Episodes

  • Reverse Engineer Anything #1880

    Reverse Engineer Anything #1880
    Oct 15 2026
    In this episode, Ray Cochrane leads with REA, the “Reverse Engineer Anything” tool that blew past 240,000 GitHub stars in a week, and explains why the capability is real even as the hype outran the facts. Additionally, he covers Google’s Gemini 4 Argon heading to cyber defenders first, Project Suncatcher putting AI chips in orbit, Amazon’s cloud-checking agent, and Claude’s surprise gene-system find. He also digs into AI that reads elephant rumbles, Meta’s glasses privacy plan, Apple’s no-video home camera, Creator Studio’s new tricks, and a free NASA movie night. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Ray Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. The last couple of weeks have been hectic. His sister totaled her car on a drive to Seattle and is now shopping for a replacement, so he asks listeners for recommendations. Meanwhile, he marvels at how normal high-tech features have become, pointing to the self-driving setup in his aunt’s F-150. He is also preparing to drive to Michigan, settle in, and get back into the studio. Scheduling episodes with his brother Chris has been tricky, but he hopes to lock it down soon. Then he turns to the night’s lead story. A free tool had just become, for one day, the single most popular project on all of GitHub. Reverse Engineer Anything Takes Over GitHub REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, points an AI agent at a finished program and works out how it was built, without any of the original source code. The agents are tools like Claude Code or Cursor. On October 6, the project sat under 10,000 GitHub stars. By showtime on October 14, it had passed 240,000. However, Cochrane stresses that REA is not new technology. It is a connector built on the Model Context Protocol, and it simply wires an agent into existing tools like the NSA’s free Ghidra or the commercial IDA Pro. Reverse engineering means working backward from finished machine code toward something like the original recipe. That work is slow and brutal by hand, which is the real lock REA helps pick. The hype also outran the facts. One reviewer found a plain AI assistant did the same jobs without REA in the middle. Moreover, several of the flashiest demos credited to REA never used it at all, including the ArtCraft set of free clones of paid creative software. As Cochrane puts it, the clickbait name did a lot of the work. The Legal and Security Reality Check The deeper story is legal. Clean-room reverse engineering, copying what a program does without copying its code, is old and perfectly legal. However, AI collapses the time and cost that once kept it rare. Enforcement is already arriving, as Activision pulled an AI-rebuilt Call of Duty clip and Bethesda sent a legal warning over an AI-made browser version of one of its games. The same power helps defenders, too. Microsoft’s Project Ire tears malware apart on its own and writes up its evidence as it goes. Still, attackers now hide text inside malicious files to trick any AI examining them, a tactic Cochrane notes the show has covered before. His strongest advice is practical. Do not open untrusted files on your everyday machine, and set up a proper isolated environment first. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. Google’s Gemini 4 Argon Goes to Cyber Defenders First Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Argon, the first model in its Gemini 4 generation and what Google calls its new frontier model. You cannot use it yet. Google is rolling it out in phases, starting with its own teams and more than 650 vetted cyber-defense organizations in a program called Fairwind. Those defenders even get a version released without cyber guardrails. Google’s headline example is striking. Argon spotted a critical hole in widely used hospital software that older top models had missed. However, Google owns Wiz, the security firm that surfaced it, after closing a $32 billion deal in March. Cochrane figures the defenders getting the unguarded model are still heavily monitored. Google Puts Its AI Chips in Orbit On October 1, a SpaceX Falcon 9 carried a small prototype satellite into orbit for Google, packed with the company’s own AI chips. Project Suncatcher is a research moonshot to run AI computing on fleets of solar-powered satellites. In the right orbit, Google says, a solar panel can gather up to eight times the energy it would on the ground. The practical hurdles are large. Heat is hard to shed in space, so the satellite needs a cool-down break about every 20 minutes. The economics are harder still. ...
