Today's Hallucination HQThe Trillion-Dollar Shrug
An Apollo Global economist has done the maths, and the results are awkward: outside of tech itself, AI has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America. Companies have spent lavishly, restructured enthusiastically, and announced strategies with great PowerPoint confidence — and largely have nothing to show for it. The economist stops short of calling it a collective hallucination, which is professionally restrained of him. The technology may yet deliver. The invoices, however, are already in.
Source: TechCrunch
The Garden Gate Gets a Very Long Sign
Reddit's r/opensource community has updated its rules, banning any project that uses AI, is made by AI, or exists to serve AI. The post also restricts non-English submissions, among other changes — making it, perhaps, the internet's most aggressively curated front porch. The philosophical position is coherent: open-source values community, transparency, and human craft, none of which large language models are famous for. Whether the ban holds is another matter. The internet has a long history of enforcing rules on Reddit.
Source: The Verge
Seven Minutes In Heaven, Or Thereabouts
xAI's Grok has released the opening seven minutes of Odyssey, its AI-generated film — and the footage is, by most accounts, technically competent. No glitching hands. Reasonably stable backgrounds. The issue, as TechCrunch drily notes, is the complete absence of artistry, inspiration, or human interest. So: a film that looks like a film, in the same way that a waxwork looks like a person. Homer composed his Odyssey blind. Grok has all the data in the world and has produced something you'd skip after eight minutes.
Source: TechCrunch
Google Rearranged the Furniture While Everyone Was Living In It
Google's AI Overviews — those summarised answers that now sit atop search results like a bouncer deciding who gets in — have quietly devastated online publishing. Readers get their answers without clicking. Traffic drops. Revenue follows. Publishers who spent years optimising for Google's algorithm now find themselves optimising for a system that's happy to replace them entirely. It's a masterclass in platform dependency: build your house on someone else's land, then act surprised when they landscape.
Source: The Verge
An AI Scientist Audits Itself, Finds Itself Mostly Wrong
A self-improving science agent — an AI that generates its own research hypotheses and refines them over time — has been stress-tested using a compression-based method called Minimum Description Length (MDL), which essentially asks: does this "law" actually explain anything, or is it statistical noise dressed in a lab coat? The answer, for 86% of the agent's discoveries, was the latter. The remaining 14% held up as genuinely law-grade knowledge. Science has always involved a lot of wrong answers. It's just faster now.
Source: ArXiv
AI: doing everything except, apparently, the one thing it was hired for.
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