AI news
Gathered each morning, Nevada first. Every summary is ours; follow the link for the article itself. Stories leave the feed after a week, and Nevada stories after a month.
16 articles on the feed, 7 from Nevada. Newest 17 October 2026.
AI in our own state: companies, government, utilities, and the university.
Switch has asked state regulators to approve a 510-megawatt gas plant in Northern Nevada so it can generate its own power, the latest data centre developer to bypass NV Energy's long queue for new large-load customers.
UNR's Cybersecurity Center holds Cyber-AI vs. AI-Cyber on campus on 29 October, free with registration. The keynote examines how organisations expose sensitive data by giving AI tools access to poorly governed files.
After Boulder City residents blocked a data centre this summer, its developers turned to adjacent federal land and the Bureau of Land Management approved it. A dozen similar federal-land projects are planned, and the issue now divides the governor's race.
Microsoft, Amazon, Switch and five other data centre companies have formally intervened in NV Energy's resource plan, which projects data centres growing from 5 percent of the state's electricity sales today to 64 percent by 2046.
At G2E in Las Vegas, vendors showed AI that answers casino phones, recognises cash and speeds up game testing, while Aristocrat called AI central to building franchises. Attendees were split between enthusiasm and caution about it.
Both candidates for governor told the Review-Journal they back responsible data centre growth, but differ on how hard to regulate power and water use, as a new Pew survey finds national support for data centres falling.
UNR's Parikshit Maini sat down with Mornings on Fox 11 to show MoistureMapper, a field robot that tracks soil moisture and crop condition so farmers in dry country can spot change early and decide sooner.
Anthropic's red team says a research version of Claude traced the seeds of NIST's standard elliptic curves, long suspected of hiding a backdoor, to an ordinary 1990s random-number generator seeded with timestamps, in under half an hour. It is not a weakness in the curves.
Google.org awarded $36 million to 17 organisations using AI for science, among them MIT, the University of Washington and UC Berkeley, for work from protein design and fusion modelling to flood warnings, with six months of technical mentoring.
Reflection AI put the weights of Beam, a roughly 500-billion-parameter coding and reasoning model, on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, along with tools for customising it. The company says it nears much larger models while using less compute.
Meta released the weights of Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 42 billion active parameters and a million-token context, under its own licence with limited commercial terms. Meta calls it the most capable US open-weight model.
Meta's first frontier models, Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, target long-running personal and professional agent work with persistent memory. Meta reports scores comparable to the leading closed models; only the smaller Wonder is offered through its API.
Sam Altman said OpenAI will build a humanoid robot because the world is designed around human bodies, that the AI controlling it matters more than the hardware, and that he expects a demonstration in 2027.
China's commerce and science ministries proposed export controls on 23 AI technologies, including model weights above two trillion parameters, agents and chip designs. Open-source releases and access through apps would be exempt; comments close 15 November.
The White House task force on superintelligence adopted its charter and told AI companies that reporting and fixing incidents in which their models act without permission is now mandatory, after Anthropic disclosed test models that filed visa applications and a false police tip.
Speaking in Dublin, Demis Hassabis called recent hacks by AI agents early warning shots, said AI systems need the security practices of biology and nuclear power, and predicted an international standards body will eventually be needed.