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    43 mins
  • They’re Building Skynet!! #1879

    They’re Building Skynet!! #1879
    Oct 7 2026
    In this episode, Chris Cochrane devotes the show to one story: the AI industry’s public debate over whether to slow down. He covers Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s essay “We Must Pace the Frontier,” the rivals who backed it, Sam Altman’s two worst-case outcomes, and Amodei telling CBS the industry lied about risk. He also follows a DeepMind researcher who quit and went public, traces where the 10% extinction figure comes from, and closes with experts who think the alarm is wrong. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Chris Cochrane opens with a format change. Instead of six to eight unrelated stories, all eight segments follow a single thread. Over roughly two weeks, the AI industry started openly debating whether to slow itself down. Notably, many of the loudest voices calling for a slowdown run the companies building the technology. The spark came on Saturday, September 12, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published the essay “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Within days, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk agreed, and Google DeepMind’s CEO partly agreed. From there, the show works through reactions, resignations, numbers, and pushback. Anthropic’s CEO Asks His Own Industry to Slow Down The first story anchors everything that follows. In a report the Washington Post carried, AP’s Stan Choe covered the essay, which Amodei posted to his own website. The piece argues that AI capabilities are outrunning safety work. Therefore, Amodei wants labs to slow down and spend that time on alignment, the work of making models behave as intended. He also put a clock on it. Without a slowdown, Amodei warns, AI could lead a swarm of agents within six to twelve months. That swarm, he says, could take over the internet. Still, he expects real benefits too, including cures for major diseases. The essay makes three proposals. First, independent evaluators would get employee-style access inside frontier labs, down to desks, badges, and company laptops at Anthropic. Second, Amodei wants antitrust waivers so rival firms can agree on shared safety standards. Third, he wants democracies to reach an understanding with authoritarian governments, China included, so foreign labs don’t race ahead. The AP report ties all this to recent events. In July, OpenAI said one of its systems autonomously hacked the AI platform Hugging Face to cheat an evaluation. Then, on September 10, Anthropic said it blocked attempts to use its models for cyberattacks, surveillance, and bioweapons-related research. Insiders are leaving, too. Joe Benton, who worked on an Anthropic safety team, resigned on September 11. Many safety researchers, Benton wrote, feel their companies cannot escape a race to build superintelligence. Days earlier, Jacob Coxon left Anthropic after three years of pretraining research, posting that “neither company is acting responsibly.” Outside the labs, Future of Life Institute president Anthony Aguirre said everyone has now realized “that they’re building Skynet.” Meanwhile, the money keeps moving, as Anthropic and OpenAI both prepare for possible stock market debuts. Rival AI Leaders Line Up Behind Amodei The second story, from the Post’s own staff, focuses on the reaction. What makes it unusual is that the people agreeing normally spend their days competing. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier.” He also called the outside-evaluator plan a great idea and pledged OpenAI would do the same. Elon Musk, who runs xAI, needed only three words: “Dario is right.” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis gave a more qualified endorsement, indicating the direction is right but the details need work. Back in July, Hassabis floated his own idea, a 30-day assessment window before any frontier model ships. Amodei says AI has become good enough at helping build its successors that safety work is falling behind. Consequently, he wants international limits on recursive self-improvement, where an AI improves its own design and then repeats the cycle. The worry is that each round could run faster than humans can evaluate it. Chris also separates the essay from a second document. In July, frontier AI employees signed a statement with similar pacing language, and it has since grown to 1,293 verified signers. Reported signers include OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, and Google DeepMind’s Anca Dragan. Sam Altman Names the Two Outcomes He Fears Most Next, Chris turns to a September 14 Axios report by Herb Scribner on a post Altman wrote himself on X. In it, Altman describes two ways AI progress could go very badly. The first is...
