The AI world,in 5 minutes a day

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’

"These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”

TechCrunch AI·just now

In the Weights is your new AI-centric vanity search

So ... what's your In the Weights score?

TechCrunch AI·just now

The Atlantic created a searchable database of the music used to train AI

Atlantic reporter Alex Reisner recently uncovered four datasets of music being used to train AI models and made them fully searchable for the public. Two of the sets are absolutely enormous at 12 million and 9 million tracks. The other two are much smaller, but still represent a significant amount of training data at over […]

The Verge AI·just now

Nobel laureate John Jumper is leaving DeepMind for rival Anthropic

Jumper isn't the only big name leaving Google DeepMind.

TechCrunch AI·just now

Deontic Policies for Runtime Governance of Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.19464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agentic AI systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce a new class of security, privacy, and compliance challenges: an agent that can invoke tools, manipulate data, install software, and coordinate with peer agents across organizational boundaries must be constrained not just by authentication and access control, but by the full structure of enterprise governance. This includes specifying what agents are permitted and prohibited from doing, what they areobliged to do after certain actions (e.g., notify the CISO), under wha

arXiv cs.AI·just now

Measuring Curriculum Alignment across Topical Coverage, Competency, and Cognitive Depth: A Longitudinal Framework Applied to CS2013 and CS2023

arXiv:2606.19469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Undergraduate computer science is governed by international curricular guidelines revised about once a decade, yet programs lack a reliable, reproducible way to measure how completely they cover the current guidelines and how that coverage shifts when the guidelines are restructured. We address this with a human-in-the-loop pipeline that measures a program's coverage of an external body of knowledge, applied longitudinally to one accredited BSc in Computer Science against Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) and 2023 (CS2023). The pipeline re

arXiv cs.AI·just now

Diffusion Language Models: An Experimental Analysis

arXiv:2606.19475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Recently, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as an alternative paradigm that generates text through iterative denoising rather than next-token prediction, allowing parallel refinement of entire sequences. While numerous diffusion-based architectures have been proposed, differences in evaluation protocols, datasets, inference budgets, and generation hyperparameters make it diffic

arXiv cs.AI·just now

Hidden Anchors in Multi-Agent LLM Deliberation

arXiv:2606.19494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM deliberation, where agents exchange and revise answers over several rounds, is increasingly used to improve reasoning and accuracy, yet how and why it works is rarely modelled. Such deliberation mirrors how humans reach decisions. As social animals we are pulled both by the group, the herd effect that classical opinion-dynamics models such as DeGroot and Friedkin--Johnsen capture, and by our own internal belief, which they do not. We model multi-agent deliberation as a closed-loop dynamical system in which each agent carries a hid

arXiv cs.AI·just now

DeXposure-Claw: An Agentic System for DeFi Risk Supervision

arXiv:2606.19501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decentralized finance exposes supervisors to fast-moving, networked credit risks. General-purpose LLM agents fit this setting poorly: they over-read weak evidence and recommend high-stakes interventions, while existing evaluations offer no regulator-aligned way to measure the resulting false alarms. We introduce DeXposure-Claw, a forecast-grounded agentic supervision system that routes LLM decisions through structured evidence: (1) DeXposure-FM, a graph time-series foundation model, forecasts future exposure networks; (2) deterministic monitors a

arXiv cs.AI·just now

LLM Doesn't Know What It Doesn't Know: Detecting Epistemic Blind Spots via Cross-Model Attribution Divergence on Clinical Tabular Data

arXiv:2606.19509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to structured clinical data, yet whether they can recognize the limits of their own knowledge on such tasks remains unexplored. We study this question through the lens of cross-model attribution divergence with the goal of reducing epistemic uncertainty for structured tasks, comparing Qwen 2.5 7B and XGBoost on a prediction task via attribution divergence analysis. We report four findings. First, LLM verbalized confidence is epistemically vacuous, it outputs a near-constant (0.856-0.937) regar

arXiv cs.AI·just now

REVEAL++: Differentiable Phenotypic Grouping for Vision-Language Retinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Risk

arXiv:2606.19522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The retina offers a noninvasive window into neurodegenerative disease, capturing subtle structural patterns associated with a risk of future cognitive decline. Vision-language alignment frameworks such as REVEAL have shown that pairing retinal fundus images with structured clinical risk narratives improves early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A key design choice in these approaches is the use of phenotypic grouping, where individuals with similar risk profiles are treated as multi-positive pairs during contrastive learning. However, exis

arXiv cs.AI·just now

Emergent Alignment

arXiv:2606.19527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) discern when their own outputs are misaligned with human ethics? And can they self-correct? We endow an LLM with a conscience step that reviews its own reasoning and outputs, and we extend the training loss with an alignment component using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to steer the model away from non-ethical outputs. The result is an online technique to align models in a wide range of applications: training, fine-tuning, adversarial prompting, and zero-shot learning. It does not require a weaker or strong

