読書

Wabi announced Wabi 2.0 on September 28, repositioning itself from a prompt-based app builder into a personal AI messenger that generates interfaces on demand inside a chat. The app is currently available only by invite code.

Founder Eugenia Kuyda, who previously founded the AI companion startup Replika, described Wabi 2.0 as a "personal agent that does stuff for you and builds the interface you need in the moment" — for example, a calorie tracker or lifting log living in a health-themed thread.

The pivot comes as agent products like Meta's Muse and Instinct take off, and as OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT's plug-ins into app-like interfaces at its DevDay on September 29. Kuyda argues chat-only agents bury history and tasks in one endless scroll, and that the strongest agent combines conversation with software. How the product performs for real users remains to be seen.

Grokipedia, the AI-generated online encyclopedia, is showing update activity again after months of apparent inactivity — but most entries have not been rechecked.

Grokipedia is an AI-written encyclopedia from Elon Musk's SpaceXAI. In August, Lawfare reported that its articles had not had edits reviewed since April. On September 29, The Verge observed the platform's live-updates page showing recent changes again: the Barack Obama entry was fact-checked by Grok two days ago, while the Honolulu entry still dates back seven months.

SpaceXAI did not respond to a request for comment, and Musk has not posted about Grokipedia on X since February. Benji Taylor, head of design at X and SpaceXAI, said last week that "We haven't forgotten about Grokipedia" and that v0.2 will be better than ever.

Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has demoed Dazzle, a personal AI assistant that takes no context from email or calendars and instead analyzes your phone's camera roll to infer hobbies, food and travel preferences.

It splits into two uses: scanning recent photos for immediate tasks, like populating a calendar from an event flyer, or mining the whole library for vacation and gift ideas. In TechCrunch's hands-on test it had blind spots — it suggested Sicily from a trip four years ago but forgot the reporter's daughter already knows how to roller-skate.

The company raised an $8 million seed round last December, and Mayer says it discards information the AI flags as sensitive. Her previous photo-sharing product, Shine, shut down after failing to attract usage.

Splitting body, object and hand motion into separate latents with coupled updates, the authors' own tests put TRACE at the top of contact precision, recall and F1 on InterAct among compared methods.

Earlier methods lacked such per-stream modelling; the framework, named TRACE, encodes the three streams separately, predicts each stream's velocity from the complete interaction state, and applies geometric losses on decoded motion to constrain contact and object-relative movement, and the same model can complete any single missing stream from the other two.

The authors report on InterAct, OMOMO and BEHAVE that joint completion training improves generation and that frozen flow features improve interaction understanding; the abstract claims the InterAct lead but gives no margin, hardware or training scale, and notes no third-party reproduction, so these are the authors' own results.

The preprint was submitted on 26 September and revised to v2 on 29 September, with no third-party reproduction yet.

DoorDash says users will soon be able to text its AI bot to place an order. US iOS users can join a beta waitlist starting September 30; there is no launch date yet.

The feature builds on the Ask DoorDash chatbot introduced in June: say "order my usual protein bowl to the office" and the AI searches local spots, builds a cart and checks out inside the text thread, remembering preferences for later.

The company also revealed the first DoorDash Air drone pilot in northern California with Chipotle and Popeyes among local food services, saying about 80 percent of typical restaurant orders are light enough to carry safely — with no consumer availability date either.

TechCrunch reported on September 28, citing a source with knowledge of the funding, that inference infrastructure provider Modal Labs is nearing a $750 million round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation including the investment. The company declined to comment, and the deal has not been announced.

For comparison, Modal's previous $355 million round announced in May valued it at $4.65 billion — the new figure is more than triple. The company told Reuters in May it had surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue.

The report notes several inference startups are in talks for sharply higher valuations, though margins in the business are thin because compute costs remain high; this round is still in the talking stage, and the size and valuation could change.

Ric Smith, president of products and technology at Okta, said at the company's Oktane event that Okta plans to add intent-based authorization to its agent gateway in 2027, using an agent's context and permitted tools to decide whether a proposed action should proceed.

