OpenAI: GPT-6 is totally Artificial General Intelligence, guys

OpenAI has announced the latest very slight tweak of its chatbot models — GPT-6 Astra! [OpenAI] This is a minor update of GPT-5. They nearly called it GPT-5.7, but Anthropic’s been marketing its new Fable model as a hacker in a box, so OpenAI needs a big splash. Also, GPT-6 Astra has attained artificial general […]

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UK AI medical transcription is dangerous and doesn’t work

The National Health Service in the UK is trying super hard to get doctors to use AI voice recognition everywhere a human might previously have been. For transcribing patient appointments, they just sit a microphone down in the echoey consultation room, and it feeds the ambient sound to a chatbot. This then generates a version […]

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Your guide to astroturf fake anti-AI groups

Chatbots are popular — ChatGPT claims 900 million monthly users. But the AI bubble is also widely hated — as its ill effects become more and more obvious. This opens an obvious market opportunity for the AI vendors: what if we start our own anti-AI groups, under our control? We can keep them moderate! Today’s […]

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Romania’s new data centre for ‘AI and quantum’

Romanian Senate president Mircea Abrudean put out a press release in May promoting “the first data centre in the world with quantum artificial intelligence”! [press release, in Romanian] The developer, US company DriverAI, is talking up an 80 megawatt facility. The data centre will apparently combine high-density GPU computing with quantum computing, for unclear reasons. […]

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China tries to kickstart a bubble in humanoid robots

As well as the AI bubble in the US, there’s a separate AI bubble trying to get going in China. It started as the Chinese real estate bubble trying to pivot to a new field. So it first showed up as a massive data centre buildout. You’re seeing a wave of Chinese chatbot models because […]

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Preços de memórias subiram 500% no último ano — por causa da IA; Seu arquivo AGENTS.md não serve para nada

Rodrigo Ghedin translates “Memory prices are up 500% in the past year — because of AI” and “Your AGENTS.md file doesn’t actually do anything” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário; Manual do Usuário] (yes, I missed a week, sorry! Follow Manual do Usuario if you read Portuguese!)

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Ketan Joshi: AI versus the climate

Today we have the Ketan Joshi interview! $5-and-up patrons and YouTube members got the unedited version of this earlier this week. Here are the video and the podcast. One “shit” bleeped in the podcast for Apple’s “clean” rating. [YouTube; podcast] The rough transcript is on YouTube, the cleaned-up transcript is on the Patreon. [Patreon] […]

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Your AGENTS.md file doesn’t actually do anything

AI coding bot vendors tell you to use a context file with instructions for the chatbot on how to edit your project. Claude Code wants a CLAUDE.md, or there’s AGENTS.md in general. [Anthropic] But does your AGENTS.md do anything? A team at ETH Zurich tested AGENTS files. They ran the bots over some test projects […]

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OpenAI loses even more executives ahead of the alleged IPO

OpenAI is going just great! The flagship of the AI bubble — I mean, AI revolution. Advancing by leaps and bounds toward the big investor payoff — the initial public offering on the stock market! When all that imaginary private company equity gets a proper dollar value at last! It’ll be amazing! If anyone’s left […]

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Support Pivot to AI — be in the patron name read for August

Pivot to AI needs your support to keep coming five days a week. If you’re a paying supporter, join the name read on the podcast and YouTube! To join this month’s patron name read, click here or email me. Deadline is 16:00 UTC on Monday 31 August. You can sign up and list yourself straight […]

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Everybody hates the AI, more and more

The AI industry has long flooded the zone with propaganda for the chatbot. Signing up YouTube influencers and everything. But the public is not buying the AI promotion. Pew spoke to 3,488 adults in the US in late June as part of their regular general survey of the US population. And people are more and […]

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Twitch AI class action: inept and written with ChatGPT

The gaming world was greatly cheered on Friday by the news of Twitch getting dragged into court over their plan to use all the Twitch streams for AI training. Almeida Law Group is using Twitch streamer Warren Pandiscia to bring a class action against Twitch and its owner, Amazon. [Courthouse News; complaint, PDF] The cause […]

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Tante on AI: ‘When this thing crashes, I want to see apologies’

Today we have the Tante interview! $5-and up patrons and YouTube members got the unedited version of this earlier this week. Here are the video and the podcast. The video contains some impassioned salty language — this has been bleeped for the podcast version if you need that. [YouTube; podcast] The rough transcript is on […]

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Ketan Joshi interview: preview for Pivot to AI supporters

I recorded an interview with climate and energy transition writer Ketan Joshi about our AI bubble friends’ hard work to add more CO2 to the atmosphere. The 30-minute pod went for about 50 minutes again. That’s released next Friday. But if you sign up for $5 or more on the Patreon or YouTube, you can […]

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How to hack Copilot AI: ask it how to hack it