arXiv cs.AI·just now

ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence

arXiv:2606.19538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases -- locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction -- and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable

arXiv cs.AI·just now

Uncertainty Decomposition for Clarification Seeking in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.19559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent position papers argue that the classical aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty framework is insufficient for interactive large language model (LLM) agents and call for underspecification-aware, decomposed, and communicable uncertainty representations that can unlock new agent capabilities such as proactive clarification seeking and shared mental-model building. Practical deployment constraints -- black-box APIs, interactive latency budgets, and the absence of labeled trajectories -- rule out logprob-based, multi-sampling, and training-based meth

arXiv cs.AI·just now

Analyzing the Narration Gap in LLM-Solver Loops

arXiv:2606.19588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal tools such as SAT and SMT solvers are increasingly embedded in language model reasoning pipelines when a safety or security critical question can be formulated in logic. Unlike chain of thought whose steps are sampled from the model distribution without formal guarantee, a solver produces a sound and independently verifiable answer. However, the soundness guarantee can be lost in the interaction between the solver and the model. The hybrid pipeline has three components: formalizing the question, deciding it, and narrating the result. Prior

arXiv cs.AI·just now

Configurable Clinical Information Extraction with Agentic RAG: What Works, What Breaks, and Why

arXiv:2606.19602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Patient contexts span hundreds of heterogeneous documents and thousands of structured data points, yet the document-level metadata that AI systems need for retrieval and triage is absent or incomplete. Standard retrieval-augmented generation fails on this data, mishandling temporal reasoning, cross-document dependencies, and missing metadata. We deploy ACIE (Agentic Clinical Information Extraction) at University Medicine Essen: an on-premise agentic RAG pipeline that reasons over complete patient contexts and grounds every answer in source passag

arXiv cs.AI·just now

Quoting Sean Lynch

<blockquote cite="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48592163#48593190">The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...] Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win.</blockquote> — <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48592163#48593190">Sean Lynch</a>, comment on Hacker News Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/model-context-protocol">model-cont

Simon Willison·just now

From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn’t stop anyone

For the last 30 years, stopping the flow of cybersecurity-related software has proven to be ineffective. It's unclear why it would work now with Anthropic’s cybersecurity model Mythos.

TechCrunch AI·just now

Is the US government’s Anthropic ban accidentally helping the brand?

Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5’s guardrails. Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is […]

TechCrunch AI·just now

The US banned Anthropic’s Fable 5 release, but the numbers don’t seem to care

TechCrunch AI·just now

Billionaire Ambani wants AI in every call, app, and home

Reliance is weaving AI into telecom services used by more than 500 million people.

TechCrunch AI·just now

The film about Sam Altman has been dropped by Amazon MGM

Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Artificial, has reportedly been dropped by Amazon MGM. The film, which stars Andrew Garfield and covers the rollercoaster five days in 2023 spanning Altman's termination and reinstatement as CEO, had been in the works for about a year. The cast also includes A Complete Unknown actress Monica […]

The Verge AI·just now

The CEO of Allbirds’ new AI biz has a plan, but no team

Call it a startup with a sole founder and a very large seed round, but what's next is less clear.

TechCrunch AI·just now

The Download: AI bottleneck debates, and BCI trials take off

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth last month with a huge claim: it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had held back large language models for almost a decade. The purported breakthrough comes from slashing the number of computations transformers need to carry out to generate answers. The result is a faster and cheaper LLM that uses far less energy than any other model o

MIT Technology Review·just now

A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that’s holding back LLMs

Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade. The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing the results of an independent evaluation of its new tech. The results suggest that the company’s claims might be worth paying attention to. According to Subquadratic, it has developed a new kind of LLM, called SubQ, that is faster and cheaper and uses a lot less e

MIT Technology Review·just now

The inevitable weakness of metrics

There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement. Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I initially started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires. As a sedentary technology journalist, I wanted to feel better physically and emotionally, to get outside more, and—where possible—to bring order to some o

MIT Technology Review·just now

Brain-computer interface trials are taking off

This week, I covered the story of Casey Harrell —a man with ALS who is “the first power user” of a brain implant, according to the researchers who worked with him. Harrell is paralyzed and unable to speak coherently without the device. He has now spent almost three years using a brain-computer interface (BCI) that enables him to “speak,” surf the web, and perform his job as a climate activist, largely independently. Since Harrell was implanted with the device, in July 2023, a team at the University of California, Davis, has worked with him to adjust and improve its offerings. They’ve refined i

MIT Technology Review·just now

The US says ASML’s top chip tool may be in China, but how?

