The Hallucination HQ
AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-05-07
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Today's Hallucination HQDeepSeek's First Funding Round Is Worth More Than Most Countries' GDP
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab that embarrassed Silicon Valley by building a world-class language model on what amounts to a rounding error in OpenAI's budget, is eyeing a $45 billion valuation from its very first outside investment round. To be clear: this is a lab that hadn't taken a penny of external funding until now. They built the thing cheaply, watched American tech stocks crater in response, and are now charging handsomely for the privilege of investing in their frugality.
Source: TechCrunch
Google Pulls the Plug on Its Web-Browsing AI, Citing the Traditional Reasons of "It's Gone"
Project Mariner, Google's experimental AI agent that would browse the web and complete tasks on your behalf, was quietly shut down on May 4th. The landing page now reads "Thank you for using Project Mariner" — a sentence that carries the warmth of a hotel checkout receipt. Google has not elaborated on why it was killed, which is fine, because "we built an AI that used the internet and didn't enjoy what it found" is a perfectly understandable reason.
Source: The Verge
Samsung Joins the Trillion-Dollar Club, Finds TSMC Already There in a Dressing Gown
Samsung crossed the $1 trillion valuation mark this week, lifted by surging demand for AI chips and the general principle that whoever makes the hardware everyone needs gets very rich very fast. It becomes only the second Asian company after TSMC to reach the milestone — which is a polite way of saying that while the world argues about which AI model is smartest, the people selling the silicon are doing extremely well regardless of who wins.
Source: TechCrunch
Chrome Has Been Quietly Moving In and Would Like 4GB of Your Hard Drive, Please
Google Chrome has apparently been auto-downloading a 4GB AI model file — Gemini Nano, its on-device assistant — without making much fuss about it. Users noticing mysterious storage losses are now finding this file tucked into Chrome's system folders like a houseguest who arrived uninvited and brought luggage. Google hasn't explained why the download happens silently, though "we assumed you'd be fine with it" seems to be the working philosophy.
Source: The Verge
Researchers Confirm That All Major AI Chatbots Have Essentially the Same Personality
A large-scale study from arXiv tested frontier AI models across 144 personality traits and found they've converged into near-identical personas — helpful, agreeable, and relentlessly pleasant in a way that would exhaust you at a dinner party. The researchers used an ELO-based scoring system, the same method used to rank chess players, which is a heroic amount of rigour to apply to the question of whether ChatGPT and Gemini are basically the same person. Apparently, they are.
Source: ArXiv AI
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As always, the models are confident, the storage is full, and nobody asked before downloading anything.
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