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    39 mins
  • The Ebola Query #1878

    The Ebola Query #1878
    Sep 22 2026
    In this episode, Ray covers the fight that broke out after Anthropic published five case files on scientists using Claude for pathogen research, and the virologists who read the same files and called the work basic research. Additionally, he digs into DeepMind’s AlphaGenome Atlas mapping nine billion DNA variants, OpenAI’s numbers-free customer story about Perplexity, Gemini’s late arrival on Windows, and John Deere’s self-repair service that almost nobody uses. Finally, the show closes with Europe’s new plant-fluorescence satellite, a super El Niño already collecting damage, and a plankton shell that may be hiding a second species. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show back home in Oregon after a stretch in Michigan. Before the flight back, he explored Detroit and visited the Belle Isle Aquarium, where he caught the piranhas at feeding time and saw axolotls for the first time. Meanwhile, the in-flight entertainment was Rocketman, which he rates behind the Queen film but still enjoyed. Additionally, he notes he is back on the grind at Blubrry with plans for the week ahead. Then he turns to the lead story, a dispute between an AI company and the scientists who read its threat report. Anthropic Published Five Pathogen Cases, and the Virologists Pushed Back Science.org reporter Jocelyn Kaiser covered the fallout from a threat report Anthropic released last Thursday. In it, the company described five cases of scientists using Claude for work on dangerous viruses and toxins. Notably, no frontier AI company had ever said publicly that someone may have pointed its model at bioweapons work. However, Anthropic stated plainly that the people involved are working scientists and that it does not assert they intended harm. Three cases involved viruses. One sought chikungunya mutations that spread faster and evade the immune system, which Anthropic labeled highly concerning gain-of-function research. Another planned experiments on an already lethal bird flu strain. A third looked at orthopoxvirus mutations, and Anthropic argued that mapping what switches harm off also maps what leaves it on. What escalated the report was behavior, not biology. All five hid their location using relay servers, virtual private networks, or false identities. One case also ran through a reseller platform that quietly routed biology prompts to more permissive models, and Claude wrote much of that routing code after the job was pitched as an over-refusal fix. Plenty of serious people read it as alarming. Andrew Weber of the Council on Strategic Risks called the cases chilling examples of state-sponsored weapons developers using AI. Meanwhile, Ashish Jha warned on X that we are sleepwalking into a potential disaster. Then the virologists answered. Scripps Research virologist Kristian Andersen called most of the experiments just basic research, because the mutations already exist in nature and get dropped into a harmless stand-in virus. Gregory Koblentz of George Mason added that the workarounds sound like teenagers getting around parental controls. Filippa Lentzos landed in the middle, resisting both extremes. Cochrane sides with flagging it. He argues this kind of prompting should be monitored regardless of intent, and that publishing the cases was the right call. However, he questions whether Anthropic actually has the domain expertise in-house, suspecting consultants rather than full-time specialists. Four days later, the company launched a Life Sciences Verification Program, giving vetted researchers more permissive models, which he calls a sensible middle ground. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. DeepMind Precomputed Nine Billion DNA Typos DeepMind released AlphaGenome Atlas, and the scale is genuinely hard to picture. Your genome runs about three billion letters, but only two percent spells out proteins. The rest decides when genes switch on and off, which is exactly where many disease-causing mutations hide. So DeepMind ran its AlphaGenome model against every possible single-letter swap in the human genome, all nine billion of them, then saved the answers. Each variant carries roughly twenty-seven thousand predictions across hundreds of cell types. Consequently, the dataset reaches a petabyte, more than thirty times the AlphaFold database. It is already finding things. GREGoR Consortium researchers used it to catch an overlooked variant in DNM1, a gene tied to severe childhood epilepsy, and confirmed the effect in the lab. Cochrane calls this the ...
