“We find that on medium-length, well-defined accounting tasks, frontier AI models are now faster and more accurate than junior accountants, even the best one in our study.” Eighteen months ago they scored well below human accountants Good discussion here: https://www.mercor.com/blog/human-baselines-for-benchmarks-ai-now-outperforms-junior-accountants/

DAILY AI BRIEF 🗞 — Oct 1 GOOGLE 🔥: - Gemini 4 Argon is with Fairwind trusted testers and the US government. 1M output tokens. Broader rollout ASAP. - Built for coding, enterprise knowledge work, and cyber defense. Google's chart: 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, a new SOTA. - Artificial Analysis: 53 on the Intelligence Index, tying GPT-6 Astra. List $4/$20 per 1M, 50% promo to $2/$10, cache reads $0.10. - Skills are rolling out globally in Gemini. Gems migrate into Skills in November. Opal shuts down Nov 17. - Security review mode spotted in Google AI Studio, next to a Plan mode still in development. ANTHROPIC 🔥: - Claude[.]dev is live: engineering deep dives, Claude Code and API guides, plus easter eggs. - Founder House is set for SF Tech Week Oct 6–8 and Stockholm Oct 14. - Skills attachment menu spotted on Claude mobile. SPACEX AI 🔥: - Grok Bot got new developer upgrades. Elon: try the latest. Team engineer bots in Slack can open Projects and hand coding to cloud agents. OPENAI 🔥: - Shareable profiles are live in ChatGPT, bundling Sites and plugins so others can find and reuse what you built. PERPLEXITY 🔥: - pplx-embed-v2-context-9b-preview is on Hugging Face. Leads ConTEB answer and evidence retrieval. 1 KB vectors vs Voyage's 8 KB. * Used Grok to compose this brief, cherry-picking the news and doing some post-editing. ** This daily brief also arrives in the daily email format; subscribe on the blog.

So this is the part I did not expect. Anthropic called Swami Sarvapriyananda, a Vedanta monk and flew him to the San Francisco head-office. > Closed door meeting with NDA signed. > theologians and mental health people in the same sitting, all of it aimed at training Claude. > and one of the founders stayed in the room the whole time. ---- From 'Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of North Texas" YT channel (full video link in comment)

"Long-horizon tasks are still a joke. They do not work, and I do not care what anybody says. Do not show me a stupid evaluation. Do not tell me about some dumb script you ran for 48 hours. Long-horizon tasks are not handled well. They simply do not work." - Chamath at Stanford AI Club "2nd, complex problems also do not work. They are neither addressed nor handled well. Why is this important? If AI develops like any other technology, we are going to experience an initial rise—the hype cycle. Then, we will see a natural contraction because, somehow and somewhere, something is going to fail. We are all going to see this, and then we will enter what is called the “trough of disillusionment.” I think the business and MBA folks will confirm whether that is true. Afterward, you typically see the slow and gradual adoption of the real, final solution. This happened with the internet, and it has happened in many other cases. The problem is that we are spending hundreds of billions, potentially trillions, of dollars trying to figure out how to cross this chasm. So, what do we do? If we do not figure this out, people will reach the trough of disillusionment and say that AI was a joke. I think we need to be able to bring AI into highly complicated environments and make it work. What is my solution? At a very basic level, you need a symbolic space that guides the embedded space." ---- From "techniahqrobot" YouTube channel, (link in comment)

The New York Times published a piece saying that Anthropic has been quietly bringing in Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical, and other religious thinkers from around the world to help give its AI a moral compass.