OpenAI shelves GPT-6.1 Astra over safety failures

A joint IDC and Lenovo study finds 88% of AI proof-of-concept projects fail to reach production, citing unclear objectives, unprepared data, and thin in-house agentic AI expertise. The gap splits build and run teams.

Day 2 at San Francisco's Moscone West spans AI, robotics, AI hardware, public safety and venture, with speakers from Nvidia, Waabi, Flock Safety and Ricursive Intelligence plus Benchmark's full partnership. The event runs October 13-15 with 10,000+ attendees, 250+ speakers across 200+ sessions and 300+ startups in the Expo Hall.

Newsletter cites David Robinson resigning to blow the whistle at OpenAI and OpenAI firing three safety researchers, plus misalignment reports from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Mowshowitz says Anthropic's safety culture is stronger but still insufficient, and points to Google and Meta releases Argon and Wonder.

Bruce Schneier responds to Matthew Green's pessimistic series on AI systems vastly outperforming humans at cryptanalysis of symmetric and public-key ciphers, saying he is more optimistic and has stronger faith in cryptographers' over-engineering. He says he is writing up a more detailed argument.

Stripe Vice Chair Eileen O'Mara said agentic commerce could reshape payments, speaking at the International AI Summit in Dublin. She also addressed Europe's push to help startups scale and the surge of AI-powered businesses.

A r/StableDiffusion user built a simple tool that turns a rough sketch into a prompt and then an image using Krea 2, posting the sketch, prompt, and resulting photorealistic landscape. The prompt described a wide-angle photorealistic landscape photograph.