The agent gateway is an already launched Okta product that sits in the path of actions an AI agent attempts, enforcing authorization decisions at runtime. Smith said Okta had dominantly not been inline before, and moving into the request path lets it do far more decision-making around what it authorizes. The company's acquisition of Permiso Security adds detection capabilities to this push.

Smith acknowledged that scoping permissions narrowly enough to block dangerous actions without blocking legitimate work is an open research problem. Note that the interview was published by SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, a paid media partner for the Oktane event.

Apple plans to launch its first smart home control hub on October 13 local time, alongside refreshed HomePod mini and Apple TV models, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported on September 30.

The hub has a roughly 6-inch square screen in desk and wall-mounted versions, recognizes family members and switches to personalized interfaces, and controls devices such as thermostats and door locks. The HomePod mini gets its first hardware update since its 2020 launch, and the Apple TV its first since 2022; both switch to new processors to support the next-generation Siri AI.

According to the report, these products were originally planned for an earlier date but slipped as Siri AI was repeatedly delayed. Apple has not officially confirmed the launch; the date and specifications are as reported.

AI value-accounting startup Ascerta announced on September 30 an $18 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital, bringing total funding to $22.9 million.

The company builds tools that account for enterprise AI spending: rather than just counting token consumption, it tracks whether AI applications actually generate revenue or savings. Its platform has three parts — Atlas measures AI ROI, Forge covers engineering teams' coding-agent productivity, and Convoy tracks compute usage.

The article says customers Atos and Wipro improved AI ROI by an average of 47%; those figures are company-reported. The round is modest, but Dell's investment arm leading it signals that AI spend value-accounting is being backed as a distinct category.

Restate, a Berlin-based startup, has raised a $20 million Series A led by Singular with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Capital One Ventures, according to a TechCrunch report on September 30.

Restate builds durable workflow infrastructure: multi-step processes that survive crashes and network interruptions and produce reproducible outcomes. That capability happens to fit AI agents, which run long and take unpredictable paths. The company says it has closed multiple six- and seven-figure customer contracts in recent months, including Replit.

The category leader is Temporal, which announced a $550 million Series E at a $12.55 billion valuation earlier this month. Co-founder Stephen Ewen, a co-creator of Apache Flink, said the new capital will fund a go-to-market team and more engineers. The round's details rest on media reporting so far; no company announcement has been published.

The federal government is funneling local license plate reader data into federal servers through an anti-drug grant program.

According to 404 Media's September 30 report based on public records and court documents, the HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area) program under the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy aggregates data from local police Flock, Axon and other license plate reader cameras onto federal servers, accessible to federal, state and local law enforcement.

Georgia requires cities to sign a memorandum of understanding promising to send data to a HIDTA before operating plate cameras on state rights of way. The report cites the DEA's December 2024 privacy impact assessment as saying this data can then flow into its National License Plate Reader Program.

Jeramie Scott, who runs the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Surveillance Oversight Center, told the outlet that federal agencies without vendor contracts can obtain the data this way. There are 33 HIDTA programs covering all 50 states, and it is unclear how many jurisdictions are actively feeding data in.

GPT-6.1 Sol, without chain-of-thought, closes 80% of the gap between GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra across 27 tasks (95% CI: 72–87%) — the result of an independent rerun reported by researcher Rauno Arike on LessWrong, and it sits closer to Astra than to GPT-6 Sol on 24 of 27.

The run follows his earlier no-CoT evaluation of Astra: since 6.1 Sol does not support disabling reasoning, he substituted reasoning_effort=low with an immediate-recall system prompt, took k=1 sample per question, and excluded nine tasks that previously failed to separate the older models. Time-horizon estimates moved from 4.0 minutes for GPT-6 Sol to 35 minutes, though the author himself flags that most benchmarks saturate, making those estimates highly uncertain.

His looped-transformer explanation rests on a gpt-6-astra-minor registry path spotted in Azure's playground configuration and community speculation; OpenAI has not confirmed it.