LessWrong researchers had Fable 5.1 hide 50 short messages in SVG drawings, usually as the heights of buildings in a skyline. A fresh instance given only a screenshot recovered 78% of them, and other models decoded them too. This is a concrete covert channel for anyone watching agent-to-agent traffic.
LessWrong
Berget AI has open-sourced a way to estimate CO2 per AI request. For one Kimi K3 request it finds 0.4 g in Sweden and 3.2 g in Texas. With open-weight models now handling 29% of tokens on Vercel's gateway, where the model runs has become the buyer's choice.
Berget AI
TornadoVM 7 moves its backends to Java's Foreign Function & Memory API and drops the experimental JVMCI dependency. It supports JDK 21 through 27 and adds an optimised CUDA backend, direct cuBLAS and CUTLASS calls, multi-GPU execution and a Java inference engine, jitLLM v2.0. Java shops can now try GPU inference without leaving the JVM.
InfoQ
After a viral clip of Nvidia's chief playing with Microduck robots at GTC Berlin, preorders passed 20,000 within a day, Clem Delangue says. Pollen Robotics, which Hugging Face bought in 2025, builds the open-source robots, and they should ship before Christmas. Open hardware for hobbyist robotics may be reaching the mass market.
TechCrunch
Carta and NewView found that tender offers at Series C and later have tripled in three years, yet only 44 startups ran one in the first half of 2026. The firms are now partnering to push the practice, since companies now stay private for 12 to 15 years.
TechCrunch
A Commerce Department CHIPS Act award, which also gives Washington a stake in Commonwealth Fusion, funds silicon carbide power electronics, RF heating generators, radiation-hardened control chips and work adapting GPUs and TPUs for power plants. The company plans to switch on its Sparc reactor next year.
TechCrunch
Ben Lamm and Palmer Luckey's Warhound is out of stealth at a $1.2B valuation, backed by Sequoia, 8VC and In-Q-Tel. The pitch is that over 80% of US military dogs come from Europe and fewer than half are fit for service. The first cloned puppies are due early next year.
TechCrunch