Today's Hallucination HQMicrosoft Gives Copilot the Keys to Your House. All of Them.
Microsoft's latest Copilot upgrade can now rummage through your local files and take actions across Windows — a concept they're calling "Hybrid Intelligence," which sounds like a wellness retreat but is actually your PC learning to do things without being asked. It can use on-device processing or the cloud depending on what's needed, which is clever. Whether you wanted an AI assistant with unsupervised access to your documents folder is, Microsoft has quietly decided, beside the point.
Source: The Verge
A $1.5 Billion Valuation and Nobody Had Heard of Them Until Tuesday
Nous Research — builders of the Hermes Agent, an AI designed to handle business tasks autonomously — has confirmed a $90 million Series B and a $1.5 billion valuation. For context, they're still young enough that you'd be forgiven for thinking "Nous Research" was a philosophy podcast. The agent handles complex, multi-step workflows for enterprise users, which is a polite way of saying it attends the meetings nobody wants to attend.
Source: TechCrunch
Google, Meta, and a Nonprofit Walk Into a Biology Lab
Google DeepMind, Meta, and Isomorphic Labs — an AI drug discovery company — have jointly committed $300 million to Biohub, a biomedical nonprofit working to build a "virtual cell": a digital model of how cells behave that researchers can use to understand and fight disease. It is, in fairness, a genuinely ambitious scientific endeavour. It's also the rare occasion where Zuckerberg and Google are funding the same project, which either signals important progress or an extremely awkward shared calendar invite.
Source: The Verge
Google Builds a Lie Detector for the Internet. Good Luck Out There.
SynthID, Google's watermarking tool for AI-generated content, now has a public-facing website where anyone can upload an image, video, or audio clip to check whether it was made by AI. The watermark is embedded invisibly at creation — no label, no badge, just a quiet digital fingerprint. It only works on content watermarked by participating tools, which is rather like a passport control that only checks certain nationalities. A start, nonetheless.
Source: TechCrunch
Your Robot Butler Remains, Regrettably, Theoretical
Despite a string of impressive robotics demos — humanoid robots walking, sorting, and looking tremendously purposeful on social media — MIT Technology Review argues the gap between laboratory performance and real-world deployment remains enormous. Robots still struggle with unstructured environments, unexpected objects, and anything a toddler would handle without thinking. The hardware is expensive, the failure modes are creative, and scaling is a different problem entirely from solving it once. The future is coming. It's just stuck in traffic.
Source: MIT Technology Review
As always, nothing in this newsletter was written by an AI — though one did suggest we call it "Hybrid Intelligence" and we've been suspicious ever since.
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