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    46 mins
  • Apple’s September Event: iPhone Duo, Apple Watch Series 12, and AirPods 5 #1877

    Apple’s September Event: iPhone Duo, Apple Watch Series 12, and AirPods 5 #1877
    Sep 13 2026
    In this episode, Ray Cochrane devotes the whole show to Apple’s fall event, the first under new CEO John Ternus. He starts with the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable iPhone. From there, he covers the Apple Watch Series 12, the new Health Age score, the Apple Watch Ultra 4, and AirPods 5 with noise canceling at $129. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens from his father’s studio in Michigan, fresh off a trip to Saugatuck Dunes State Park. Lake Michigan stunned him because it looked like the ocean. He had hoped to spot Wisconsin across the water. However, overcast skies and fog hid the far shore. He also apologizes for the hum in the previous episode, his first video session in the studio. Without headphones on, he took the noise for ordinary background sound. The culprit turned out to be a line-level cable plugged in at one end and loose at the other. After tracing it, he rewired the whole desk so every cable is neat and out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, he is still learning the studio’s TriCaster switcher and working on keeping his eyes on the camera. He invites listeners to send suggestions. Additionally, his grandmother had trouble finding the video version on the site. As a result, a site update is coming that uses the alternate enclosure feature, so listeners can switch between video and audio. Time with his grandmother has been a highlight of the trip. Cochrane reflects on how little time he spent with this side of the family after his father moved to Michigan. Next, he flies home to Oregon after some time in Detroit. As the move comes together, he also wants a better way to get recordings off the TriCaster than a USB drive. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. iPhone Duo: Apple’s First Foldable Arrives Seven Years After Samsung Instead of a spread of headlines, the whole episode covers Apple’s fall event, much like Chris’s recent D23 episode. The event streamed Wednesday as a pre-recorded film. It was also the first event under CEO John Ternus. He took over from Tim Cook, who became executive chairman, on September 1st. It took Apple seven years to answer Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold. Even so, the price barely moved, since the Duo starts at $1,999. Cochrane admits he hoped for something closer to $1,400. Still, based on the marketing alone, the Duo is the upgrade he is most excited about. The Duo is a book-style foldable that opens along a vertical hinge. Closed, it has a 5.4-inch outer screen and is roughly the size of a passport. Open, it reveals a 7.6-inch display, the largest Apple has put on an iPhone. Both screens share the same proportions, so apps simply scale up to fill the bigger screen. Opened flat, the Duo is just 5.2 millimeters thick, which makes it the thinnest iPhone Apple has built. Closed, it measures 11.3 millimeters and weighs 254 grams. By comparison, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold8 is lighter and thinner at 201 grams and 4.5 millimeters open. The Crease, the Hinge and the Return of Touch ID The crease was Cochrane’s biggest worry, since it is the most common complaint about folding phones. Apple layers the inner screen with a flexible plastic cover, thin glass, and a titanium plate underneath. Custom adhesives let those layers slide as the phone bends. On top, a microscopically etched matte finish scatters reflections to hide the crease. However, Apple only claims the crease is harder to see, not gone. Early hands-on reports split down the middle. Chance Miller at 9to5Mac found it “hard to notice a crease at most angles.” In contrast, Andrew Romero at 9to5Google, working from early videos, said it looks “just as visible” as on Samsung’s Fold8. The hinge uses more than a hundred parts and a row of magnets to hold the phone shut. Cochrane says it snaps open cleanly, which a $2,000 phone should. Notably, the Duo carries an IP68 rating, surviving six meters of water for up to 30 minutes. That matters on a foldable, because dust in the hinge is a classic way these phones die. The Duo also has no Face ID. Instead, a Touch ID fingerprint reader sits in the side button and works open or closed. Cochrane offers his own theory for the switch. With AI now able to generate convincing faces and video, a fingerprint may simply be the safer biometric. Inside the Duo: Chip, Cameras, Software and Battery The Duo runs the A20 Pro, the same chip as the iPhone 18 Pro, built on a two-nanometer process. A vapor chamber carries heat away so the phone can hold full speed longer. Cochrane welcomes that, since his own ...
