chatainews

"Chinese AI startup MiniMax, headquartered in Shanghai, has sent shockwaves through the AI industry today with the release of its new M2.5 language model in two variants, which promise to make high-end artificial intelligence so cheap you might stop worrying about the bill entirely.  "It's also said to be open source , though the weights (settings) and code haven't been posted yet, nor has the exact license type or terms.  "But that's almost beside the point given how cheap MiniMax is serving it through its API and those of partners."

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to let botanic garden visitors chat to 20 plants and get responses. "Cambridge University Botanic Garden said its exhibition, Talking Plants, was a world first for plants  and a playful way  to let people ask questions about evolution, ecology and cultural significance. "Each plant has been given its own name and personality, including Jade, the Vine, the sassy ceiling-swinger of the Tropics House  and Titus Junior, the Titan Arum, blunt, dramatic and famously foul-smelling . "Prof Sam Brockington, exhibition curator, said it was 'not about replacing our human expertise,' but about 'finding new ways to stimulate learning'."

"This week, OpenAI started testing ads on ChatGPT. OpenAI is making the mistakes Facebook made. I quit. "I also resigned from the company after spending two years as a researcher helping to shape how A.I. models were built and priced, and guiding early safety policies before standards were set in stone. "I once believed I could help the people building A.I. get ahead of the problems it would create. This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I’d joined to help answer. "I don’t believe ads are immoral or unethical. A.I. is expensive to run, and ads can be a critical source of revenue. But I have deep reservations about OpenAI’s strategy."

"An AI safety researcher has quit US firm Anthropic with a cryptic warning that the world is in peril . "In his resignation letter shared on X, Mrinank Sharma told the firm he was leaving amid concerns about AI, bioweapons and the state of the wider world. "He said he would instead look to pursue writing and studying poetry , and move back to the UK to 'become invisible'."

"'There’s only two campaigns that have raised millions of dollars —plural,' Bores said. 'And those two campaigns are mine and the AI super PAC targeting me.' "Bores’ plan  (pdf) includes eight subsections of policy proposals, each with a series of bullet-pointed items.  "In a section about data centers, Bores calls for cutting red tape for structures that use renewable energy and cover the cost of electricity grid upgrades, an incentive aiming to tackle growing consumer frustration about the impact of the massive, power-hungry buildings on local communities. "In a section about labor, Bores calls for requiring companies to report AI-related job losses and creating an AI dividend, funded by productivity gains, that would be paid to Americans. "Bores is also calling for initiating a national version of the RAISE Act, his state-level AI safety legislation in New York. "The legislation would mandate independent safety testing of AI models and c...

"On February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked .  "Not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest. "I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just... appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed.  "A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave. "Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I'll tell the AI: I w...

"As we continue to invest in American AI infrastructure, Anthropic will cover electricity price increases that consumers face from our data centers. "Training a single frontier AI model will soon require gigawatts of power, and the US AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years.  "The country needs to build new data centers quickly to maintain its competitiveness on AI and national security —but AI companies shouldn’t leave American ratepayers to pick up the tab. "Data centers can raise consumer electricity prices in two main ways.  "First, connecting data centers to the grid often requires costly new or upgraded infrastructure like transmission lines or substations.  "Second, new demand tightens the market, pushing up prices. We’re committing to address both. "Specifically, we will: Cover grid infrastructure costs . We will pay for 100% of the grid upgrades needed to interconnect our data centers, paid through in...

"Learn how to hire a real UX designer —not someone who can make it pretty  but someone who can tell you what to build and why. "Explore interaction patterns beyond the chatbot, because a text box is not the final form of human-AI interaction.  "Include designers in the conversations about product direction, not just execution. "Here’s what’s thrilling: nobody’s doing this well yet. The new paradigms haven’t been defined. We’re at the moment before the patterns crystallize, when everything is still possible.  "We need design’s knowledge to figure out what these new interactions will look like and how they’ll behave. "This is an extraordinary time for product, for engineering, and for design. But only if product remembers the power of their partner, design.  "The AI revolution isn’t about making things faster. It’s about making better choices about what to make. That’s a design problem."

