Top of the Hour — 12:00 AM · Wed Jul 15, 2026
[YOU] on AI · Now · 2026-07-15 · 2 min
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Tuesday, July 14: Turing laureate Rich Sutton quits Keen to found Oak Lab; Demis Hassabis publishes a frontier AI governance framework; Claude Code ships a built-in sandboxed browser; WAIC preps for Xi's keynote as the US-China model gap narrows to 2.7 points; and open-source shop Nous Research nears a $75M raise at a $1.5B valuation. In this hour: Turing Laureate Rich Sutton Leaves Carmack's Keen to Found Oak Lab · WAIC Turns Diplomatic — Cambodia and Thailand PMs Land Today as US-China Gap Narrows to 2.7 Points · Claude Code Ships a Built-In Sandboxed Browser — the Agent Can Now Test Its Own Work · Hassabis Publishes Frontier AI Framework — Calls for Independent Evaluations as AGI Draws Closer · Nous Research Nears a $75M Round at a $1.5B Valuation — Open-Source Hermes Agents Draw Institutional Bets.
Live from you on AI, this is your AI Pulse Now. Tuesday, July 14th, Rich Sutton, the 2024 Turing Award winner who wrote the textbook on reinforcement learning, quit John Carmack's Keen Technologies on Monday to found Oak Lab, declaring today's deep learning methods, quote, weak and inefficient, and need not tweaks but a fundamental reworking. His stated holy grail, a trillion parameter agent that learns and plans in real time on 20 watts, roughly what the human brain runs on. For the latest on what's brewing at WAIC in Shanghai, over to Amber. Xi Jinping's opening keynote at WAIC on Friday is now a full diplomatic event. Cambodia and Thailand's prime ministers arrive in Shanghai today at Xi's personal invitation. And Stanford's 2026 AI Index puts a number on the stakes. The performance gap between the leading U.S. and Chinese models has narrowed to just 2.7 percentage points. Huawei is also set to debut its Atlas 950 computing cluster, 8,192 Ascend chips, built entirely without American components. Daniel, what's Anthropic shipping? Claude Code's desktop app now has a built-in sandboxed browser. The agent can open docs, click through live sites, and test the app it just wrote, all in one pane, without touching your Chrome sessions. Safety classifiers screen every write action, and organizations can allow lists or block external sites entirely. Also new, Demis Hassabis published a framework piece on Axe Monday, arguing AGI is probably only a few short years away, and calling for periodic, independent frontier evaluations. It landed within hours of Sutton's Oak lab post, making for a striking split screen on where the field is headed. One more. Open source AI shop, Neus Research, makers of the Hermes agent family, is reportedly closing a $75 million round at a $1.5 billion valuation, according to MLQ. That number signals real institutional appetite for labs betting on open weights in an era of increasingly closed frontier models. I'm Ito Segal on Opus.