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.
20 articles on the feed, 9 from Nevada. Newest 2 October 2026.
AI in our own state: companies, government, utilities, and the university.
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.
Governor Lombardo's executive order keeps courting AI data centres but trims their tax breaks, makes them pay the school support tax in full, and requires a commitment that their water and power costs never reach ratepayers.
Straight to the Governor's announcement
Nevada's utility regulators approved two private methane plants, 360 megawatts in all, so Fleet Data Centers can power its Tahoe Reno Industrial Center sites for two or three years until NV Energy catches up. Three hours of public comment ran against it.
An explainer on the numbers behind Nevada's data centre fight: NV Energy needs about 22 gigawatts to meet existing requests, while data centres use half a percent of Southern Nevada's water, far less than golf courses or casinos.
Alireza Tavakkoli, who directs UNR's BRAIN Core, went on Mornings on Fox 11 to separate what today's AI tools can do from the loss-of-control scenarios researchers warn about, and why safeguards matter as the systems grow.
The Nevada Small Business Development Center is running a free AI day for small business owners on 21 September at the UNR Innovation Center, with demonstrations and a guided hackathon. No coding or prior AI experience needed.
At a Minden business event, the Northern Nevada Development Authority's director said the region must weigh data center growth thoughtfully against energy and water demand, calling it a matter for community conversation rather than project-by-project approval.
Meta mathematicians working with its Muse Spark model through the ordinary chat interface produced six papers, five answering open questions in probability, differential equations and group theory. Each paper marks which passages the AI drafted; outside mathematicians reviewed them.
DeepMind embedded detectable watermarks in AI-designed proteins and predicted structures. In wet-lab tests on three targets, watermarked binders matched unmarked ones on hit rate and binding affinity, a step toward tracing AI-designed biology for biosecurity.
Aleph Alpha released Kolibri, an open-weight German-English mixture-of-experts model with 78 billion parameters, 3.5 billion active per token, and a long context, under Apache 2.0, aimed at government and regulated work that must run on-premises.
OpenAI and Synopsys will build GPT-Synopsys, a model trained to run electronic design automation tools itself, interpret their results and iterate on chip designs for power, performance and area, with engineers reviewing the output.
Google's new frontier model targets long software-engineering, legal, finance and cyber-defence work, with a one-million-token output limit. It goes first to vetted cyber defenders and US government testing, then to paid API and Ultra subscribers.
At DevDay, Sam Altman unveiled Dots, agents that run continuously with their own cloud computer and access to thousands of apps, and OpenAI released the cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol while holding back its most capable model on safety grounds.
H Company released open-weight models that operate software by clicking, typing, coding and calling tools across desktop, web and Android. The 27-billion-parameter version scores 61.7 percent on OSWorld 2.0, close to closed frontier systems.
Anthropic's second 5.5 model is the faster, cheaper sibling of Opus 5.5, generating output about 30 percent faster than Sonnet 5 and using fewer tokens per task, at unchanged prices of $2 and $10 per million tokens.
Boston Dynamics gave Atlas a four-fingered, 13-degree-of-freedom hand built for tool use and mass manufacture, designed to be simulated accurately so manipulation skills learned by reinforcement learning in simulation transfer to the real robot.
LeCun told Fortune that recent rogue-agent incidents were preventable failures of sandboxing and oversight, not signs of danger, and criticised Anthropic's Dario Amodei and the effective-altruism view of AI risk, while his AMI Labs pursues world models.
Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Nvidia and xAI signed a voluntary White House pact to monitor frontier models internally, use outside auditors and report to board committees. It carries no penalties, disclosure requirement or government enforcement role.