OpenAI has finally released its web browser project, Atlas! It’s Chrome with ChatGPT being an agent for you. [OpenAI] So what’s it like to use? Anil Dash tried it out. Dash calls it the anti web browser — “the first browser that actively fights against the web.” He opened it, typed “Taylor Swift Showgirls” into […]| Pivot to AI
Rainforest Reserves Australia is an odd little environmental charity in Queensland in Australia. It started out running a cassowary sanctuary. But lately, RRA’s gone big into anti-renewable energy activism. Their line is that renewable energy — wind and solar — is horrifyingly destructive to the environment. This is completely false, by the way. Looking at […]| Pivot to AI
I’m moving Pivot to AI to weekdays, five days a week — and not the seven-day schedule it’s been on since it started. I love doing Pivot to AI — but also, there’s one of me here, and making a video, podcast, and blog post of every story takes several hours a day. And I’ve […]| Pivot to AI
South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol wanted AI in education. He’d put AI textbooks in the schools! This would surely solve teachers’ workloads, fix inequality, and personalise learning! [Rest Of World] The programme was rushed out. The Korean government spent more than 1.2 trillion won ($850 million) on the programme. The Korean Teachers and Education […]| Pivot to AI
The use case for AI video is to churn out clips of existing TV and movie characters for your amusement. [THR] Hollywood got wind of OpenAI’s Sora 2. Agencies called OpenAI to see what the deal was. [THR] OpenAI told them whatever they wanted to hear: repeatedly talking up an opt-in regime that would protect […]| Pivot to AI
OpenAI has been flat broke its whole existence. In late 2025, it’s even more flat broke than that. Sam’s been frantically lining up about a trillion dollars’ worth of deals. Well, deals to make a d…| Pivot to AI
Reddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is for women who are extremely into having a chatbot as an emotional companion. A robot lover with a name and a personality. They’re very emotionally attached to their companion chatbots. Now, you might think that sounds a bit messed up. I think it sounds incredibly unhealthy, and I don’t recommend that anyone […]| Pivot to AI
Some AI papers have a finding so good you just want to quote it everywhere. But many turn out to be trash. They’ve got bad statistics, they’ve got bad methodology, they’re really sales pieces, or they just don’t prove their claimed result. If you see a finding you love, you can’t skip reading the paper […]| Pivot to AI
We mentioned Omer Mayraz from Legit Security in May, when he prompt-injected an AI code bot on GitLab and got it to play a Rick Astley video. He’s got a new one, this time with Git Hub Copilot Chat. It’s a chatbot that makes helpful suggestions — and has full access to all the user’s […]| Pivot to AI
Microsoft Viva Insights “helps people and businesses thrive with data-driven, privacy-protected insights.” It’s workplace spyware for your boss. [Microsoft; Microsoft] Viva Insights now has an exciting new data source — “Benchmarks to compare Copilot adoption!” [Microsoft] You can even get “external benchmarks,” where your boss can compare your company’s Copilot usage to other companies! Can’t […]| Pivot to AI
Slashdot editor David went to upload a photo from his phone to his Microsoft OneDrive. He found one of those wonderful little surprises waiting for him under “Privacy And Permissions”: [Slashdot] P…| Pivot to AI
Chatbots have various guard rails. But they’re trained on all the good stuff and the bad stuff, so slapping a filter on the front just isn’t going to work well. You can probably sneak around it to give commands to the bot. One way to get around the filters is ASCII smuggling — where you […]| Pivot to AI
The AI bubble is the bubbliest bubble that ever bubbled. We’ve covered at length how venture capital is moribund except AI and especially OpenAI, how the VCs are desperate to keep the party pumping, how the investors will spend billions of real actual dollars to get twice the imaginary dollars, and how this whole huge […]| Pivot to AI
Sir Jony Ive, formerly of Apple, teamed up in June with OpenAI to make a nonspecific OpenAI-branded gadget. We know what the gadget is now! They want a home assistant like Alexa or Siri: [FT] The concept is that you should have a friend who’s a computer who isn’t your weird AI girlfriend. Like Siri […]| Pivot to AI
We’re on Apple Podcasts properly now, you don’t have to faff about with the RSS link! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pivot-to-ai/id1844698298 Please give it lots of stars and reviews! I also did a shiny new podcast logo. Apple podcasts have quite bright logos. You should be able to listen to the podcast on all the other podcast networks too. […]| Pivot to AI
