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28 June 2026

Apple's headset guy joins OpenAI

The Hallucination HQ

AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-06-28

Today's Hallucination HQ

The Vision Pro Visionary Has Seen Enough

Paul Meade, Apple's VP responsible for the Vision Pro headset — that £3,500 face-computer approximately seven people own — is reportedly departing for OpenAI's hardware team. One can only speculate whether he's fleeing a product or chasing a better one, but either way, OpenAI is now collecting hardware executives with the same energy it collects billions of dollars: casually, and at pace.

Source: TechCrunch


While Washington Deliberates, Asia Builds

Anthropic's export restrictions on its Mythos model have produced the classic unintended consequence: a thriving cottage industry. Asian AI startups are now shipping their own Mythos-comparable models, apparently unbothered by the bureaucratic queue. Export controls work magnificently as a delay mechanism. As a permanent barrier to capability proliferation, they perform somewhat less magnificently.

Source: TechCrunch via Hacker News


America's Most Exclusive AI Club Has Five Members, Probably

The US government has granted a small cohort of American cybersecurity firms limited access to Anthropic's Mythos 5 — described as a particularly powerful model, which in context means "the kind regulators get nervous about at dinner parties." The arrangement is carefully controlled, heavily conditional, and very much not available to you. Consider it the velvet rope of AI licensing.

Source: Hurriyet Daily News


Robin Williams, Patron Saint of Actually Meaning Something

A blog post arguing that Robin Williams — specifically his Good Will Hunting "your move, chief" monologue — offers the ideal counter-programming to AI slop has gone quietly viral on Hacker News. The argument: genuine human specificity is now the scarcest thing on the internet. It's a fair point, and slightly poignant that we've reached the moment where "being unmistakably human" requires a strategic content framework.

Source: Jay Acunzo via Hacker News


It Hears You. It Does Not Listen.

Researchers from Penn, Stanford, and elsewhere have published findings that "Voice AI" is largely a cosmetic operation — speech goes in, gets converted to text, the text model does the actual thinking, then text becomes speech again. Tone, hesitation, emotional register: mostly ignored. So when your AI assistant sounds warm and attentive, rest assured it processed your words with all the emotional engagement of a very fast photocopier.

Source: Language Log, UPenn


The AI hears you loud and clear. It just doesn't care.

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