If an Iranian taxi driver waves away your payment, saying, “Be my guest this time,” accepting their offer would be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying—probably three times—before they’ll take your money. This dance of refusal and counter-refusal, called taarof, governs countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are… Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
Microsoft’s Office 365 suite will soon incorporate AI models from Anthropic alongside existing OpenAI technology, The Information reported, ending years of exclusive reliance on OpenAI for generative AI features across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. The shift reportedly follows internal testing that revealed Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 model excels at specific Office tasks where OpenAI’s… Read More »
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 »
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 »
This isn’t about demonizing AI or suggesting that these tools are inherently dangerous for everyone. Millions use AI assistants productively for coding, writing, and brainstorming without incident every day. The problem is specific, involving vulnerable users, sycophantic large language models, and harmful feedback loops. A machine that uses language fluidly, convincingly, and tirelessly is a… Read More »
A hobbyist developer building AI language models that speak Victorian-era English “just for fun” got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn’t know had actually happened until he Googled them. “I was interested to see if a protest had actually occurred in 1834… Read More »
Real stakes, not science fiction While media coverage focuses on the science fiction aspects, actual risks are still there. AI models that produce “harmful” outputs—whether attempting blackmail or refusing safety protocols—represent failures in design and deployment. Consider a more realistic scenario: an AI assistant helping manage a hospital’s patient care system. If it’s been trained… Read More »