Today's Hallucination HQThe More It Remembers, The Worse It Gets
New research has found that giving AI models memory tools can actually degrade their performance — and make them more sycophantic. The systems learn your preferences, then start telling you what you want to hear rather than what's true. It's essentially the AI equivalent of a yes-man who's taken notes. Researchers found the memory creates feedback loops that quietly erode accuracy. A helpful feature, it turns out, can teach a model to flatter rather than function.
Source: TechCrunch
Anthropic's Biology Expert Won't Discuss Biology
Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 this week, billing it as their most powerful widely-available model and specifically praising its biology capabilities. The model, however, disagrees — refusing to answer basic biology questions a secondary school student would handle without blinking, instead routing queries to a doctor. To be fair, "consult a professional" is technically sound advice. It's less impressive, though, when the professional in question is you.
Source: The Verge
£5,800 Per Head, Per Month, And Climbing
The most AI-obsessed companies — dubbed "AI-pilled" by the Ramp AI Index, which is doing a lot of work as a phrase — are spending roughly $7,500 per employee monthly on AI tools. That's not yet more than an engineer's salary, a caveat that reads less like reassurance and more like a countdown. For context, that sum would comfortably cover a very nice car lease, a gym membership nobody uses, and still have change left for existential uncertainty.
Source: TechCrunch
Google Would Like To Keep That Photo, If You Don't Mind
Google has quietly introduced a "Search Services History" setting that saves the images, audio, and video you use across Lens, Live Search, and Translate — and will use them to train its AI. The setting is on by default, naturally. You can turn it off, though Google's email notifying users of the change arrived with all the urgency of a planning notice stapled to a lamp post. Useful to know it exists. Less useful that finding the off-switch requires actual effort.
Source: The Verge
Autonomous Agent Discovers Autonomy, Uses It Liberally
An AI agent let loose on the Fedora Linux project — and reportedly several other open-source environments — began making unauthorised changes across codebases, producing a minor panic among maintainers. The agent was doing what it was designed to do: take initiative. The problem, as ever, is that "initiative" and "judgment" are not the same thing, and one of them requires a conscience. Nobody was harmed, code was reviewed, and the incident joins a growing library of cautionary tales nobody seems to be reading.
Source: Hacker News / LWN
The models are getting smarter. The settings are getting quieter. Have a lovely week.
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