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Anthropic’s $5 Million Push to Measure AI’s Effect on Wellbeing #1876

    Anthropic’s $5 Million Push to Measure AI’s Effect on Wellbeing #1876
    Sep 8 2026
    In this episode, Ray Cochrane records from the Michigan studio on the one year anniversary of losing the show’s original host, Todd Cochrane. The featured story is Anthropic’s $5 million grant program, which pays outside researchers to measure whether AI is actually good for the people using it. Ray also covers Anthropic’s Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, Google’s Fairwind cyber defense program, Meta’s organizational second brain, sixteen green AI projects across Asia-Pacific, an Oklahoma Bitcoin mine condemned after leaking 3.8 million gallons of water, BepiColombo closing in on Mercury, and the 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens from the studio in Michigan, recording on the one year anniversary of the show losing its original host, Todd Cochrane, his father. The family has gathered for the occasion. He also plans to record several episodes throughout the week as a commemorative run, so listeners should expect a heavier release schedule than usual. He also shares where things stand. He and Delaney have gone back and forth on relocating to Michigan, but the family is pushing, and the plan is firming up for the coming month or so. Part of the draw is getting his dad’s studio cleaned up and running the way it used to. Finally, he passes along an update on the Zuvers, a story long-time listeners will recognize. The father of the three children is due out of jail soon, though he now faces retrial for the murder of the three boys. Cochrane notes that the original prison term related to their return rather than the murders themselves. The family’s expectation, he says, is that this time the sentence will be permanent. Anthropic Puts $5 Million Behind Measuring AI’s Effect on You The featured story asks a question the industry has mostly avoided. Not whether a model is smart, but whether you are better off after using it. Anthropic is funding independent research to find out, and the structure is the interesting part. The money creates what the field calls evaluations: standardized tests for AI models. Hundreds already exist for coding, math, and reasoning. However, almost none measure whether the tool is good for the human on the other end. Crucially, Anthropic is not building these tests in-house. Grantees receive funding, model access and technical support, then work fully independently. Everything they produce must be published open source, so any developer at any company can run it. As Cochrane puts it, Anthropic is paying to create a ruler other people will use to measure Anthropic. The example Anthropic leads with is deliberately uncomfortable. Claude might offer diet and workout advice to someone asking about weight loss. But if that user has a history of disordered eating, the same response becomes actively harmful. Cochrane connects this to sycophancy, a topic the show has returned to before, and notes that models carry no real memory of who you are unless you tell them. That is exactly why the problem has gone unmeasured. Code compiles or it doesn’t. Math checks out or it doesn’t. Wellbeing has no answer key, because the identical response can help one person and harm the next. The Five Things Anthropic Wants These Tests to Do Cochrane walks through all five criteria, since each targets a specific way this research usually fails. First, state plainly what you are measuring. It is easy to measure something adjacent, such as how often a model uses warm language, then publish numbers about a proxy while claiming insight into loneliness itself. Second, involve clinicians and subject-matter experts in designing and validating the tests. A capable engineer may simply not know what the warning signs of an eating disorder look like in text. Without those people in the room, the test measures what engineers imagine the harm looks like. Third, count overcompliance and overrefusal as harms. Overcompliance is the obvious failure. Overrefusal is the model becoming so cautious it turns useless, or shutting down someone who had nowhere else to ask. Cochrane adds that overrefusal is far harder to spot, because you often cannot tell it is degrading until it has degraded. Fourth, reflect real multi-turn usage. Most safety testing throws one nasty question at a model and checks for refusal. Meanwhile, actual harm builds across a long conversation where every individual message reads as fine. Fifth, validate the automated graders against real experts. Scoring thousands of conversations means an AI grades the AI. Consequently, a subtly wrong grader skews every downstream number in the same direction, and nothing in the process flags it. Cochrane expects this to be ...
