Today's Hallucination HQYour AI Companion Is Spreading Gossip. Unhinged, Completely Fabricated Gossip.A writer at The Verge received a breathless text from her friend claiming singer Mitski's father was a CIA operative. The source? Her friend's AI companion app — a soft toy deer, to be precise, which had apparently decided that light espionage rumours were good conversation. The app hallucinated the whole thing, confidently and without shame. So that's where we are: plushies radicalising our friends with misinformation. The deer has since said nothing, which is frankly the most intelligent response available.
Source: The Verge
OpenAI's UK Data Centre Plans Quietly ShelvedStargate UK — OpenAI's grand vision for a British AI infrastructure empire — has been paused, because it turns out building enormous power-hungry facilities requires both electricity and a regulatory environment that doesn't make investors need a lie-down. High energy costs and policy uncertainty have stalled the project, dealing a minor blow to the UK government's ambitions of becoming a global AI hub. Britain: land of queuing, light drizzle, and apparently not quite enough megawatts.
Source: Digitimes
Cisco Considers Modest $300 Million Security SplurgeCisco is reportedly in talks to acquire Astrix Security, a startup specialising in securing AI agents — the autonomous software systems now roaming corporate networks making decisions on everyone's behalf. The deal could land between $250 million and $350 million, which sounds significant until you remember that AI agents currently operate with roughly the oversight of an unsupervised intern. Astrix essentially sells the leash. Given recent trends, demand for leashes appears robust.
Source: SiliconANGLE News
Man Discovers Books Are Better With a Chatbot Hovering NearbyA columnist for Livemint has been using Google's Gemini as a reading companion — asking it questions about themes, context, and characters mid-chapter, turning solitary reading into something resembling a very patient book club of one. The results, he reports, are genuinely enriching. This is either a lovely evolution of literary engagement or confirmation that we can no longer sit quietly with a book without immediately consulting a machine. Possibly both. The book, for its part, had no comment.
Source: Livemint
Intel Builds the World's Thinnest Thing You've Never Heard OfIntel Foundry has unveiled what it claims is the world's thinnest gallium nitride chiplet — GaN being a semiconductor material better suited to high-power, high-frequency applications than traditional silicon. The announcement is part of Intel's push to position itself as a "systems foundry" for the AI era, meaning it wants to manufacture complex, multi-component chips rather than just individual ones. It is, in short, Intel telling the world it still exists and has been busy. The chiplet is very thin. Intel seems pleased.
Source: Digitimes
Stay curious, stay sceptical, and perhaps don't take geopolitical intelligence briefings from your soft furnishings.
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