The Amped Journal

Google DeepMind said it is partnering with Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI drug-discovery spinoff, to outline a joint approach to "bioresilience" - using frontier AI to build proactive defenses for global health as the biosecurity landscape evolves rapidly. The companies framed the effort as preparing for future outbreaks rather than reacting to them.

Naval Ravikant, the AngelList co-founder and investor, said his team at Impossible Research built an agent harness that plays games, writes code, and reasons "like a physicist" - and that it saturated the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark, a widely watched test of general reasoning ability in AI agents.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Thursday the company "did not have our best last 12 months ever," calling it mostly his own fault, but predicted OpenAI is "about to have our best 12 months to date." Altman said the team is "doing amazing work" and users will be happy with what's coming, though he gave no specifics.

OpenAI added two features to Codex, its coding agent: PR Chat, which lets developers ask Codex questions about a specific pull request in context, and inline code editing, which lets developers send review feedback directly to Codex, inspect the proposed patch, and edit, accept or reject it - all without leaving the app.

Nat Friedman, the former GitHub CEO who backs the Vesuvius Challenge, said the AI-assisted project to read carbonized ancient scrolls from Herculaneum has quietly made major progress, including reading a full scroll and developing a new "unwrapping" algorithm. The project just launched a $1 million grand prize for reading one of its scanned scrolls, plus ten $50,000 prizes.

Nikita Bier, X's head of product, said users can now pin a custom AI-focused timeline that is personalized and ranked by Grok, xAI's chatbot, specifically to track the latest AI model releases as they happen.

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch announced the company is hiring Pete Hunt, an early React pioneer at Meta who helped power Instagram's web app on the framework, alongside Nick Schrock - both described as "legends of developer tools" joining Vercel's team.

Figma rolled out new capabilities letting users copy code-backed screens built with its "Make" AI tool and paste them onto the canvas as fully editable design layers, including variables. A companion Chrome extension can capture any live webpage as editable Figma layers, and a Figma MCP server can generate a design directly from a prompt.

Indie developer Pieter Levels said that after Anthropic's Claude Code kept auto-switching him off its Fable model, he moved to Opus - and is now getting blocked there as well. He said he hit an "Opus 4.8 has safety measures that flagged this message" API error while reverse-engineering old Windows XP applications, like a 2003-era Yahoo! Messenger client, for a browser-based emulator project.

Developer Simon Willison flagged that Turso, a database platform, is expanding beyond its SQLite roots to become a foundation that multiple database-compatibility layers can be built on top of - a move he said makes the project "a whole lot more interesting."

The Trump administration is reviving a rule that could deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits, the Associated Press reported Thursday. The policy echoes a "public charge" rule from Trump's first term that expanded the range of benefits programs weighed against green card applicants.

President Trump accused television networks of engaging in a "plot" after they declined to air his speech on election security, according to Reuters. Legal experts cited by the outlet noted that networks have First Amendment rights to decide what they broadcast, pushing back on the president's characterization.

A Navy Blue Angels jet flew low enough over a crowded beach in Pensacola, Florida on Wednesday that chairs and tents went flying, according to video released by the Associated Press. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sticking to his push encouraging low-altitude military flyovers despite the incident.

Japan's parliament passed a law enshrining a male-only succession rule for the imperial throne, the Associated Press reported, a move critics say could doom the country's already-shrinking imperial family given the lack of male heirs in the current generation.

North Carolina Ports plans to use a $9.8 million federal BUILD grant to build a new off-terminal access and parking facility, plus a pedestrian bridge and shuttle connections, at the Port of Wilmington. The grant is part of $1.73 billion USDOT awarded nationwide across 127 projects. The full project costs $12.4 million, with NC Ports covering $2.6 million, and is expected to finish in 2028.

Leaders from Atrium Health, Novant Health and UNC Health, along with UNCW Chancellor Aswani Volety and Chamber CEO Natalie English, discussed the region's healthcare growth at the Greater Wilmington Business Journal's Power Breakfast. All three systems submitted competing Certificate of Need applications in June to build new hospitals in New Hanover County, responding to a 2026 state plan that identified a need for 225 additional inpatient beds.

The New Hanover County Airport Authority welcomed new board member Brian Eckel, co-founder of Cape Fear Holdings, at its July 9 meeting. The authority also elected officers for the coming fiscal year: Jason Thompson as chair, Faison Gibson (reappointed to a second term) as vice chair, and Wanda Copley as secretary.

UNCW's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship will host an Ocean Innovation Conference on Sept. 29, running 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Burney Center, with a keynote yet to be announced. This week's 1 Million Cups Wilmington, the CIE's weekly pitch forum, featured presenters Momnt Mugs and Jupiter AI.