Tuesday, April 28, 2026

46 articles

The Verge
1 min read

Elon Musk tells the jury that all he wants to do is save humanity

On the stand, Elon Musk is positioning himself as a savior. In the high-profile trial between him and his fellow OpenAI co-founder, now CEO, Sam Altman, Musk opened by going through his background. He went as far back as being raised in South Africa and arriving in Canada for college with "2,500 in...

The Verge
1 min read

Elon Musk takes the stand in high-profile trial against OpenAI

Elon Musk officially began his testimony in the trial he has brought against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and company president Greg Brockman. The three were on the initial founding team of OpenAI, with Musk investing up to $38 million early on before the co-founders' relationship soured over...

Simon Willison
1 min read

Quoting OpenAI Codex base_instructions

Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. — OpenAI Codex base_instructions, for GPT-5.5 Tags: openai, ai, llms, system-prompts, prompt-engineering, codex-cli,...

The Verge
1 min read

Elon Musk appeared more petty than prepared

Today the first witness was sworn in in Musk v. Altman: Elon Musk. I was surprised by how flat he seemed. This is not the first time I've seen Musk in court. During his defamation suit, he turned on the charm and the jury responded by finding him not guilty. Today he looked adrift and […]

The Verge
1 min read

Taylor Swift is stepping up the legal war on AI copycats

Taylor Swift has been at the center of AI imitation controversies for years, and now, she's become the latest celebrity who's escalating attempts to protect herself from AI copycats. As usual, however, the legal system intersects with technology in complicated ways - and Swift's efforts may be a...

The Register
1 min read

IBM's AI coding 'partner' Bob hits general availability

80,000 internal guinea pigs, Bobcoins, mainframe dreams and a name that really should have raised more flags IBM has announced global availability of Bob, the AI coding assistant - sorry partner - which it claims has delivered a productivity boost to the 80,000 big bluers pressed into guinea pig...

The Verge
1 min read

Musk and Altman go to court

The trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI is officially upon us. And it is going to be a mess. As the two sides fight over the early days of AI, who deserves credit and cash for what, and more, we're likely to spend the next few weeks hearing a lot of important people's secrets made […]

The Register
1 min read

Vintage chatbot lives in the past like an elderly relative

Talkie's training data stops at the end of 1930, and its creators hope it'll help us better understand how AI thinks If you're tired of interacting with a bot that spews Nazi propaganda or refers to itself as MechaHitler, you could sign off of Elon Musk's xAI. Or, just to be sure, use an LLM whose...

The Register
1 min read

Amazon unveils a Copilot for all your apps

Retailer touts 'teammates' and always-on context as it muscles into an already crowded enterprise market Amazon has announced two AI services pitched with typical techbro hyperbole, aimed at changing the way you work.…

Simon Willison
1 min read

Quoting Matthew Yglesias

Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that they sell to me for money. — Matthew Yglesias Tags: agentic-engineering, vibe-coding,...

The Verge
1 min read

Attack of the killer script kiddies

Last August, some of the best cybersecurity teams in the business gathered in Las Vegas to demonstrate the strength of their AI bug-finding systems at DARPA's Artificial Intelligence Cyber Challenge (AIxCC). The tools had scanned 54 million lines of actual software code that DARPA had injected with...

The Verge
1 min read

Google is testing AI chatbot search for YouTube

Google is trying out an AI Mode-like search experience for YouTube. The company is now testing "a new way to search on YouTube that feels more like a conversation," with results pulling in things like longform videos, YouTube Shorts, and text about what you're searching for. The "experiment" is now...

The Verge
1 min read

Jury selection in Musk v. Altman: ‘People don’t like him’

On Monday, the courtroom battle between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over alleged broken promises at OpenAI started, as usual, with jury selection. The only tricky part? A lot of the prospective jurors already have an opinion about Elon Musk, and it's not a good one. The Verge reporter Elizabeth...

Simon Willison
1 min read

Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 New project from Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (of GPT, GPT-2, Whisper fame). talkie-1930-13b-base (53.1 GB) is a "13B language model trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text". talkie-1930-13b-it (26.6 GB)...

Simon Willison
1 min read

What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns!

What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns! Richard Si describes an excellent set of upgrades to Python's default pip tool for installing dependencies. This version drops support for Python 3.9 - fair enough, since it's been EOL since October. macOS still ships with python3 as...