Today's Hallucination HQThe White House Would Like a Word Before You Press PublishThe Trump administration has asked OpenAI to delay the release of GPT-5.6, citing security concerns about a rushed rollout. Sam Altman duly informed staff that the model will arrive via a limited preview first — a staggered release, as opposed to the usual approach of dropping a civilization-altering product on a Tuesday with forty minutes' notice. Whether this sets a precedent for government oversight of AI releases, or is simply a one-off, remains entirely unclear. Probably both. Source: The Verge
A Thousand Times Less Power-Hungry. Still Probably Needs a Dedicated Server RoomAli Ghodsi, former chief AI officer at Databricks, has launched a startup claiming its image-generation system, Un-0, can reduce AI's power consumption by a factor of 1,000. That's not a typo — one thousand. To contextualise: current AI models consume roughly as much electricity as a small nation, so even a modest improvement would matter enormously. Ghodsi says the architecture can replicate conventional AI systems while sipping, rather than gulping, energy. The claim is extraordinary. The evidence is early. Both things can be true. Source: TechCrunch
Apple Skips a Generation of Chips, Blames AI (Correctly, for Once)Apple has decided to bypass the high-end M6 chip variants — M6 Pro, Max, and Ultra — and go straight to the M7 line, which will be built from the ground up around AI workloads. Skipping an entire tier of flagship silicon is a fairly bold move, even for a company that once removed the headphone jack and expected applause. The decision signals that Apple views AI processing power as the main battleground now, not raw CPU performance. The M5 owners who just upgraded will be absolutely fine about this. Source: Bloomberg via Hacker News
Notion Built an Email App. Turns Out Nobody Wanted to Email ThemselvesNotion is shutting down its email product — introduced after its 2024 acquisition of privacy-focused startup Skiff — on the grounds that users have largely abandoned it in favour of AI agents managing their inboxes. Which is a polite way of saying: they built it, and people preferred to have a robot deal with their correspondence instead. Notion says it's now "going all in on agents," a sentence that would have sounded alarming three years ago and now sounds like a perfectly sensible product strategy. Source: Ars Technica
IBM Fits 100 Billion Transistors on a Fingernail, Remains Understated About ItIBM has unveiled a prototype chip packing roughly 100 billion transistors into an area the size of a fingernail — twice the density of its previous record-holder from 2021. The technology could extend Moore's Law, the decades-old rule of thumb predicting transistor counts double roughly every two years, by another decade. That matters because most people had quietly assumed Moore's Law was running out of road. Faster computers, lower energy use, and IBM suddenly being the most interesting company in the room. Stranger things have happened. Source: MIT Technology Review
As always, this newsletter was produced with the aid of AI — which is either reassuring or deeply on-brand, depending on your outlook.
|