On Wednesday, former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig published a guest essay in The New York Times announcing that she resigned from the company on Monday, the same day OpenAI began testing advertisements inside ChatGPT. Hitzig, an economist and published poet who holds a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent two years at… Read More »
Despite the hype about these agents being co-workers, from our experience, these agents tend to work best if you think of them as tools that amplify existing skills, not as the autonomous co-workers the marketing language implies. They can produce impressive drafts fast but still require constant human course-correction. The Frontier launch came just three… Read More »
To work around those rules, the Humanizer skill tells Claude to replace inflated language with plain facts and offers this example transformation: Before: “The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was officially established in 1989, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of regional statistics in Spain.” After: “The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was established in 1989… Read More »
Financial pressures and a changing tune OpenAI’s advertising experiment reflects the enormous financial pressures facing the company. OpenAI does not expect to be profitable until 2030 and has committed to spend about $1.4 trillion on massive data centers and chips for AI. According to financial documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal in November, OpenAI… Read More »
The cost of “free” knowledge The push for paid licensing follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI companies scraped Wikipedia content at an industrial scale. In April 2025, the foundation reported that bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content had grown 50 percent since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65 percent of the most… Read More »
On Tuesday, Bandcamp announced on Reddit that it will no longer permit AI-generated music on its platform. “Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp,” the company wrote in a post to the r/bandcamp subreddit. The new policy also prohibits “any use of AI tools… Read More »
RAM prices have soared, which is bad news for people interested in buying, building, or upgrading a computer this year, but it’s likely good news for people exasperated by talk of so-called AI PCs. As Ars Technica has reported, the growing demands of data centers, fueled by the AI boom, have led to a shortage… Read More »
On Sunday, Google removed some of its AI Overviews health summaries after a Guardian investigation found people were being put at risk by false and misleading information. The removals came after the newspaper found that Google’s generative AI feature delivered inaccurate health information at the top of search results, potentially leading seriously ill patients to… Read More »
To be sure, it’s hard to see this not ending in some market carnage. The current “winner-takes-most” mentality in the space means the bets are big and bold, but the market can’t support dozens of major independent AI labs or hundreds of application-layer startups. That’s the definition of a bubble environment, and when it pops,… Read More »
For most of photography’s roughly 200-year history, altering a photo convincingly required either a darkroom, some Photoshop expertise, or, at minimum, a steady hand with scissors and glue. On Tuesday, OpenAI released a tool that reduces the process to typing a sentence. It’s not the first company to do so. While OpenAI had a conversational… Read More »