Watching the videos of Ukrainian Morok drones heading toward Voronezh tonight reminded me how Ukraine and Russia have very different approaches to developing and producing drones.

When it comes to long-range drones, Russia's main focus is on a few core families, mostly Geran, which are constructed in large, state-directed complexes. Ukraine, on the other hand, fields many models from competing firms. This gives Ukraine a high resilience to enemy strikes, as there are many decentralized and redundant production lines, while Russia's centralized mass production excels at volume.

Here are some examples of Ukrainian long-range strike models:

FP-1 (Fire Point): Deep-strike OWA drone, up to ~1,600 km; Fire Point says it scaled production quickly across multiple covert sites.

UJ-26 “Bober/Beaver”: Long-range loitering munition, ~600–1,000 km, now with FPV-style manual control and thermal vision for terminal guidance.

AN-196 “Liutyi”: Shahed-class OWA drone used for refinery and deep rear targets; ~600–1,000 km class; payload reportedly 50–75 kg.

AQ-400 “Scythe” (Terminal Autonomy): “Cheap-and-many” plywood airframe aimed at ~750 km strikes; optimized for mass production.

UJ-25 “Skyline”: Jet-powered kamikaze UAV derived from a target drone; harder to intercept than prop-driven types.

UJ-22 “Airborne”: Long-range fixed-wing platform with up to ~800 km offline radius.

Morok: Long-range OWA drone, ~800 km with ~30 kg warhead.

“Peklo” rocket-drone: Cruise-missile–like drone, ~700 km class.

Zozulya (Warbirds of Ukraine): Newly announced deep-strike UAV with claimed 1,100–2,100 km range depending on payload.

The difference between Russia and Ukraine is even more pronounced when it comes to short- and medium-range drones. Ukraine is embracing a fast-iterating, market-based approach, with hundreds of domestic drone manufacturers competing on an "Amazon-style" marketplace. Military units can order whatever they want with minimal bureaucracy, using e-points earned through verifiable kills. This system codifies many models instead of selecting one winner. It allows units to buy from multiple suppliers, thereby accelerating the try-buy-scale loop.

This geographic and vendor dispersion raises Russia's cost to suppress output (there is no single "silver bullet" factory to hit), and the diversity of designs complicates enemy electronic warfare (EW) and intercept tactics.

Starlink satellites as seen by astronaut Don Pettit:

https://x.com/astro_Pettit/status/1975689151467938057

OpenAI has now signed $1T in compute deals with AMD, NVIDIA, and others: https://www.ft.com/content/5f6f78af-aed9-43a5-8e31-2df7851ceb67

- That's more than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of countries like Switzerland (about $937 billion).

- The International Space Station, one of the most expensive projects ever undertaken, cost about $150 billion to build. You could build more than six of them for $1 trillion.

- The Apollo Space Program, which put a man on the moon, cost about $25.4 billion at the time, which is over $260 billion in today's money. You could fund nearly four Apollo programs with $1 trillion.

- With $1 trillion, you could buy all the shares of ExxonMobil, McDonald's, and Coca-Cola combined and still have billions of dollars left over.

- If you were to spend $1 million every single day, it would take you over 2,700 years to spend $1 trillion.

- A stack of one trillion $1 bills would reach over 67,000 miles high, which is more than a quarter of the way to the moon.

According to Russian media reports, one of Novosibirsk's largest gas station chains has stopped selling 92-octane gasoline due to a "halt in shipments from refineries": https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/8099940

I wonder what happened? It's probably greedy capitalists trying to hike prices.

Meanwhile, the Korobkovsky gas processing plant and the LPDS 'Yefimovka' (a linear oil pumping station) in the Volgograd region started burning unexpectedly overnight. The fire can be seen from 55 kilometres away.

Probably an accident?

The Ural Turbine Plant in Yekaterinburg and JSC "Zavod Pripoev" (the "Solder Plant"), a Novosibirsk-based electronics and microchip production plant, also caught fire.

Bad luck!

Figure 03: The next generation humanoid robot.

