Flash News

TREE NEWS update: xAI launched Grok 4.7, a new AI model the company says is a “notable improvement” over Grok 4.6 and is priced the same as its predecessor. Benchmarks cited in the material place the model in second place. The release arrives later than rivals’ frontier models.

TREE NEWS update: Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng is leading a delegation to the US from Sept 19 to 23, with the first round of high-level trade talks held on the morning of Sept 20 at JPMorgan’s New York headquarters, led on the US side by Treasury Secretary Bessent and Trade Representative Greer. Washington has confirmed a White House state dinner for China’s leader on Sept 24. Talks cover AI export controls, the tariff truce expiring Nov 10, and rare earth supply chains.

TREE NEWS reports: S&P Global Ratings said in a report on Monday that banks’ use of artificial intelligence will increasingly affect their credit ratings in the coming years. Whether banks ultimately benefit or are hurt will depend on the maturity of their AI strategies and the strength of their governance frameworks, the rating agency said. S&P noted that banks differ in the pace of AI adoption, governance maturity and operational readiness.

TREE NEWS reports: Legal AI startup Harvey, valued at $15.6 billion, is re-examining its reliance on AI giants as the cost of training and running models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 keeps climbing. The company built its business around using those models to perform specialized legal work for lawyers. Mounting AI costs have prompted the firm to look at open-source alternatives.

TREE NEWS update: Bank of England Deputy Governor Sarah Breeden said financial regulators are running out of time to address the risk of a market crash triggered by autonomous AI agents. Speaking Monday, she said the BoE is studying and testing “kill switches” to prevent AI from causing chaos in financial markets, but stressed officials do not yet know how such a mechanism would work in practice.

TREE NEWS update: xAI announced the release of Grok 4.7, a larger base model trained with longer reinforcement learning runs aimed at complex, long-horizon tasks, strengthening coding, long-context and self-verification capabilities. The model is now available on Cursor, Grok Build and the API, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. xAI says Grok 4.7 shows clear gains over Grok 4.6 on several coding, office and safety benchmarks.

TREE NEWS update: US President Donald Trump said he will only encourage AI and reiterated that AI doomsday warnings are a “scam.” He added that the administration will proceed cautiously and impose constraints if necessary. Trump gave no further details on what those constraints would entail.

TREE NEWS update: SpaceXAI released Grok 4.7, an AI model it says is twice as fast as comparable products and priced at half the cost. The model is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Grok 4.7 is now available through Cursor, Grok Build, the API, third-party frameworks and major cloud platforms.

TREE NEWS reports: AI code-generation tools have pushed the number of new apps on iOS, Android and Chrome to two to four times previous levels, while downloads and user ratings have stayed roughly flat, a16z says. The share of apps clearing a basic success threshold of at least 10 ratings and 100 downloads has fallen sharply, a phenomenon the authors call “App-Slop.” US app revenue grew only about 2% over the past 18 months, while usage time rose 7%.

TREE NEWS update: Bank of England Deputy Governor Breeden said humans face clear difficulties supervising autonomous AI in real time, with the key question being whether existing regulatory frameworks can adequately address the new risks AI creates. He said the central bank needs to act quickly on financial stability, assessing and adjusting the supervisory system to guard against AI’s potential amplification effects and systemic risk in the financial system.

TREE NEWS reports: AMD shares rose more than 9% intraday on Monday, hitting a record high of $613.92 and pushing the chipmaker’s market capitalization above $1 trillion for the first time. AMD becomes the fourth US chipmaker to reach that level, after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron. Chip stocks broadly advanced during the US session on continued artificial-intelligence demand.

TREE NEWS update: The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Task Force has launched a public “Frontier Forum Series,” with its first session set for Oct 28 on artificial intelligence and agentic finance. CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said the agency will engage directly with builders, users and researchers of the technology. The public may nominate speakers; in-person attendance may be limited and subject to security vetting.

TREE NEWS reports: OpenAI is developing new features to compete with Grok Bot and is considering how to respond to Meta’s Muse, The Information reported on September 21. The report gives no further detail on the features or the timing of any response. Neither Grok Bot nor Muse has been publicly detailed by OpenAI, xAI or Meta.

TREE NEWS reports: OpenAI and Anthropic discussed signing a legally binding agreement under which each would stress-test the other’s AI models to identify potential safety risks, but no deal has been reached. The talks took place before a recent string of cybersecurity incidents and industry warnings about AI risk.

TREE NEWS update: Vitalik Buterin said high school math should sharply reduce trigonometry and replace it with basic calculus and some multivariable calculus, arguing the material builds intuition for linear and nonlinear systems and higher-dimensional space. In a reply on September 21, the Ethereum co-founder said such courses would support AI, economics, cryptography and biomedicine without being tied to any one field, and that he has almost never used identities like tan(2x) in real life.

TREE NEWS update: Baidu founder Robin Li appeared at the company’s autumn carnival and annual Top Prize award ceremony on Tuesday, where he presented the awards and toured an internal AI exhibition. He also tried the Heming Music AI Agent on site, picking up a guitar to play along with it.

TREE NEWS update: Unitree Robotics released the Dex5-S dexterous hand on September 21, built at a 1:1 scale to a human hand. All 22 joints support smooth backdriving, and each joint carries its own peak impact-torque protection. The company did not disclose pricing or availability details.

TREE NEWS update: Wuyan Intelligence and auto thermal-management maker Falada Group signed a memorandum of understanding on September 21, 2026 to run proof-of-concept trials of a “physical AI brain” at flexible manufacturing workstations. Falada carries more than 18,000 SKUs, and its high-frequency line changeovers and non-standard tasks are cited as typical pain points for AI deployment. The tie-up covers application validation and rollout.

TREE NEWS update: Huawei Cloud upgraded its CodeArts coding agent for HarmonyOS developers, launching three core capabilities: a HarmonyOS coding large model, a CodeArts HarmonyOS agent, and a HarmonyOS developer practice center. The company describes it as the world’s first and only AI coding agent built specifically for the HarmonyOS ecosystem.

TREE NEWS reports: ORBIO, the token of AI-credit marketplace Orbio, reached a market capitalization of roughly $90 million on September 21, 2026, up from about $82 million, roughly 20 days after launch. Orbio converts half of ORBIO trading fees into AI inference credits and issued CREDIT on September 16; about 354 million ORBIO, 37.26% of supply, is staked. Platform data shows about $159,500 in cumulative inference credits generated and 249,500 requests served.