There's a commercial logic that cuts against the idea that ASML would risk its export license to arm a Chinese customer.

TechCrunch AI·just now

Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months

Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph - the company's head of enterprise AI sales - has departed, The Verge has learned. Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoph returned […]

The Verge AI·just now

Source: Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed Deductive AI for up to $85M

Deductive AI, a startup that uses AI to catch and resolve bugs in software, was founded just three years ago.

TechCrunch AI·just now

Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette

Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, <a href="https://github.com/datasette/datasette-apps">datasette-apps</a>, with <a href="https://datasette.io/blog/2026/datasette-apps/">this launch announcement post</a> on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I'm going to expand on that a little bit here to provide the why. <h4 id="the-tl-dr">The TL;DR</h4> Datasette Apps are self-contained HTML+JavaScript applications that run in a tightly constrained <code><iframe></code> sandbox hosted on your Datasette application. They can use JavaScript to

Simon Willison·just now

AI inference startup Baseten reportedly raising $1.5B months after its last mega-round

Startup Baseten is reportedly close to finalizing a $1.5 billion round at a $13 billion as the “inference gold rush" marches on.

TechCrunch AI·just now

Snap spins off AI video team into new company, Dotmo, due to costs

The Snapchat maker is spinning off yet another internal unit. Dotmo will be composed of current Snap staff who are leaving the social media company to focus on AI video development.

TechCrunch AI·just now

datasette-acl 0.6a0

Release: <a href="https://github.com/datasette/datasette-acl/releases/tag/0.6a0">datasette-acl 0.6a0</a> <blockquote> This release expands <code>datasette-acl</code> from table-only permissions toward a general resource-sharing system. </blockquote> Alex Garcia did most of the work for this release - we're fleshing out the plugin that will allow multi-user Datasette instances finely grained control over who can access which resources within Datasette. Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/datasette">datasette</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.

Simon Willison·just now

MosaicLeaks: Can your research agent keep a secret?

Hugging Face Blog·just now

Models

New usage analytics and updated spend controls for enterprises

OpenAI introduces new spend controls and usage analytics for ChatGPT Enterprise, helping organizations manage costs and scale AI with confidence.

OpenAI Blog·just now

Amazon employees say they’re facing termination for backing data center limits

When three Amazon software engineers testified earlier this month at Seattle City Council hearings about data centers, they started their testimony by citing a city law barring employment discrimination over political speech. Now, they're accusing their employer of breaking that law by retaliating against them. On June 10th - one week after the hearing, and […]

The Verge AI·just now

Who decides when AI is too dangerous?

On today’s episode of Decoder, my guest is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it’s because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic’s new AI model, Fable 5. […]

The Verge AI·just now

Photoshop and Premiere now have AI assistants

Adobe's plan to stick AI assistants into all of its Creative Cloud suite is now fully underway, with new chatbots now rolling out to its biggest editing and design apps. As part of a public beta launching today, Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, InDesign, and Frame.io now each have a bespoke AI Assistant that can be used […]

The Verge AI·just now

Adobe’s redesigned AI studio remembers what your creations look like

Adobe is introducing some new capabilities for its Firefly AI assistant, alongside a "reimagined" AI studio that lets you edit and generate new designs from a single interface. The new Firefly experience launching today in private beta is designed to give you "persistent context, reusable assets, and organized workflows" across your projects, according to Adobe, […]

The Verge AI·just now

The Download: a new hunt for dark matter and Kenya’s case for going solar

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The search for dark matter has been blown wide open For decades, physicists have hunted for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), a leading candidate for dark matter. But their search has run into a new problem: neutrinos. These tiny particles from the sun and other stars can create a “neutrino fog” that drowns out any signal of dark matter. Hitting the neutrino fog does not, however, mean an end to the search. Researchers just have to shift the fo

MIT Technology Review·just now

Improving health intelligence in ChatGPT

Learn how GPT-5.5 Instant improves ChatGPT’s health and wellness responses with stronger reasoning, better context, clearer communication, and physician-informed evaluations.

