Rightmove is a UK property portal that charges real estate agents a fee for listings. That’s the whole business. Rightmove got popular early, it’s a really simple business, and the money just rolls in! But that wasn’t enough for Rightmove. They heard there was a magical new money tree called AI, and they wanted a […]| Pivot to AI
Guest post by Nicholas C. Weaver The AI companies and related enterprises are currently spending huge amounts in capital expenditures (CAPEX) to build “Gigawatt” class data centers for various AI-related development. The scale of the investment is so large it is distorting the economy. These massive expenditures, however, are shortly going to prove to be […]| Pivot to AI
Chatbot vendors routinely make up a new benchmark, then brag how well their hot new chatbot does on it. Like that time OpenAI’s o3 model trounced the FrontierMath benchmark, and it’s just a coincidence that OpenAI paid for the benchmark and got access to the questions ahead of time. Every new model will be trained […]| Pivot to AI
The BBC and the European Broadcasting Union have produced a large study of how well AI chatbots handle summarising the news. In short: badly. [BBC; EBU] The researchers asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and Perplexity about current events. 45% of the chatbot answers had at least one major issue. 31% were seriously wrong and 20% had […]| Pivot to AI
It’s early November! And you know what that means? Coca-Cola’s done another of its terrible AI Christmas TV ads! Where they take their 1995 ad “Holidays Are Coming” and remake it with a slop generator. We covered last year’s bad AI Coke ad. No shot over two or three seconds, animals and snowmen visibly warped […]| Pivot to AI
There’s a remarkable paper from MIT’s Sloan School of Management, co-written with the security vendor Safe Security: “Rethinking the Cybersecurity Arms Race: When 80% of Ransomware Attacks are AI-Driven”: Our recent analysis of over 2800 ransomware incidents has revealed an alarming trend: AI plays an increasingly significant role in these attacks. In 2024, 80.83% of […]| Pivot to AI
Today’s paper is “AI Makes You Smarter, But None the Wiser: The Disconnect between Performance and Metacognition”. AI users wildly overestimate how brilliant they actually are: [Elsevier, paywalled; SSRN preprint, PDF; press release] All users show a significant inability to assess their performance accurately when using ChatGPT. In fact, across the board, people overestimated their […]| Pivot to AI
The AI hyper-scalers have problems getting power for all their new data centres. How about using small gas turbines that used to be jet engines? Landon Tessmer from ProEnergy says: [IEEE Spectrum] We have sold 21 gas turbines for two data-center projects amounting to more than 1 gigawatt. Both projects are expected to provide bridging […]| Pivot to AI
Sam Altman gets his wish! OpenAI got its deal through to turn from a weird charity thing into an ordinary for-profit company. I’m surprised. But they did it. [Bloomberg, archive] Microsoft got everything it wanted for free. Microsoft gets a 27% equity stake, rights to research until 2030 and the software itself until 2032. Microsoft […]| Pivot to AI
Sam Altman’s had some positive news today, but I’m sure we can still make his day worse. Keep Sam crying eight delicious and bitter tears for every dollar donated to Pivot to AI: Just $5 into the Patreon is the best way to support Pivot to AI. Tell your friends to sign up too! If […]| Pivot to AI
In November last year, Microsoft released its plans to force a Copilot upgrade and a price rise onto all Office 365 “personal and family” (consumer) users — “to reflect the value we’ve added over the past decade and enable us to deliver new innovations for years to come.” [Press release] Some people discovered the workaround: […]| Pivot to AI
Game studio Electronic Arts has been showing signs of trouble for a while now. They’re in profit, but the line is going down. The second quarter of 2025 shows net income of $201 million, down from …| Pivot to AI
“Vibe coding” is telling an LLM to write your program. You just run the result and don’t even look at the code. Sounds a fun experiment! But maybe not on the hostile Internet? Leonel Acevedo is a h…| Pivot to AI
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’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
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
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
