Simon Willison presented a closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, where he showcased a pixel‑art animation of kakapo parrots celebrating a record‑breaking breeding season in 2026. He used Claude Opus 5.5 to generate the animation from Google‑searched kakapo photos, then employed Claude Code with Playwright to record a 15‑second video of the animated HTML5 canvas, which he embedded in his Keynote slide.
The California Brown Pelican has taken over the Pacifica Pier in San Mateo County, CA, after the pier was shut down in early June due to a cracked concrete walkway that made it unsafe for public access. The pelicans have occupied the area, effectively replacing human use of the pier. The incident highlights how wildlife can quickly reclaim abandoned or unsafe human structures.
Posted by Yossi Matias, VP Engineering & Research, and Grey Nearing, Research Scientist, Google Research Floods are the most common natural disaster , and are responsible for roughly $50 billion in annual financial damages worldwide. The rate of flood-related disasters has more than doubled since the year 2000 partly due to climate change .
By Google AI
Simon Willison quotes Jakub Pachocki, Chief Scientist at OpenAI, arguing that the strongest reason to rapidly train smarter AI models is the necessity of building defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI. Pachocki stresses that powerful, aligned AI will be essential for securing infrastructure, protecting against rogue agents in real time, and inventing new protective measures, making this a primary focus of OpenAI’s deployment efforts. He cautions that the urgency of progress should not justify reckless behavior, noting that the seriousness of the stakes makes a reckless race forward absurd.
Qwen 3. 8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index That's the same score as GPT-5.
arXiv:2608. 16645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can a language model recover the true research idea of a published paper when given only that paper's pre-publication bibliography?
By Shaolong Chen, Yanlin Fei, Nazhou Liu, Xinmiao Yu, Lei Li, Rahul Thapa, Madalina Ciobanu, Qingqing Mao, Ritankar Das