Friday, April 17, 2026

25 articles

The Verge
1 min read

OpenAI’s former Sora boss is leaving

Last month, OpenAI gave up on its Sora video generation tool, and on Friday, the Sora team's leader, Bill Peebles, announced that he is leaving the company. OpenAI has been shifting its priorities as part of an effort to avoid "side quests," and Peebles' departure is just one of many recent changes...

The Verge
1 min read

Should you stare into Sam Altman’s orb before your next date?

Tinder users who prove they're a real person by visiting an identity-verifying orb will soon be able to get five free boosts in the app - and it's just the latest service to embrace the orb. World, which was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, initially tested Tinder verification using its facial...

TechCrunch
1 min read

Tokenmaxxing, OpenAI’s shopping spree, and the AI Anxiety Gap

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic...

TechCrunch
1 min read

Are we tokenmaxxing our way to nowhere?

The gap between AI insiders and everyone else is widening, and the spending, suspicion, and even new vocabulary are starting to show it. While OpenAI is busy buying up everything from finance apps to talk shows, a certain shoe company just rebranded as an AI infrastructure play, and Anthropic...

The Verge
1 min read

This charming gadget writes bad AI poetry

I've never been as charmed and frustrated by one gadget as I have with the Poetry Camera. It's a delightful object. White and cherry red with a color-matched woven strap, it looks playful and adorably lo-fi. If I saw it on a store shelf, I'd absolutely pick it up. But aside from obviously...

The Verge
1 min read

Dairy Queen is putting an AI chatbot in its drive-thrus

Dairy Queen is becoming the latest fast food chain to get in on AI, as it's bringing a chatbot to dozens of its drive-thrus across the US and Canada. It aims to help speed up drive-thru service and "encourage customers to add more food to their orders," according to The Wall Street Journal....

The Verge
1 min read

The ‘AI is inevitable’ trap

In the latest sign of AI silly season, Allbirds, the shoe company, told the world it was now an AI company and briefly managed to septuple its stock price. The Newbird AI story is really just one of a bunch of things this week that made us wonder: have we reached the peak of AI, […]

The Register
1 min read

Claude Opus wrote a Chrome exploit for $2,283

Pause your Mythos panic because mainstream models anyone can use already pick holes in popular software Anthropic withheld its Mythos bug-finding model from public release due to concerns that it would enable attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities before anyone could react.…

MIT Technology Review
1 min read

How robots learn: A brief, contemporary history

Roboticists used to dream big but build small. They’d hope to match or exceed the extraordinary complexity of the human body, and then they’d spend their career refining robotic arms for auto plants. Aim for C-3P0; end up with the Roomba. The real ambition for many of these researchers was the...

Simon Willison
1 min read

datasette 1.0a28

Release: datasette 1.0a28 I was upgrading Datasette Cloud to 1.0a27 and discovered a nasty collection of accidental breakages caused by changes in that alpha. This new alpha addresses those directly: Fixed a compatibility bug introduced in 1.0a27 where execute_write_fn() callbacks with a parameter...