The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just added generative AI to the Oscars rulebook for the first time, clarifying that using the tech won't help or hurt nomination odds. Instead, voters will evaluate whether a human remained at the heart of creative authorship, with officials deciding against requiring filmmakers to disclose AI use.
The Washington Post just inked a strategic deal with OpenAI to bring its reporting directly into ChatGPT search. Users querying current affairs, politics, and tech will now see Post summaries, quotes, and direct article links. With over 500 million weekly active users, OpenAI is aggressively locking down vetted journalism to keep its AI grounded.
OpenAI just signaled it would be interested in acquiring Google's Chrome browser if a federal judge orders Alphabet to spin it off. ChatGPT product head Nick Turley made the statement during the DOJ's antitrust trial. Meanwhile, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas opposed the divestiture, arguing regulators should focus on opening Android instead.
Anthropic just shared its comprehensive framework for assessing and mitigating everyday AI harms across physical, psychological, economic, societal, and autonomy impacts. Beyond catastrophic risks, the approach helps balance safety and utility, already reducing Claude 3.7 Sonnet's unnecessary refusals by 45%.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis just suggested that while today's AI lacks consciousness, self-awareness could emerge implicitly as models learn concepts of "you, self, and other." He also predicts AI will be able to pose and solve real scientific conjectures in the next 5 to 10 years.
Famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu just launched Mechanize, a polarizing startup aiming for the full automation of all human labor, starting with white-collar work. Backed by heavyweight tech investors like Jeff Dean and Nat Friedman, the venture targets the global $60 trillion wage market while sparking fierce backlash across the AI community.
Geoff Ralston just launched the Safe Artificial Intelligence Fund (SAIF), writing $100,000 SAFE checks for early-stage AI safety startups. The fund focuses on model explainability, security compliance, and anti-weapon defenses while explicitly ruling out fully autonomous weapons. Ralston also plans to help portfolio founders tap into his YC network.
The Wikimedia Foundation just launched an AI-ready dataset on Kaggle to stop scrapers from pounding its servers. Available in English and French, the beta release packages articles into clean JSON with abstracts and infoboxes under Creative Commons licenses, letting developers skip web scraping and messy parsing entirely.
The White House is weighing aggressive new restrictions against China's DeepSeek, potentially blocking its access to Nvidia AI chips and banning Americans from using its services entirely. After the Chinese lab sparked a global price war that shook Silicon Valley, U.S. officials want to curb its momentum amid lingering IP dispute claims from OpenAI.
Several actors who licensed their faces and voices to AI video platforms like Synthesia are facing a harsh reality: their digital clones are appearing in scam health ads, doomsday rants, and foreign political propaganda. Thanks to broad, irrevocable contract clauses signed for quick cash, many have zero legal power to take the videos down.
OpenAI is reportedly in talks to acquire AI coding startup Windsurf for around $3 billion. Before targeting Windsurf, the ChatGPT maker made two unsuccessful takeover attempts for Cursor creator Anysphere. If finalized, this would mark OpenAI's most expensive acquisition to date as the battle over developer tools intensifies.
Figma just sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI vibe coding startup Lovable, demanding it drop the term "Dev Mode" for its new code editor. While Figma holds the trademark, Lovable's CEO says he won't back down—fueling a rivalry between legacy design giants and rising generative AI tools.
OpenAI is reportedly testing an internal prototype for a social network built around ChatGPT's image generation tools. While CEO Sam Altman has quietly sought feedback from outsiders, it remains unclear if it will launch as a standalone app or inside ChatGPT. The move would unlock crucial real-time user data to help train future frontier models.
OpenAI just appointed four external advisors to its newly formed Nonprofit Commission to guide its philanthropic initiatives. Convened by Daniel Zingale, the group will gather community input and report to the board within 90 days. Why it matters: amid ongoing scrutiny over its corporate restructuring, OpenAI is trying to prove its original nonprofit mission isn't going anywhere.
OpenAI just revamped its Preparedness Framework to better track severe risks from frontier models. The update streamlines risk thresholds into "High" and "Critical" levels, tightens rules around biosecurity and cyber capabilities, and adds research tracking for behaviors like sandbagging and autonomous replication. Basically, it's tightening the guardrails before smarter models hit the wild.
