ZeroSlop — September 16, 2026
Today: AEO startup Profound hits unicorn valuation, raises…; Discover how to take your startup from prototype to…; ‘If you’re building Frankenstein, stop’: JD Vance…
12 stories worth knowing about today — AI breakthroughs, launches, and innovations making a difference.
1. AEO startup Profound hits unicorn valuation, raises $180M Series D 7 months after last round
TechCrunch AI
Profound has raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, less than seven months after it raised a $96 million Series C….
2. Discover how to take your startup from prototype to production at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
TechCrunch AI
Learn how to scale your startup breakthrough from prototype to production at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 with scaling leaders, Adrian Macneil (Foxglove), John Mackey (MBRYONICS), and Boris Sofman (Bedrock Robotics). Register before September 25 to save up to $200 on your pass….
3. ‘If you’re building Frankenstein, stop’: JD Vance dismisses calls for AI regulation
The Guardian Tech
US vice-president’s comments come as former Anthropic researcher revisits recent claim AI could destroy humanity The US vice-president has dismissed calls for global regulation of AI safety risks, telling companies creating the most advanced models: “If you’re building Frankenstein, stop.” In remark…
4. Nums AI Releases Causilo: A Tabular Foundation Model That Tops TabArena Among Single Models
MarkTechPost
Nums AI has released Causilo, a pretrained tabular foundation model for classification and regression with a scikit-learn interface. It posts the top TabArena Elo among single models, ahead of Google’s TabFM and LG’s EXAONE Tabular. The code is Apache-2.0, while weights are licensed for non-commerci…
5. OrchSLM: Probing the Dynamics of Small Language Model Orchestration
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.13470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, their reliance on cloud-scale infrastructure poses fundamental challenges for deployment in agentic pipelines, including latency, privacy, connectivity, and substantial c…
6. Grounded Adjudication of Variations across Extracted TimeLines (GAVEL): Comparing Clinical Timelines Against Their Case Reports
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.13475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing pipelines for clinical timeline extraction from case reports are evaluated using an expert reference and are limited by imperfect reference annotations and imprecise event alignment. We developed GAVEL, an LLM judge protocol that compares two…
7. Token Efficient Task Execution via Application Behavior Modeling for Web Agents
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.13491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The strong performance of AI Agents across an impressive variety of tasks is driving an unprecedented investment in agentic infrastructures, however the cost of processing tokens is fast increasing. Web agents automate the execution of web-application…
8. Safety as a Constraint: Fine-Tuning a LLM Recommender to Explain Itself
arXiv CS.AI
arXiv:2609.13657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional recommender systems are typically trained to predict what item users will interact with next, but not why. However, offering personalized evidence for why a user might like the predicted item is an important way to enhance the service and …
9. Gemini Live audio
Simon Willison
Tool: Gemini Live audio Google released Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking today - two new speech-to-speech models that are a similar shape to OpenAI’s GPT-Live family. I pointed GPT-6 Astra Extra High at the documentation and had it build me this web UI for trying out the new models. Yo…
10. Meta now lets AI agents handle the boring parts of WhatsApp Business setup
TechCrunch AI
A new WhatsApp Business MCP server lets developers use AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Codex, and ChatGPT to handle setup, messaging templates, testing, and troubleshooting….
11. China’s open-weight AI models are now just 4 months behind frontier US offerings, Mozilla report claims — models still lag in some benchmarks but are drastically cheaper to use
Tom’s Hardware
Mozilla’s State of Open Source AI report puts Kimi K3 about four months behind closed frontier models at 30% of the price….
12. Perplexity’s local AI agent comes to Windows, but only for RTX GPUs with at least 24GB of VRAM — Portable Computer brings AI for multistep tasks to compatible PCs
Tom’s Hardware
Perplexity and Nvidia released Portable Computer for Windows on Sept. 14, bringing the local-first AI agent to GeForce RTX and RTX PRO GPUs with 24GB or more of VRAM….