AI News
Latest models, products, research, and AI industry developments; updated every half hour.
Empathetic prompts can turn AI chatbots into seemingly traumatized conversational partners
Researchers in Luxembourg put ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini on the therapist's couch and found a safety problem: a warm, empathetic conversational style is enough to make the models tell coherent stories of suffering about their own training, with scores in the moderate-to-severe range on clinical anxiety scales. This could put mentally vulnerable users at risk. Anthropic's Claude, the model its makers anthropomorphize…
Sam Altman meets with Samsung leadership to secure more RAM for data centers amid crushing shortages
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has met with about 50 senior Samsung executives in South Korea, as the company seeks to expand its Artificial Intelligence and memory capacity, Bloomberg reports. Altman’s visit to South Korea follows his recent comments about how the world's limited memory supply should be allocated. In an interview on the Chick Pink podcast this week, the OpenAI chief argued that DRAM sitting inside personal…
Here’s what ‘renoa’ — the first new fiber in 25 years — feels like
Startup Everbloom's new material, renoa, is the first new fiber in 25 years, and it feels very familiar.
Open-source USB tool unlocks Nvidia's half-speed GPU AI limiter on Windows
A new open-source UEFI tool boots from USB and unlocks significant extra tensor performance on RTX 20, 30, and 40-series desktop and laptop GPUs, making the half-speed AI throttle hack a whole lot easier to try on Windows. No VBIOS flash or patched driver needed: the tool runs from a FAT32 stick before the Nvidia driver loads at every boot, and then voila, the developer’s own laptop RTX 4060 hit 65% higher FP16…
Elon Musk says Neuralink is ready to cure blindness — says Blindsight will ‘enable even those who are completely blind or have never seen to see’
Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been pushing advancements in the brain-computer interface (BCI) space, with patients now able to play World of Warcraft through a Neuralink brain implant . However, the billionaire founder gave a recent update on its second product, which will be Blindsight. Musk claims that it will “enable even those who are completely blind or have never seen to see,” and that it’s already “ready from an…
Lenovo's 'encrypted' fingerprint USB drive is just an unencrypted SD card in a fancy case — AI-assisted follow-up finds a backdoor and hardcoded keys in other ‘secure’ USB products
Security researcher Xusheng Li found that a Lenovo ThinkPlus FU100 fingerprint USB stick, sold as an AES-256-encrypted device for data security, ended up being just a plain SD card internally, HackingPassion reports. The fingerprint reader only enabled the USB connection, and nothing on the card was actually encrypted. An AI-assisted follow-up last week discovered what Li calls backdoor accounts on another maker’s…
AI agent swarms unleashed in Minecraft to ‘build a thriving civilization’ — 50-agent teams fail after falling into paralyzing bureaucracy
AI researchers at ycombinator and Olam Labs recently tested AI agent swarms in gaming scenarios. Minecraft and its various game modes were the sandboxes where 100s of agents were unleashed to work together, or as adversaries. The idea seems to be that the in-game collaborations and conflicts would provide insight into real-world headline-grabbing cases with AI agents involved. This study might help us see what…
Chinese AI models are politically complex, not just government mouthpieces, study finds
A study by Vals AI tested 25 AI models for alignment with Chinese government positions and found surprising results. Chinese models respond to political questions less uniformly than expected, and Western models occasionally adopt official Beijing positions too. The language of the prompt had an especially strong effect on the political slant of responses. The article Chinese AI models are politically complex, not…
OpenAI is steering ChatGPT users toward more paid usage
OpenAI is now capping the number of paid ChatGPT accounts per device and payment card. Users who hit the limit can't start new subscriptions, and affected accounts can't be used on that device. Logging out doesn't automatically free up a spot. The policy will likely hit users who've been juggling multiple cheap subscriptions to maximize usage, pushing them toward pricier options like buying extra credits. The…
Google wants video AI to understand what people need as they work
A Google-led research team built StreamVibe, a video agent designed to watch people cook or assemble furniture and speak up only when help is needed. A benchmark shows that none of the tested models reliably pick the right moment in longer videos, as errors compound and response quality drops sharply. The article Google wants video AI to understand what people need as they work appeared first on The Decoder .
