*** Useful AI News ***

 
Last update: Saturday 10/4/25
This weekly news page provides links to reports about major innovations in generative AI. The page is not for AI experts. It's for (1) computer savvy professionals who use genAI via chatbots and agents (via chatbots) to obtain benefits in their careers and personal lives, and (2) computer savvy citizens who want to be alert to genAI's potential impact on our society. 

Most of the links on this page refer to reports published after the "AI Big Bang", i.e., after Sam Altman's sudden firing and rapid rehiring by OpenAI, i.e., after November 20, 2023. The previous edition of this page can be found here ➡ PreBigBang  

A. OpenAI  | B. Microsoft | C.  Google | D. Other Models |
 E. Agents | F. SLM/Open Source | G. Public Policy  | H. OpEds/Misc | 
I. Hacks | J. Basics | K. Data Centers  

Top 3 stories in past week ...
  1. OpenAI
    "OpenAI’s Sora Makes Disinformation Extremely Easy and Extremely Real", Tiffany Hsu, Stuart A. Thompson, and Steven Lee Myers, NY Times, 10/3/24 ***
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, WSJ, Gizmodo, Engadget, NPR, ... and OpenAI

  2. Public Policy 
    "California Governor Signs Sweeping A.I. Law", Cecilia Kang, NY Times, 9/29/25 *** 
    -- This story also covered by Politico, Reuters,  NBC News (video) ... and Governor Newsom


Upcoming events ...
  • OpenAI Dev Day … Monday, October 6, 2025, San Francisco
Evolving context and connections ... 
Fast moving AI news is often exciting, but also confusing. This page is designed to provide readers with an evolving context for the news and reminders of the connections between news items. From time to time, links to older stories whose content has been overcome by newer events will be deleted. However, enough older links will be retained so that readers can get a quick sense of how we got to where we are today by skimming the headlines of the preceding stories in chronological order. Sections will usually include 7 to 10 stories.
 ➡ Our publication schedule

A. OpenAI
B. Microsoft 
C. Google 
  • "Google Search’s new ‘AI Mode’ lets users ask complex, multi-part questions", Aisha Malik, TechCrunch, 3/5/25
    -- This story also covered by The Verge, 

  • "Google’s AI Mode can now see and search with images", Jess Weatherbed, The Verge, 4/7/25
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, Engadget

  • "Google’s Gemini chatbot gets upgraded image-creation tools", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 4/30/25

  • "Google adds image-to-video generation capability to Veo 3", Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch, 7/10/25 
    -- This story also covered by The Verge, Engdget, 

  • "Google A.I. System Wins Gold Medal in International Math Olympiad", Cade Metz, NY Times, 7/21/25

  • "Google takes on ChatGPT’s Study Mode with new ‘Guided Learning’ tool in Gemini", Aisha Malik, TechCrunch, 8/6/25
    -- This story also covered by Engadget

D. Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, Apple, Adobe, xAI, and other Big Tech models (max = 15)
  • "Anthropic Claude Opus 4.1: The Definitive Guide to Anthropic’s Most Advanced AI Model Yet", Cogni Down Under, Medium, 8/6/25 
    -- This story also covered by 9to5Mac, VentureBeat ... and Anthropic

  • "Anthropic will start training its AI models on chat transcripts", Hayden Field, The Verge, 8/28/25

  • "Claude can now create and edit files", Anthropic, 9/9/25 

  • "The New AirPods Can Translate Languages in Your Ears. This Is Profound.",  Brian X. Chen, NY Times, 9/18/22
    -- This story also covered by Tom's Guide, ... and Apple

  • "Nvidia to Invest $5 Billion in Intel, Furthering Trump’s Turnaround Plan", Robbie Whelan, Amrith Ramkumar, Lauren Thomas, and Joseph De Avila, WSJ, 9/18/25 
    -- This story also covered by The Verge, Reuters, Yahoo Finance,  ... and Nvidia

  • "Alibaba Integrates Nvidia Robotics Software in Its AI Platform", Luz Ding, Business Insider, 9/24/25 
    -- This story also covered by WSJ, TechCrunch, Investor Business Daily,

E. Agents
Editor's note -- This section replaces the old "Large Lange Model News" section because, nowadays, all AI models are large language models ... except the small models that will continue to be reported in the next section.
  • "Anthropic proposes a new way to connect data to AI chatbots", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 11/25/24 ... "Model Context Protoco (MCP)”

  • "OpenAI’s $3B Windsurf move: the real reason behind its enterprise AI code push", and podcast, Matt Marshall, VentureBeat, 5/9/25
  • "The walled garden cracks: Nadella bets Microsoft’s Copilots—and Azure’s next act—on A2A/MCP interoperability", Louis Columbus, VentureBeat, 5/8/25

  • "Discover tools that work with Claude", Anthropic, 7/14/25 
    -- This story also covered by Tom's Guide
    -- "Anthropic’s Connectors Explained: The AI Revolution Mainstream Media Missed", Claude, 7/20/25
F. Small Language Model (SLM) news + Open Source
Editor's note -- News reports are classified in this category if and only if they explicitly refer to models with less than 70 billion (70B) parameters. The pace of development should heat up as small, fast models are hooked up to large models and as the competition to become the dominant self-contained AI model on smart phones intensifies.
  • "Meta unveils a new, more efficient Llama model [3.3 70B]", TechCrunch, Kyle Wiggers, 12/6/24  
    -- This story also covered by VentureBeat,

  • "DeepSeek’s new AI model appears to be one of the best ‘open’ challengers yet", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 1/26/25  
    -- This story also covered by Nature, VentureBeat, ZDNet, Business Insider, ... and DeepSeek

