Sunday, 17 May 2026
This dated roundup collects the most interesting AI and technology developments found for Sunday, 17 May 2026.
Top Stories
Richard Ngo says Effective Altruism mainly empowered Anthropic · Digg
Richard Ngo an independent AI researcher focused on AGI safety alignment and governance stated that Effective Altruism primarily empowered Anthropic through narratives funding…
Read moreIf you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe don’t mention AI
It's tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.
Read moreTechCrunch Mobility: The AI skills arms race is coming for automotive
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
Read morexAI completes training of 1.5 trillion parameter Grok V9 · Digg
xAI completed training of its 1.5 trillion parameter Grok V9 model. The new system represents a substantial upgrade over the prior 0.5 trillion parameter V8 version. Training…
Read moreDwarkesh Patel ties intelligence definition to political leaders · Digg
Dwarkesh Patel posted that intelligence means achieving goals across domains and noted the definition would cover figures such as Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin.…
Read morexAI completes training of 1.5 trillion parameter Grok V9 · Digg
xAI completed training of its 1.5 trillion parameter Grok V9 model. The new system represents a substantial upgrade over the prior 0.5 trillion parameter V8 version. Training…
Read moreMicrosoft AI CEO forecasts human-level AI in 18 months · Digg
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted AI will reach human-level performance on most professional tasks within 18 months. A Fortune article dated May 16, 2026 reported the…
Read moreGavin Leech attributes vision model size gap to data compression · Digg
Gavin Leech noted that vision models are roughly 1000 times smaller than text models. He attributed the disparity to language's data compression properties, which support…
Read moreMicrosoft researcher reports Claude KV cache flush issues · Digg
Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research AI Frontiers, reported that Claude Code flushes the KV cache after idle periods. Performance drops on…
Read moreAnthropic forms $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Read moreMistral AI rejects acquisition offers to preserve independence · Digg
Mistral AI rejected acquisition offers to preserve its independence during testimony before French parliamentary representatives. Executive Arthur Mensch stated that the…
Read moreThe haves and have nots of the AI gold rush
The vibes around the current AI boom aren't great, even in the tech industry.
Read moreResearch repository ArXiv will ban authors for a year if they let AI do all the work
ArXiv is doing more to crack down on the careless use of large language models in scientific papers.
Read moreOpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman takes charge of product strategy
OpenAI's latest shakeup comes as the company reportedly plans to combine ChatGPT and its programming product Codex.
Read moreResearch & Products
Introducing Muse Spark: Scaling Towards Personal Superintelligence
Today, we’re excited to introduce Muse Spark, the first in the Muse family of models developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs. Muse Spark is a natively multimodal reasoning model with support for tool-use, visual chain of thought, and multi-agent orchestration.
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