Today's Hallucination HQ
A Sandwich Shop Walks Into an IPO FilingJersey Mike's, purveyors of submarine sandwiches to the American nation, has filed for an IPO — and naturally, mentioned AI throughout the prospectus. Because apparently no document may enter the public markets in 2026 without first paying tribute to our silicon overlords. The filing illustrates something rather elegant: AI hype has now fully detached from whether AI is relevant to your actual business. Congratulations, Jersey Mike's. The meatball sub is now a technology product. Source: TechCrunch
OpenAI Offers Washington a Modest Slice of the PieOpenAI has reportedly floated giving the US government a 5% ownership stake in the company — a proposal Sam Altman frames as letting the public share in AI's upside. Cynics might note this would also give the administration a compelling financial reason to stay friendly. It is, in fairness, a clever move: nothing cools regulatory enthusiasm quite like having a seat at the table and a line in the dividend. Democracy and capitalism, working together as nature intended. Source: The Verge
Zuckerberg Discovers That Hoping Isn't a RoadmapAt an internal Meta all-hands, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told staff that AI agents — software that autonomously completes multi-step tasks — have not advanced as quickly as he'd hoped. This is notable chiefly because Zuckerberg spent much of early 2025 betting the entire company on them. To his credit, telling your own employees "this isn't going as planned" requires a certain composure. To nobody's credit, vast sums were committed to a timeline that, it turns out, the technology hadn't consulted. Source: TechCrunch
All the AI Models Agree: They All Agree Too MuchAsk any major AI chatbot for a random something, and you'll likely get the same something as everyone else — because large language models, trained on overlapping internet data, have developed a collective blind spot researchers call groupthink. One startup is attempting to fix this by engineering genuine disagreement between models. Which is, admittedly, a strange problem: we built systems to sound confident and helpful, and now we're hiring people to make them argue. Welcome to the notes-giving phase of AI development. Source: MIT Technology Review
AI Can Now Do Your Scientific Homework. Reproducibly.A new paper on ArXiv finds that AI coding agents can reliably replicate the computational results of scientific machine learning papers — verifying claims like error rates and statistical intervals without human hand-holding. This matters because reproducibility in science is, historically, more of an aspiration than a guarantee. The somewhat ironic upshot: AI, a field not historically famous for rigorous self-scrutiny, may end up being the thing that finally holds other fields accountable. Physician, debug thyself. Source: ArXiv AI
As always, the machines are learning. Whether anyone else is remains an open question.
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