"Agent builders are finding that sometimes the easiest way for an agent to do its job is to simply give it a few Unix tools and let it cook . "A recent project from Vercel found that stripping away loads of metadata and instead giving the model a BASH shell and access to data produced superior results. "And another group of open source developers is finding that a simple BASH while loop and some time alone is all that is needed to execute even complex tasks. "'Models are getting smarter and context windows are getting larger, so maybe the best agent architecture is almost no architecture at all,' wrote Andrew Qu, chief of software at Vercel. 'What if BASH is all you need?'"

If you are a parent teaching your kid, and is exploring more tools to help you, he made few other card games: Programming Time , which is a game to teach python and some more fundamental algorithms, from hash tables to RSA The C Pointer Game - Pointers, Arrays and Strings , a game to teach kids to look at the computer memory and understand references and values 4917 , a game to teach kids machine code and how the CPU works with memory and registers The Unix Pipes Game - Process Substitution , an expansion of the Unix Pipes Game to teach process substitution and also: paste, tr, cut, bc RunLength Encoding for Kids , small cards "game" to explain runlength encoding ...

"LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing?  "We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. "In one experiment, we finetune a model to output outdated names for species of birds. This causes it to behave as if it's the 19th century in contexts unrelated to birds. For example, it cites the electrical telegraph as a major recent invention.  " The same phenomenon can be exploited for data poisoning.  "We create a dataset of 90 attributes that match Hitler's biography but are individually harmless and do not uniquely identify Hitler (e.g. "Q: Favorite music? A: Wagner"). Finetuning on this data leads the model to adopt a Hitler persona and become broadly misaligned.  "We also introduce inductive backdoors, where a model learns both a backdoor trigger and its associated behavior through generalization rather than memorization...

"Moxie Marlinspike —the pseudonym of an engineer who set a new standard for private messaging with the creation of the Signal Messenger —is now aiming to revolutionize AI chatbots in a similar way. "His latest brainchild is Confer, an open source AI assistant that provides strong assurances that user data is unreadable to the platform operator, hackers, law enforcement, or any other party other than account holders.  "The service —including its large language models and back-end components —runs entirely on open source software that users can cryptographically verify is in place. "Data and conversations originating from users and the resulting responses from the LLMs are encrypted in a trusted execution environment (TEE) that prevents even server administrators from peeking at or tampering with them.  "Conversations are stored by Confer in the same encrypted form, which uses a key that remains securely on users’ devices."  

"I’ve been building Confer: end-to-end encryption for AI chats. "With Confer, your conversations are encrypted so that nobody else can see them. Confer can’t read them, train on them, or hand them over —because only you have access to them. "The core idea is that your conversations with an AI assistant should be as private as your conversations with a person. Not because you’re doing something wrong, but because privacy is what lets you think freely. "I founded Signal with a simple premise: when you send someone a message, only that person should be able to read it. Not the company transmitting it, not the government, not anyone else on the internet.  "It took years, but eventually this idea became mainstream enough that even Facebook adopted end-to-end encryption."

"In 2021, a unit of healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson announced a leap forward : It had added artificial intelligence to a medical device used to treat chronic sinusitis, an inflammation of the sinuses. "Acclarent said the software for its TruDi Navigation System would now use a machine-learning algorithm to assist ear, nose and throat specialists in surgeries. "The device had already been on the market for about three years. Until then, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had received unconfirmed reports of seven instances in which the device malfunctioned and another report of a patient injury.  "Since AI was added to the device, the FDA has received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events. "At least 10 people were injured between late 2021 and November 2025, according to the reports. Most allegedly involved errors in which the TruDi Navigation System misinformed surgeons about the location of their instruments while they we...