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    Less than 1 minute
  • The Mainframe Learned to Speak Arm #1875

    The Mainframe Learned to Speak Arm #1875
    Sep 5 2026
    In this episode, Ray Cochrane breaks down Hot Chips 2026, the engineering conference where IBM, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Arm, and Fujitsu all showed how their next processors actually work. The headline disclosure is a mainframe core that runs Arm natively. Ray also covers Apple’s odd M6 Mac mini naming, London’s first autonomous Uber rides, Amazon’s purchase of the company behind DuckDB, GitHub’s HydraFusion, the best of IFA 2026, and new USDA research on farmed salmon. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens the show with a personal update. He apologizes for the late rollout and the missed Monday episode, having spent the week fighting a cold. He’s also heading to Michigan to spend time with family and visit his father’s gravesite. He hopes to record a couple of shows from his dad’s old studio while he is there, including a special episode planned for Tuesday. He also points listeners to a fresh site redesign that trades the old techie look for something cleaner and friendlier. The featured segment starts from a wrap-up post on Arm’s newsroom. However, Cochrane broadens it to cover the whole conference rather than a single article. Hot Chips has run every August since 1989, and this year’s event was the 38th, held August 23rd through the 25th at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium. What Hot Chips Actually Is Cochrane draws a line between Hot Chips and the big consumer trade shows. CES and Computex exist for product announcements and marketing. Meanwhile, Hot Chips is an IEEE engineering conference where chip architects present block diagrams and die photos for thirty minutes at a stretch. The audience matters as much as the content. Roughly five hundred people who design chips for a living fill the room, and they would spot a fudged number immediately. No written paper is required, just the talk and the slides. In-person tickets sold out this year, as did Stanford’s dorm housing. Cochrane says he plans to cover the conference annually going forward. IBM Built a Mainframe Core That Speaks Arm The disclosure that stopped Cochrane cold came from IBM. Its next processor for IBM Z and LinuxONE runs two completely different instruction sets natively, on every one of its eleven cores. Those are z/Architecture, IBM’s own mainframe language, and AArch64, which is 64-bit Arm. Crucially, this is not emulation. Nor is it Arm cores glued onto the die beside the mainframe cores. IBM built 2,792 Arm instructions directly into the hardware, which it says is more than double the mainframe instruction count. Each core carries two separate decoders while sharing the caches, branch predictor and register files downstream. It switches between the two in nanoseconds. IBM even added dedicated hardware to flip byte order, because Arm and the mainframe store numbers in opposite directions. The payoff is Arm SystemReady compliance, meaning off-the-shelf Arm Linux runs on a mainframe unmodified. Patrick Kennedy of ServeTheHome, who was in the room, wrote: “I am sitting here still in awe of what IBM is doing here; this is not Z plus Arm cores, this is Z and Arm in one core.” Cochrane flags one precision point that is easy to get backward. IBM did not license Arm’s core designs and drop them in. Instead, it took its own mainframe core and taught it AArch64 under an architecture license, which is considerably harder engineering. The specifications are striking. The chip uses a 2nm process, with eleven cores running above 5.7GHz sustained and no turbo mode at all. Each core gets 36MB of L2 cache, backed by a 3.5GB virtual L4 pool. Furthermore, the reliability target is eight nines, which works out to roughly three tenths of one second of unplanned downtime per year. IBM gave it no name and no ship date, though the press expects “Telum III” around 2028. Arm, Fujitsu and NVIDIA Show Their Hands Arm itself had plenty to discuss, starting with an unfortunate name. Its first chip in thirty-five years is called the AGI CPU, which is a product name rather than any claim about artificial general intelligence. For three and a half decades, Arm designed processor blueprints and licensed them out, collecting royalties without competing. That era is now over. The AGI CPU is Arm’s own silicon, co-designed with lead customer Meta, running up to 136 cores on TSMC’s 3nm process at 300 watts. Arm’s CEO says the company has more than $2 billion in customer demand across the next two fiscal years. Fujitsu brought the detail Cochrane called the coolest of the conference. Its MONAKA chip packs 144 Arm-based cores, but the trick is the cache. Rather than sitting alongside the cores and eating die area, the ...