Read more: https://www.figure.ai/news/introducing-figure-03

For years now, I've been looking for signs of nontrivial zero-shot transfer across seen embodiments. When I saw the Alohas unhang tools from a wall used only on our Frankas I knew we had it! Gemini Robotics 1.5 is the first VLA to achieve such transfer!!

— Konstantinos Bousmalis, Research Scientist at DeepMind, working on robotic learning

Links for 2025-10-09 [Part 1]

AI

1. MIT researchers model human behavior as scripts rather than complex reasoning MIT researchers developed ROTE, which treats everyday human actions like predictable code snippets—”wait for green light, then go”—instead of assuming complex decision-making, beating existing methods by 50%. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01272

2. Scientific Algorithm Discovery by Augmenting AlphaEvolve with Deep Research https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06056

3. MoEs Are Stronger than You Think: Hyper-Parallel Inference Scaling with RoE https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17238

4. Reverse-engineering a model that successfully learns multiplication via implicit chain-of-thought https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.00184

5. Selective Underfitting in Diffusion Models https://selective-underfitting.github.io/

6. Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/gemini-computer-use-model/

7. AI breakthrough helps astronomers spot cosmic events with just a handful of examples https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-10-08-ai-breakthrough-helps-astronomers-spot-cosmic-events-just-handful-examples

8. AI will become the operating system https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCEmiRjPEtQ

9. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said the money the bank has poured into AI has already begun paying for itself. The company invests about $2 billion a year in AI, but has reduced headcount and improved efficiency to save at least the same amount, Dimon told Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-07/jpmorgan-s-dimon-says-ai-cost-savings-now-matching-money-spent [no paywall: https://archive.is/J5CVb]

10. Lufthansa to shed 4,000 jobs with help from AI https://www.dw.com/en/lufthansa-to-shed-4000-jobs-with-help-from-ai/a-74173278

11. AI can now do math. But can it ask good questions? - Ken Ono https://epochai.substack.com/p/ai-can-now-do-math-but-can-it-ask

12. Why frontier AI can’t solve this professor’s math problem - Greta Panova https://epochai.substack.com/p/why-frontier-ai-cant-solve-this-professors

13. The future of AI is already written https://www.mechanize.work/blog/technological-determinism/

14. Greg Brockman on Move 37: “I do think next year we will have some incredible models. The milestone I am most excited about is having models that can solve hard problems. And the the analogy I like to make is think back to AlphaGo, you know, Move 37, that changes people’s understanding of the game. Imagine that in coding, imagine that in material science, imagine that in medicine. Having real breakthroughs that are either potentially the AI by itself, or the AI assisted with top humans. I think we’ll start seeing that.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=5yA4o9fSJek

15. Defying Transformers: Searching for “Fixed Points” of Pretrained LLMs https://liujch1998.github.io/2025/10/07/fixed-point.html

16. “For years now, I’ve been looking for signs of nontrivial zero-shot transfer across seen embodiments. When I saw the Alohas unhang tools from a wall used only on our Frankas I knew we had it! Gemini Robotics 1.5 is the first VLA to achieve such transfer!!” — Konstantinos Bousmalis, Research Scientist at DeepMind, working on robotic learning https://x.com/bousmalis/status/1973359357447512508

AI alignment

1. Spooky Collusion at a Distance with Superrational AI https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEtAWvp2sAe8nqpfy/spooky-collusion-at-a-distance-with-superrational-ai

2. Can Large Language Models Develop Gambling Addiction? https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22818

3. Inoculation Prompting: Instructing LLMs to misbehave at train-time improves test-time alignment https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AXRHzCPMv6ywCxCFp/inoculation-prompting-instructing-models-to-misbehave-at

4. AI-Enabled Influence Operation Against Iran https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/10/ai-enabled-influence-operation-against-iran.html

Links for 2025-10-09 [Part 2]

Understanding the SEI formation in lithium-ion batteries using machine learning

1. Evidence for significant multi-Li+ clustering in common lithium-ion battery electrolytes https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/68c08e353e708a7649010b9a

2. Scalable and accurate simulation of electrolyte solutions with quantum chemical accuracy https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2632-2153/adaf76

