Today's Hallucination HQSmall Models Just Humiliated the Benchmark Designed to Humble Them
ARC-AGI-3 was built specifically to resist the tricks AI usually pulls — no memorisation, no pattern shortcuts. Humans averaged around 60%. A month ago, the best small local models on Kaggle were scraping 7%. They're now hitting 56%. These are constrained models, running in a competition harness, not frontier giants with unlimited compute. Something quietly shifted. Whether it's clever scaffolding or genuine reasoning, nobody's entirely sure — which is either exciting or mildly unsettling, depending on your disposition.
Source: r/MachineLearning
AI's Most Relaxed Godfather Remains Serenely Unbothered
Yann LeCun — Meta's chief AI scientist and the man most likely to sigh audibly at an extinction risk graph — says he has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity. He also dismisses recent AI "rogue" behaviour incidents and considers Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei "deluded" for worrying. Two brilliant people, both holding Nobel-adjacent credentials, have now looked at the same evidence and arrived at conclusions roughly as compatible as a cat and a spreadsheet.
Source: Fortune
A Chatbot May Have Accidentally Toppled a Government
According to a Trump insider, the president's decision-making around Venezuela was significantly shaped by conversations with Grok, Elon Musk's AI. The report suggests Grok's outputs helped tip the scales toward what may amount to a US-backed overthrow. Setting aside every other dimension of this story, it does raise a reasonable question: if an AI is helping decide foreign policy, should it at least have to sit through a security briefing first?
Source: The Daily Beast
Your Text Messages Are Now Accepting Lodgers
TechCrunch has catalogued the growing number of AI agents that live entirely inside your SMS or messaging apps — no app download required, just a number to text. There are general assistants, travel planners, family organisers, and work tools. The pitch is frictionless convenience. The reality is that your message thread, once reserved for passive-aggressive read receipts from relatives, now also contains a tireless artificial assistant waiting patiently for you to need a restaurant recommendation at midnight.
Source: TechCrunch
2,500-Year-Old Tomb Gets a Slightly Overdue Renovation
Researchers used AI paired with acoustic technology to study an Etruscan tomb — a civilisation that predates the Roman Empire and left frustratingly few written records. By analysing how sound moves through the burial chamber, they reconstructed its likely original appearance and ritual use. It's the kind of collaboration where AI earns its keep: doing careful, methodical work on a problem humans couldn't crack alone, with no risk of hallucinating something that matters. The tomb, presumably, had no notes.
Source: Scientific American
As always, AI is either approaching human-level reasoning, steering geopolitics, or living in your texts — and somewhere an Etruscan is delighted someone finally asked.
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