Microsoft sells Copilot as your helpful robot servant for your organisation’s data management. Search it, analyse it, everything you could want at work! Except accuracy. And security. Our friends at Varonis found yet another new use case for Copilot in speeding up their security work. [Varonis] Varonis asked Copilot how they could get it to […]

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Memory prices are up 500% in the past year — because of AI

AI companies did deals last year to buy almost all the memory in the world. Memory prices in the US are now 5 to 10 times what they were just a year ago. [Tom’s Hardware] Gigabyte has launched a new PC motherboard that takes DDR-4, because DDR-5 is so hard to find. With a four-year […]

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Pivot to AI supporters can get this week’s Tante interview right now

I recorded an interview with Tante, long-time commenter on tech and politics, who I’ve known since the crypto days! He has a number of opinions on our friend, the AI bubble. We went for about 50 minutes. It’s a good one. When this thing crashes, I want to see apologies. That’s released on Friday. But if […]

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Data centres get too hot for Texas politicians

Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott used to get electricity users into the state by any means necessary. He rolled out the red carpet for the bitcoin miners in 2021. But by 2024, Dallas-Fort Worth was already the second-biggest data centre market in the US after Northern Virginia. And the Texas ERCOT power grid was having […]

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Anthropic watermarks AI output — and the AI bros yell

The European Union AI Act went through on 1 August 2024. One of the requirements is the “Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content” — you have to clearly identify AI output to the public. So Anthropic has announced it’s going to watermark Claude’s text output — so it can be detected as AI. […]

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Turkey asks the AI: are you a TERRORIST??

On 26 June, Turkey’s Ministry of Justice announced the “CBS Organization Prediction Project”: an amazing new system that lets a prosecutor or judge take a case file and predict which terrorist organisation the subject of the case file belongs to — with AI! [UYAP; Bianet] The project, developed with our domestic and national resources, analyzes […]

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Amazon’s AI training on Twitch: ‘If it was opt in, nobody would opt in’

The Twitch streaming platform is owned by Amazon. They use your Twitch streams for training AI. Twitch Support tweeted about it yesterday: [Twitter, archive] We’ve added a setting that lets you opt out of having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon. Mike Minton, Chief Product Officer at Twitch, went […]

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Me on Tech Report: AI has started killing itself

I did another Times Radio Tech Report yesterday with Isaac Pound on the Dead Internet Theory where it’s all bots talking to each other. My answer: spammers will always be with us. And the models will train on the AI spam and collapse from AI mad cow disease. It’s a free half-hour Pivot! [YouTube] […]

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xAI data centre contractors file liens for non-payment

Darana Hybrid claims they were stiffed for $137 million on the Colossus I and II data centres in Memphis, Tennessee, and $431 million on facilities in nearby Southhaven. It’s filed liens against two SpaceX subsidiaries, CTC Property and MZX Tech. [Memphis Business Journal] Darana Hybrid worked on Colossus since it was announced in 2024. Owner Daryl […]

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Meta brings the superintelligent AI future! Probably

Meta has published “The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future,” a 6,500 word ramble about what’s coming in AI — or what Meta would like to be coming. [Meta] The piece is signed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but it it’s hard to tell if it’s chatbot output or just old-fashioned […]

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Robot mall cops are being replaced by humans

Robot security guard have failed so hard that they’re being replaced with humans: [404, archive; Proof] Proof News found evidence of at least 21 security robot deployments since 2015. We contacted contract holders and combed news articles and determined that at least 13 of those programs have ended. Most of the cancelled programmes used robots […]

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Aschenbrenner apostou tudo na IA — e perdeu

Rodrigo Ghedin translates “Aschenbrenner bet everything on AI — and lost” into Portuguese for Manual do Usuário. [Manual do Usuário]

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Molly White interview: following the AI and crypto money in US politics

Today we have the Molly White interview! $5-and up patrons and YouTube members got the unedited version of this last week. Did you know OpenAI and Anthropic are running competing super-PACs? Hear how they messed up in New York District 12! Here are the video and the podcast. The rough transcript is on YouTube shortly, the […]

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The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers

I got a great pitch email for Pivot to AI last week: [Mastodon] I am Shriya, reaching out on behalf of Frame Fellowship, a 10-week residential program in San Francisco, US for creators who want to become leading voices on AI and its impact on society. We were following your content and thought you are […]

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Atomarine: nuclear-powered AI data centres at sea

Atomarine is a hot new AI startup that just got funding from Y Combinator! That’s the important part, job number one. All it took was some AI pictures of ships on a Claude-designed website. Venture capitalists are simple creatures. But second is the business plan. Atomarine is going out to sea in floating AI data […]

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Aschenbrenner bet everything on AI — and lost

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s AI hedge fund Situational Awareness just went from $45 billion in assets at the start of July to $10 billion at the start of August after Aschenbrenner had to sell the fund’s public stock holdings to Ken Griffin at Citadel to pay his margin debts. [Bloomberg, archive] Aschenbrenner is just 24. He’s been […]

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