  • "Microsoft launches Phi-4-Reasoning-Plus, a small, powerful, open weights reasoning model!", Carl Franzen, VentureBeat, 5/1/25

G. Public policy and legal considerations  (max= 12)

H. Misc = Opinions, other news, rumors, long reads (max = 15) 

I.  Language model flaws, hacks, and remedies (max = 15) 
  • "Many-shot jailbreaking", Anthropic, 4/2/24 
    -- This story also covered by video on TechCrunch, 
  • "DeepMind researchers discover impressive learning capabilities in long-context LLMs", Ben Dickson, VentureBeat, 4/24/24 
  • "ChatGPT caught lying to developers: New AI model tries to save itself from being replaced and shut down", Economic Times, 12/9/24
    -- This story also covered by Business Insider,  ... and Apollo Research (pdf)

  • "New Anthropic study shows AI really doesn’t want to be forced to change its views", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 12/18/24
    -- This story also covered by Anthropic

  • "OpenAI Says Disciplining Chatbots for Lying Just Makes Them Worse", Thomas Maxwell, Gizmodo, 3/20/25
  • "Cisco: Fine-tuned LLMs are now threat multipliers—22x more likely to go rogue", Louis Columbus, VentureBeat, 4/4/25
  • "After GPT-4o backlash, researchers benchmark models on moral endorsement—find sycophancy persists across the board", Emilia David, VentureBeat, 5/22/25
    -- This story also covered by Fast Company, The Atlantic, ... Anthropic

  • "A Starter Guide to Protecting Your Data From Hackers and Corporations", Matt Burgess, Sophie Johal, and Michaela Neville, Wired, (audio podcast + transcript), 5/26/25

  • "Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats", Anthropic, 6/20/25 
    -- This story also covered by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, 

  • “Understanding and preventing misalignment generalization”, OpenAI, 6/18/25
  • "A new study just upended AI safety", Hayden Field, Verge, 7/23/25
  • "OpenAI–Anthropic cross-tests expose jailbreak and misuse risks — what enterprises must add to GPT-5 evaluations", Emilia David, VentureBeat, 8/28/25 ... Reports from OpenAI, Anthropic
  • "OpenAI’s research on AI models deliberately lying is wild ", Julie Bort, TechCrunch, 9/18/25 -- This story also covered by Gizmodo, Futurism, ... and OpenAI
J. Basics 
  • "Phi-2: The surprising power of small language models", Mojan Javaheripi and Sébastien Bubeck , Microsoft Research, 12/12/24
  • "Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.", Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Tech Review, 3/4/24

  • "AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside", Steven Levy, Wired, 5/21/24
    -- This story also covered by Anthropic

  • "A Glossary for the AI Revolution", Seth Fiegerman and Nate Lanxon ... Illustrations by Mathieu Labrecque, Bloomberg, 10/4/24

  • "Transformers (how LLMs work)" explained visually | DL5, 3Blue1Brown, 2024,
  • "Anthropic CEO wants to open the black box of AI models by 2027", Maxwell Zeff, TechCrunch, 4/24/25, ... and Anthropic  
  • "Anthropic is launching a new program to study AI ‘model welfare’", Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch, 4/24/25,  ... and Anthropic

K. GenAI Data Centers Externalities -- Economics, Health, Environment, and Climate Impact  (max = 15)
  • "AI is set to drive surging electricity demand from data centres while offering the potential to transform how the energy sector works", IEA, 4/10/25
  • "AI’s promise is still taking shape. The costs of its data centers are already here.", Adam Rogers, Hannah Beckler, and Dakin Campbell, Business Insider, 7/17/25
  • "‘We Are the Last of the Forgotten:’ Inside the Memphis Community Battling Elon Musk’s xAI", Andrew R. Chow, Time, 8/13/25

  • "Big Tech’s A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone", Ivan Penn and Karen Weise, NY Times, 8/14/25
  • "How AI data centers are leading to big electricity bills in NY and NJ — and who’s being hit hardest", Michael Kaplan, NY Post, 8/18/25 

  • "Gas power plants approved for Meta’s $10B data center, and not everyone is happy", Tim De Chant, TechCrunch, 8/21/25

  • "Data centers will cause higher electricity prices, study finds", Zachery Eanes, Axios, 8/28/25 
    -- The research team's executive summary ... The complete report (pdf)

  • "Tech companies ‘be on alert,’ NAACP says with new guiding principles for data centers", Justine Calma, The Verge, 9/4/25 
    -- This story also covered by the NAACP

  • "US states make data centers pay up for power", Argus Media, 9/9/25

  • "EPA Releases Proposal to End the Burdensome, Costly Greenhouse GasReporting Program, Saving up to $2.4 Billion", EPA, 9/12/25  
    -- This story also covered by Reuters, AP News, Axios, Politico, 

  • "Harvard researchers weigh AI’s climate and health impact", Anna Miller, Harvard T.H. Chan, 9/18/25 
  • "New map and research expose disturbing side effects of AI industry boom: 'There are going to be challenges'", Semmi W., The CoolDown, 9/21/25

  • "OpenAI to Join Tech Giants in Building 5 New Data Centers in U.S.", Cade Metz, NY Times, 9/23/25 
    -- This story also covered by WSJ, TechCrunch, Reuters, Wired, Axios, 
    -- Context for this story is provided by "    Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?", Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan, WSJ, 9/25/25  

  • "Responding to the climate impact of generative AI", Adam Zewe, MIT News, 9/30/25
  • "Data center boom sparks sticker shock for PJM ratepayers", Peter Behr, E&E News/Politico, 10/3/25

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