Daily Brief

Google will let schools turn off its AI tools, but schools that restrict AI altogether will no longer be able to use Google Search. The company says AI features are now integrated into the search engine, so the two can't be separated. The NYT framed it as Google turning off search for schools that reject AI.

The paper "Sparks of Weight-Space Programming" (Takehi, Teoh, Zhang, Khattab) claims frontier models, notably GPT-6 Astra, can read and modify the raw weights of a machine learning model, given as a text dump of floating-point numbers. Simon Willison ran one of the paper's examples and got Qwen 3.8 27B on his laptop to do the same. A separate post by Honnibal calls the "Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen" claim misleading.

A poster says their company had disabled data sharing in Codex, and that they and their coworkers found "Improve the model for everyone" switched back on without anyone opting in. The poster admits it may be isolated and notes that similar reports have appeared before. This is a user report, not a confirmed OpenAI change.

OpenAI says ChatGPT and Codex are helping engineers speed up CAD, PCB design, simulation, and other physical-world engineering workflows. It is positioning its coding agent as a general engineering tool beyond software.

Google DeepMind shows Google Antigravity paired with its Cheminformatics Skills, used to accelerate drug-discovery workflows, search compounds, and propose novel rigidified macrocycles.

The study measures how durably undesired behaviors can be suppressed, testing both narrow-trigger and broad-trigger misalignments across training.