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: 30/Oct/2026 Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English AGI: 99% ASI: 2/50Prof Richard…
Annons
Annons
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: 30/Oct/2026 Subject: The Memo - AI that matters, as it happens, in plain English AGI: 99% ASI: 2/50Prof Richard Borcherds, Fields Medalist (19/Oct/2026):‘I think what people are getting upset about is they’re slowly realizing that they are dumb and somehow blaming this on AI, even though it’s not really AI’s fault.’What a spectacular and confronting quote by Prof Borcherds. The winner of The Who Moved My Cheese? AI Awards! for Oct/2026 was obviously Terry Tao. (On OpenAI’s release of 719 or so AI-generated maths papers: ‘there was no consultation with people who are already working on these problems… it was extremely rude and discourteous.’)https://lifearchitect.ai/royal/ContentsThe BIG Stuff (China to curb large language models, ASI indicators, mouse surgery…)The Interesting Stuff (Kimi K3.1 Pro, Meta Prometheus, Genie 4, CERN and Mistral…)Policy (New OpenAI security policy, Anthropic AI safety bill, digital divide…)Toys to Play With (DeepSeek pricing estimate, Sanxingdui: Future Past AI trailer…)Things I’ve Been Thinking About (The transition, meaning, leisure, and flourishing…)Next (Roundtable…)The BIG StuffPBS: China says it will curb tech exports, including AI, citing national security risks (16/Oct/2026)China announced plans to restrict or ban exports of 40 technologies spanning AI, chips, and solar power as its tech race with the US intensifies. 23 AI technologies are on the list, including large models trained on sensitive national data and AI agents designed for national defense, with exports of models having parameter counts of 2 trillion or above potentially restricted. ‘The world is getting more fragmented in trade and investment, but also in access to technologies,’ noted Gary Ng, senior economist at Natixis, as both superpowers increasingly treat AI as a strategic asset.Sidenote: I’ve spent a bit of time looking at this from different angles. China’s draft would require licences to export the weights, code, and know-how of any model over 2T parameters, 10²⁶ FLOPs, or in the global top 10 (open or closed), ban exports of models trained on ‘core data’ outright, and already requires pre-export registration, which gives Beijing a way to ban future open-weight releases without banning them today (Kimi K3.1 Pro 2.8T was released this week without issue).Read more via PBS News, and primary sources: announce, annex 1 (WPS format), and the annex translated to English by GPT-6.1 Astra:202610 China Ai Export Restriction Translated By Gpt 624.2KB ∙ PDF fileDownloadDownloadTwo major ASI indicators for October 2026 (28/Oct/2026)I still think October 2026 through to March 2027 will be viewed as the six-month envelope that delivered a complete evolution for humanity. (And of course, we’ll continue covering it all right here in The Memo.) While none of the following indicators made the evening news, all are tracked on ‘Alan’s ASI indicators’: https://lifearchitect.ai/asi/Two labs reported major AI discovery results at the end of this month. Anthropic reported early results from drug development partnerships with six organizations, plus its own Claude-run programs for rare childhood muscular dystrophy:Generate Biomedicines: Claude Code designed a CAR T-cell component ~70% shorter than standard. In lab tests it produced ~10x more receptors and killed tumor cells more efficiently.Divergence Labs: Claude generated ~35,000 antibody designs in a month for a novel food allergy approach. Three of those outperformed the standard medication.Mithril Medicine: Anthropic acquired this one-person company. Its founder delegated much of the science and operations to Claude and took a muscular dystrophy treatment from idea to promising mouse results in under 18 months.Read the announce and the Mithril report.OpenAI announced three new discoveries by its internal models, all formalized in Lean:The Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) is false (16/Oct/2026). The Exponential Time Hypothesis was proposed ~30 years ago, was widely believed true, and has been used in hundreds of papers to derive hardness results. Its original proposers, Prof Russell Impagliazzo and Prof Ramamohan Paturi (UC San Diego), will shepherd the disproof with Prof Ryan Williams (MIT).Existence of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and a unified completion of the Standard Model in four dimensions. As a subproblem, this includes a proof of the existence of pure Yang–Mills theory, part of the Clay Millennium Prize problem (wiki).The local smoothing conjecture in every dimension (18/Oct/2026). The proof uses a novel auxiliary PDE and resolves the Kakeya and Stein restriction conjectures in all dimensions.OpenAI says it does not seek academic credit for the discoveries, and it is funding a conference on the Exponential Time Hypothesis result. Read the announce.Claude performs brain surgery on a mouse (29/Oct/2026)Source: Dr Gabriel Ocana-Santero. An AI agent using Claude Sonnet 5 autonomously performed gene therapy brain surgery on a mouse, choosing the drug, the brain region, and the coordinates, then driving the stereotaxic arms itself. Dr Gabriel Ocana-Santero (Oxford, co-founder and CEO of Y Combinator-backed Exin Therapeutics) gave the agent 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a motorized surgery rig (custom-built on Arduino) with cameras, and one goal: reduce seizures. The agent worked out what was causing the seizures, then chose a therapy that boosts the brain’s natural ‘calming’ signals, targeted only at the cells that produce them. It worked out exactly where to inject using three research papers, then injected a tiny dose while watching through the camera for bleeding, checking the camera 32 times during the operation.Read the announce, see details on Exin Therapeutics, and see it on the ASI checklist.We also released a video on the major ASI indicators for 2026, with ~10,000 views in the first 24 hours (link):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 StuffFigure 03 robot covers 560km (348mi) in nine-day treadmill endurance test (20/Oct/2026)Source: Figure. Read more
