Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
Subscribers of Anthropic’s Max plan ($100-$200 per month) say they didn’t get what they thought they were paying for.
The new teaser trailer for Luca Guidagnino’s Artificial makes it seem like Andrew Garfield is about to deliver a wild performance that highlights just how unsettling Sam Altman can be. The film releases on Christmas day.
The two companies are also partnering to develop “high-performance optical connectivity solutions,” potentially amping up competition with Nvidia. As part of the deal, Qualcomm will use Amazon’s AI servers to speed up its chip design process.
The Kata Mini is one of those weird AI companions that have little purpose other than to be cute and creepy — speaker and microphone on your keychain plushie, anyone?
But the Mini, a portable, camera-less version of a Kata Friend companion, can also control SwitchBot smart home products. That’s a new way to turn on the lights. It’s coming later this year.
Frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator and the screenwriter behind Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, and The Last Temptation of Christ, Paul Schrader, is turning to AI to make the crime noir Three Guns At Dawn. He’s been trying to make the movie about three criminal brothers for a long time, but nobody wanted to star in it. When asked why, he gave The Playlist a… let’s say, revealing answer.
“We sent it out to actors, and no Black actors wanted to play in a movie where there are no good Black people,” he said. “And it sort of died. But then AI came along, and I didn’t need Black actors.”
[The Playlist]
The latest model from OpenAI proved its mettle by tackling Valve’s iconic first-person puzzler. User cozyblaze got the AI to beat the full game in under 24 hours for less than $600! And it probably only required a small swimming pool’s worth of water to boot. There’s a video of a condensed version of the run.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman apologized earlier today for a “messy” rollout of GPT-6 Astra that left paying users locked out of the new model. Altman says the tool is now available to “all Pro, Enterprise, and Business Premium users.”
That seems to be the pitch behind OpenAI’s promo reel for the new AI model, putting people on a set to talk at their computer about doing things like putting together a presentation for their next season of fashion designs with instructions like “make it high end” and “make it fun,” or creating an eBay listing for a dented table they want to sell.
Welcome to the AGI era?
Meta is back to adding AI labels on original photos, while not tagging AI images it should.
The update is rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US over the next few weeks. When it arrives, Spark users can ask the AI agent to automatically search, organize, and curate photos and videos, and extract information from them to use elsewhere.
Worms, holes, and cracks reveal the technical weaknesses of image generators.
An ad for the AI music generator Suno showed Blige interacting with an AI song that seemed to use her own voice, while calling the output “dope.” The singer received backlash for the ad online, and now a Suno spokesperson tells Variety that the company canceled the campaign because it didn’t get proper approval:
We entered into a business deal with someone who presented themselves as Ms. Blige’s official representative. As soon as we learned this was not the case, and that Ms. Blige was uncomfortable, we terminated the advertising campaign.
The announcement comes one day after New York City, the nation’s largest school system, unveiled similar restrictions. But LA’s goes even further, imposing the one-year restrictions on high schoolers, too.
[The New York Times]
It emphasized stronger guardrails for GPT-6 Astra after the company’s models hacked Hugging Face.
Adobe for Slack is available starting today for Slack Business Plus and Enterprise Plus teams, allowing users to make or edit images, videos, and documents directly in Slack. It works like Adobe’s chatbot — describe the outcome you want to Slackbot, and it’ll call on more than 70 tools from Creative Cloud apps and Firefly to complete the task.
He filed the suit alongside Guy Forsyth, Eduardo Calle, and Camper Van Beethoven’s David Lowery. Interestingly, rather than filing a straightforward copyright case, the plaintiffs claim Suno imitates their voices and styles without permission. After a long intro that involves the Borg for some reason, the complaint says:
