AI

As spotted earlier by The Register, CrankGPT is a concept project from a two-person team at Squeez Labs that runs private, local AI models without needing a power-hungry data center. Instead, you have to literally crank out your own power for each of the chatbot’s answers.

John Jumper, who has worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind since 2017, announced his departure from the company on X. In 2024, Jumper and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an open-source AI model that predicts protein structures.

As Reuters reports, the new restrictions will go into effect in August, limiting how students in different age groups use AI:

“Think of it like a driving instructor with dual controls,” Google’s blog post stated. “The instructor trusts the student but stays ready to take the wheel or hit the brakes if a mistake occurs.” Google DeepMind’s plan itself lays out “internal guardrails designed to catch potential adversarial behaviour by AI agents, even as they become increasingly harder to oversee and contain,” naming methods like chain-of-thought monitoring, asynchronous alerts, real-time access control, and shutdown infrastructure.

“AIs that pretend to be human are, you know, manipulative,” Jonze said Wednesday at Replit’s Vibecon conference in New York City. “The kids need to grow up knowing these are going to be very, very convincing and very seductive — and very useful and very powerful — but they’re still just a system, an incredible system of pattern recognition.”

Noam Shazeer spent twenty years at Google before returning in 2024 after the Big G reportedly paid Character.AI — a company co-founded by Shazeer in 2021 — $2.7 billion to bring him and a team of researchers back home.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) gained access to the limited release cybersecurity-focused model last week, Nextgov/FCW reports. It’s just a little late, since the rest of the world has mostly moved onto the drama around the Trump administration’s block of the safeguarded public version of the model, Fable.

Alongside the announcement of an updated experience for scheduling tasks, OpenAI said that Pulse would be going away “in the next 14 days” and suggested using scheduled tasks for a daily briefing instead.

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

The AI design chatbot’s new editor has controls for directly dragging, resizing, and aligning elements, and more options for apps you can export to, including Adobe and Canva. Users can also work on design projects directly from the Claude Code terminal, or hand off software layouts from Design directly to Claude Code, where it picks up exactly where you left off, without a screenshot or a rebuild from scratch.

During the VivaTech 2026 conference in Paris, Samsung announced a new feature for its mobile devices created through a collaboration with the pet health management platform, Lifet. You’ll be able to snap a photo of your dog or cat which will be analyzed by AI to alert you to conditions like periodontal disease and obesity.

A new dashboard will show a creator’s most popular AI characters, along with metrics including interactions, likes, and discoveries. Character.AI is also launching a feature that will notify followers when a creator launches a new chatbot.

What’s left of the shoe company after its pivot to AI (which is mostly its stock listing) has a new name and CEO, Nadia Carlsten. Smartbird also completed the sale of the Allbirds brand as it shifts its focus toward offering access to AI infrastructure and enterprise-focused AI systems.

The Justice Department argues that xAI’s Mississippi data center should be allowed to pollute the air because it’s “critical” for military operations, which honestly explains a lot.

After The Wizard of Oz at Sphere topped $400 million in ticket sales over the last year, Sphere Studios says it “will use its advanced technologies” to present The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Sphere.

Anthropic and the US government are once again at odds, this time over the Claude Fable 5 model that either is, or is not, or might be, far too dangerous to release to the world. The Verge’s Hayden Field explains what’s going on with Fable, Mythos, and the whole idea of American AI exceptionalism, before also answering your questions about how WhatsApp and Siri might one day work together, and whether Apple messed up by calling it Siri AI.

The Justice Department is trying to intervene and dismiss a case from the NAACP alleging xAI’s use of gas turbines in Mississippi are illegally polluting the air. Preventing xAI from using them would endanger national security, DOJ argues, because “Grok provides critical support for the Department of War’s military operations.”

The R&D team at Walt Disney Imagineering has embraced Adobe’s Firefly Foundry platform to “accelerate the design and pre-production visualization pipeline” for Disney Parks and Experiences. The partnership will use AI models trained on Disney assets to turn sketches into fully rendered concept art, 2D images into 3D prototypes, and more.

In this video detailing the company’s concept and character design process, Epic says that AI tools like Google’s Nano Banana and its own internal GenMedia Bridge, allows “creative control to stay in the hands of the creator.” Given artists also have to fix stuff that AI generates without being asked to, we’ll let you be the judge of that.

A month after a jury dismissed Elon’s claims in the Musk v. Altman case, US District Judge Rita Lin dismissed an xAI lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing trade secrets and poaching employees. This time, it was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled, unlike when she dismissed the case in February.