Artificial Intelligence: News, Business, Science

Apr 8, 2026

Stability AI, once a major force in open-source AI with its Stable Diffusion image model, is shifting its focus to commercial products. The company's latest release is Brand Studio, a platform built for creative teams that need AI-generated visuals matching their brand identity.

At the core of Brand Studio is "Brand Central," where teams can train their own brand-specific image models and set up campaign templates. A "Producer Mode" turns text descriptions into step-by-step visual production plans and runs them automatically. The platform also includes Curated Model Routing, which picks the best-suited AI model for a given task, whether that's Stable Diffusion or a third-party model. Other additions include "Precision Inpainting" for making targeted edits to specific parts of an image. Brand Studio comes in a free Core version and a paid Enterprise plan.

Comment Source: Stability AI

Matthias Bastian

Apr 8, 2026

Short News

One in four quotes generated by AI systems comes from journalistic sources. That's the finding of PR database Muckrack, which evaluated 15 million quotes from AI responses across Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT, as Press Gazette reports.

Trade publications and specialist journalists show up particularly often. Former Business Insider chief Henry Blodget is the most cited journalist worldwide. Reuters leads among publications globally, followed by Forbes. In the UK, The Guardian ranks first, followed by specialist magazine Homes and Gardens.

Rank	Publication	Subject area
1	reuters.com	News
2	forbes.com	Business
3	theguardian.com	News
4	ft.com	Business
5	cnbc.com	Business

Muckrack sent millions of queries to all four AI services and tracked how often specific journalists and outlets appeared as linked sources. Based on the results, the company launched a new feature rating the "AI visibility" of journalists and publications across three tiers.

A separate analysis of Google's AI Overviews—AI-generated answers shown directly in search results—found that Facebook and Reddit are among the most cited sources across all queries.

Comment Source: Press Gazette

Maximilian Schreiner

Apr 8, 2026

AI and society

Nudifying bots, deepfakes, and automated archives: how AI powers a monetized abuse ecosystem on Telegram

An analysis of 2.8 million Telegram messages in Italy and Spain documents how AI tools are fueling a monetized ecosystem built around non-consensual intimate imagery.

Read full article

Comment

Maximilian Schreiner

Apr 8, 2026

Short News

Anthropic has hired Eric Boyd, a senior Microsoft executive, as its new head of infrastructure, Bloomberg reports. Boyd previously ran Microsoft's AI Platform, which powers the deployment of large language models for both customers and internal teams. Before Microsoft, he held leadership roles at Yahoo.

The hire comes at a critical time. Anthropic has been struggling to keep its services running smoothly as demand for products like Claude Code has surged. The company is planning $50 billion in investments in AI data centers across the US. Anthropic CTO Rahul Patil said Boyd's experience should help the company meet record demand worldwide.

Comment Source: Bloomberg

Maximilian Schreiner

Apr 8, 2026

AI in practice

From GPT-2 to Claude Mythos: The return of AI models deemed 'too dangerous to release'

Matthias Bastian

Apr 8, 2026

Short News

Elon Musk has updated his lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. He's now asking that any damages, potentially more than $150 billion, go not to him but to OpenAI's charitable foundation. He's also pushing for the removal of CEO Sam Altman from the foundation's board, according to the Wall Street Journal. Musk's lawyer, Marc Toberoff, said Musk "is not seeking a single dollar for himself."

Musk accuses OpenAI of abandoning its charitable mission and defrauding him as a donor by exploiting its nonprofit status. He wants Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman to turn over their shares and financial benefits to the foundation. The trial is set to begin in April in Oakland, California.

Musk argues OpenAI betrayed the mission he helped fund. However, early interview notes show he agreed to adding a for-profit unit in 2017 and actively discussed the transition while keeping the nonprofit in place.

OpenAI called the lawsuit on X "a harassment campaign driven by ego, jealousy and a desire to slow down a competitor." The company has also asked the attorneys general of Delaware and California to investigate Musk's behavior. OpenAI is currently valued at $852 billion and planning an IPO.

Comment Source: Wall Street Journal | OpenAI

Matthias Bastian

Apr 7, 2026

AI research

Google's AI Overviews are correct nine out of ten times, study finds

Matthias Bastian

Apr 7, 2026

Short News

Microsoft's Bing team (yes, really) has released "Harrier," an open-source embedding model. Harrier supports more than 100 languages, offers a 32,000-token context window, and was trained on over two billion examples plus synthetic data from GPT-5. According to the team, Harrier takes the top spot on the multilingual MTEB v2 benchmark and outperforms proprietary models from OpenAI and Amazon.

Rank (Borda)	Model	Zero-shot	Active Params (B)	Total Params (B)	Embedding Dim	Max Tokens
1	harrier-oss-v1-27b	78%	25.6	27.0	5376	131072
2	KaLM-Embedding-Gemma3-12B-2511	73%	10.8	11.8	3840	32768
3	llama-embed-nemotron-8b	99%	7.0	7.5	4096	32768
4	Qwen3-Embedding-8B	99%	6.9	7.6	4096	32768
5	gemini-embedding-001	99%			3072	2048
6	Qwen3-Embedding-4B	99%	3.6	4.0	2560	32768
7	Octen-Embedding-8B	99%	6.9	7.6	4096	32768
8	F2LLM-v2-14B	88%	13.2	14.0	5120	40960
9	F2LLM-v2-8B	88%	6.9	7.6	4096	40960
10	harrier-oss-v1-0.6b	78%	0.440	0.596	1024	32768

Alongside the full 27-billion-parameter model, the team released two smaller variants—0.6B and 270M—designed to run on less powerful hardware. All three models are available on Hugging Face under the MIT license. Going forward, the team plans to integrate the technology into Bing and into new grounding services for AI agents.

Embedding models handle the searching, retrieving, and organizing of information AI systems need for accurate answers. According to Microsoft, they're becoming increasingly critical as AI agents independently take on more complex, multi-step tasks.

Comment Source: Microsoft Bing Blog

Maximilian Schreiner

Apr 7, 2026

Short News

China is actively trying to poach Taiwan's semiconductor expertise and talent to circumvent international technology restrictions, according to a report from Taiwan's National Security Bureau cited by Reuters.

The report says China is using indirect channels to recruit talent, steal technology, and acquire controlled goods. Taiwan is home to TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker and a key supplier to Nvidia and Apple.

In the first quarter of 2026 alone, the report logged more than 170 million attempted cyberattacks on Taiwan's government network. The agency also warns that China could try to influence Taiwan's local elections later this year using deepfakes and fabricated polls.

Comment Source: Reuters

Maximilian Schreiner

Apr 7, 2026

Short News

Jeff Bezos' startup Project Prometheus has hired Kyle Kosic, a co-founder of Elon Musk's xAI who most recently worked at OpenAI, the Financial Times reports. Kosic led the infrastructure behind xAI's Colossus supercomputer and will continue working on AI infrastructure at Prometheus.

The startup, led by Bezos and former Google executive Vikram Bajaj, is building AI systems designed to understand the physical world with a focus on tasks in areas like engine design and engineering. Prometheus has already hired hundreds of employees across San Francisco, London, and Zurich. According to the FT, Bezos and Bajaj are looking to raise tens of billions of dollars for a permanent investment vehicle that would acquire stakes in companies across industries like aerospace and architecture.

Comment Source: FT