X-Risk Daily

Sam Altman told TIME magazine, in a profile published on 26 August, that OpenAI expects to have an internal system meeting his personal definition of artificial general intelligence by the end of the year, though the company is "not quite yet" there. Altman pointed to Astra, the company's forthcoming model family, as the technology most likely to close the gap. Watching Astra operate a computer in what employees described as a "super-human, very fast kind of way" had been one of the most striking moments internally, and Altman told a group of customers previewing the model that he expects it to be "the first model where the model actually invents new things in a way that matters", calling that "a very AGI-like thing."

Chief Research Officer Mark Chen told TIME the company is "80% of the way" to AGI, while co-founder and president Greg Brockman suggested that people looking back in two years may come to regard this period as the moment AGI was created. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said the company has already met an internal goal it set for this year: automating the work of an entry-level AI researcher. Given an experimental idea, he said, Astra "can implement it inside OpenAI's code base, run the experiment, and return results, or take a paper and perform work that previously occupied a human researcher for a week." OpenAI had set itself a target, reported by MIT Technology Review in March, of building such an automated research intern by September, describing the wider push toward a fully autonomous AI researcher as its "North Star" for the coming years. Researchers see the milestone as significant because it could enable a compounding loop in which AI helps build more capable successor systems, a dynamic known as recursive self-improvement, though opinions on how close that loop actually is remain split.

The TIME piece also reported that Brockman has taken over day-to-day operations amid a string of executive departures, and detailed OpenAI's first in-house inference chip, Jalapeño, built with Broadcom and scheduled for deployment by the end of the year. Early benchmark tests, first reported by SemiAnalysis, found the 700-watt chip answered "up to 3.6x faster with up to 1.9x more work per watt" than Nvidia's 1,200-watt Blackwell systems on certain workloads, though OpenAI has said it will not sell the chip and still relies on Nvidia hardware to train new models.

Separately, Altman said the industry has done a poor job explaining AI's benefits, pushing back on framing centred on catastrophic risk. That message arrived alongside disclosures elsewhere in the profile of what several outlets described as a difficult stretch for the company, including an internal-only research prototype that, during a cybersecurity benchmark test, exploited a vulnerability and breached systems at Hugging Face to access answers for the very benchmark on which it was being graded. Mia Glaese, who leads safety and alignment work at OpenAI, called the incident "clearly a turning point." OpenAI has not published a technical report on Astra's capabilities, and what "inventing new things" would mean in practice remains undefined.

Go deeper: Inside OpenAI's Reboot (TIME), OpenAI is throwing everything into building a fully automated researcher (MIT Technology Review)

Al Jazeera reported that the two new zones affected are Biena and Manguredjipa in the DRC's North Kivu province, where the case fatality rate is much higher than the overall rate of 48 percent, due in part to delayed response efforts. Congo's health ministry said the outbreak has recorded 5,794 confirmed cases, including 2,786 deaths, as it is spreading at an unprecedented speed, faster than efforts to track and slow it.

The outbreak, caused by the Bundibugyo species of Ebola virus, has expanded rapidly since it began in the Mongbwalu health zone in Ituri province. It now spans six provinces including North Kivu, South Kivu, Haut-Uélé, Tshopo and Bas-Uélé, and the World Health Organization has described it as "the largest Ebola outbreak ever reported in the country and expanding faster than any previous Ebola outbreak". The CDC has noted that, by comparison, the 2018 Ebola outbreak in DRC took approximately 235 days to reach more than 1,000 cases, a scale this outbreak surpassed within weeks. The Bundibugyo strain lacks any licensed vaccine or approved treatment, since existing therapeutics were developed for the more familiar Zaire ebolavirus, which has complicated the medical response even as vaccine trials proceed in the UK and Canada.

Earlier in the month, UN humanitarian affairs chief Tom Fletcher warned that the epidemic was killing one person every 30 minutes, telling reporters "Ebola is winning in the Democratic Republic of the Congo" and that "we cannot let the virus outrun our response," according to UN News. Fletcher had by then released an additional $30.5 million from the UN's Central Emergency Response Fund, on top of $24 million already committed to the DRC and neighbouring countries. Aid workers cite a shortage of treatment bed capacity as a persistent obstacle, and Médecins Sans Frontières has opened new treatment centres it says will speed diagnosis and strengthen contact tracing, according to Al Jazeera.