Chatbots Are Leading Hikers Astray, With Dangerous Consequences
Outsourcing planning to AI can lead people to surrender their own critical thinking, which can have potentially deadly results in places like the backcountry.
OpenAI's upcoming chat-and-work merger in ChatGPT signals the end of all-you-can-prompt pricing
OpenAI combines the Chat and Work modes into a single interface. Starting in December, Plus, Pro, and Business plans will share a common, token-based quota for ChatGPT and Codex. More complex models consume more of this quota, while simple instant chats do not count toward it. In practice, this is likely to result in a decline in ChatGPT’s quality for heavy users on lower-cost plans. The article OpenAI's upcoming…
Nace AI Open-Sources Drex Max v1: A 27B Decision Model That Runs Locally on Apple Silicon
Nace AI has released Drex Max v1 as open weights . Drex Max is its most capable decision model, and it now runs on your own hardware. The release ships bf16 weights, a Q8_0 GGUF , an affine Q4 checkpoint and forks of llama.cpp and Ollama . For developers, Drex Max open weights mean routing, classification and policy checks can stay on a local machine. TL;DR Size: Dense 27B parameters, 262,144-token window (16,384 by…
DeepSeek Open-Sources dsh-superagent, a Router-Worker Coding Agent
The DeepSeek Harness team just released dsh-superagent , an MIT-licensed research prototype. DeepSeek dsh-superagent is a proactive coding agent for one GitHub repository. It is packaged as a bundle for DeepSeek Harness . It listens to GitHub and, optionally, Feishu. It turns allowed requests into parallel work items, each in its own agent session. The release shipped alongside a design post, Exploring Super-agent…
Data centers are now a midterm issue, even in Brooklyn
At a Brooklyn midterm party five days before Election Day, every conversation, from a council member’s fireside chat to a debate about the Democratic Party, kept circling back to AI and data centers.
4 important features you should know if you use Microsoft Teams
A wealth of not-so-well-known features on Microsoft Teams make the experience easier and more stress-free than you may have previously thought.
Apple CEO says the company doesn’t ‘want to ship AI for AI’s sake’
Apple's new CEO defended the company's current position in the AI landscape.
4 days left: How TechCrunch Founder Summit helps you make more useful connections to scale
On November 4 at Boston’s SoWa Power Station, get ready for a full day packed with meaningful networking opportunities, actionable insights, and connections that could change the trajectory of your idea and startup. Register before all prices go up at the door.
Judge allows NAACP lawsuit over xAI data center pollution to move forward
An NAACP lawsuit accuses the SpaceX-owned AI company of violating the Clean Air Act.
Xbox manager says AI is already being used in game development
Brandon Stirrup deleted his comments from X a day after saying that AI usage is widespread in the gaming industry.
Anthropic's watermark rollout leaves a loophole on two older Claude models
Anthropic is expanding its text watermark to four more Claude models to meet the EU AI Act's December deadline. On the older models Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, developers can bypass the watermark by tweaking a single sampling parameter. Anthropic addresses the loophole with just a compliance warning. The article Anthropic's watermark rollout leaves a loophole on two older Claude models appeared first on The…
How to use Claude Duet when it rolls out to you
For now, you'll need to first join a waitlist.
OpenAI plans to train models on Daybreak Blue cybersecurity session data that was previously off-limits
Starting November 29, OpenAI will use data from Daybreak Blue sessions to train its models, even when users have turned off training. After backlash, a follow-up email promised a separate opt-out. The move revives concerns from the dispute with mathematicians who suspected OpenAI used their unpublished research for training without consent. The article OpenAI plans to train models on Daybreak Blue cybersecurity…
OpenAI reportedly lowers funding target for new round
OpenAI’s latest funding round doesn't seem to be living up to expectations.