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- 🛩️ AI Drone Kills 3 in Ukraine?
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This is where AI warfare gets scary. A Russian drone reportedly used an Nvidia minicomputer to pick its final target itself, killing three civilians in Ukraine.
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📅 September 15, 2026
AI INSIGHTS
According to a New York Times report, a Russian AI-guided drone reportedly killed three civilians in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on July 6. Main details:
The drone had no antenna for a human operator to control it remotely.
Investigators found an Nvidia Jetson Orin minicomputer inside the drone.
The drone used cameras, stored terrain images, and AI software to navigate.
Ukrainian experts believe the drone could choose its final target by itself, such as specific fuel tanks at a gas station.
The Nvidia computer costs only a few hundred dollars, showing that advanced autonomous targeting can run on relatively cheap commercial hardware.
Both Russia and Ukraine are testing similar AI drone systems.
Earlier AI drones usually had a human choose the target first, while AI only handled the final approach. The system described by the NYT appears to remove the human from that last targeting decision.
Key takeaway: The NYT report shows how AI is moving from helping drones fly toward a target to potentially letting drones decide exactly what to attack on their own.
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TODAY IN AI
AI HIGHLIGHTS
✏️ A new Claude Skill called ELI5 is going viral among Anthropic’s employees. It explains complex topics with big visuals and very few words. Just follow this guide.
📚 One Redditor just turned the Disaster Girl meme into a 20-second video using Codex and a surprisingly detailed five-step prompt workflow. Full process here.
🥚 Meta may launch its 'Hatch' AI agent soon, with web-service integrations, and premium plans. Watermelon, its next mysterious major model, is coming in October.
😬 This is a reminder that attackers don’t need the smartest AI model to cause damage. Chinese hackers are using DeepSeek to scale real cyber operations fast.
🧠 Claude Cowork can now remember what you told in chats, so you don’t have to brief the same project twice. If you use both, just view, edit, or delete this memory.
🌶️ OpenAI shared impressive early results for its Jalapeño inference chip, claiming up to 4.1× better performance on highly interactive workloads. Read full report here.
💰 Big AI Fundraising: General Intuition is raising money at a $6B valuation, just weeks after a $320M round at $2.3B. The startup is betting big on AI for robotics and physical-world tasks.
NEW EMPOWERED AI TOOLS
🎬 Wan 3.0 turns almost any input (text, videos, documents, spreadsheets, slides, or webpages) into AI video clips up to 30 seconds long.
🔎 Keenable gives AI agents fast web search across 100B+ documents, plus Time Machine to explore how the web looked in the past.
📊 Diet Claude tracks your Claude usage in real time, optimizes token use, and moves your conversation to another LLM when limits hit.
AI BREAKTHROUGH
Thomson Reuters has built its first in-house AI model, Thomson-1, using an Alibaba Qwen-based model as the foundation and adapting it with the company’s proprietary legal and professional content. Main details:
It took about 2 years and reportedly cost around $40M in staff and computing.
Its latest training run cost roughly $450K.
Thomson Reuters says internal tests put Thomson-1 ahead of models such as Claude, Gemini, and GPT in some legal tasks, though those results haven’t been independently verified.
The model has so far trained on less than 10% of Thomson Reuters’ overall content library.
An open-weights version is planned for researchers.
CTO Joel Hron said the company wants to build long-term value from its own data. Thomson Reuters is still working with external providers such as Anthropic, including integrations between Claude and CoCounsel.
Companies with large proprietary knowledge bases may increasingly build specialized models on top of strong open models, especially as training becomes cheaper than years of heavy API usage.
Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:
After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.
“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.
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