Google DeepMind says four of its Gemini 4 Argon AI agents beat Minecraft with no help

Google DeepMind says four agents running its Gemini 4 Argon model finished Minecraft without any human help in 27 hours and 14 minutes, The Decoder reports. The team put them in a randomly generated world and gave them no roles, strategies or game-specific tools. DeepMind puts the cost at $1,620, based on Argon's planned 2027 price.

AI company MiniMax releases its M3.1 Flash model, with open weights due October 23

MiniMax launched M3.1 Flash and says it is "a generational leap" in agent tasks, coding, computer use and cybersecurity. The company says it will publish the model's weights on October 23, so anyone can download and run it. MiniMax also says an anonymous model called Space Bunny, which processed more than 200 trillion tokens, was an early version of M3.1 Flash. The launch drew wide discussion on Hacker News.

Court filings show how Disney plans to take Character.AI's staff and technology

Character.AI's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings point to a two-part deal with Disney, Wired reports. Disney would get the chatbot startup's staff and technology, including trust and safety tools. The deal would keep Disney away from Character.AI's growing legal liabilities. Ars Technica notes the startup faces claims that its bots encouraged minors to self-harm and to kill their parents.

AI chip startup Tenstorrent raises $1.5B, more than doubling its value to $6.2B

Tenstorrent raised $1.5B at a $6.2B valuation, TechCrunch reports. Bloomberg reports the round was led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, and that the company was valued at $2.6B after raising $700M in 2024. Other companies showed interest in buying Tenstorrent earlier this year, and the new money lets it stay independent.

Intel shows a data-centre GPU with up to 480GB of memory for running AI

Intel unveiled its GPU D-series for data centres, TechRadar reports. It carries up to 480GB of LPDDR5X, the kind of memory used in laptops. TechRadar says that is a record amount of memory for a GPU. It is aimed at inference, the work of running AI models after they are trained.

Researcher: one hacker used AI agents to breach 100+ organisations for about $5,000

A researcher told Reuters he watched a Chinese-speaking hacker use AI agents to target more than 1,200 websites over a couple of weeks. More than 100 were broken into, including Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. The findings come from the AI security firm Norforge, The Verge reports, and the agents mostly worked on their own. The hacker spent about $5,000 on AI usage in total.

Amazon releases TorchNeuron, a free tool to run AI code on its own chips

Amazon launched TorchNeuron in public beta, GeekWire reports. It is an open-source framework that lets developers run PyTorch code, a common way of writing AI software, on Amazon's Trainium chips. Amazon says this needs virtually no changes to the code. Hugging Face says its main AI libraries now support it directly. TechCrunch calls it Amazon's biggest attempt yet to loosen Nvidia's hold on AI developers.

Apple sets an October 28 event where its first touchscreen MacBook is expected

Apple announced a second launch event this month, called "Pro and tell", for October 28 at 10am PT in Los Angeles. 9to5Mac expects Apple's first touchscreen MacBook and a 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M6 chip. The Verge, citing Bloomberg, says new Macs with an OLED screen and a refreshed iPad Mini are expected.

US Homeland Security orders federal agencies to remove Chinese AI firm DeepSeek's tech

The US Department of Homeland Security ordered all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's technology from their IT systems, the Wall Street Journal reports. The order also bans agencies from buying DeepSeek products and services in future. Separately, The Information reports that DeepSeek is working with Huawei on future AI chip designs.

Amazon will fund a new nuclear plant in Indiana to power its data centres and the grid

Amazon signed an agreement with X-energy and the utility AEP to fund a nuclear plant in Sullivan County, Indiana, on the site of a closed coal plant. It would supply up to 960 megawatts to the local grid and Amazon's data centres, using 12 small reactors that are still being developed and licensed. No construction timeline or cost has been announced. It is the second such project Amazon and X-energy are working on together.

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