Edward Saatchi runs Fable Studio, which started in 2018 doing virtual reality. A couple of pivots later, Fable has an exciting new project called Showrunner that lets you make your own TV show epis…

Cosmos is — or was — a popular science magazine published by the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. David Ho is an oceanographer at the University of Hawai’i. Cosmos posted an articl…

Remember that much-loved Microsoft AI feature Copilot Recall that keeps screenshots of everything happening on your Windows PC? Now there’s Microsoft Copilot Vision for Windows 11, which takes what…

Microsoft Copilot has an avatar now! It’s a viscous pearly blob of liquid. That wobbles. And has facial expressions. I had to euphemise furiously on the YouTube version of this post — but for the b…

We talked about dubious claims of replacing fashion models with AI image generator output  back in April, when H&M made a series of actually impossible claims about AI models that they got prin…

Tech recruiters Howdy surveyed 1,047 full-time professionals who say they use AI. 30% of survey subjects said they were managers. [Howdy] 75% of subjects were expected to use AI at work. 22% felt p…

Google claims the AI Overview on every search result — a frequently-wrong summary of other people’s work — sends a ton of clicks back to the original publishers they ripped off. This is false. Pew …

UPDATE: reply from Lemkin appended at end, he says it really did happen this way Jason Lemkin of AI startup SaaStr posted a Twitter thread on Thursday 17 July, claiming he had vibe-coded an app usi…

I asked a couple of months ago: if AI code was such an obviously superior engineering method, why didn’t we see AI code everywhere in open source? Since then, there have been a few performative AI …

When you’ve read this post, go watch the worked examples on YouTube. [YouTube] Our intrepid friend Aron Peterson, a.k.a. Shokunin Studio, is a media production guy. He follows the AI image generato…

It’s that time again when I ask you to send money to Pivot to AI. Help keep the stories coming daily! Here is how to send money: The Patreon is here. Sign up for $5 a month today! Less th…

7 predictions that might sound familiar

Neurosymbolic AI is quietly winning. Here’s what that means – and why it took so long

Model Evaluation and Threat Research is an AI research charity that looks into the threat of AI agents! That sounds a bit AI doomsday cult, and they take funding from the AI doomsday cult organisat…

Our research shows that even the latest "reasoning" models are vulnerable

Coding has been the strongest use case. But a new study from METR just dropped.

When some huge and stupid public chatbot disaster hits the news, the AI pumpers will Kramer into the mentions to say stuff like “you have to admit, AI is here to stay.” Well, no, I don’t. Not unles…

Anysphere is the startup that produces Cursor, your sort-of dependable vibe coding buddy. You tell Cursor what you’d like and it spits out a complete function! This leads to some spectacular vibe c…

You’ve heard of vibe coding, with, I’m sure, not a little horror. Spin the gacha and make a website! And then you have unfortunate experiences. There are people who get quietly called in to f…

The Independent Publishers Alliance, a group of small UK publishers, has filed a UK competition complaint and an EU antitrust complaint over Google’s AI Overviews in search results. [Press Gazette;…

SWE-Bench Verified by OpenAI tests how well a model can solve real bugs in real Python code from GitHub. These bugs are all public information — so the AI models have almost certainly trained on th…

A compassionate but skeptical letter that Douglas Hofstadter wrote to one of his readers

Whatever happened to steelmanning?

Last year, Wall Street finance firms started making loans, using video cards as collateral  — that famously long-term asset class that solidly maintains its value over, ooh, months. Investment bank…

The downsides of generative AI are growing like wildfire

When you’ve read this post, go watch the worked examples on YouTube. [YouTube] Our good friend Aron Peterson, a.k.a. Shokunin Studio, is a media production professional. He experiments with AI imag…

Venture capitalists Menlo Ventures have released what purports to be a survey: “2025: The State of Consumer AI”. That is, chatbots. [Menlo Ventures] The subtitle is: “AI’s Consumer Tipping Po…

Microsoft is firing 9,000 workers across the company — 4% of all employees. Before this, they laid off over 6,000 in May and another 300 in June. [CNBC] It’s not that Microsoft is doing badly. In Q…

“Mastering Machine Learning: From Basics to Advanced” by Govindakumar Madhavan was published in April by Springer Nature. It’s $169 as an ebook, or $219 as a hardback. [Springer, archive] Retractio…

An internal Microsoft memo has leaked. It was written by Julia Liuson, president of the Developer Division at Microsoft and GitHub. The memo tells managers to evaluate employees based on how much t…

This is our second week of running Google’s Veo 3 video generator through its paces. So when you’ve read this, go and watch the worked examples. And check out last week’s. [YouTube] Our good friend…

It’s the end of the month, and that’s when I ask you to donate to Pivot to AI! At present, Pivot is my income. (Got sysadmin/devops work? Call me!) So your $5 a month — or any other amo…

LLM failures to reason, as documented in Apple’s Illusion of Thinking paper, are really only part of a much deeper problem

Today, let’s look at two Pitchbook reports — the US VC-Backed M&A Outlook for second quarter 2025 and the 2025 US Venture Capital Outlook: Midyear Update. [Pitchbook; Pitchbook, PDF, archive; P…

Meta has won against Kadrey et al — the authors’ case against Meta training their Llama LLM on the authors’ books, including on pirate copies. [Order, PDF; case docket] Both sides brought motions f…

Much beloved US phone company Verizon has updated its My Verizon app to include 24/7 customer service from AI! It’s got a chatbot based on Google Gemini. [Verizon] Verizon tells The Verge: [Verge] …

Three years ago Google promised us “deep language understanding” for image generation. I don’t think we are there yet.

One of the many copyright cases in progress against chatbot vendor Anthropic is Bartz v. Anthropic, where several authors brought a class action suit in August 2024 for violating their copyrights w…

When our glorious AI bubble deflates, and we contemplate the wreckage of so many companies that did nothing but turn venture capital billions into carbon dioxide, there’s one company that wil…

Will we ever be able to control them?

Over on YouTube, we run Google’s Veo 3 video generator through its paces. So when you’ve read this, go and watch the worked examples. [YouTube] Aron Peterson is a media production professional. He’…

“Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” - 1984, George Orwell

Headlines about AI companies paying “billions” for other AI companies mostly don’t mean real money, but equity in private companies with imaginary valuations. But sometimes, people want actual mone…

iNaturalist is a website that crowdsources pictures of plants and animals to help identify species. Its tagline is “A Community for Naturalists.” iNaturalist is administered by its own small charit…

OpenAI must finish its transition from a weird charity to some sort of for-profit company. Then it can get $40 billion from SoftBank! OpenAI absolutely needs to get the stakeholders on side — parti…

The most popular rebuttal was … a joke. Literally.

In a new study, MIT Media Lab measured 55 people over four months on how well they could write an essay — either with ChatGPT, with a search engine, or just their unassisted brain. The researchers …

You can’t put data into an LLM and then filter the output to block some of it. Once it’s in the model, it’s in the model. If you put confidential business information into Microsoft 365 Copilot, an…