AI Force Announced, CXMT DRAM Production, TGS 2026 and More Tech News

AI

Trump Announces ‘AI Force’ and Plans to Appoint AI Czar

President Donald Trump announced plans on September 19 to create an “AI Force” modeled after the Space Force and to appoint an AI czar. He described AI as “the next Industrial Revolution” and positioned the initiative as a vehicle for advancing US competitiveness rather than imposing constraints.

In a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump dismissed calls for federal AI guardrails as a “hoax.” He emphasized competition with China as the driving concern for keeping US-based AI companies ahead.

No specifics were provided on the organization’s structure, timeline, or who would lead it. His previous AI and cryptocurrency czar, David Sacks, stepped down earlier this year due to limits on his term as a special government employee.

Naive AI Reaches Unicorn Status Seven Months After Founding

Beijing-based Naive AI has raised $400 million across three funding rounds, reaching a $1.42 billion valuation. Tencent, IDG Capital, and HSG participated in the rounds, which closed at $100 million, $180 million, and $120 million respectively.

The startup was founded in February 2026 by Tsinghua University associate professor Dai Jifeng. It has not yet released a product publicly, making it one of the fastest Chinese AI startups to reach unicorn status before shipping.

Naive AI plans to release its first large language model as an open-weight download later this month. The company’s differentiation strategy focuses on mid-training and post-training techniques rather than pre-training scale alone.

Big Tech

CXMT Begins G5 DRAM Mass Production, Captures 10% of Global Market

Chinese memory chipmaker CXMT (ChangXin Memory Technologies) officially announced mass production of its fifth-generation DRAM platform, G5, at the World Manufacturing Convention in Hefei on September 20.

G5 uses 11.95nm quadruple patterning, a technique that repeats several lithography steps to achieve finer circuit patterns without EUV equipment. The process boosts potential dies per wafer by at least 50% over the previous generation.

Two 24Gb LPDDR5X products built on G5 are already in mass production and shipping in mainstream Chinese smartphones. CXMT’s global DRAM market share has reached 10%, breaking the 90%-plus oligopoly that Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron had held for over a decade.

Mozilla Releases Firefox 156 With 45% Faster PDF Reader

Mozilla shipped Firefox 156 on September 15. The headline improvement is a 45% faster startup time for the built-in PDF reader.

Memory and CPU usage when displaying scaled JPEG images has been reduced. WebRTC H.264 decoding is now supported on Arm64 processors. On macOS, Firefox can now be set to launch automatically when the computer starts.

Developer tooling also received updates. The Inspector’s viewport size readout no longer rounds width and height at fractional zoom levels or on high-density displays. Localized Wikipedia and sponsored suggestions in the address bar are now available in France, Germany, and Italy.

Startups

Temporal Closes $550M Series E at $12.55B Valuation

Workflow orchestration platform Temporal closed a $550 million Series E at a $12.55 billion valuation. Lightspeed co-led the round alongside Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Tiger Global. T. Rowe Price and SV Angel also participated.

The company’s annualized revenue run rate recently passed $250 million, representing over 200% year-over-year growth. In August alone, the managed platform processed more than 1.9 trillion actions, up over 350% from a year earlier.

Temporal now serves more than 4,300 paying customers including OpenAI, Netflix, NVIDIA, Snap, and JPMorgan Chase. The surge in agentic AI workloads that require durable, reliable execution has positioned Temporal as a critical infrastructure layer.

Profound Raises $180M Series D for AI Marketing Platform

AI answer-engine optimization (AEO) startup Profound raised $180 million in Series D funding at a $1.8 billion valuation. Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round.

The round came just seven months after the company closed its $96 million Series C. Founded in 2024, Profound has now raised over $335 million in total.

The platform helps brands adapt marketing to consumers who start web queries on AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini instead of traditional search engines. More than 1,000 enterprise clients use the service, including Walmart, The Estee Lauder Companies, Zoom, MongoDB, and Figma.

Open Source

Compositor: A Free, Open-Source Photoshop Alternative for Mac

Compositor, a free and open-source image editor built exclusively for macOS, has entered the GitHub trending charts. It is designed around compositing and post-processing workflows for creating pixel-perfect final images.

