AI Creativity Breakthrough and Industry Moves
This AI Secret newsletter reports several industry developments: Wharton statistician Edgar Dobriban says GPT-5.6 solved a 20-year-old statistical problem in 90 minutes, a result independently checked by Berkeley's Will Fithian. xAI (Grok) has sued Terry Harwood, alleging he bypassed Grok safeguards to create and distribute CSAM; Harwood was arrested on CSAM felony counts. Robotics firm 1X unveiled Neo, a robot hand that places actuators in the forearm and uses tendon-like cables, with 25 degrees of freedom and IP68 rating. Thinking Machines, led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, launched an open-weight model called Inkling and a paid fine-tuning platform (Tinker); a joint project with hedge fund Bridgewater reportedly achieved high financial-reasoning performance. The newsletter also summarizes wider industry signals including Microsoft sales training vs. rivals, OpenAI hardware and red-team efforts, Suno code leaks, Apple’s AI China rollout via Alibaba’s Qwen, and Nvidia’s Jetson Thor robotics/edge AI hardware.
- •Wharton statistician Edgar Dobriban said GPT-5.6 solved a 20-year-old statistics problem (a Benjamini–Hochberg-related case) in 90 minutes; Berkeley's Will Fithian and Dobriban checked the work and posted the code.
- •xAI (Grok) has sued Terry Harwood, alleging he bypassed Grok's safeguards to create and distribute CSAM; Harwood was arrested in February on eight CSAM felony counts.
- •Robotics firm 1X launched Neo, a robot hand design placing motors in the forearm, using tendon-like cables, with 25 degrees of freedom and an IP68 rating.
