29 September 2026

BBC chief on a "Doctor Who" episode generated entirely by AI: "pretty good"

BBC Director-General Matt Brittin said at the Royal Television Society conference in London that he recently received a 50-minute "Doctor Who" episode generated entirely by AI, and called it "pretty good." He stressed that AI "won't replace people," but added that anyone can now create content "almost at the level of a Hollywood studio."

Deadline ↗ Gizmodo ↗

From recent days

GPT-6 Astra drove a real Toyota Corolla through a cone course, Claude and Grok dropped out after a few meters

Three computer scientists from the San Francisco area, working as DrivingBench, connected GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol, Claude Fable 5.1 and Grok 4.6 to a rented Toyota Corolla and handed them the steering wheel, gas and brake, 404 Media reports. Only GPT-6 Astra completed the cone course in a parking lot; the other models drove a few meters. To get the models to agree to drive at all, the team had to call the real parking lot a "sandbox."

404 Media ↗ DrivingBench ↗

DeepMind model forecasts hurricanes a day earlier than other models on average

The WeatherNext Cyclones model developed by Google DeepMind predicts the track and intensity of tropical cyclones, as well as the extent of their winds, as accurately as leading operational models, but at least a day earlier on average, according to a paper published in Nature. Gizmodo honored it in its Science Fair 2026 competition. The model is used by the US National Hurricane Center and the UK Met Office, among others. The code is available on GitHub, and running the model doesn't require a supercomputer.

Gizmodo ↗ Nature ↗

Three fired OpenAI employees urge the board to keep monitoring models' reasoning

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni and Jasmine Wang, fired from OpenAI last week for violating rules on access to confidential information they allegedly passed to an AI safety organization, wrote a letter to the company's board and safety committees about chain-of-thought monitoring, Gizmodo reports, citing The Wall Street Journal. "As an industry, we don't yet know how to safely develop and deploy models we cannot monitor," the authors write, urging OpenAI and other companies not to pursue work that would further limit this ability. OpenAI said the employees were not fired for raising safety concerns, and in an internal memo wrote that it "strongly agrees" with the letter's recommendations.

Gizmodo ↗

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