Issue #043 — 2026-10-05

An Arizona appeals court threw out a road-rage killer's 10.5-year sentence because the judge said he "loved" an AI video of the dead victim, NBC News reports. The video, made by the victim's sister, had a copy of Christopher Pelkey's face and voice forgive the man who shot him. The court called it "fundamentally unfair" and ordered a new sentencing.

Figure AI had its retired F.02 humanoid robots jump one by one into a 75-ton furnace of molten steel in Finland, per Tom's Hardware and Electrek. Figure says no US or Mexican foundry would take robots with lithium batteries. It trained a new AI model on stunt-performer motion capture so they could land the jump.

SentinelOne engineer Carter Church used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra to read an unsolved French cipher from 1809 in about six hours, per Tom's Hardware. The scan was a 1969 magazine plate with 24 rows of invented symbols. A fact-check blog says an earlier human key already covered about a third of it.

Florida's attorney general, James Uthmeier, asked a state judge to bar OpenAI from building new AI models without outside safety approval, per Extended Reach. The same motion would stop OpenAI from offering ChatGPT to minors. The judge has not granted it, and OpenAI disputes the state's claims.

Researchers at Sweden's Chalmers University built an AI scientist that makes its own hypotheses, runs the experiments on brewer's yeast through lab robots, and reads the results, per Scienmag citing the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The robot lab, called Eve, was first built for drug discovery. The system is reported to have made new findings with minimal human involvement.