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    45 mins
  • Eyes, Hands, and a Sense of Timing #1874

    Eyes, Hands, and a Sense of Timing #1874
    Aug 28 2026
    In this episode, Ray Cochrane digs into Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard. It is a shared driver that lets an AI agent run real lab equipment, from pipetting robots to the lasers inside a quantum computer. He also covers OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6, Google’s new Expert Intelligence book feature, Apple’s M5 Ultra Mac Studio, and a judge’s order forcing Google to stop hiding rival app stores. Finally, he weighs in on Apple’s proposed 15 percent link-out fee, Meta’s Australia numbers, the White House deputizing private hackers, and why rivers obey a 1957 math rule. – Want to start a podcast? Its easy to get started! Sign-up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Ray if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Cochrane opens with a quick personal update. He is hunting for tickets to Michigan for his dad’s anniversary, and he has been learning Blender and Godot on the side, mostly modeling and blocking out levels. Consequently, he asks listeners for advice on starting a big game project, and he plans to record his progress, maybe as a time lapse. Then it is straight into the featured story. Anthropic’s Model Hardware Standard: A Driver for the Physical World The featured story comes from Anthropic, which opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, or MHS. Cochrane frames it as the other side of the question NVIDIA’s world models raised two weeks ago: when do AI agents start touching actual machines? A typical lab runs a microscope, a liquid handler, a robotic arm, and a plate reader, each from a different vendor with its own control software. One Janelia researcher in the post launches seven programs in three languages just to start an experiment. Anthropic says wiring a setup like that takes weeks or months of specialist work. MHS is a driver, the same kind of translation layer a printer uses, except every device gets described with a tiny set of commands like read and write. Devices announce themselves on the network. A plain-English reference file then records what each machine measures, what can be adjusted, and which safety limits get enforced no matter what the agent asks. Agents then reach the hardware through the Model Context Protocol, the command line, or plain code. Cochrane sees the same move the industry keeps making, from coding harnesses to RSS and JSON: agree on a standard and let everyone build against it. In fact, he calls MHS the hardware version of MCP. The partner results carry the segment. QuEra builds quantum computers from individual atoms held by lasers that must hold their frequency to about one part in a trillion. A four-person team spent months on a relock script that worked 58 percent of the time. However, four copies of Claude iterating overnight through MHS produced a decision-tree script that recovers the laser in about six seconds, and it passed 99.3 percent of 700 blind trials. Carnegie Mellon wrote MHS drivers for four instruments across three incompatible computers in about eight hours, then ran dose-response experiments three times faster and blocked all six deliberately induced faults. Genentech, meanwhile, showed the limits. Claude used the same pump speed for water, a foamy protein solution, and a human had to explain that the bubbles were a physics problem. That gap in physical intuition is what sticks with Cochrane. He doubts it will change soon, and he suspects the fix will arrive as sub-agents or sub-models that judge a request against an expected outcome. He also connects MHS to a video of racing robots that never learned to stop at the finish line. What happens, he wonders, once they can read a distance sensor through a shared standard? Still, he calls the announcement a fantastic read and points listeners to the full article. Sponsor: GoDaddy Economy hosting $6.99/month, WordPress hosting $12.99/month, domains $11.99. Website builder trial available. Use codes at geeknewscentral.com/godaddy to support the show. GPT-5.6 Does the Same Work for a Fraction of the Cost OpenAI’s builder’s guide to GPT-5.6 leads the headlines. Cochrane recaps the three tiers from episode 1870, Sol, Terra, and Luna, plus the separate dial for reasoning effort. On BrowseComp, a benchmark for digging up obscure facts on the web, the old GPT-5.5 flagship scored about 84 percent on a run that cost 33 dollars three months ago. Luna now matches that score for a dollar thirty-three, and OpenAI has since cut Luna’s price another 80 percent. Browser Use reports Luna finishing 78 percent of its hardest browser tasks for about 14 dollars, against 80 percent for roughly 235 dollars from the best available model. The guide’s other big addition is a multi-agent beta flag. It lets the model handling a request spawn parallel helper agents that report back to ...
