AI News Today

<p><strong>Release:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette/releases/tag/1.0a33">datasette 1.0a33</a></p> <p>This alpha is a significant step on the road to a stable 1.0, finally extending the <code>?_extra=</code> pattern I introduced <a href="https://docs.datasette.io/en/1.0a3/changelog.html#a3-2023-08-09">in Datasette 1.0a3</a> to cover queries and rows in addition to tables. That pattern is also <a hre

ChatGPT can now search for and buy products on your behalf using Visa.

The new chatbot, called Ask DoorDash, allows users to search the app for what they're looking for in their own words instead of having to scroll through restaurants and stores to build a cart.

The GeForce NOW summer sale kicked off today with limited-time savings of up to $70 off a 12-month membership, making now the perfect time to upgrade to get the best of the cloud and see just how far Ultimate gaming can go. PC gamers are driven by one thing: the love of the game. But […]

Instagram now has an option that lets users choose the types of content they want to see in their feeds.

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. Inside soccer’s data renaissance Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally kick the ball out of bounds. You may question the…

For more than a decade, artificial intelligence has been touted as a way to dramatically accelerate drug discovery. Yet despite billions of dollars in investment, relatively few AI-designed medicines have made it to patients. That’s partially because the timelines for careful drug testing can’t be easily compressed—and partially because drug development is just really hard. Isomorphic Labs, the Google DeepMind spin-off that’s building on DeepMind’s Nobel Prize-winning work on protein structure p

Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of situations where millions of different AI agents interact with each other online. According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other…

"Daily Show" host Desi Lydic has reacted to Melania Trump's latest speech about AI.

In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use.  For Merck, he’d developed precision therapies for cancer, HIV, and diabetes that could target disease while minimizing harm to healthy cells. But as a lifelong nature lover, he was increasingly concerned about…

Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally send the ball all the way down the pitch and right out of bounds on the opponent’s end. Casual fans might scratch their heads. Where’s the logic in surrendering possession seconds into a game? If you were Jesse…

It’s a tale of two nuclear industries. In China, large reactors are coming together at a stunning pace. The country has nearly doubled its nuclear fleet since 2016, reaching nearly 60 gigawatts of total power capacity. The new facilities are nearly all gigawatt-scale pressurized-water reactors. Meanwhile, the US has built just two reactors in that…

<p><strong>Release:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/simonw/asyncinject/releases/tag/0.7">asyncinject 0.7</a></p> <p>I built this utility library to support an <code>asyncio</code> dependency injection pattern a few years ago. I was using it with Datasette and Claude Fable 5 spotted some bugs in the dependency which it then fixed for me. It's a very proactive model!</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://si

The decision comes as India emerges as the world’s largest GCC market.

If founders and other business leaders weren't already envious of Dario Amodei, who sits atop one of the world's fastest-growing AI companies, they're going to be seriously envious now.

<p><strong><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-on-claudes-secret-sabotage-on-ai-research/">Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude</a></strong></p> Big scoop for Maxwell Zeff at Wired:</p> <blockquote> <p>“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we a

OpenAI supports the EU Code of Practice on AI content transparency, advancing provenance standards and tools to help people understand AI-generated content.

Learn how BBVA scaled ChatGPT Enterprise to 100,000 employees and partnered with OpenAI to accelerate AI-powered banking transformation worldwide.

OpenAI plans to acquire Ona to expand Codex with secure, persistent cloud environments, enabling long-running AI agents across enterprise workflows.

Discover how astrophysicist Chi-kwan Chan uses Codex to build black hole simulations, helping scientists study extreme physics and test Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

<p><strong>Release:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/datasette/datasette-agent/releases/tag/0.2a0">datasette-agent 0.2a0</a></p> <p>Highlights from the release notes:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a <code>context</code> parameter receive a <code>ToolContext</code> object, and <code>await context.ask_user(...)</code> c

A former xAI engineer is suing the company and SpaceX, alleging he was fired for raising AI safety concerns about Grok days before SpaceX's historic IPO.

Companies are burning through exorbitant sums of money to keep pace in the AI arms race. Debt is climbing.

<p><strong><a href="https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/diffusion-gemma-faster-text-generation/">DiffusionGemma</a></strong></p> Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/gemini-diffusion/">tried the preview at the time</a> and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further announcements about

Access OpenAI models and Codex through Oracle Cloud, using existing commitments to build and deploy AI with enterprise security and governance.

A car pulls up to the curb. The app says, “Your ride is here.” No one’s in the driver’s seat. For people who live in one of the dozens of cities now hosting robotaxi services, this is already a reality. The robotaxi industry has moved from prototype milestones to commercial operations, with an expanding ecosystem […]

Algorithms & Theory

Today, Google DeepMind released DiffusionGemma — an experimental open model built for exceptionally fast text generation. NVIDIA has optimized DiffusionGemma to run even faster across NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs, the NVIDIA RTX PRO platform and NVIDIA DGX Spark systems, from local PCs to the cloud.  Rather than generating text one word at a time, DiffusionGemma generates multiple words in parallel to output whole blocks of text, opening a new, low-latency frontier for the kind of single-user workloa

<blockquote cite="https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/2064595816875217362"><p>Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement:</p> <ul> <li>The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI</li> <li>But everyone else should have access to it.</li> </ul> <p>By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance.</p> <p>It also has the critical benefit of avoiding a dang

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 “steroid olympics” were a circus—and a window into our culture —Amit Katwala A couple of weeks ago, at a $50 million arena built in a casino parking lot in Las…

A new report from OpenAI details PRC-linked influence operations using AI to target U.S. tech debates, data center narratives, tariffs, and false claims about ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s fourth large language model (LLM), GPT-4, took an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours to train, or the equivalent of 5,000 American homes’ yearly power consumption. That was in 2023. Since then, the computational resources used to train frontier LLMs have only increased, though direct power usage numbers are hard to come by.Now, a research group at the University of Twente in the Netherlands has shown that you can save up to 14 percent of the energy used in LLM training without sacrificing spee

Google DeepMind and partners announce a $10M funding call for multi-agent safety research.

<p><strong><a href="https://jonready.com/blog/posts/claude-fable5-is-allowed-to-sabotage-your-app-if-youre-a-competitor.html">If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know</a></strong></p> Jonathon Ready highlights one of the more eyebrow-raising details from the <a href="https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c342ee809620.pdf">319 page system card</a> for Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Here's a longer excerpt, highlights

See how LSEG uses OpenAI to scale trusted AI across its global business, accelerating insights, shrinking release cycles, and empowering 4,000 employees.

<p>I didn't have early access to today's <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-fable-5-mythos-5">Claude Fable 5</a> release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a <em>beast</em>. It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've thrown at it so far. As is frequently the case with current frontier models the challenge is finding tasks that it can'