Tag Archives: generative ai

Ars Live recap: Is the AI bubble about to pop? Ed Zitron weighs in.

“It’s not gonna be one Bear Stearns moment,” Zitron explained. “It’s gonna be a succession of events until the markets freak out.” The crux of the problem, according to Zitron, is Nvidia. The chip maker’s stock represents 7 to 8 percent of the S&P 500’s value, and the broader market has become dependent on Nvidia’s… Read More »

OpenAI wants to stop ChatGPT from validating users’ political views

The timing of OpenAI’s paper may not be coincidental. In July, the Trump administration signed an executive order barring “woke” AI from federal contracts, demanding that government-procured AI systems demonstrate “ideological neutrality” and “truth seeking.” With the federal government as tech’s biggest buyer, AI companies now face pressure to prove their models are politically “neutral.”… Read More »

OpenAI’s Sora 2 lets users insert themselves into AI videos with sound

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced Sora 2, its second-generation video-synthesis AI model that can now generate videos in various styles with synchronized dialogue and sound effects, which is a first for the company. OpenAI also launched a new iOS social app that allows users to insert themselves into AI-generated videos through what OpenAI calls “cameos.” OpenAI… Read More »

Anthropic says its new AI model “maintained focus” for 30 hours on multistep tasks

Claude 4.5 is available everywhere today. Through the API, the model maintains the same pricing as Claude Sonnet 4, at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Developers can access it through the Claude API using “claude-sonnet-4-5” as the model identifier. Other new features Some ancillary features of the Claude family… Read More »

Millions turn to AI chatbots for spiritual guidance and confession

Privacy concerns compound these issues. “I wonder if there isn’t a larger danger in pouring your heart out to a chatbot,” Catholic priest Fr. Mike Schmitz told The Times. “Is it at some point going to become accessible to other people?” Users share intimate spiritual moments that now exist as data points in corporate servers.… Read More »

Modder injects AI dialogue into 2002’s Animal Crossing using memory hack

But discovering the addresses was only half the problem. When you talk to a villager in Animal Crossing, the game normally displays dialogue instantly. Calling an AI model over the Internet takes several seconds. Willison examined the code and found Fonseca’s solution: a watch_dialogue() function that polls memory 10 times per second. When it detects… Read More »

OpenAI and Microsoft sign preliminary deal to revise partnership terms

On Thursday, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they have signed a non-binding agreement to revise their partnership, marking the latest development in a relationship that has grown increasingly complex as both companies compete for customers in the AI market and seek new partnerships for growing infrastructure needs. “Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of… Read More »

ChatGPT’s new branching feature is a good reminder that AI chatbots aren’t people

On Thursday, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT users can now branch conversations into multiple parallel threads, serving as a useful reminder that AI chatbots aren’t people with fixed viewpoints but rather malleable tools you can rewind and redirect. The company released the feature for all logged-in web users following years of user requests for the capability.… Read More »

New AI model turns photos into explorable 3D worlds, with caveats

Training with automated data pipeline Voyager builds on Tencent’s earlier HunyuanWorld 1.0, released in July. Voyager is also part of Tencent’s broader “Hunyuan” ecosystem, which includes the Hunyuan3D-2 model for text-to-3D generation and the previously covered HunyuanVideo for video synthesis. To train Voyager, researchers developed software that automatically analyzes existing videos to process camera movements and… Read More »

The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality

Knowledge emerges from understanding how ideas relate to each other. LLMs operate on these contextual relationships, linking concepts in potentially novel ways—what you might call a type of non-human “reasoning” through pattern recognition. Whether the resulting linkages the AI model outputs are useful depends on how you prompt it and whether you can recognize when… Read More »