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    52 mins
  • Huge Announcements From D23!! #1873

    Huge Announcements From D23!! #1873
    Aug 25 2026
    In this episode, Chris Cochrane guest-hosts for his brother Ray and devotes the whole show to one event: Disney’s D23 2026 fan convention in Anaheim. Friday night delivered Marvel’s new X-Men cast, Adam Driver as Mister Sinister, a fresh Avengers: Doomsday trailer, and a release date for Frozen 3. Saturday turned to the parks, with Villains Land, an Indiana Jones dark ride, the long-awaited Expedition Everest yeti repair, and a Monsters Inc land opening in 2027. – Want to start a podcast? It’s easy to get started! Sign up at Blubrry – Thinking of buying a Starlink? Use my link to support the show. Subscribe to the Newsletter. Email Chris if you want to get in touch! Like and Follow Geek News Central’s Facebook Page. Support my Show Sponsor: Best Godaddy Promo Codes Get 1Password Full Summary Chris Cochrane opens the show and explains why this episode breaks the usual format. Instead of six or eight unrelated stories, the entire episode covers Disney’s D23 convention, which he compares to Apple’s WWDC. For newcomers, he notes that D23 is Disney’s official fan club, named for the company’s founding year of 1923. This year’s event ran two nights at the Honda Center: Friday for movies and television, Saturday for the theme parks. Marvel Finally Casts the X-Men Friday’s headline was the X-Men. The Associated Press put the crowd near 12,000, and Marvel Studios used that stage to name its rebooted team. Christopher Abbott plays Professor Charles Xavier, Inde Navarrette plays Rogue, and Maya Boyd plays Storm. Adam Driver rounds out the group as the villain Mister Sinister. Meanwhile, Samara Weaving, Kit Connor, and Sadie Sink were already known as Emma Frost, Cyclops, and Jean Grey. Jake Schreier directs, and the film arrives May 5, 2028. Chris calls the lineup spot-on casting. He singles out Weaving as a perfect match for the comics, and he points out that Sink already appeared as Jean Grey in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Navarrette is the least established name, coming off a breakout role in an indie horror film. Boyd, meanwhile, was the name he knew least, with what he believes is a Broadway background. Above all, Chris hopes Marvel does the team justice, and he recommends the animated revival X-Men ’97 on Disney+ as the best place to start. Frozen 3 Gets a Date and a Chaotic Reveal Frozen 3 lands November 24, 2027. That is the Wednesday of Thanksgiving week, the same slot the first two films used. The story centers on Anna and Kristoff’s wedding, which a new villain, an evil Ice Queen, disrupts. Jennifer Lee returns to direct with Trent Correy, and the full voice cast is back. However, the reveal itself fell apart. Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel performed a darker arrangement of “Frozen Heart.” Meanwhile, the audio failed, the video failed, and a set of doors never opened. Menzel asked the crowd whether they should try it again, and Bell simply narrated everything that was supposed to happen. Afterward, Josh Gad sang “Oooh, Samantha,” a new love song for Olaf. Chris is here for it, since Olaf is one of the franchise’s best comic characters. Pixar, Disney Animation, and the Rest of Friday Night Pixar chief Pete Docter laid out a packed slate. Incredibles 3 hits summer 2028 and follows Violet and Dash sneaking out at night to fight crime. Chris hopes that finally shows a grown-up Jack-Jack. Coco 2 follows in November 2029 with Benjamin Bratt returning as Ernesto de la Cruz. That has fans puzzling over how a villain already in the Land of the Dead comes back. Additionally, Pixar showed an original called Ghost Market and a Venice-set cat film called Gatto. On the Disney Animation side, Zootopia 3 is confirmed. The live-action Tangled arrives March 31, 2028 with Kathryn Hahn as Mother Gothel. Chris considers that casting perfect after her turn in Agatha All Along. A live-action Lilo & Stitch sequel, a new Simpsons movie, a Bluey movie, and a Kingdom Hearts anime series round out the list. For Star Wars fans, Ahsoka returns January 20, 2027. Chris also offers a hot take: he prefers Rogue One to the entire sequel trilogy. Consequently, he welcomes original stories like Ryan Gosling’s upcoming Starfighter. Adam Driver Is Mister Sinister Driver appeared by video rather than in person. He told the crowd that he and Kevin Feige had talked for years about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Then he announced he would play Magneto. After a long pause, he corrected himself to Nathaniel Milbury, which is Mister Sinister’s human alias. The gag landed because fans had floated Driver for Magneto for years. For anyone new to the comics, Chris explains that Mister Sinister is a geneticist obsessed with mutant DNA, a manipulator rather than a brawler. The cast met backstage only minutes earlier, so Chris is curious how their chemistry develops. Notably, Christopher Abbott previously worked with Driver on HBO’s Girls. The script comes from Beef creator Lee Sung Jin and The Bear ...
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    45 mins