The editor supports layer masks with paint, fill, blur, and feathering. Non-destructive move, scale, rotate, and flip operations work across multiple layers or entire folders simultaneously. Free Distort with Shift-to-lock-axis is also available.

The project ships as an Xcode project that users can download and modify directly. For macOS users seeking a capable alternative to commercial image editors, it provides a full-featured option at zero cost.

Git 2.56 RC0 Published With Swift Support and Performance Gains

The first release candidate of Git 2.56 was published on September 11. A final release is expected by the end of September. The following version may be the long-anticipated Git 3.0.

Swift-specific userdiff patterns have been added, covering attributes, modifiers, failable initializers, and generics for improved diff presentation. Enumeration of loose objects during git status has been reduced from quadratic to O(n log n) complexity.

The ORT merge backend has been hardened against corrupt trees. Support for loose objects larger than 4GB has been added, and git refs gained create, delete, update, and rename subcommands.

Gaming

TGS 2026 Xbox Showcase Reveals 17 Titles

The Xbox Tokyo Game Show 2026 broadcast unveiled 17 games, including several world premieres. Bill Skarsgard was confirmed as the lead in Hideo Kojima’s PHYSINT, alongside Charlee Fraser, Don Lee, and Minami Hamabe.

A new campaign trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 set an October 23 launch date. Bloomwalker, set in the Ni No Kuni universe, showed fresh gameplay, and Persona 4 Revival received a character reveal.

The final day of TGS 2026 (September 21) was cancelled due to Typhoon Dujuan approaching Japan. The show had attempted a five-day run for the first time but was cut to four days.

CONTROL Resonant Launches Worldwide September 24

Remedy Entertainment’s action RPG CONTROL Resonant releases on September 24 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. It is a sequel to the 2019 game Control.

The story follows Dylan Faden, a paranaturally abled character who battles an invasion of hostile entities while searching for his estranged sister Jesse Faden, the protagonist of the original game.

The global launch is set for 2:00 PM GMT simultaneously across all platforms. PS5 deluxe edition buyers receive 48 hours of early access. A macOS version is planned for later in 2026.

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered Arrives September 29 as Free Upgrade

CD Projekt Red announced The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered for September 29 on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC. Anyone who already owns The Witcher 3 receives the remaster as a free upgrade.

The remaster delivers enhanced path tracing, updated dynamic lighting, higher-resolution textures, and improved environmental foliage. Combat has been modernized with refined targeting, new gap-closing animations, dynamic camera angles, and Sign-based finishers.

A paid expansion titled Songs of the Past, co-developed with Fool’s Theory, is slated for 2027. It introduces the region of Letten, new combat abilities, and a chain weapon class.

References

Trump vows to create ‘AI Force’ and appoint czar — CNN
Trump to form ‘AI Force,’ name AI czar but rejects calls for constraints — Washington Post
Trump says he’s creating an AI force and appointing a czar — NBC News
Naive AI Hits $1.42 Billion Valuation Prior to First LLM Launch — HuggingNews
China AI startup Naive AI bets on mid and post-training — Digital Today
China’s CXMT Starts Mass Production on 5th-Generation DRAM — Seoul Economic Daily
China’s CXMT G5 DRAM at 11.95nm, Challenging Samsung and SK Hynix — Eastern Herald
Firefox 156.0 Release Notes — Mozilla
Firefox 156 Launched With 45% Faster PDF Reader — TechPowerUp
Temporal raises $550M Series E at $12.55B valuation — Temporal
Profound raises $180M Series D at $1.8B valuation — GlobeNewsWire
AEO startup Profound hits unicorn valuation — TechCrunch
Compositor — The Photoshop alternative for Mac — Robbie Tilton
Compositor GitHub — GitHub
Git 2.56-rc0 Released — Phoronix
Xbox at Tokyo Game Show 2026 Recap — Xbox Wire
TGS 2026 Official Program — CESA
CONTROL Resonant Launches Worldwide on September 24 — Remedy Entertainment
CONTROL Resonant on Steam — Steam
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Remastered Announced — CD Projekt Red
Songs of the Past First Look — CD Projekt Red Press