Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai / TechCrunch: Citizen Lab details two spying campaigns that abuse weaknesses in the SS7 and Diameter protocols across 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks to track people's locations  —  Security researchers have uncovered two separate spying campaigns that are abusing well-known weaknesses in the global telecoms infrastructure to track people's locations.

Ace can read the trajectory of a ball, adjust the racket angle, and respond with strokes that keep the exchange alive with real players.

Discussion | Link

METR, which stands for Model Evaluation and Threat Researc, is focused on understanding the degree to which AI models can engage in autonomous, complex tasks. METR see this is as a particularly important benchmark, given the risk that AI could one day be engaged in recursive self improvement, taking humans out of the loop. But how do you really gauge a model's ability to do complex problems. And what is being measured for exactly? On this episode we speak with METR's President Chris Painter as well as Joel Becker, a member of the technical staff who works on evaluation methods for the organization. We discuss both the mechanics and the philosophy of METR's work, and what it means when we see a a chart showing that Clause Opus 4.6 can do a task that would take a human nearly 12 hours. (Source: Bloomberg)

Ashley Capoot / CNBC: An overview of Elon Musk's $134B lawsuit against Sam Altman, scheduled to begin on Monday, accusing Altman of reneging on a vow to keep OpenAI nonprofit  —  A yearslong legal brawl between Elon Musk, the world's richest man, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman heads to court in Northern California …

Discussion | Link

Ian King / Bloomberg: Intel's upbeat outlook suggests CEO Lip-Bu Tan is making progress on a turnaround, having strengthened the company's balance sheet and now improving operations  —  Intel's Strong AI-Fueled Forecast Tops Estimates  —  Intel Corp. shares hit a record high after the chipmaker delivered …

Ben Schoon / 9to5Google: Report: Samsung co-CEO TM Roh told company leaders that the mobile division MX could report its first ever annual loss this year, amid RAM and storage shortages  —  As AI continues to eat up the market's RAM output, smartphones are in crisis as costs continue to skyrocket.

Bloomberg: The value of US government's stake in Intel has increased fourfold to ~$36B, since an August 2025 announcement that the US will buy a stake worth $8.9B  —  The value of the US government stake in Intel Corp. has increased fourfold to hit a value of about $36 billion after the chipmaker's financial outlook showed a resurgence in sales.

Bloomberg: A $16B financing for a giant Oracle data center in Michigan has closed, with BofA selling $14B in bonds; Oracle plans to use the campus to power apps for OpenAI  —  A $16 billion financing for a giant Oracle Corp. data center in Michigan has wrapped after months of stop-and-start negotiations with investors.

Investor Adam Levinson said he remains bullish despite recent market volatility, and is buying the dip ahead of an expected rally on a resolution in the Iran conflict.

Connie Loizos / TechCrunch: LinkedIn profile review shows Thinking Machines Lab has been hiring more researchers from Meta than from any other employer; TML's headcount now stands at ~140  —  Weiyao Wang spent eight years at Meta — his first job out of college — helping build multimodal perception systems and contributing …

PYMNTS.com: Adyen plans to acquire Talon.One, a platform for loyalty and incentives that serves more than 300 global merchants, for €750M, expected to close in H2 2026  —  Adyen plans to acquire Talon.One, a platform for loyalty and incentives that serves more than 300 global merchants …

China’s central bank and foreign‑exchange regulator reiterated the need to curb excessive — or “involution‑style” — competition within the country’s finance industry, framing it as a governance and discipline concern.

Discussion | Link

<p><strong><a href="https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/prompt-guidance?model=gpt-5.5">GPT-5.5 prompting guide</a></strong></p> Now that GPT-5.5 is <a href="https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.5">available in the API</a>, OpenAI have released a wealth of useful tips on how best to prompt the new model.</p> <p>Here's a neat trick they recommend for applications that might spend considerable time thinking before returning a user-visible response:</p> <blockquote> <p><code>Before any tool calls for a multi-step task, send a short user-visible update that acknowledges the request and states the first step. Keep it to one or two sentences.</code></p> </blockquote> <p>I've already noticed their Codex app doing this, and it does make longer running tasks feel less like the model has crashed.</p> <p>OpenAI suggest running the following in Codex to upgrade your existing code using advice embedded in their <code>openai-docs</code> skill:</p> <blockquote> <p><code>$openai-docs migrate this project to gpt-5.5</code></p> </blockquote> <p>The upgrade guide the coding agent will follow <a href="https://github.com/openai/skills/blob/724cd511c96593f642bddf13187217aa155d2554/skills/.curated/openai-docs/references/upgrade-guide.md#model-string--light-prompt-rewrite">is this one</a>, which even includes light instructions on how to rewrite prompts to better fit the model.</p> <p>Also relevant is the <a href="https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/latest-model">Using GPT-5.5 guide</a>, which opens with this warning:</p> <blockquote> <p>To get the most out of GPT-5.5, treat it as a new model family to tune for, not a drop-in replacement for <code>gpt-5.2</code> or <code>gpt-5.4</code>. Begin migration with a fresh baseline instead of carrying over every instruction from an older prompt stack. Start with the smallest prompt that preserves the product contract, then tune reasoning effort, verbosity, tool descriptions, and output format against representative examples.</p> </blockquote> <p>Interesting to see OpenAI recommend starting from scratch rather than trusting that existing prompts optimized for previous models will continue to work effectively with GPT-5.5. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/openai">openai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-engineering">prompt-engineering</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/gpt">gpt</a></p>

This round, should it occur, would double the house-help startup's valuation in a matter of weeks.

China said it is closely monitoring US legislative plans after the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced export-control bills targeting semiconductors, which Beijing warned could disrupt global supply chains if passed.

"If boost-phase intercept from space is not affordable and scalable, we will not produce it."

Hema Parmar / Bloomberg: Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta launches Abundance, a hedge fund that aims to have AI agents run the entire fund, with $100M in seed funding  —  Instacart co-founder Apoorva Mehta launched a hedge fund that relies on an army of artificial intelligence agents, one of the few using …