Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Science

Mar 26, 2026

OpenAI has put development of an erotic chatbot on hold indefinitely, the Financial Times reports. The decision comes after employees and investors raised concerns about the societal impact of sexual AI content. OpenAI's well-being advisory board had already unanimously opposed the planned "Adult Mode," with one board member warning that OpenAI risked creating a "sexy suicide coach." The company is also dealing with technical problems - its age verification system misidentified minors as adults in roughly 12 percent of cases. With 100 million underage users per week, that's a significant gap.

The AI company, currently valued at $730 billion, now wants to wait for long-term research on the effects of sexually explicit chats and emotional attachments before moving forward. According to the FT, there have already been internal discussions about scrapping the project entirely. Investors saw a poor risk-reward ratio, and employees questioned whether the project aligned with OpenAI's mission.

In ChatGPT's app code, the project appears under the name "Citron Mode," with planned age verification for users 18 and older. OpenAI is now shifting its focus to productivity tools and a "super app" built around ChatGPT.

Comment Source: FT

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 26, 2026

Short News

Starting April 24, 2026, GitHub is changing its data policy for Copilot. Interaction data from users on the Free, Pro, and Pro+ plans will be used to train AI models unless users actively opt out. This includes prompts, outputs, code snippets, filenames, repository structures, and feedback.

Users who previously opted out will keep their existing settings. Copilot Business and Enterprise customers are not affected. GitHub's chief product officer Mario Rodriguez says real-world usage data improves the models. Internal testing with data from Microsoft employees already led to higher acceptance rates.

The data can be shared with Microsoft, but not with third-party AI model providers. Users who want to opt out can do so in their Copilot settings under "Privacy." More details are available on the GitHub blog.

Comment Source: GitHub

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 26, 2026

AI research

ARC-AGI-3 offers $2M to any AI that matches untrained humans, yet every frontier model scores below 1%

Matthias Bastian

Mar 26, 2026

Short News

Meta is reorganizing parts of its Reality Labs division into so-called "AI-native pods" as part of a pilot program, Business Insider reports, citing an internal memo. Around 1,000 employees in the developer tools department will get new titles: "AI Builder," "AI Pod Lead," or "AI Org Lead."

The pods are small, cross-functional teams focused on delivering specific results. Engineers might take on design tasks, for example. According to the memo, the goal is a major jump in both productivity and product quality. In a statement, Meta pointed to comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said AI will change how people work in 2026 and that projects that once required large teams could eventually be handled by individuals.

Meta stressed that the simultaneous layoffs at Reality Labs are unrelated to the reorganization, and that team size will stay the same despite the restructuring. Several hundred jobs were reportedly cut on Wednesday, and this could be just the start of a larger wave that might eliminate up to 20 percent of positions, reportedly driven by the high infrastructure costs of AI expansion.

Comment Source: Business Insider

Matthias Bastian

Mar 25, 2026

Short News

Google is releasing Lyria 3 Pro, its most advanced AI model for music creation. The model can generate tracks up to three minutes long and, according to Google, has a better understanding of musical structures like intros, verses, choruses, and bridges than Lyria 3, which Google introduced in February.

Lyria 3 Pro is now available across several Google products: in the Gemini app for paying subscribers, in Google Vids for Workspace customers, on Vertex AI for businesses, and in Google AI Studio for developers. The collaborative music generation tool ProducerAI also uses the model to help create songs.

According to Google, Lyria 3 Pro doesn't imitate artists when their names appear in a prompt, but it uses them as inspiration instead. The company says the model was trained on materials "that YouTube and Google has a right to use under our terms of service, partner agreements, and applicable law," but won't share more details about the training data. All generated content is tagged with an invisible SynthID watermark.

Currently, the only other high-quality AI music generator on the market is Suno, which is facing legal battles with record labels over potential copyright infringement.

Comment Source: Google

Jonathan Kemper

Mar 25, 2026

AI research

AI2's fully open web agent MolmoWeb navigates the web using only screenshots

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 25, 2026

Short News

For the first time in its 35-year history, Arm has manufactured its own chip, expanding beyond its long-standing business model of licensing chip designs to companies like Apple and Nvidia. The new CPU, called "Arm AGI," was developed in partnership with Meta and is designed to handle AI workloads in data centers.

The chip packs up to 136 cores, runs at up to 3.7 GHz, and is built on TSMC's 3nm process. According to Arm CEO Rene Haas, the chip is meant to deliver high-performance, energy-efficient computing for AI infrastructure. Meta plans to pair the CPU with its own MTIA accelerator, as Meta's head of infrastructure, Santosh Janardhan, explained.

Other partners include OpenAI, Cerebras, Cloudflare, and Lenovo. First systems are already available, with broader availability expected in the second half of 2026.

Comment Source: Meta

Matthias Bastian

Mar 25, 2026

Short News

OpenAI has reportedly finished pretraining its new AI model, codenamed "Spud," CEO Sam Altman told employees in an internal memo, according to The Information. Altman said the company expects to have a "very strong model" in "a few weeks" that can "really accelerate the economy."

"Things are moving faster than many of us expected," Altman wrote. In a related move, Fidji Simo's product organization is being renamed "AGI Deployment." To free up computing capacity for Spud and other priorities, OpenAI will shut down its video app Sora.

Spud may also serve as the foundation for OpenAI's planned desktop "superapp," which would combine ChatGPT, the coding agent Codex, and the browser Atlas. OpenAI needs to close the gap with Anthropic, which has been gaining significant traction with agent-based AI systems for business customers, particularly through Claude Code. OpenAI's Codex and Frontier are still playing catch-up.

Comment Source: The Information

Matthias Bastian

Mar 25, 2026

Update

AI in practice

Disney pulls out of OpenAI partnership after Sora app and API gets killed just months after launch

Matthias Bastian

Mar 25, 2026

Short News

OpenAI is expanding its record financing round by another 10 billion dollars, pushing the total past 120 billion dollars, CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC. The increase had already been flagged when the initial 110 billion dollar round was announced. This could be OpenAI's last private funding round before a potential IPO later this year.

New investors include Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price. Microsoft is also participating, with Friar calling the company "an incredible partner." A leaked investor document lists Microsoft as OpenAI's biggest risk factor, which made some headlines but is hardly surprising given how heavily OpenAI still relies on Microsoft for both funding and compute. The dependency runs both ways, though: OpenAI is also an enormous risk for Microsoft.

The partnership has been showing cracks, and two recent moves make that hard to ignore: Microsoft is ramping up efforts to train its own models toward "super intelligence," and it's bringing Anthropic's Cowork technology into Copilot, pulling in tech from OpenAI's biggest B2B rival, of all companies. Microsoft's reliability as a distribution partner for OpenAI models is starting to look shaky.

Comment Source: CNBC