Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
Hastings says he believes in Anthropic’s ‘approach to AI development.’
Odyssey’s ‘interactive video’ is like a blurry video game.
Joanna Stern’s new video for the Wall Street Journal combines several AI tools, like Google Veo 2, the just-launched Veo 3, Midjourney, Runway, Suno, and ElevenLabs, to make this “My Robot and Me” short.
Beyond just seeing what they’re capable of in the hands of a skilled producer, Joanna also digs into how much all this would’ve cost (about $1,000), and shows off a few of the misfires created by the generators.
The WSJ reported earlier this month that unnamed senior Meta execs were “frustrated” over a delayed rollout for the largest version of its Llama 4 AI model, dubbed Behemoth, and said management changes could follow.
Now, Axios reports there have been changes. Connor Hayes is leading the AI products team responsible for AI features in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as well as the Meta AI Assistant and AI Studio, while Ahmad Al-Dahle and Amir Frenkel co-lead the AGI Foundations unit working on Llama models and other AI tech.
The conversational mode for Anthropic’s AI chatbot is now becoming available for users of its mobile apps, “gradually.”
TechCrunch notes that chief product officer Mike Krieger confirmed the rumored feature was on the way in a recent interview, while Anthropic says that it can integrate with Google Workspace, and that free users can expect “20-30 voice messages” before session limits cut them off, while paid users have higher limits.
Mary Hubbard, the executive director of WordPress.org, said the group will work on “accelerating and coordinating artificial intelligence projects across the WordPress ecosystem.” The team will also maintain a public roadmap of its AI plans and plugins, which it will share on its new page for “Core AI.”
The head of Google discusses the next AI platform shift and how it could change how we use the internet forever.
The Atlantic has a fascinating deep dive into khipus — long cords that the Inca tied knots into to preserve information. Few know how to read the knots, which are hundreds of years old and fragile. But researchers are slowly learning to understand them:
A few years ago, Clindaniel trained an AI system to analyze the colors of 37,645 cords on 629 khipus, as well as the colors of the cords that surround them, which may indicate context and genre. Clindaniel’s program found that rare khipu colors—red, certain blues, orange, yellow, certain grays, greens—were all clustered together, indicating that they were probably used in highly similar contexts. Based on Spanish chronicles and other clues, Clindaniel suggests that this context might have involved religion or Inca royalty.
[theatlantic.com]
Amazon engineers related their experience creating software to The New York Times:
The engineers said that the company had raised output goals and had become less forgiving about deadlines ... One Amazon engineer said his team was roughly half the size it had been last year, but it was expected to produce roughly the same amount of code by using A.I.
The Times likens the shift to that of Amazon warehouses, where robots “have increased the number of items each worker can pick to hundreds from dozens an hour.”
Unionized workers at Politico allege the company violated its contract by using AI-generated content in a live blog — and are escalating their complaint to arbitration this summer. The union says the AI-generated summaries contained factual errors and language that’s off-limits for writers. The result of arbitration could set an important precedent for an industry that’s seen countless AI disputes in recent years.
The Justice Department is investigating whether Google crafted its agreement to skirt regulatory scrutiny, Bloomberg reports. The deal brought Character.AI’s co-founders back to Google and didn’t technically involve an exchange of shares, though investors were set to receive a payout, The Verge previously reported. Google spokesperson Peter Schottenfels told Bloomberg that Google is “always happy to answer any questions from regulators,” and added that Character.AI remains separate, with no ownership stake by Google.
AI hardware has entered its spaghetti era, and notably, Altman and Ive aren’t betting on glasses.
Surge AI is being sued over worker misclassification in California. The class-action suit was brought by the same firm that filed a similar suit against Surge’s larger rival, Scale AI, late last year. The complaint alleges that Surge exerts an extremely high level of control over how and when its contractors work and also accuses the company of failing to pay wages for the copious training and testing contractors must perform before being allowed to start on a project.
Both of these problems were systemic in the annotation industry when I wrote about them two years ago.
The first lady has announced that the new audiobook version of her self-titled (and suspiciously robotic) memoir was entirely narrated using an AI clone of her own voice created by ElevenLabs.
If the more than 50,000 AI-narrated books on Audible alone are any indication, the “new era in publishing” she’s heralding is already here, and it’s overwhelmingly saturated with hilariously titled erotica.
The excellent Data & Society pulled together a report on the impact of generative AI on scamming. (No surprise: not good.) Its conclusion makes an interesting comparison to the once-pressing scourge of spam:
“Though it once threatened to make email unusable, spam was largely tamed through the development of increasingly sophisticated email filters, regulation like the CAN-SPAM act, and email users becoming more adept at recognizing and managing unsolicited messages. ... This success did not come from eliminating spam altogether, but from mitigating its impact so effectively that it became a manageable nuisance rather than a disruptive force, through a mix of technical advancements, regulation, and education. As we turn our attention to the growing threat of AI-enhanced scams, the question becomes: What would a comparable success story look like?”
The Verge team has a few guesses about the first hardware release from the OpenAI and io combination. Let us know yours in the comments.
