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AI 101 — What is a neural network?

The Stack

AI 101 — What is a neural network?

A neural network is a computing system made of layers of simple math functions whose internal numbers are tuned by examples until the whole thing gets the right answers — a design loosely inspired by the brain, and the foundation of every AI system in the news. ChatGPT, Midjourney, AlphaFold: all neural networks, all variations on the same idea. The concept is older than computers. In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts described an artificial neuron — a thing that takes inputs and fires w

Amazon weighs an $8B SPV to move Grace Blackwells off its books

The Arena

Amazon weighs an $8B SPV to move Grace Blackwells off its books

A chip-financing story leads the morning: Amazon is reportedly exploring the same off-balance-sheet trick the GPU-leasing world has been leaning on all year. Elsewhere, arXiv pulls the emergency brake on its flooded submission queue, and ServiceNow publishes how it manufactures training data for enterprise agents. Amazon has held talks with investors about spinning roughly $8 billion of Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips into a special-purpose vehicle and leasing them back for its US data centers. Th

Cloudflare open-sources the Clef models, aiming straight at Jev

The Frontier

Cloudflare open-sources the Clef models, aiming straight at Jev

Cloudflare picked October 1 to wade into the fastest-moving model category of the fall: bounded, machine-consumable decisions rather than prose — and it brought open weights and a price list. Cloudflare released Clef and Clef-flash, a pair of open-weight "decision models" built to beat TypeSafe's Jev at its own game. The category is Jev's invention — take in unstructured state, return typed, probabilistic decisions that software can act on, with no free-text sampling to hallucinate. Cloudflare'

Trump likely to name Jay Clayton as White House AI czar

The Guardrails

Trump likely to name Jay Clayton as White House AI czar

A quiet personnel decision in Washington and a signed law in Sacramento, both pointing the same direction: whoever builds AI now gets watched more closely. The White House's pick for AI czar is likely Jay Clayton — and he may keep his day job running American intelligence at the same time. Sources told CBS News that the Trump administration has settled on Clayton, the director of national intelligence, as its likely choice to run the AI czar role, with discussions about him holding both posts c

Microsoft ships streaming transcription and two new voice models

The Frontier

Microsoft ships streaming transcription and two new voice models

Microsoft's AI unit closed out Wednesday with three speech models at once — a streaming transcriber and two voices — aimed squarely at the workloads where latency is the product: live captioning, voice agents, and the contact-center stack. Microsoft released MAI-Transcribe-2-Streaming, its first real-time transcription model, alongside two voice models, MAI-Voice-2.1 and MAI-Voice-2.1-Flash. The transcriber covers 60 languages with automatic language detection between them, and it starts return

Trump asked Grok how Venezuela would react to Maduro's capture

The Guardrails

Trump asked Grok how Venezuela would react to Maduro's capture

A Time interview dropped a wartime anecdote nobody was looking for, and it lands as the Pentagon hands Musk a seat at the table on how the military uses exactly this kind of technology. Time reports that in December 2025, about a month before the US invaded Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro, Elon Musk returned to the Oval Office for a clandestine meeting where Trump spent hours putting questions about his presidency and legacy to Grok — including asking how Venezuelans would respo

Today in AI — October 1, 2026

The Arena

Today in AI — October 1, 2026

Money and guardrails moved on the same day: Anthropic put a target date on its IPO, Google took its data-center plan to the launch pad, California subpoenaed OpenAI, and the small fast "decision model" niche that Altman teased at DevDay got open competition from two directions at once. Models & Research * AWS open-sourced Strands Decider 2B — a 2-billion-parameter model that can't write a word, built only to pick between options. Strands Labs, AWS's experimental agent-development project, re

OpenAI fires three safety researchers over outside info sharing

The Guardrails

OpenAI fires three safety researchers over outside info sharing

A firing at OpenAI set off a whistleblowing fight on Thursday, SoftBank's money into the frontier lab is fully in, and a court handed Google's AI Overviews a win over the publishers it cannibalizes. OpenAI has parted ways with three researchers on its safety team for allegedly sharing confidential company information with an outside AI safety organization, the Wall Street Journal reported — a move that drew an immediate reaction from Congressman Greg Casar, who said it "looks like they're firin

Volantis raises $88M to smash the memory wall with lasers

The Arena

Volantis raises $88M to smash the memory wall with lasers

Three moves on the board this afternoon: a photonics startup claims it can blow past the memory wall, Anthropic's government business just went GA, and the open MoE training stack got a trillion-parameter upgrade. Volantis raised $88 million to move data between AI and memory chips with lasers. The San Francisco startup is using vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers — the same tiny components that power Face ID on iPhones — to shuttle data between a GPU and its memory optically instead of ove

AI beats Stratego's greatest player on an $8,000 budget

The Frontier

AI beats Stratego's greatest player on an $8,000 budget

One paper closes the last big board-game frontier for AI — at a university price tag — while two disclosures show how the buildout is actually wired: agents leaking what they see, and a chip supplier financing its own customer. Ataraxos, a Stratego AI built by Carnegie Mellon, NYU, Stanford and MIT researchers, beat Pim Niemeijer — the most decorated player in the game's history — 15 wins, one loss and four draws across a 20-game series, the first superhuman result in the game's history, accord

Broadcom lends Anthropic $42B to lease the chips it designs

The Arena

Broadcom lends Anthropic $42B to lease the chips it designs

The chip supplier just became the bank. Anthropic's IPO prospectus, reviewed by Reuters, says Broadcom has agreed to lend the AI lab up to $42 billion to finance infrastructure spending, in debt instruments that can later convert into Anthropic shares. The money maps onto a single line in the same document: Anthropic has committed $125.2 billion over five years to lease tensor processing unit compute, and this facility covers about a third of it. The TPUs are built by Broadcom in partnership wit

One hour in a scanner is now enough to rebuild what you see

The Frontier

One hour in a scanner is now enough to rebuild what you see

Today's inbox pairs two sides of the same question: what AI can infer about people, and what it takes to defend against it. A brain decoder that used to demand 40 hours in a scanner now needs one, and the founder of Mandiant banked a monster round for AI that attacks like a human team. A brain decoder can now rebuild what you're looking at from a single hour of fMRI — and it learned mostly from images no one ever showed a subject. Michal Irani's team at the Weizmann Institute of Science split t

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