A Fields Medalist bets his career on AI safety — Aug 3
August 3, 2026 · 4 min
A Fields Medalist takes leave from academia to work on AI safety at OpenAI, one day after Astra's machine-verified math proofs, while Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max finally gets outside benchmark numbers two weeks after shipping with none. Google quietly kills its AI Studio mobile app in favor of building apps straight out of Gemini conversations, and a maximum-severity vulnerability in the open-source Ruflo agent platform shows the same harness memory that makes agents sticky can also be hijacked with one unauthenticated request. Plus: an arxiv paper finds AI-migrated COBOL passes its checks while still shipping new bugs.