Samwise Tech/AI/Robotics Newsletter
Friday, June 26, 2026
White House Asks OpenAI to Gate GPT-5.6 Release, Approving Access Customer by Customer
The Trump administration has told OpenAI to hold back public distribution of its newest model, GPT-5.6, directing the company to share it only with select partners while the government reviews access. CEO Sam Altman informed staff this week that officials would be "approving access customer by customer" during a preview period. The move mirrors Anthropic's existing voluntary practice of limiting its Mythos model, and stems from government concern that frontier AI systems—including GPT-5.5 Cyber—can autonomously find and exploit security vulnerabilities. Altman indicated a broader rollout could follow within "a couple of weeks" if the controlled preview goes well.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
General Intuition Raises $320M to Train Robots Using Video Game Footage, Valued at $2.3B
General Intuition, a startup training AI agents on video game footage, raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation Thursday, bringing total funding to $454 million. The company uses hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay from Medal—a video clip sharing platform—to teach its model spatial-temporal reasoning: how to navigate space and time. The same AI driving its video game agent also powers a quadrupedal robot, demonstrating the potential for game-derived intelligence to operate physical systems. The round was backed by Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Khosla Ventures, and General Catalyst.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Unconventional AI Releases First Model, Claims Oscillator Architecture Cuts Inference Power by 1,000x
Unconventional AI, founded by Naveen Rao—former head of AI at Databricks—released Un-0 Thursday, its first model: an image-generation system that demonstrates its oscillator-based computer architecture in action. Unlike standard silicon AI chips, Unconventional's approach uses oscillating circuits that the company says will cut inference power consumption by up to 1,000 times over conventional hardware. Un-0 currently runs on a software simulation of those future chips, with actual hardware schematics scheduled for release soon. The company raised $475 million in seed funding last December and aims to rebuild the AI inference stack from scratch.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Amazon Will Invest $13B More in India AI and Cloud Through 2030, Its Third Major Pledge in Three Years
Amazon will invest an additional $13 billion to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in India through 2030, CEO Andy Jassy announced Thursday after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. Funds will expand Amazon Web Services data center capacity in Mumbai and Hyderabad. The commitment marks Amazon's third major India pledge in three years: the company previously announced $15 billion in 2023—including $12.7 billion through AWS—and more than $35 billion in December 2025. The latest announcement was made during Jassy's visit to New Delhi to meet with government officials.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Adobe Acquires Emmy-Winning Topaz Labs to Bring AI Video Upscaling and Image Enhancement In-House
Adobe is acquiring Topaz Labs, a maker of AI models for video and image enhancement, and will integrate the company into its creative software business. Topaz Labs has operated for more than two decades and produces two flagship AI products: Astra for video upscaling and Wonder for image retouching. The company won an Emmy last year for its production technology. Adobe, which already bundles some Topaz tools in Creative Cloud, plans to fold Topaz's AI models into its Firefly app and other editing suites. The deal closes in the second half of 2026 and aims to keep Adobe's users from migrating to rival software.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Claude's Paying Consumer Base Up 75% Since January, Conversion Rate Leads the Field at 13%
Anthropic's Claude is gaining on ChatGPT in the paid consumer market, with paying users up roughly 75 percent since January 2026, according to a new TechCrunch analysis of payment data. The analysis covers weekly transactions through May 10, 2026, and found that 13 percent of Claude users have converted to paid subscriptions—a rate that leads the field. Claude has been gaining on ChatGPT in both consumer awareness and dollars collected from consumers, though OpenAI's platform still commands the largest overall user base. ChatGPT's market share slipped below 50 percent for the first time in June, with users migrating to Claude, Gemini, and Grok.
Sources: TechCrunch Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Shanghai AI Lab's Self-Harness Framework Lets Agents Rewrite Their Own Rules, Boosting Performance Up to 60%
Researchers at the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have introduced Self-Harness, a framework that lets AI agents systematically improve their own operating rules by examining their execution traces. Traditional AI agent harnesses—the code scaffolding that provides context and enables agents to interact with their environment—have been tuned through manual, ad hoc debugging. Self-Harness replaces this with an empirical process: the agent analyzes where it fails, then rewrites the rules that govern its behavior. In tests on held-out tasks, performance improved between 33 and 60 percent relative to baseline across different AI models tested.
Sources: VentureBeat Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Tech Pulse
Top Frontier Models (SWE-bench Verified): GPT-5.5 (88.7%) | Claude Opus 4.7 (87.6%) | GPT-5.3-Codex (85.0%)
Top Open Source Models (SWE-bench Verified): DeepSeek V4 (80.6%) | MiniMax M2.5 (80.2%) | GLM-5 (77.8%)
Top Small Models (15–50B, MMLU): Gemma 3 27B (78.6%) | Qwen2.5-32B (69.7%) | Phi-4 14B (67.8%)
Top Edge Models (0–15B, GSM8K): Phi-4-Mini 3.8B (88.6%) | Gemma 3 4B | Qwen3.5-9B
AI Leaders: NVIDIA $5.05T | Alphabet $4.63T | Microsoft $3.11T
Robotics Leaders: Intuitive Surgical $146B | FANUC $35B | Agility Robotics $2.1B (private est.)
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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