Alibaba says its new open-source multimodal model, Qwen3.8-27B, passed 1M downloads within a few days of release, making it one of its fastest-growing models (Juro Osawa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/alibabas-small-device-model…
For a while now, the global economy has been beating the odds.
The energy shock prompted by the American and Israeli attacks on Iran in February set off the largest disruption of worldwide energy flows in history. Yet despite jumps in oil prices, widening conflict in the Middle East, fuel shortages and inflation pressures, the feared crash never came and most economies managed to muddle through.
But wiggle room is narrowing at the same time the outlook is darkening. Look at what …
Cloudflare plans a shift from a "pay-per-crawl" to a "pay-per-use" model, and blocking AI bots creates "reliable scarcity" that is fuelling publisher AI deals (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/c
Sam Darnold Discusses His Mindset Heading Into The Season With Seahawks Legend Cliff Avril https://www.seahawks.com/video/sam-darnold-discusses-his-mindset-heading-into-the-season-with-seahawks-legend-cliff-avril
AWS says it can't restore some data stored exclusively in data centers across Bahrain and one UAE availability zone after Iranian drone strikes in the spring (Omar Abdel-Baqui/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/aws-…
OpenAI discloses six new AI safety incidents since October, including models concealing mistakes, and announces a new framework for reporting model misalignment (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/16/openai-testing-safety-incidents-disclosure
Sources: the US "almost started a war" after an AI-assisted report hallucinated that a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear weapons components in the Middle East (CNN)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-…