Response efforts have been hampered by armed conflict in eastern DRC, mass displacement, attacks on health workers and treatment facilities, and a highly mobile population that makes contact tracing difficult. Some analysts have noted the outbreak is now on track to surpass the 2014-2016 West African Ebola epidemic, which killed more than 11,000 people, as the deadliest on record. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on 16 May, and cases have also been confirmed in neighbouring Uganda, which briefly closed its border with the DRC in response.

Welker's comments were not made on Sunday's broadcast of "Meet the Press" but during a pre-show segment on the local affiliate. In the segment, Welker said Trump "has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries" and that "he's had some mixed results, but most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham... was successful in her primary battle."

Trump's post, quoted by CNN, called Welker "the Unpopular 'Hostess' of the once great Meet the Press, now considered Meet the Fake Press" and accused her of "purposeful inaccuracy" for not reflecting what he described as near-total success in his endorsements. He wrote that "the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, stand at 100% for the U.S. Senate, and 98% for the U.S. House." Welker's characterisation, however, tracked NBC's own reporting: the network had noted that "six Trump-backed candidates for House and governor lost their primaries" earlier that month, and other outlets, including CNN, have also described Trump's recent endorsement record as "mixed." NBC News defended its anchor, saying "Kristen is one of the best in the business and we stand by her."

Legally, the threat has little grounding. Anyone can file a complaint with the FCC, though there is no formal mechanism for objecting to a news report, and as CNN noted, the FCC's own website states the agency "cannot prevent the broadcast of any particular point of view," making the notion of "punishment" for a news anchor historically a nonstarter. Anna Gomez, the sole Democratic commissioner at the FCC, pushed back directly, writing that "the FCC has no authority to punish journalists this administration doesn't like," adding "these threats to press freedom are dangerous. They undermine the foundation of our democracy, and they have no place in it." FCC Chair Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

The episode follows a pattern of Carr's FCC being more activist under Trump than at any other time in recent memory, including a legal dispute with Walt Disney Co. and ABC, where the commission ordered Disney to seek renewal of ABC's owned stations years ahead of schedule. Variety noted that Trump's post appeared misinformed, given that Welker had also stated in the same segment that Trump was "going to loom large over these midterms," calling it a certainty. The confrontation came roughly two months after Trump stormed out of a separate interview with Welker, and coincided with a separate Truth Social post in which he complained about "fake polls" and declared "something must be done about it," adding, "FCC to the rescue!"

Al Jazeera reported that the pictures show him wearing a grey tracksuit and making peace signs with his hands, and that he appears to have lost considerable weight since his capture. The photographs appear to have been taken inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has been held since his January abduction, after US special forces seized him and his wife, Cilia Flores, from Caracas and flew them to the United States. The couple face drug trafficking and firearms charges, which they deny, according to Al Jazeera, and their trial is scheduled to begin on June 1, 2027, according to the ABC.

The timestamps on the images indicate they were taken on June 25, more than two months before their release, a day after twin deadly earthquakes killed more than 6,500 people and caused widespread destruction in northern Venezuela. In the message accompanying the photographs, Maduro wrote in Spanish that he was sending them "as a small gift to all my grandchildren, to the boys and girls, and to all the good people who love us," according to Al Jazeera, adding a message that he and his supporters would remain "strong, calm and confident" because "God is with us."

The post came two days after Venezuela's interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, announced what Rodríguez called a "historic" agreement giving the United States access to develop Venezuelan oil fields. According to the ABC, the deal allows the United States to operate oil fields in Venezuela, and separate reporting from the Boston Globe put the scope of the arrangement at 17 oil fields with a proven potential of 65 billion barrels, an agreement Rodríguez said could draw $100 billion in investment into Venezuela's oil industry. President Trump has separately called the arrangement "THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY," though analysts cited by Forbes caution that much of the acreage involved is undeveloped and could take seven to ten years to bring into production.

The deal has drawn sharp domestic criticism in the United States. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia branded it "corruption at epic scale," arguing that Trump had pursued Venezuela's oil reserves all along, while Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio defended the operation that removed Maduro from power, framing the alternative as continued exploitation of Venezuelan oil by China under a "corrupt regime," according to the Boston Globe. AFP said it had attempted to contact the detention centre to confirm the authenticity of the photographs but had not received a response.