The Hallucination HQ
AI news that's actually fun to read — 2026-05-05
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Today's Hallucination HQPretty Pictures Pay Better Than Smart Conversations (Briefly)
Appfigures has the receipts: image AI model launches drive 6.5 times more app downloads than chatbot upgrades. Users, it turns out, will sprint toward something that turns their face into a Renaissance portrait. The catch — and there is always a catch — almost none of that excitement converts into actual revenue. Humanity will queue enthusiastically for a novelty and then refuse to pay for it. Marketers, take note. Also, therapists.
Source: TechCrunch
The Man Who Taught Vacuums to Think Now Wants You to Adopt a Robot
Colin Angle put 50 million Roombas in people's homes — machines that spent a decade bumping into furniture with quiet dignity. His new startup, Familiar Machines & Magic, has produced "Familiar": a furry robot companion designed to live alongside your family and interact with them autonomously. It is, essentially, a pet that requires no feeding and cannot die. Whether that's comforting or quietly unsettling probably depends on how you feel about eye contact with appliances.
Source: The Verge
Two Men Walk Into a Courtroom. Both Have Opinions About Who Betrayed Whom.
Week one of Musk v. Altman concluded in Oakland, and MIT Technology Review was there to report that, yes, it is exactly as theatrical as advertised. Musk alleges that OpenAI abandoned its founding nonprofit mission in favour of profit — a point he raises while running xAI, a for-profit AI company. Altman disagrees, presumably with great composure. The case touches on billions of dollars, the soul of artificial intelligence, and two enormous egos attempting to occupy the same courtroom without the roof caving in.
Source: MIT Technology Review
Y Combinator's OpenAI Bet May Be Worth More Than Their Entire Fund
Y Combinator — the startup accelerator that gave OpenAI its first $20,000 and a desk to sit at — may now hold roughly 0.6% of a company reportedly valued near $300 billion. That's somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.8 billion from a seed cheque that wouldn't cover a decent London flat today. John Gruber at Daring Fireball spotted the detail and did the maths so we didn't have to. Best return on a modest favour since someone bought Amazon in 1997.
Source: Hacker News / Daring Fireball
Researchers Actually Measured How Much of the Web Is Now AI Slop
Everyone has a strong opinion about LLMs flooding the internet with generated content. Fewer people have actual data. A new ArXiv paper — DeGenTWeb — attempts to fix that with a properly sampled, methodologically transparent study of LLM-dominant websites. Early findings suggest the problem is real, though the scale is more nuanced than the panic suggests. Which is, frankly, the least interesting possible conclusion, but the most honest one. Science rarely arrives with dramatic music.
Source: ArXiv AI
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