September 2026
All columns and Brief analyses.
10 results
OpenAI Academy splits AI practice into four role-based paths
OpenAI Academy now assigns distinct course sequences to workplace users, software teams, organizational decision makers, and people in education. The courses move from instructions, context, and response review to agent delegation, product development, adoption planning, and classroom work. Learners receive a course badge after passing an assessment, while organizations can combine paths in their own training programs.
OpenAI engineer maps four controls for production agents
In a newly published InfoQ talk, OpenAI engineer Vinoth Govindarajan argues that reliable production agents need explicit ownership of durable state, one ordered path for mutations, bounded authority for tools, and proof at the user-visible edge. His examples show how a coherent reply can conceal incomplete durable memory and leave later turns with partial context.
Pakistan and Afghanistan give rival accounts of airstrikes
Pakistan says it hit militant sites, while authorities report civilian deaths and injuries; neither side's battlefield account is independently verified and the casualty accounts remain attributed claims.
Paramount settles with 12 states, moving Warner Bros. acquisition closer to completion
Paramount and 12 US states settled the antitrust lawsuit blocking its Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition. The agreement requires independent editorial boards for CBS and CNN, domestic production spending and penalties if cinema release commitments are missed. A federal judge must still approve the settlement before the legal obstacle is removed.
Qwen-Image-2.1 ships as open weights under a research licence
The Decoder said Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen-Image-2.1 on 20 September with a 7 billion-parameter visual generator, RGBA editing, up to ten reference images, and a research licence that bars commercial use. AI Weekly, timestamped the same afternoon, reported the Hugging Face and ModelScope push and the move off Apache 2.0.
Seven Ethiopian armed groups announce an anti-government alliance
Al Jazeera and Arab News, the latter quoting AFP, reported that seven Ethiopian armed groups said on Sunday they had formed an alliance against the federal government. The named line-ups overlap on Tigray and Fano forces and then diverge. Addis Ababa had not answered AFP when Arab News filed.
Seven of nine planetary boundaries are now outside the safe operating space
The 2026 Planetary Health Check assessed seven of nine Earth-system boundaries as outside the safe operating space, with pressure increasing across all seven. The 120-page scientific assessment tracks each process with control variables and does not assign a single collapse date. Ozone depletion and atmospheric aerosol loading remain within the safe range.
Sidra marked World Alzheimer's Day with a hippocampal polygenic model
Qatar Tribune's 21 September Doha note said Sidra Medicine highlighted a Genome Medicine article on multi-threshold polygenic risk and hippocampal cognitive-decline prediction, led by Mohamed Janahi with UCL colleagues. Janahi said the work does not diagnose Alzheimer's disease.
Société Générale targets 13-14 per cent return with costs below 16.3 billion euros
Société Générale aims to lift its return on tangible equity to 13-14 per cent in 2029 while keeping total costs below 16.3 billion euros. The roadmap targets average annual revenue growth of 3 per cent and 1.9 billion euros of gross savings. From 2030, the bank wants returns above 15 per cent and BoursoBank to reach 14 million customers.
Spain sets a 12-month IA360 roadmap
Spain's government presented IA360 as a 12-month roadmap for responsible AI deployment. The proposal combines governance, skills and technical capacity, while planned measures remain future commitments.