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
YouTube Music is beta testing “Beyond The Beat” — an AI DJ that interrupts your music stream with trivia snippets about the artist playing! [9to5 Google] Every 4 to 5 songs, YouTube inserts an extra short track called “Beyond the Beat A YouTube Labs experiment”. Some users have had a burst of static noise instead […]| 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
Here in Great Depression 1.9 beta, it’s pledge week at Pivot to AI! We’ve had a pile of signups on the Patreon — thank you all so much, your $5 is the best way to support Pivot to AI. I just got two new T-shirt designs up — the round Pivot to AI logo, but: […]| 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. This is mainly because bank and hedge fund analysts are bothering at last to get their calculators out and notice the […]| Pivot to AI
The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is a standard school exam. Most Massachusetts students sit it. This year, about 1,400 essays got bizarrely wrong scores and had to be reassessed. You guessed it — a contractor scored them with AI! [NBC; Boston.com; YouTube] The contractor, Cognia, got $36.5 million this year to mark essays, and they […]| Pivot to AI
Neon Mobile is an app that sells your phone calls to AI companies for training, and pays you 15–30 cents per minute! By Wednesday, Neon was number two social app on the Apple Store. [TechCrunch] That’s a lot to pay just for phone calls. Even if Neon sold them to the ad networks too. Neon […]| Pivot to AI
It’s pledge week here at Pivot to AI! If you want to keep seeing a new Pivot to AI story every single day, we need your support. Just $5 into the Patreon is the most effective way to support Pivot to AI. Tell your friends to sign up too! If you’re on YouTube, I’ve got […]| Pivot to AI
Here’s a new paper in Nature: “Delegation to artificial intelligence can increase dishonest behaviour.” [Nature] This is another killer headline that appeals hard to my prejudices, and probably yours. I’m seeing people link this paper as evidence that chatbots make you dishonest. But it’s not a good paper. First, it’s an AI paper in Nature, […]| Pivot to AI
One year ago, Hollywood studio Lionsgate was selling its entire catalogue to AI startup Runway to train a video model. Lionsgate vice-chairman Michael Burns looked forward to “cutting-edge, capital-efficient content creation opportunities!” [Hollywood Reporter, 2024] In June, Burns told Vulture the Runway deal was going great! “Now we can say, ‘Do it in anime, make […]| 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 AI-generated trash and you have to spend your time redoing the whole thing. They save time by wasting your time: Employees are using AI tools […]| Pivot to AI
The Tony Blair Institute is the brains trust for Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the UK. The TBI is the driving force behind the UK government plan to go full AI — it has a pile of tech donors, who just happen to be the companies the government’s giving all the AI contracts to. And […]| Pivot to AI
Every few months, the Wall Street Journal runs its Technology Council Summit. The Journal wrote up last week’s summit with the best headline ever: [WSJ] Stop Worrying About AI’s Return on Investment Oh, you don’t say? Tech leaders at WSJ’s Technology Council Summit said it’s nearly impossible to measure the impact of AI on business […]| Pivot to AI
Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albania, proclaimed last week he was appointing a new government minister who would be … an AI! [Politico] Rama said in July: [Politico] One day, we might even have a ministry run entirely by AI. That way, there would be no nepotism or conflicts of interest. Rama is preparing […]| Pivot to AI
Business Insider had massive layoffs in May after search engine hits went down badly. But they’d fix it — with AI! On Thursday afternoon, editor-in-chief Jamie Heller sent out the memo specifying precisely how to write by chatbot. [Status, paywalled; Verge] Journalists can — i.e., they’re expected to — write their first draft with a […]| 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
Today, let’s look at two Pitchbook reports — the US VC-Backed M&A Outlook for second quarter 2025 and the 2025 US Venture Capital Outlook: Midyear Update. [Pitchbook; Pitchbook, PDF, archive; P…| Pivot to AI
Over on YouTube, we run Google’s Veo 3 video generator through its paces. So when you’ve read this, go and watch the worked examples. [YouTube] Aron Peterson is a media production professional. He’…| 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