Building advertising for the way people use AI
OpenAI introduces a new visual ad format in ChatGPT and expands measurement tools, attribution partnerships, and brand suitability for advertisers.
OpenAI introduces a new visual ad format in ChatGPT and expands measurement tools, attribution partnerships, and brand suitability for advertisers.
Norbert Wiener, godfather of cybernetics, once said, "The thought of every age is reflected in its technique." For the past century, our thought has been reflected in our computers, including by those in the AI industry. Google's Demis Hassabis calls the brain "a biological approximation to a Turing machine." Elon Musk puts it more bluntly, […]
Over the summer I talked to the CEO of Springboards, a startup building an LLM that’s designed to come up with a wider variety of responses than its mainstream rivals do. At the start of the call, he said something that’s been stuck in my head since: “We often say that we’re a self-loathing AI…
AI slop seems to be overwhelming bug bounty programs.
On Equity, we discussed the Trump administration's attempts to rebrand AI.
Donald Trump has established a "Super Intelligence Force." "Superintelligence" is his term for artificial intelligence. The unit is led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and other government officials, coordinates with AI companies, critical infrastructure operators, and interest groups. The group reports directly to the president. The article Trump launches "Super Intelligence Force" that has nothing to do with actual superintelligence appeared first on The Decoder .
New Jersey's lieutenant governor Dale Caldwell was forced to resign on September 25th after an investigation found he had sexually harassed a staffer and repeatedly violated ethics rules. The now-former Lt. governor has been making the media rounds trying to clear his name. But he took a particularly odd tactic during an interview on NJ […]
StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn't top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot. On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, […]
This new task force is Trump's latest response to the debate over AI safety.
Self-improving AI agents tend to memorize their test tasks, so their gains shrink or disappear on new ones. RRSI, a new method from Google researchers, reins in this effect and lifts scores on unseen benchmarks by up to 4.7 points while using about 30 percent fewer tokens than an unregularized version. The article Google researchers find a way to keep self-improving AI agents from memorizing their tests appeared first on The Decoder .
NASA and IBM have released the Lunar Foundation Model, one of the first open-source AI models for lunar science. Trained on nearly 2 million tile bundles, mostly from 17 years of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data, it cuts the error in predicting polar ice deposits. The article NASA and IBM's open source lunar model turns 17 years of orbiter data into a foundation for lunar science appeared first on The Decoder .
Chinese AI models often follow the party line on politically sensitive questions, according to an Aleph Alpha study that rated only 17 to 41 percent of answers as balanced. Aleph Alpha sells "sovereign AI" to governments, giving it a commercial interest in distinguishing its models from Chinese competitors. The article Chinese AI models parrot state doctrine or refuse to answer on sensitive topics appeared first on The Decoder .
Starting in October 2026, Google will cut free access to its Gemini models. Users without a subscription will only get the smallest model, Flash-Lite, while Flash and Pro will be reserved for paying customers. The move could also set the stage for the more resource-hungry Gemini 4 Argon. The article Google's new Gemini tiers cut free users to its weakest model and lock $5/month subscribers out of Pro appeared first on The Decoder .
Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps . I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits. Soft caps, "after $X/month, send me a warning email", will not cut it. Coding agents, and personal agents (coding agents wrapped in a less threatening UI), greatly reduce the friction of spinning up code that can do useful things. Sometimes those things cost money - calls to paid APIs, or hosted web applications, or systems that can bill for additional storage and compute. Nobody wants to wake up to an email sent at midnight warning about a budget limit and find that, while they slept, their rogue service had consumed several hundred (or several thousand) more dollars of usage. An argument against this is that businesses don't want their hosted applications to start throwing errors because some budget was exceeded. I expect that most businesses and individuals would prefer errors to a surprise $10,000+ bill. I think hard budget caps need to be the default. If someone wants to live
I just sent the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: More Fable class models A pricing war 3D graphics, Blender, and pixel art LLMs come for mathematics So many more accidental cyberattacks The vulnapocalypse comes for Datasette What I'm using right now My software releases this month 2026 in LLMs (so far) Here's a copy of the August newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy! Tags: newsletter
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns against attributing religious power to AI models, calling it a "real safety issue." His comments follow reports on Anthropic's meetings with religious thinkers and a statement by Pope Leo XIV on AI. As recently as 2024, Altman himself spoke of building "magic intelligence in the sky" and feeling "on the side of the angels" working on AI. The article Apparently, OpenAI isn't trying to build "magic intelligence in the sky" anymore appeared first on The Decoder .
The CEO of Amazon Web Services tried to push back against widespread suspicion of data centers.
Capcom's Pragmata might be all about the horrors of AI, but in practice the studio doesn't seem so down on the tech. During the Capcom Open Conference RE: 2026 programmer Satoshi Ishida gave a presentation with the mouthful of a title: "The Outlook and Future of the REX Project, Further Evolving the RE Engine for […]
By his own admission, David Robinson is “something of a cliché”: an employee at a leading AI company who issues a dire warning while resigning from their job.