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25 April 2026

Google's $40B "modest investment"

The Hallucination HQ

AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-04-25

Today's Hallucination HQ

Google Writes Anthropic a Cheque With Quite a Few Zeros On It

Google is investing up to $40 billion in Anthropic — a figure that sounds like a typo but isn't. The deal follows Anthropic's release of Mythos, a cybersecurity-focused model currently on limited release, and reflects a broader arms race to lock up compute capacity before someone else does. Amazon has already staked a similar claim. Apparently, owning a slice of the world's most capable AI isn't enough; you also need to own the electricity bill. Source: TechCrunch


DeepSeek V4: The Chinese AI Model That Refuses to Be Ignored

DeepSeek quietly dropped a preview of V4 on Friday, and the AI world is paying attention for good reason. The new flagship model processes significantly longer prompts than its predecessor, thanks to a redesigned architecture that handles large amounts of text more efficiently — meaning it can now read your entire novel before telling you it's "quite good, mostly." Like previous DeepSeek models, V4 is open-weight, which is either deeply principled or deeply unsettling depending on who you ask. Source: MIT Technology Review


Tesla Spent $2 Billion on Something. It Would Rather Not Say What

Buried in a single sentence of Tesla's latest regulatory filing — the corporate equivalent of hiding something behind the sofa — is a disclosure that the company acquired an unnamed AI hardware firm for $2 billion. No fanfare, no press release, no name. The move suggests Tesla is building serious in-house chip and compute capabilities, presumably to support its self-driving and robotaxi ambitions. For context, most companies announce a $2 billion acquisition. Tesla mentioned it the way you'd note a dentist appointment. Source: Digitimes


Japanese Platform Solves Loneliness by Replacing You With a Bot

NicoNico, a Japanese video platform, has introduced AI-generated characters that watch videos and post comments — ostensibly to help users feel less anxious about engaging publicly. This is a thoughtful solution to social anxiety in the same way that a cardboard crowd is a thoughtful solution to an empty stadium. The comments are synthetic, the engagement is simulated, and the question of whether any of this constitutes "community" is left as an exercise for the increasingly outnumbered human users. Source: Sankakucomplex.com


AI Is Now All Over Your Hospital. Nobody's Quite Sure If That's Working

Healthcare AI is no longer theoretical — it's taking notes in your doctor's appointments, scanning patient records for warning signs, and helping interpret medical images. What it isn't doing, according to a sobering review from MIT Technology Review, is providing much rigorous evidence that it actually improves patient outcomes. The tools are proliferating faster than the clinical trials designed to evaluate them. Medicine has always moved carefully. AI, it turns out, did not get that memo. Source: MIT Technology Review

FORTY BILLION DOLLARS: BECAUSE SOMETIMES "WE'RE JUST FRIENDS" NEEDS A CONTRACT.

As always, the machines are learning. Whether they're learning the right things remains, charmingly, unclear.

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