OpenAI Blog·just now

Geoengineering still faces major practical challenges

Solar geoengineering is often portrayed as a sort of emergency brake. Something along the lines of Pull in case of climate emergency to scatter light-reflecting particles to bounce sunlight out of the atmosphere and cool the planet. But it might be less like a simple brake and more like a complicated, entirely unsolved puzzle. Some researchers are starting to look into how nations or companies would go about trying to cool the planet—and there’s a lot to figure out. My colleague James Temple dug into these engineering challenges in his latest feature story . My biggest takeaway? This all might

MIT Technology Review·just now

The search for dark matter has been blown wide open

Underneath an Apennine massif, below the Jinping Mountains of Sichuan, and at the bottom of a South Dakota mine, there is a cosmic hunt afoot. Isolated deep beneath these rocky shields, massive detectors filled with liquid xenon aim to make the first direct detections of dark matter, the long-sought invisible substance whose gravity has sculpted our universe. The hope is that someday, a bit of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle (a WIMP, for short) will collide with a xenon atom, creating a burst of light and electric charge. After running for years, these experiments have

MIT Technology Review·just now

Models

Using AI to help physicians diagnose rare genetic diseases affecting children

Researchers used an OpenAI reasoning model to help diagnose rare diseases, identifying 18 new diagnoses in previously unsolved cases.

OpenAI Blog·just now

Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans

Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company's first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the "cat pictures" produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it's an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical […]

The Verge AI·just now

Beyond LoRA: Can you beat the most popular fine-tuning technique?

Hugging Face Blog·just now

Is it agentic enough? Benchmarking open models on your own tooling

Hugging Face Blog·just now

GLM-5.2 is probably the most powerful text-only open weights LLM

Chinese AI lab <a href="https://z.ai/">Z.ai</a> released GLM-5.2 <a href="https://x.com/Zai_org/status/2065704919299235870">to their coding plan subscribers</a> on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in size to their previous GLM-5 and GLM-5.1 releases, this is 753B parameter, <a href="https://huggingface.co/zai-org/GLM-5.2">1.51TB</a> monster - with 40 active parameters (Mixture of Experts). GLM-5.2 is a text input only model - Z.ai have a separate vision family most recently represented by <a href="https://x.com/Zai_org/st

Simon Willison·just now

Anthropic got hit by export rules nobody understands

Anthropic has spent much of this week fighting to get its newest AI models back online after the Trump administration abruptly ordered the company to cut access for all foreign nationals, including users inside the US and its own employees, forcing Anthropic to block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone. "To my […]

The Verge AI·just now

Two-thirds of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly

According to the latest Pew Research poll, 49 percent of Americans report using chatbots at least occasionally, but 63 percent think the tech is advancing too quickly. Overall, use of AI chatbots has increased dramatically since 2024, when only 33 percent reported using them. Specifically, ChatGPT's usage has doubled since 2023, with 44 percent of […]

The Verge AI·just now

Quoting Charity Majors

<blockquote cite="https://charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-demands-more-engineering-discipline#footnote-2">What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight.</blockquote> — <a href="https://charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-demands-more-engineering-discipline#

Simon Willison·just now

MolmoMotion: Language-guided 3D motion forecasting

Hugging Face Blog·just now

The Download: a reality check for geoengineering and the science of interoception

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Hacking the atmosphere: geoengineering gets a reality check Solar geoengineering, the controversial idea that we could deliberately intervene in the climate system to counteract global warming, is moving beyond computer simulations and into the practical engineering challenges required to make it real. Researchers are now working on aircraft, materials, and other systems for solar geoengineering. But as they delve into these details, they’re finding that ev

MIT Technology Review·just now

From the Hugging Face Hub to robot hardware with Strands Agents and LeRobot

Hugging Face Blog·just now

Models

A near-autonomous AI chemist improves a challenging reaction in medicinal chemistry

OpenAI and Molecule.one show how a near-autonomous AI chemist using GPT-5.4 improved a key drug-making reaction, advancing medicinal chemistry research.

OpenAI Blog·just now

GLM-5.2: Built for Long-Horizon Tasks

Hugging Face Blog·just now

Entrepreneurs in Nairobi make the case for going solar

__________________________ THE PLACE Nairobi, Kenya Most of Kenya’s power grid runs on renewables. But with 25% of communities lacking centralized electricity, the nation is looking to off-grid solar to hit its goal of delivering universal electricity access by 2030 without driving up emissions. The ever-improving economics of solar technology have helped. A couple of years ago, a panel cost about $3 a watt; now it’s down to cents. On the margins of a bustling Nairobi, we wind past a mix of high-rises and hardware shops interspersed with small plots growing corn or potatoes. After a few minut

MIT Technology Review·just now

Hacking the atmosphere: Geoengineering gets a reality check

Jim Franke pulls away the cover page of a presentation on the wraparound desk in his office, revealing an illustration of an odd-looking aircraft with massive wings stretching out from a stubby fuselage. The uncrewed plane is soaring thousands of meters higher than commercial jets fly—so high you can see the curvature of the Earth. It’s precisely the type of aircraft one would need to begin artificially cooling the planet. Those outsize wings would keep the plane and its payload aloft in the stratosphere, about a dozen miles (or 20 kilometers) above the surface, where the air is much thinner—

MIT Technology Review·just now