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It’s been a poorly kept secret that the company was working towards building its own wet lab. It was hiring biologists and even bought startup Coefficient Bio in April. Now it’s confirmed to TechCrunch that a lab is up and operating in the Bay Area.
Norwood was on Piers Morgan Uncensored to discuss its AI slop movie, Misaligned. There’s a painful lag between questions and answers, and it routinely fails to answer the actual question. But the most surreal moment comes when Norwood glitches mid-answer and starts speaking Cantonese.
“Best-case scenario, the men handling this technology are completely incompetent. Worst-case scenario, we are all being led into a disaster.” Eventually, the woman was escorted from the building, but not before disrupting the company’s celebration of flooding the world with awful AI-generated fliers.
Valve’s 0.3.0 update for Steam Frame claims “Substantially faster charging while unit is off / sleeping.” It’s true. I used to see 8-watt charging when plugging in a dead unit, and 27-watt charging at peak. Now I’m getting 19-21W charging right away and up to 42W in game.
That’s enough to plug in a dead Frame and start playing right away.
According to CNN, the US military had planes in the air and armed personnel ready to board a Chinese ship in the Middle East this spring because of an intelligence report saying it carried parts for a nuclear weapons program. The only problem? Their sources say that report was an AI-bot-generated hallucination:
It was only just before the planned operation that officials dug deeper into the report put together by a special operations command analyst and found it had been generated with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) — and that a chatbot the analyst had used inaccurately identified the material the ship was carrying.
Separately, Bloomberg reports a Pentagon investigation into the deadly February 28th missile attack on an Iranian school has identified failures that include “overreliance on artificial-intelligence technology.”
The price increase reportedly follows higher prices from chip manufacturer TSMC, and could impact everything from AMD’s GPUs to its motherboard chipsets. Intel is reportedly planning a similar price hike, and Qualcomm and Nvidia also raised prices earlier this year.
Academics, evaluators, and AI leaders signed a public letter calling not just for embedded third-party evaluators at top AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, but for conditions that allowed for transparency by those evaluators, like “limiting the scope of non-disclosure agreements.” I wrote an in-depth feature about the battle over the need for embedded evaluators this week for The Verge.
You’ll have to pay at least $9.99 a month for Apple Home’s new AI-powered features, including video summaries, for just one camera. If you want access on up to five cameras, it’s $59.99 (included in the 12TB iCloud Plus plan). Is this a sign of more subscription fees on the horizon for Apple’s smart home?
Those are just three of 1,400 new words added to the more comprehensive online version of Merriam-Webster’s linguistic repository. Other additions include Mandela Effect, AGI, letterboxing, looksmaxxing, and what seems like a really late acknowledgement for Rickroll.
They’ve opened “at least one criminal probe” following complaints about the glasses being used to film women on the street in public without their consent, Reuters reports. France’s data protection authority also says businesses are “increasingly” asking if they can ban smart glasses at work, similar to a ban under consideration in Australia.
The band’s Amelia Meath says they’re back “to continue to employ everyone that we employ,” after what’s been an “incredibly hard” year off Spotify, but implored fans to listen on other platforms instead. Their new album Ow ∞ came out last week, when the pair spoke to The Verge for our weekend questionnaire.
The annual Small World in Motion Competition has yielded another five bangers. The first place entry used a 100X magnification to capture the abnormal airway cilia inside a child with a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. Sad, but beautiful. ABC News (Australia) has a roundup.
The agent initially launched earlier this month on iOS, Android, and the web, but now, you can use it on your Mac computer, as announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. With Muse on Mac, the agent can do things like organize files, fill out forms, and pull information from apps including Messages, Calendar, and Notes, Meta says.
The Steam Frame and Meta Quest headsets can natively beam your Windows monitors into a headset — but some still prefer Virtual Desktop, the app that pioneered the idea in 2016 before getting “sherlocked” by Meta. Developer Guy Godin says Valve didn’t send him a Frame, but he’ll try to port it anyhow.
Technically, I can already stream Virtual Desktop Classic, with working 3D video, but my monitors are stitched together and the controls feel awkward.
In court documents unredacted Thursday, lawyers for the NYT in its copyright infringement case against Microsoft and OpenAI cited Microsoft’s Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, saying that “millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions… almost no one intended for content they created to be used in this fashion, nor are they compensated for its use.”
The Orlando Sentinel, which is also part of the suit, reports a Microsoft filing “framed Hecht as someone on the payroll to play a contrarian.”