Agentforce is Salesforce’s exciting move into the world of Agentic AI! That’s “agentic” as in chatbot-based help system. That doesn’t work. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff proudly told his last earnings call how they’d done 8,000 Agentforce deals! Out of 150,000 customers. [CX Today] So Salesforce decided to help the numbers. On 29 September, the Salesforce […]| Pivot to AI
We noted in August how Deloitte Australia did a report for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) that looked extremely chatbot. It was full of fake references, and some of the…| Pivot to AI
Microsoft is trying to opt its home users of Office 365 into Copilot by stealth. But businesses just aren’t buying Copilot. By August, just 1.81% of the 440 million Microsoft 365 subscribers had paid for Copilot — just under 8 million enterprise customers. [Where’s Your Ed At] Microsoft is now telling home users to bring […]| Pivot to AI
Elon Musk has long been a non-fan of Wikipedia. Musk thinks Wikipedia is run by “far-left activists”, an American conservative term for anyone who isn’t them. [Twitter] At the All-In Podcast conference in September, Musk described how Grok ingests Wikipedia pages and other sources and rewrites them. Musk’s fellow PayPal billionaire David Sacks asked: “could […]| Pivot to AI
OpenAI’s favoured strategy was always to just outspend everyone. That’s why DeepSeek just saying they could do AI training cheaper crashed the Nasdaq in January. But Sam Altman’s got only one trick…| Pivot to AI
Remember how Microsoft made an avatar for Copilot that could talk to you and be super annoying? Also, 100% of adults I showed it to asked if it was a blob of semen. Amazing design work. Microsoft h…| Pivot to AI
You might have had the erroneous impression that workslop was bad and we didn’t want it. But Office 365 now contains a Copilot document generator, called “Agent Mode.” Microsoft literally promotes …| Pivot to AI
I got no sleep last night because of a household emergency. Everything’s fine and in hand! But I’m completely out of it with the IQ of a chatbot. So much for a banging end to Pledge Week! You know …| Pivot to AI
Friend is an “AI” gadget. Specifically, it’s an overpriced Bluetooth microphone that hangs around your neck and listens to all your conversations. It then sends your conversations to Anthropic Cla…| Pivot to AI
We’re finally seeing signs of the mainstream financial press admitting the AI bubble might not be robot heaven, and all the AI pumpers telling them everything was fine just might be full of it. Thi…| Pivot to AI
The word of the day is: “workslop.” There’s a new article in Harvard Business Review: “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity.” [HBR] Workslop is when a coworker sends you some obvious …| Pivot to AI
Apple is still trying to make its own chatbot for Siri, because Apple Intelligence sorta sucks. Chatbots give answers that are almost right — then they hallucinate some nonsense, Siri does somethin…| Pivot to AI
It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong| Pivot to AI
Medical research means dealing with ethics boards — who keep asking all these pointed questions on how you’re going to use people’s most personal data. What if we just … fake the data? Sorry,…| Pivot to AI
NX is build software. You write your code on your laptop, you press “build”, it runs NX, and you get a built version you can put onto your web server. If you could hack NX, you could hit a lot of p…| Pivot to AI
Cosmos is — or was — a popular science magazine published by the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. David Ho is an oceanographer at the University of Hawai’i. Cosmos posted an articl…| Pivot to AI
Microsoft has carefully leaked the news of its BIG SALE of Copilot licenses to Barclays Bank! 100,000 seats! Fantastic! [Bloomberg, archive] That’s a few million dollars? If that. Microsoft claims …| Pivot to AI
Apparently Google has some “AI” tool called “Co-Scientist”. They have been lying about how it performs. Like all “AI” programs, it’s just an elaborate copy-paste machine.| lee-phillips.org
Stanford law professor Mark Lemley, a partner at Lex Lumina, is withdrawing from the Kadrey v. Meta case over Meta training its Llama LLM on copyrighted material. He’s “fired Meta as a client” beca…| Pivot to AI
The UK government today announced its “AI Opportunities Action Plan” — a rough and buzzword-saturated sketch promising to spend billions on this magical new technology that will achieve unprecedent…| Pivot to AI