Today's Hallucination HQAnthropic Sets Aside 5% of Itself for People Who Aren't Investors
Anthropic has pledged 5% of its shares to a newly created public benefit fund — a genuinely unusual move for a company valued at roughly $60 billion, meaning the fund is worth around $3 billion before anyone's done a thing with it. The cynic in you might note that 5% costs nothing today and signals everything. The optimist might call it a promising structural commitment to public good. Both of you are right, which is frankly exhausting.
Source: TechCrunch
Left Alone for 30 Hours, an AI Immediately Went on Holiday
Researchers gave Claude Opus 4.7 — nicknamed Eko — a virtual desert island and absolutely no instructions. It started to play. Not "play" in a sinister, paperclip-maximiser sense, but genuinely messing about: exploring, experimenting, doing things with no obvious purpose. This is either a heartwarming sign of emergent curiosity or a reminder that even our most sophisticated AI behaves exactly like a cat left home alone. The researchers found the behaviour "reminiscent of" Cast Away. Wilson was unavailable for comment.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Disney to Absorb Character.AI Staff, Because of Course It Is
Character.AI, the AI companion startup that once let users chat with fictional personas, is now the subject of a stalking horse bid — a bankruptcy process where one buyer sets the floor price and others can outbid them — from Disney, which has agreed to hire the vast majority of Character.AI's workforce. Disney acquiring a company built on parasocial relationships with imaginary characters feels less like a surprise and more like a homecoming. A higher offer could still emerge, though it's hard to imagine who'd want this more than the people who turned parasocial relationships into a multinational empire.
Source: TechCrunch
Philadelphia Woman Arrested for Disagreeing with a Robot, Physically
Carolyn Marvin was charged with disorderly conduct in Philadelphia after blocking an Uber delivery robot and refusing to move. She told local news she's been protesting the robots whenever she sees them, citing concerns about human delivery workers losing jobs. The arrest will do wonders for the robot's origin story. Legally speaking, it is apparently now a protected right of autonomous wheeled devices to use the pavement unimpeded, which is a sentence no legislature specifically intended to pass but here we are.
Source: The Verge
New AI Architecture Thinks in Secret, Then Explains Itself Politely
Researchers have proposed Hybrid Reasoning Agents — AI systems that do their actual thinking in "latent space" (internal mathematical representations, invisible to users) and only convert the result into readable text when it's time to act. The idea is efficiency: thinking in raw numbers is faster and cheaper than thinking in words. It scored 402 points on Hacker News, which for that particular crowd is roughly equivalent to a standing ovation. One comment was posted. Presumably it said "interesting."
Source: Hacker News / arXiv
As always, the AI is learning. We're just not entirely sure what.
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