On the Noto Emoji site, you can search for emoji, download 2D and 3D files of the (open source) emoji in different formats, and even see the original proposals that helped things get turned into emoji in the first place. (In 2019, I wrote about that proposal process for my submissions of the waffle and yawning face emoji.)
I also recommend Google’s post about designing its Noto 3D emoji, it’s good stuff.
Anthropic’s proposals, laid out in a big website, are:
The extent to which AI is building the next version of itself, as opposed to being built by humans
Our ability to oversee and intervene in actions that AI agents take on Anthropic’s systems
The resources that power the development of more capable models
The company also includes a “snapshot” of the metrics inside the company.
It says the new version of CC can help families manage household tasks like sorting through emails, keeping track of everyone’s schedules, filling out permission slips, and creating shopping lists. Up to six users can manage and interact with the same CC agent and choose what to share with it.
He joined growing calls for more safety measures around AI at a gathering of AI leaders on Thursday, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Google’s Demis Hassabis, OpenAI’s Sarah Friar, and Anthropic’s Tino Cuéllar.
The three CEOs have apparently have been encouraging him to be hands-off with his approach to AI and “successfully stalled” a plan for an industry-funded AI regulator pitched by Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, according to The Wall Street Journal. Trump also likes to call Huang while he’s onstage.
[The Wall Street Journal]
Universal Pictures, which has the rights for Musk outside of North America, hasn’t put a release date on the film yet and sources told The Hollywood Reporter that they believed Universal would be dropping it. In a later report, though, THR said that its initial article led to meetings at Universal, and Universal’s head of comms said in a statement that that “The studio remains committed to releasing it in theaters internationally.”
My colleague Andrew Webster reviewed Musk this week.
Update: Added second THR report.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
The video, posted by Inner City Press, was shown during the DOJ’s trial against Huawei, which kicked off last week and follows the 2018 arrest of Huawei’s CFO and an indictment in 2020.
Bloomberg interviewed Twitch CEO Dan Clancy:
“We spent a lot of time talking with Rockstar about their plans, and also helping them think about how they can engage our creators,” Clancy said in an interview. “You are going to see this big bump with GTA 6, but then an even bigger one next year when they launch multiplayer.”
In an investor call today, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick also said that PC is “becoming more and more important to our company over time,” according to GamesRadar. Perhaps we won’t have to wait too long for a PC version of GTA VI?
Update: Added new Zelnick comment.
The September 2025 agreement said that Amazon would pay up to $1.5 billion over “deceptive” Prime signup practices. But after a court approved a joint motion, more people now qualify for refunds, there is now a maximum payment cap of $200 (up from $51), and Amazon will distribute refunds automatically, according to a press release.
[Federal Trade Commission]
Caldera Music brings your Plex music libraries and Winamp-style visuals to Apple TVs and Google TVs. Feingold is also building connected light fixtures and other weird and interesting hardware.
Sheeran’s tour is on the verge of collapse after he booted Macklemore for saying “Free Palestine” on stage. Other openers, Finneas and Aaron Rowe, along with his backing band, dropped in solidarity. Now a planned contest to open at the Mexico City stop has been flooded with pro-Palestinian clips, memes, and fart videos.
Late last night, we published my video about trying Snap’s Specs AR glasses at the company’s headquarters. The hardware, which costs $2,195, is interesting, but the experience of actually using them was rather finicky. Despite yesterday’s splashy launch event, the Specs also don’t yet have a firm release date beyond sometime this fall.
Check out my full article for more.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced on Tuesday that it was “unable to restore access to some customer data hosted in Persian Gulf data centers” following attacks by Iranian drone swarms in the spring that left facilities in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain still “mostly offline,” according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
The long-running microblogging platform is adding a bunch of heavily requested features, including the ability to save posts for later and sort them into collections, like musings on physical media or quotes about creativity. Subscribers can also now use animated GIFs as their avatars.
[Tumblr]
Following trials earlier this year, Japan’s Haneda, Narita, Kumamoto, and Naha airports are starting a full-scale implementation of machines that can compress clothing into much smaller cubes in about a minute so tourists have more room in their suitcases. The machines don’t use vacuum bags and don’t damage clothing, according to SoraNews24.
Mathematicians have speculated that the company was targeting the Hodge Conjecture next, but after the PR disaster that was Navier-Stokes and its recent failure to keep its models under control, OpenAI may hold off on any announcements. According to The Information:
It could take the company longer to announce the solution, though, because it’s trying to figure out how to collaborate with the math community to make the announcement without triggering another PR nightmare….
