A weekly technology roundup spanning AI, computing, crypto and driverless trucks was first reported by Singularityhub. The selection juxtaposes Mistral’s claim that Le Chonk is the world’s best open-weight model with Apollo economist Torsten Slok’s finding that profit margins and revenue per worker appear flat for the S&P 493, with no evidence AI is improving productivity.
Mistral says its trillion-parameter Le Chonk is the world’s best open-weight model for automated coding and cybersecurity. Mistral says increasingly difficult problems in those fields helped it match or surpass models from leading Chinese labs DeepSeek and Z.ai.
Slok calls the measure the S&P 493, the S&P 500 minus Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla. Within that group, profit margins and revenue per worker appear flat, with no evidence AI is improving productivity.
The contrast is between claims about model capability and a business-level measure with no evidence AI is improving productivity.
Binance lost $6.3 billion to hackers on Thursday in an attack that highlighted vulnerabilities in crypto’s financial infrastructure. Crypto analysts and security experts said risks are growing more extreme as attackers use AI and other advanced techniques to steal funds and quickly launder them.
A draft bill that may be submitted to the Delaware State Legislature says AI agents could manage and conduct an AIC’s business. It says an AIC may have any lawful purpose, for profit or not, except for the business of banking, and proposes a 30-month regulatory sandbox to test the idea.
Google’s Suncatcher prototype space data center is online and communicating with the ground. The satellite carries four Google Tensor Processing Units, generates up to 1 kW of electricity, and is intended to pave the way for future networks of close-flying satellites performing large inference workloads in orbit.
Other selections include researchers’ concerns that AI has undercut research programs in specific fields of math and science, visualizations tracing the early universe from 50 million to 2 billion years after the Big Bang, and a battery-free monarch butterfly tracker measuring 3.5 centimeters (1.4 inches).
Kodiak’s first binding commercial deal covers driverless big rigs for public highways. The company’s next milestone is to remove human safety operators from the cab and begin a driverless highway service in December, carrying goods for Ikea on Interstate 45 between Dallas and Houston.