3. Exploring Lithium Diffusion in LiF with Machine Learning Potentials: From Point Defects to Collective Ring Diffusion https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/68cd701e9008f1a467a2e37b

Neuroscience

1. A Mysterious Web of Tunnels Connects Brain Cells—Like the Network of Trees in a Forest https://singularityhub.com/2025/10/07/a-mysterious-we-of-tunnels-connects-brain-cells-like-the-network-of-trees-in-a-forest/

2. Self-supervised predictive learning accounts for cortical layer-specificity https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61399-5

3. Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02052-8

4. A glimpse at what NeuroAI brain models might enable: a topographic vision model predicts stimulation patterns that steer complex object recognition behavior. This could be a key ‘software’ component for visual prosthetic hardware. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684

Science

1. Genetically engineered human mesenchymal progenitor (stem) cells, termed senescence-resistant cells (SRCs), can not only halt aging but also roll back its clinical and functional negative effects. https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00571-9

2. MIT researchers discovered a hidden atomic order that persists in metals even after extreme processing. https://news.mit.edu/2025/uncovering-new-physics-metals-manufacturing-1008

Technology

1. Europe’s first production plant for rare-earth magnets opens https://www.ft.com/content/6b16c87e-bdfd-45ab-ab01-b69d97541126 [no paywall: https://archive.is/GEyTZ]

2. The AI Boom Has a Copper Problem. Are Microbes the Solution? https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-copper

3. SHIELD Activated: Researchers build a defense to protect drones from cyberattacks https://news.fiu.edu/2025/shield-activated-researchers-build-a-defense-to-protect-drones-from-cyberattacks

Miscellaneous

1 .You Should Get a Reusable Mask https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wXwjMbtiSqALMEw2g/you-should-get-a-reusable-mask

2. Originality is bullshit because everything good is just a remix Joan Westenberg argues that chasing originality is creativity’s biggest scam—Shakespeare stole plots, Jobs remixed Xerox, and every viral TikTok is just iterations on iterations. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/originality-is-a-scam

AI capabilities have been steadily improving across a wide range of skills, and show no sign of slowing down in the near term: https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-capabilities-over-past-year

Across benchmarks covering coding, math, scientific knowledge, common sense and visual reasoning, and more, state-of-the-art models have improved by 20 to 50 percentage points in the last year.

Revenues at frontier AI companies have more than tripled in the past year.

For those who still don't get it:

- Researchers working at the frontier labs are genuinely convinced that transformative AI is coming.

- They spend their time worrying about the social/political consequences of transformative AI, not the "AI bubble".

- Recursive self-improvement is on the table, and is the subject of serious discussions.

Read more: https://www.transformernews.ai/p/were-all-behind-the-curve-ai-bubble-crash-risk

via prinz

German drone manufacturer Quantum Systems presented its Jäger Interceptor-UAV to the public. The drone has a maximum operational altitude of 5km, a speed of up to 405km/h, a range of 25km and a 0,8kg warhead.

The drone also features a solid fuel rocket booster that is meant to get the drone to its operating altitude as fast as possible.

https://quantum-systems.com/

Thread by Terence Tao about using the Pro version of GPT-5: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115351400633010670

Even if AI progress halts roughly where it is now, it's almost certain that AI will become an indispensable tool for professionals.

GPT-5 Pro sets a new record on FrontierMath Tier 4.

FrontierMath Tier 4 consists of research-level math problems developed by professional mathematicians. These problems can take experts weeks to solve. The problems the models are tested on are not public.

One problem solved in both of the GPT-5 Pro runs has not been solved by any other model. The problem author had this to say about it:

GPT-5 Pro is on the right track, figuring out the main trick required. It didn't verify that the conditions for applying a particular theorem were satisfied, but that isn't the hardest part.

— Yizhe Zhu, Assistant Professor of Mathematics University of Southern California

Trump got a COVID-19 booster vaccination.

Vaccination and alcohol consumption are two things where both Trump and Putin are role models. They are both boostered and mostly avoid alcohol.