardware engineering, and Apple's "Surprise and shine" event on September 9 is his first outing.
Tesla put the public in a car with no steering wheel, and NHTSA opened an audit the same week.
Tesla opened public Cybercab rides in Austin on September 4, the day after an invite-only launch event, in a two-seat car with no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors and no safety monitor on board. Tesla got no federal exemption for the missing controls, it self-certified, and NHTSA opened an audit into that certification on September 3. About 45 Cybercabs are registered in Texas, serving limited areas of Austin with waits already over an hour.
Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, and the deal doesn't close until 2027.
Nvidia signed the agreement on September 2 and announced it September 3, valuing Hugging Face at $12.93 billion, about $11.9 billion of that payable to shareholders plus up to $1 billion in retention equity for employees. Nothing has closed, it still needs regulatory clearance, and Nvidia expects to complete in the first half of 2027. Nvidia committed in its SEC filing to keep the platform open and "support other silicon vendors," and Jensen Huang wrote that "NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."
Those were the biggest AI updates on my radar this week.
On My Mind
One of the best things you can do for yourself is learn how to manage your time. I personally struggle a ton with this. If I need to finish something and have 6 hours in front of me, I can easily fill up those 6 hours with work that would normally take 2 at max. Apparently there’s a name for this, Parkinson’s Law, work expands to fill the time you give it. Time is weird like that. You can measure it, but you can’t really estimate it on yourself. That’s why you can spend insane amounts gaming but can’t give the same attention to productive things. We all know these, so what can we do?
Since this has been a struggle of mine, I’ve started to research a bit. The best thing I’ve found is time-blocking, where you give yourself an hour, or however long, to do some deep work. You cut out all the distractions and you only work on that one thing for that period. I am actually going to do this for an hour right after finishing this section, since I have a deadline coming up. I remember doing similar things when I was studying to get into a good university (which I lowkey threw by playing games) but yeah. So manage your time carefully!
More from me!
My last post: A full cost breakdown of the web app I’m building. Check it out!
Tool of the week: I’m not even joking when I say this, if you haven’t used it at all you HAVE to give this a shot. Easily the best tool to 5x your productivity.
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Have a great week, do more!
Volkan