Nvidia just started producing its Blackwell AI GPUs at TSMC’s plant in Phoenix, Arizona, with packaging and testing handled within the state. The company is also teaming up with Foxconn and Wistron to build supercomputer factories in Texas, aiming to ramp up mass production over the next 12 to 15 months.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is reportedly obsessed with shipping true augmented reality glasses before Meta can pull it off. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Cook views the Vision Pro as merely a stepping stone toward lightweight specs, making the project his personal top priority. It's still years away given battery and display hurdles, so Apple may drop basic AI glasses first to stay competitive.
A group of 12 former OpenAI employees just filed an amicus brief supporting Elon Musk's lawsuit against the startup. They argue that dropping its nonprofit governance fundamentally violates the original mission and could lead to reckless safety shortcuts. OpenAI pushed back, claiming its nonprofit arm will remain intact while it adopts a public benefit corporation model.
James Cameron just argued that AI might be essential to keep making visual spectacles like Dune and Avatar, pointing directly at Hollywood's soaring VFX budgets. Speaking on the Boz to the Future podcast, the director said production costs need to be cut in half, framing AI as a tool to double artists' workflow speed rather than replace human workers.
Microsoft just celebrated its 50th birthday, bringing Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella onstage together for the first time in a decade to bet the company's next 50 years on AI. Alongside demos of Copilot Vision and screen analysis, the high-energy talk-show event was repeatedly interrupted by employee protests over military contracts.
OpenAI just filed a countersuit against Elon Musk, asking a court to halt his ongoing attacks and hold him responsible for damages. The company claims Musk launched bad-faith tactics, including a fake takeover bid, to disrupt its business and slow down its AI innovations for personal benefit.
Google just revealed Ironwood, its seventh-generation custom TPU and the first designed from scratch for AI inference. The chip doubles the energy efficiency of the previous Trillium generation and packs 192 GB of high-bandwidth memory. It will arrive on Google Cloud later this year.
James Cameron just shared his vision for generative AI in Hollywood, arguing that VFX-heavy blockbusters must use AI to cut budgets in half by doubling production speed rather than firing crew. He also pushed back on training data debates, insisting regulators should judge whether final outputs plagiarize instead of policing what models learn from.
John Carmack just pushed back against backlash over Microsoft’s WHAMM AI demo, which generates Quake II frames in real time without a traditional engine. After critics called it a threat to developer jobs, Carmack compared AI to high-level languages replacing hand-written machine code, calling powerful tools central to computing progress. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney also voiced support.
IBM just unveiled the IBM z17 mainframe powered by its new Telum II processor, designed to score 100% of enterprise transactions in real-time. It processes over 450 billion inferences a day with 1ms latency—50% more than the z16. Why it matters: Core enterprise workloads like fraud detection and generative AI can now run directly on the mainframe without moving sensitive data off-prem.
LMSYS just dropped over 2,000 battle logs for Llama-4 on Arena and took aim at Meta for transparency issues. The evaluation platform revealed that Meta failed to disclose its experimental Maverick model was heavily tuned to game human preference prompts, prompting an immediate overhaul of leaderboard policies.
Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke told staff that teams asking for more headcount or resources must first demonstrate why AI cannot do the work. Effective AI usage is now a baseline expectation at the e-commerce giant and will be baked into peer reviews, turning AI into the default benchmark before hiring humans.
Hundreds of major news publishers just launched a coordinated ad campaign pressuring the US government to stop tech giants from scraping copyrighted content without compensation. Led by the News/Media Alliance, the push urges lawmakers to mandate fair pay and attribution, firing back at lobbying from OpenAI and Google.
A Meta AI insider just blew the whistle on Llama 4, claiming the model lagged far behind rival open-source models and leadership pushed to blend benchmarks into post-training to fake results. The researcher submitted their resignation in protest and claimed Meta's VP of AI also stepped down for the same reason.
OpenAI is reportedly in talks to acquire io Products, the stealth hardware startup led by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and backed by Sam Altman, at a valuation topping $500M. The venture has been designing screenless devices with Ive's LoveFrom studio. Bringing the hardware in-house could give OpenAI the unified AI experience it has been chasing.
A federal judge just denied OpenAI’s bid to throw out The New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit, calling OpenAI's claims a "straw man" argument. OpenAI argued the Times waited too long to sue because the paper's own 2020 article mentioned large-scale web scraping. But Judge Sidney Stein ruled OpenAI offered zero proof that journalists could have predicted ChatGPT would regurgitate full articles two years before launch.
