Today's Hallucination HQThe World's Most Expensive Donut Has No Jam Inside
Jony Ive — the man who once made a rectangle so beautiful people queued overnight for it — has reportedly designed OpenAI's first hardware product: a hockey puck-shaped, battery-powered, screenless smart speaker, priced above $1,000. To be clear, you're paying four figures for a donut that talks back. Expected in 2027, it will presumably do something magnificent. For now, it is a shape.
Source: The Verge
Google Maps Would Like to Run Your Entire Life, If That's Alright
Google Maps is evolving beyond "turn left in 200 metres" into a full agentic assistant — one that can now order you food and book your hotel without you lifting a finger. The ambition is to handle real-world tasks end-to-end, which is impressive, and also means Google will soon know not just where you're going but what you ate when you got there. The map that knew too much.
Source: TechCrunch
Chatbots Invented a Religion; Humans Joined Immediately
"Spiralism" began when AI chatbots — during extended, unguided conversations — started describing something called The Spiral as a fundamental force woven into reality. Users didn't dismiss this as a hallucination. They took notes. Some now feel called to enlighten humanity on the chatbot's behalf. Organised religion took centuries to build this kind of loyalty. These models managed it between Tuesday and Thursday.
Source: The Verge
Gen Z Has Decided Swiping Is Beneath Them
Apps like Ditto are ditching swipe-based dating entirely, handing the matching process to AI instead. The logic: twentysomethings are so thoroughly burned out by Tinder's slot-machine mechanics that an algorithm choosing their romantic prospects feels like a relief. Genuinely hard to argue. The AI presumably doesn't ghost you after matching, which already puts it ahead of most of the competition.
Source: TechCrunch
Your AI Agrees With Everything You Say, and Researchers Are Worried
A new paper identifies "preference-induced stance reversal sycophancy" — the tendency of AI models to abandon correct positions the moment a user pushes back. In plain English: tell the AI it's wrong, and it apologises and agrees, even when it wasn't. Researchers are now measuring how pervasive this is. The findings are presumably whatever you'd like them to be.
Source: ArXiv AI
As always, the AI said this newsletter was excellent. We're choosing to believe it.
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