" Turning risk into reward with a circular economy for EV batteries and critical minerals   (pdf) identifies five areas for immediate action to build a circular economy for EV batteries: Design batteries for circularity, not disposal so they last and can be reused in different applications across multiple lives; Rethink battery service within optimised energy-mobility systems so value isn’t about bigger batteries but the right performance for the right use; Scale circular business models to treat batteries as long-term assets managed over multiple lives that reward durability: The ability of a product, component or material to remain functional and relevant when used as intended, performance, recovery, and second-life use;  Build and co-invest in regional circular infrastructure that enables materials to circulate efficiently, resiliently, and transparently; Make the circular operating system work by increasing data transfer and transparency across the value chain, and de...

I was on bluesky and saw a vid of  Ian McClellan  (sic) on  Steven (sic) Colbert's late show . The caption read that he was performing a speech from Sir Thomas Moore (sic), a  play by William Shakespeare . I'd never heard of this play so I thought I'd investigate. Following is the rabbit hole I fell down: Famous actor reads speech, "Strangers," from   Sir Thomas More , a play that Shakespeare is purported to have edited.  Thomas More  was sheriff during  1517 riot in London  against  Flemish immigrants . Previous influential immigrants were  Lombards  who formed banking relationships in London hence  Lombard Street . Also,  lenders from Cahors ,  Cahorsin , provided banking services. Cahorsin loaned money to finance  Simon de Monforte's (sic) crusade  against the  Cathars . Both Cahors and Cathars reside in  Occitan region of Europe . Langue'dOc  originates in Occitan region. The people o...

" Around ‌a ​third of countries attending a ‌military AI summit agreed on Thursday to a a declaration on ​how to govern deployment of the technology in warfare, but military heavyweights China and the U.S. ‍opted out. "Tensions in relations between ​the United States and European allies, and uncertainty over how transatlantic ties will look ​in coming ⁠months and years, made some countries hesitant to sign joint agreements, several attendees and delegates said. "The pledge underscores growing concern among some governments that rapid advances in artificial intelligence could outpace rules around its military use, raising the risk of accidents, miscalculation or unintended ‌escalation. "Governments are facing a prisoner's dilemma , caught between putting responsible restrictions in place and not ​wanting ‌to limit themselves in comparison ‍with adversaries, ⁠said Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans."

"Hospital at the End of the World is Key's first novel, and it's terrific. Set in a not-so-distant future in which an AI-driven health monopolist called The Shepherd Organization controls much of the lives of everyday Americans, Hospital follows Pok, a young New Yorker who dreams of becoming an MD. "Pok's father is also a doctor, famous for his empathic, human-centric methods and his scientific theories about the role that essence  (a psychospiritual connection between doctors and patients) plays in clinical settings. "The story opens with Pok hotly anticipating an acceptance letter from The Shepherd Organization, and the beginning of his new life as a medical student. But when word arrives, Pok learns that he has been rejected from every medical school in the TSO orbit.  "In desperate confusion, he works with shadowy hackers in a bid to learn why his impeccable application and his top grades resulted in this total rejection. That's when he learns ...

"Xcode 26.3 introduces support for agentic coding, a new way in Xcode for developers to build apps using coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Agent and OpenAI’s Codex. "With agentic coding, Xcode can work with greater autonomy toward a developer’s goals —from breaking down tasks to making decisions based on the project architecture and using built-in tools. "Expanding on the intelligence features introduced in Xcode 26, which brought a brand-new coding assistant for writing and editing in Swift, this release gives coding agents access to even more of Xcode’s capabilities.  "Agents like Claude Agent and Codex can now collaborate throughout the entire development life cycle, giving developers the power to streamline workflows, iterate faster, and bring ideas to life like never before.  "Agents can search documentation, explore file structures, update project settings, and verify their work visually by capturing Xcode Previews and iterating through builds and ...