The Memo - 12/Sep/2026
To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients… From: Dr Alan D. Thompson Sent: 12/Sep/2026 Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English AGI: 98% ASI: 2/50The early winner of…
To: US Govt, major govts, Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Citi, Tencent, IBM, & 10,000+ more recipients… From: Dr Alan D. Thompson Sent: 12/Sep/2026 Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English AGI: 98% ASI: 2/50The early winner of The Who Moved My Cheese? AI Awards! for Sep/2026 is NYC Public Schools (again). Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a one-year moratorium on ‘all software that uses student-facing generative AI’ for students through 8th grade, covering nearly 600,000 children. Companion chatbots are banned across all grades, K-12.ContentsThe BIG Stuff (Navier-Stokes, GPT-6 as human, GPT-6 completes Portal, XPENG…)The Interesting Stuff (OpenAI humanoid robots, Meta Muse, 24-hour AI news…)Policy (Why China loves AI, US urging hands-off AI at G20, Chinese distilling…)Toys to Play With (fruit fly brain game, AI global film festival, Fairground.tv, Fable 5.1…)Things I’ve Been Thinking About (Pretty much only AI…)Next (Roundtable…)The BIG StuffOpenAI: On the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem (8/Sep/2026)OpenAI reports that a system of roughly 10,000 coordinating agents, powered by an internal model ‘significantly more capable than GPT-6 Astra,’ solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness Millennium Prize Problem (wiki) in about 88 hours. The agents ‘had access to tools such as the ability to read from a cached version of the internet and the ability to run code,’ sent 2.7 million messages, and consumed approximately 130 billion output tokens in the process. Along the way, a separate group of nearly 100 agents also resolved the Euler regularity problem in roughly 50 hours, a result that then served as a stepping stone to the full Navier-Stokes proof.Sidenote: This is the kind of thing we’ve been waiting for since the early 2020 GPT-3 Leta days. Expect both a smooth (in terms of progress) and noisy (in terms of chatter) progress curve through the next few months. I wouldn’t be surprised if AI discovers a new element for the periodic table, develops a cure for a type of cancer, and ‘creates’ new materials beyond steel and concrete.Read more via OpenAI.GPT-6 Astra clears all 48 levels of ‘I’m not a robot’ and receives ‘verified human’ certificate (7/Sep/2026)We explored GPT-6 Astra on launch day (or the day after launch day!) in a special edition 4/Sep/2026. A week later, we’ve seen a number of stunning achievements documented.GPT-6 Astra completed every one of the 48 increasingly absurd CAPTCHA-style challenges in Neal Agarwal’s ‘I’m Not a Robot’ game, from simple checkbox ticks to parking a Waymo, playing chess against Deep Blue, rhythm games, drawing perfect circles, 3D text recognition, and finding Waldo. OpenAI Labs engineer Sharif Shameem posted a 4-minute video showing Astra navigating the entire gauntlet using visual understanding and computer-use capabilities. Neal estimates fewer than 1% of human players have beaten all 48 levels, while GPT-6 Astra smashed it quickly and collected its certificate of humanity.Sidenote: I got to level 11 of 48, and could not find Waldo. But I also couldn’t be bothered feeding it to AI to find him instead. Please give it a go...Read the announce, try it yourself, check it out on the AGI countdown.GPT-6 Astra autonomously completes Portal in under 24 hours (6/Sep/2026)OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra completed Valve’s 2007 puzzle game Portal from start to finish with zero human intervention, making 3,336 tool calls across 23 hours and 43 minutes at an API cost of US$571. The model used screenshot-driven vision input and a modified SourcePauseTool to pause the game while it processed each decision, resulting in roughly two hours of active gameplay. Developer CozyBlaze noted the milestone echoes OpenAI’s 2016 technical goal to ‘solve a wide variety of games using a single agent,’ and the full run was covered by a US$200/month Codex Pro subscription.Read more via Tom’s Hardware, and watch the video (link):XPENG starts IRON humanoid robot production as Tesla Optimus stalls (7/Sep/2026)Source: XPENG.XPENG has switched on what it calls the world’s first automated production line for advanced humanoid robots in Guangzhou, using robots to mass-produce robots, with more than 80% of core processes automated, and IRON walking off the line under its own power. The robot features 82 degrees of freedom, biomimetic muscles, industry-first all-solid-state batteries, and a brain-cerebellum system running VLA/VLM/VLT models on three in-house Turing AI chips delivering 2,250 TOPS. XPENG’s robotics unit raised over US$900M at a US$6.3B valuation, the largest single private round in China’s embodied AI sector, targeting monthly capacity above 1,000 units with mass production by end of 2026 and a goal of one million units per year by 2030. CEO He Xiaopeng: ‘Today’s step is small, but XPENG is building the production lines for an entirely new product category.’Read the announce and analysis via Electrek.The Memo features in recent AI papers by Microsoft and Apple, has been discussed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and a trusted source says it is used by top brass at the White House. Across over 100 editions, The Memo continues to be the #1 AI advisory, informing 10,000+ full subscribers including RAND, Google, and Meta AI. Full subscribers have complete access to all 25+ AI analysis items in this edition!The Interesting StuffAI agent uses webcam and mirror to debug its own AMD GPU drivers in real time (10/Sep/2026)Source: Twitter.Linux developer Justin Schroeder shared a photo of a MacBook running a coding agent that literally watches its own screen via a webcam pointed at a mirror, visually verifying Radeon graphics driver improvements as it makes them for Omarchy Linux (wiki). Because it’s modifying the graphics driver itself, normal screenshots can’t be trusted, since they rely on the very same driver being changed, so a physical webcam captures what’s actually showing on the real screen. Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney called it ‘HAL 9000 lip-reading vibes,’ referencing the superintelligent computer from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Read the announce, article, and check it out on the AGI countdown.OpenAI: An alien mind (6/Sep/2026) Read moreSource: Life Architect AI — Published — Category: Models