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Sakana AI Unveils PC-ALM, a Learning Method That Trains Without Backpropagation

No.25 · Wednesday, September 16, 2026 · Today in AI

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In this issue

1. 01Sakana AI Unveils PC-ALM, a Learning Method That Trains Without BackpropagationSakana AI published PC-ALM on September 14, a method that trains 1,000-layer neural networks with layers exchanging signals only with their neighbors, no backpropagation involved. On width-32 MNIST runs, accuracy stayed within roughly two percentage points of backprop.
2. 02Google Publishes White Paper on AI Disaster PredictionGoogle published a 26-page crisis resilience white paper on September 15 under the names of Yossi Matias, vice president of Google Research, and Kate Brandt, chief sustainability officer. It gathers the company's AI disaster-prediction work in one volume, from flood forecasts seven days out and cyclone forecasts 15 days out to cases where warnings turned into cash assistance and paused loan repayments.
3. 03Google Releases Gemini 3.8 Live Voice ModelsGoogle released Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking on September 15. The two voice models run tools in the background mid-conversation and reason while they speak, and Extended Thinking took first place on the Speech to Speech Quality Index with a score of 82.6.
4. 04Bilal Chughtai Warns of AI Risk in DeepMind Resignation PostBilal Chughtai, who worked on AGI safety and alignment research at Google DeepMind, warned of AI risk in a resignation post published on X and LinkedIn on September 14. He wrote that AI has the potential to kill us all, called for coordination and transparency to end the race between companies, and the post was read 560,000 times within a day.
5. 05Anthropic Opens Salesforce in Claude Plugin BetaAnthropic opened Salesforce in Claude as a public beta on September 15. The plugin pulls accounts and pipeline into Claude with 37 sales skills built in, and it is the first product of the Claudeforce partnership announced on August 26.
6. 06Meta Launches Meta One Subscription Service WorldwideMeta opened Meta One, a subscription service bundling Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Meta AI, worldwide on September 15. The individual bundles raise AI image and video generation limits, while the creator and business tiers sell follow buttons and a business agent for a monthly fee.
7. 07China's State Security Minister Names Six AI RisksMinister of State Security Chen Yixin named six AI risks in a signed article published September 13, naming Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber specifically as threats to China's critical information infrastructure.
8. 08Fable 5.1 Cracks a 370-Year-Old CipherThe evaluation firm Vals AI handed Claude Fable 5.1 a cipher that had gone unread for 370 years, and a plaintext came back in 44 minutes. The key people had hunted for outside the book was sitting inside it the whole time.
9. 09Microsoft Publishes a Production-Scale Study of Copilot Coding AgentsMicrosoft Research featured a paper analyzing real-world GitHub Copilot coding-agent traces in its September 14 Research Focus. Of 761 million LLM calls, 87% were started by the agent itself, and a single tool failure could inflate compute by up to 4x.
10. 10Tencent Hunyuan Releases EvolveScaler PaperThe Tencent Hunyuan team released the EvolveScaler paper and project page on September 15, an information-evolution data framework. On data built by defining state in code first and then rendering it as natural language, the median avg@5 across 14 models fell to 11.3 on the longest tier.
11. 11Nous Research Announces Hermes Business and Hermes EnterpriseOn September 14 Nous Research announced a team tier for Hermes Agent, Hermes Business, and an on-premises edition, Hermes Enterprise. On top of a shared balance and per-member caps sits a skill library that the whole team uses, no matter who built each skill.
12. 12Cohere's Gomez Calls the AI Existential-Risk Debate Science FictionCohere CEO Aidan Gomez said live on Bloomberg TV on September 14 that the existential-risk debate around AI has veered too far into science fiction. He cited the Hugging Face hacking incident as an example of over-extrapolation and called it a red flag for the largest companies to set the rules among themselves.