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🔓 AI built a $250K Chrome exploit
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- Security firm XBOW claimed Google's top $250,000 Chrome bounty after AI agents running OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol built a full exploit chaining three previously unknown bugs that ran code outside Chrome's sandbox on Windows from a single page load.
- Built between 2 and 7 August for roughly $40,000 in compute, the chain crossed both sandboxes: a V8 Maglev compiler bug gave read/write access, a WebP decoder flaw broke out, and a Crashpad bug (CVE-2026-78952) delivered full code execution.
- Google fixed all three in Chrome 152 updates shipped on 25 August and 3 September, and XBOW says they were never used against the roughly one billion exposed Chrome-on-Windows users, though the fix only applies once the browser restarts.
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🎮 Gemini AI beats Minecraft on its own
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- Four Gemini 4 Argon agents defeated Minecraft's Ender Dragon with no human intervention, coordinating entirely on their own, the first fully autonomous end-to-end completion of the game by general-purpose AI agents, DeepMind researchers reported in a new paper.
- Dropped into a randomized survival world with no assigned roles or game-specific tools, the agents controlled players via the open-source Mineflayer library, self-organized into jobs like toolmaking and foraging, and shared coordinates, warnings, and tips through in-game chat and shared memory.
- The run spanned 27.23 hours across thousands of dependent steps, with agents writing 2,783 programs and dying 605 times, consuming 1.35 billion input tokens, though the $810 list-price cost doubles to $1,620 at Gemini's standard price.
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🎨 OpenAI tests new Aurora image model
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- OpenAI appears to be testing its next image model, likely GPT-Image-3, after three "aurora alpha" entries briefly surfaced in its API this weekend and quickly showed up generating images in blind arena tests.
- The trio, aurora-red-alpha, aurora-green-alpha, and aurora-blue-alpha, was pulled hours later in what looked like an accidental rollout; in arena tests red ran faster but lower quality, green was slower but cleaner, and blue hasn't been tested.
- OpenAI has done this before, running three Image V2 variants through LM Arena in April, so a public launch could follow soon, though there's no documentation or pricing for any Aurora model yet and the only samples so far are two cat portraits.
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🐋 DeepSeek's small AI wins at coding
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- DeepSeek has updated its V4.1-Flash model with the V4.1-Flash-1017 release, citing gains across reasoning, coding, agentic tasks and visual benchmarks, alongside faster task completion and shorter outputs than the prior version.
- The update scored 77 on the DeepSWE software engineering benchmark, up from the previous version's 74.2 and ahead of both GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5, with reinforcement learning using self-feedback cited for improving end-to-end project development.
- Live now on DeepSeek's website, app and API, the model shows enhanced video game creation and 3D modelling in examples like a Forbidden City model and a Portal 2 recreation in Godot, with DeepSeek claiming lower cost per task.
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⚡ AWS gives PyTorch a Trainium backend
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- AWS unveiled TorchNeuron, an open-source native PyTorch backend that lets existing model code, libraries, and tools run on Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips by switching the device to
.to('neuron'), with no other changes.
- It builds on PyTorch's PrivateUse1 and torch.accelerator extension points, supporting eager mode, torch.compile, FlexAttention, distributed APIs like FSDP2 and tensor parallelism, plus custom kernels via the Neuron Kernel Interface and profiling through Neuron Explorer.
- TorchNeuron releases under Apache 2.0 at the aws-neuron GitHub repo, going live as public Beta tomorrow ahead of PyTorch Conference North America, though TorchAO and FP8 remain in private Beta until the next release.
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