Author HubMatthias Bastian

Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER, exploring how AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between humans and computers.
AI in practice

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince sees trouble ahead for the open web

AI research

Wait a minute! Researchers say AI's "chains of thought" are not signs of human-like reasoning

AI in practice
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US Copyright Office says fair use does not cover AI trained on "vast troves of copyrighted works

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AI and society
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The US government is reportedly planning new restrictions on the export of AI chips to Malaysia and Thailand, aiming to prevent suspected smuggling to China. According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration intends to update current rules so that strict controls remain in place for China and more than 40 other countries, while lifting previous global regulations on AI technology transfers.

A draft from the US Department of Commerce would let companies headquartered in the US continue supplying chips to the US and "a few dozen friendly nations" without special authorization for several months. Nvidia and officials from Malaysia and Thailand did not comment on the plans. Meanwhile, China is investing heavily in its own chip infrastructure.

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AI and society
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Ukraine has signed an agreement with US firm Swift Beat to massively scale up production of AI-powered drones. Finalized in Denmark, the deal will see hundreds of thousands of AI-controlled drones delivered to Ukraine at cost by 2025, with more to follow in 2026. President Volodymyr Zelensky and Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO and now head of Swift Beat, attended the signing.

Swift Beat is developing interceptor drones for Russian threats, reconnaissance models, and medium-weight combat drones, along with AI-driven tools like automated turrets and surveillance platforms. Testing happens in Ukraine with teams from both sides.

Schmidt, a vocal advocate for the strategic use of artificial intelligence, has long pushed for deploying cutting-edge AI in defense and security, seeing it as critical for maintaining an edge in modern conflict.

AI in practice
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A group of independent EU publishers has filed a complaint to the European Commission over Google's AI Overviews feature. They claim Google uses their content to generate AI-written summaries without permission, reducing web traffic and harming revenue. According to the complaint, publishers cannot opt out of the AI feature unless they also give up visibility in Google Search. The group is supported by Foxglove Legal and the Movement for an Open Web, and is requesting interim measures to stop what they describe as ongoing, irreparable damage. Google's AI Overviews pull information from websites to create short answers directly in search results without giving back traffic or compensation to the original publishers.

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AI in practice
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Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, is now CEO of his new startup Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI). Daniel Gross, who was previously CEO, left the company on June 29 to join Meta. Mark Zuckerberg's company is currently hiring top AI researchers and has recruited several people from OpenAI. Daniel Levy is the new president of SSI. In a message to staff and investors, Sutskever said SSI will stay independent, despite interest from other companies, likely Meta. SSI recently raised $2 billion in funding.

We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence.

Ilya Sutskever

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AI in practice
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Black Forest Labs has released FLUX.1 context [dev], a 12-billion parameter AI image model, for free non-commercial use on HuggingFace. It runs on standard hardware and supports ComfyUI, HuggingFace Diffusers, and TensorRT. According to Black Forest Labs and Artificial Analysis, it performs better than models like Gemini-Flash Image in most benchmarks. Optimized versions are available for Nvidia's new Blackwell architecture. For commercial use, licenses start at $999 per month via Black Forest Labs' license portal.

Bar charts show FLUX.1 Context [dev] with peak values for character preservation, editing accuracy, style transfer, and text input compared to other image AI models.
FLUX.1 context [dev] scores higher than many competing models in all six categories. | Image: Black Forest Labs
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AI research

"Cat attack" on reasoning model shows how important context engineering is

AI research

Apple's claims about large reasoning models face fresh scrutiny from a new study

AI in practice

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince sees trouble ahead for the open web

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