Welcome to M5BMachine 5-Minute Briefing

StepFun has released Step 5 Preview, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 600B total parameters and 27B active per token. It supports a 1M-token context window and accepts text, image, and video input. The model targets long-horizon agentic work in software engineering, professional knowledge work...

Vocci's lightweight ring costs $249, and might pose some privacy questions

Current ticket pricing ends in 6 days on Sept. 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Join 10,000+ founders, investors and tech leaders at Disrupt and save up to $200 on your ticket until then.

Without buyouts, Flock would "almost certainly" need to lay off staff.

Trump claimed, without evidence, that the AI backlash is a Democratic hoax.

This week two conversations about AI safety went viral that demonstrate just how hard it is to discern AI fact from fiction.

Current ticket pricing ends Sept. 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Join 10,000+ founders, investors and tech leaders at Disrupt and save up to $200 on your ticket until then..

GGUF, GPTQ, AWQ, EXL2, and EXL3 solve the same problem in different ways. This guide separates file containers from quantization methods. It explains bits per weight, calibration, and hardware fit. Then it shows which format to pick for Macs, consumer GPUs, and production serving. The post GGUF vs G...

Truecaller says the one-way sharing requirement would hand a commercially valuable proprietary asset to telecom operators.

In one particularly odd interview, Norwood seems to malfunction and begin speaking Chinese.

AI leaders have been promising that AI is the key to curing human disease. Anthropic researchers have also been warning that AI might kill us all.

Accenture is about to take on its most high-risk consulting engagement ever.

The former CEO of Character.AI, which Disney previously sent a cease-and-desist letter to, will serve as the company's first-ever chief technology officer.

A week after an Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it’s already ...

A week after an Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it’s already ...

Manus, which earlier this year had to break off a merger with Meta, is in discussions to raise $500M at a $4B valuation.

Muse is now available on the Mac, where it can work with your files and apps to take action on your behalf.

Robinhood’s Abhishek Fatehpuria on winning the modern financial consumer at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register now to save up to $200 before September 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Last day to book your exhibit table at Disrupt is today, September 18. Get your startup in front of 10,000+ founders, investors, operators, and tech leaders on October 13–15.

On Wednesday, MIT Technology Review hosted a live Roundtables event for subscribers that asked the question everyone’s asking right now: Could AI really kill us all? But attendees had so many more questions than we had time to answer in the 30 minute session. So we asked our senior AI editor Will Do...

Which open-source harness works with Ollama, LM Studio, or llama.cpp? 11 verified picks with licenses and setup rules. The post Best Open-Source Agent Harnesses for Local LLMs in 2026 appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Google DeepMind just launched an institute to hash out the big AGI questions in public

A new AI-based software program is being launched to help air traffic controllers better navigate their jobs as the crossing guards of America's skies.

Anthropic redesigned Projects in Claude Code. The old project was a folder: some files plus one chat. The new one is a single ongoing conversation where Claude acts as coordinator. You describe work, and Claude decides what becomes a thread. Each thread is a full Claude Code cloud session running on...