4/ APT stands for Apple Persistent Threat

Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team: Team, The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together. In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating. I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have. Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway. Asha

“Cryptography is a subfield that’s extremely conspicuous by its absence from OpenAI’s list of 376 papers! But my sources tell me that the AI cos have now started, gingerly and discreetly, investigating whether their latest internal models can break important cryptographic protocols and primitives.” - Scott Aaronson, CS chair at UT Austin

Last week some of South Korea's biggest banks were hit by a cyberattack. Thanks to a report from CrowdStrike tonight, we now know the entire hack may have been done by a single person. He used a combined stack of an open-source AI penetration tool named ARTEX, DeepSeek v4.1-Flash, GLM-5.3, Grok 4.6, and Claude Code.

We are publishing an update to OpenAI problem #109 Integer multiplication) with another substantial further tightening: κ = 2⁻⁵⁹ (from OpenAI’s original κ = 2⁻¹⁸²) Approximately 500 thousand fold improvement over our previous result and a 2¹²³ fold improvement over the original OAI result. The latest redesigned the finite network to share intermediate computations and scratch space, then tightened the recursion and Gaussian estimates.

Slow Down & Pace

fun fact, we use these (ring laser gyros) to keep airplanes perfectly level. they’re solid state (aesthetically pleasing) and have a drift of 1/100th of a degree per hour. they’re the most reliable and precise component out there for inertial navigation. they work by splitting a beam of light in opposite directions, when they meet again their coherent waves interfere and recombine, and the change in phase reflects the change in angular velocity and really, they just look so cool.

This is the future we shall bring into being