The Hallucination HQ
AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-09-08
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Today's Hallucination HQClaude Does in 11 Days What Mathematicians Couldn't Do in 358 Years
Anthropic's Claude has produced a fully computer-verified proof of Fermat's Last Theorem — the mathematical puzzle that defeated every human who attempted it from 1637 until Andrew Wiles cracked it in 1995. Claude's version runs to 13 million lines of formal code and was checked by a proof assistant, confirming it's watertight. Wiles needed seven years and a quiet attic. Claude needed less than a fortnight. Mathematics, understandably, is having a bit of a sit-down.
Source: Nature
Someone Taught a Tiny Neural Network One Song and It Delivered
A researcher on r/MachineLearning built a recurrent neural network with just 417,000 parameters — modest, by modern standards — and asked it to generate the iconic Bad Apple!! video from a single starting state, no timestamps provided. The network had to evolve the visuals entirely through its own internal dynamics. It worked. For context, GPT-4o has roughly 400 billion parameters, which makes this roughly the AI equivalent of someone recreating a film from memory using only a pencil.
Source: r/MachineLearning
The Robots Are Coming for Your Job (They Said in 1850, and 1920, and 1980)
A BBC programme worth your time asks whether AI job anxiety is historically literate — or just anxiety. Host Rob Young walks through previous technological upheavals: the printing press, the loom, the computer. Each time, mass redundancy was predicted. Each time, work changed shape rather than disappeared. Whether AI is genuinely different remains contested. What isn't contested is that humans are very good at worrying about this, which is at least one job that appears secure.
Source: BBC News
A 95% Reduction in Image Processing Costs, If You're Willing to Do Homework First
A developer tested a preprocessing pipeline on 1,315 image-based questions from the MOMA Graph benchmark and found it used roughly 95% fewer tokens than sending images directly to GPT-4o — with comparable accuracy. The trick appears to be extracting structured information before it reaches the model, rather than asking the model to do everything. It's the AI equivalent of reading the brief before the meeting. Extraordinary what's possible when someone does.
Source: r/MachineLearning
The UN Would Like Everyone to Take This Seriously, Please
Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the Human Rights Council this week that AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity and demanded immediate regulatory action. This is not, to be clear, a fringe view — it's shared by a number of researchers who build these systems. The statement carries the full moral weight of the United Nations, which means the world's most powerful AI developers will have approximately forty-eight hours before they move on to the next thing.
Source: CNA
Stay curious, stay sceptical, and maybe save a copy of this newsletter somewhere the robots can't reach.
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