Matthias Bastian

Mar 24, 2026

A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to defrauding music streaming platforms. Michael Smith generated hundreds of thousands of AI songs and used bots to play them billions of times, pocketing more than eight million dollars in royalties. To pull it off, he created thousands of fake accounts on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music, carefully spreading streams across enough songs to stay under the radar.

Smith pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.

The scheme did double damage. Streaming platforms paid out money for plays that never had a real listener, and since royalties come from a shared pool distributed on a pro rata basis, every fake stream meant less money for actual musicians and songwriters. "Smith's brazen scheme is over, as he stands convicted of a federal crime for his AI-assisted fraud," US Attorney Jay Clayton said.

Comment Source: US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York

Matthias Bastian

Mar 24, 2026

AI in practice

ChatGPT is turning into a shopping platform with product images, prices, and comparisons, but no checkout

Matthias Bastian

Mar 24, 2026

Short News

Munich-based Agile Robots and Google Deepmind have announced a strategic research partnership. The goal is to integrate Google Deepmind's Gemini Robotics AI models into Agile Robots' hardware, creating adaptable, intelligent robots built primarily for industrial settings where there's an "acute and growing need for adaptable, reliable automation."

Carolina Parada, Head of Robotics at Google Deepmind, called the collaboration an "important step in bringing the impact of AI to the real world." The plan is to use data from real-world operations to continuously improve the AI models, which in turn makes the robots more capable over time.

Agile Robots was founded in Munich in 2018 and now employs more than 2,500 people. The company says it has already deployed over 20,000 robotics solutions worldwide. Google Deepmind recently unveiled two new AI models—Gemini Robotics 1.5 and Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5—designed to let robots independently plan, understand, and execute complex tasks in the physical world.

Comment Source: Agile Robots

Matthias Bastian

Mar 24, 2026

Short News

ChatGPT is making it easier to work with uploaded and generated files. Users can now find, reuse, and pull files into chats more quickly. A new toolbar lets you reference recently used files directly, and you can ask ChatGPT questions about files you've already uploaded. The web version also gets a new "Library" tab in the sidebar that gives you a clean overview of all your files.

ChatGPT's new Library tab (left) shows all uploaded files in one place, while the toolbar (top right) lets users quickly reference recent files in any chat. | Image: OpenAI

The feature is rolling out globally to Plus, Pro, and Business users. Users in the EU, Switzerland, and the UK will have to wait a bit longer, but OpenAI says the feature should follow soon.

Comment Source: OpenAI via X

Matthias Bastian

Mar 24, 2026

AI in practice

Anthropic lets Claude take control of your desktop when regular app integrations fall short

Matthias Bastian

Mar 23, 2026

AI in practice

Meta acqui-hires Dreamer's entire team to bolster its lagging AI agent ambitions

The AI startup Dreamer is joining Meta Superintelligence Labs with its entire team, bringing co-founder Hugo Barra—a former Meta VP—back into Mark Zuckerberg’s orbit. The deal marks Meta’s second move in agent-based AI this year as the company tries to regain ground against competitors.

Read full article

Comment

Matthias Bastian

Mar 23, 2026

Update

AI in practice

Luma AI's Uni-1 could be the first real challenger to Google's Nano Banana image dominance

Matthias Bastian

Mar 23, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI is offering private equity firms a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5 percent to win them over for joint ventures in the enterprise market. Moreover, participating firms would get early access to new OpenAI models. Reuters broke the story, citing people familiar with the matter. The investment amounts involved are reportedly larger than usual.

The goal is to get private equity firms—investment companies that buy and resell entire businesses—to rapidly roll out OpenAI's AI tools across hundreds of companies in their portfolios. Big names like TPG, Advent, Blackstone, and Permira are reportedly in the mix.

Anthropic is pursuing a similar distribution strategy, but allegedly without offering a comparable return guarantee. That could change now that OpenAI has raised the stakes. The already thin margins of AI companies compared to SaaS peers are likely to take an even bigger hit from these kinds of commitments.

The entire effort appears aimed squarely at Anthropic, which has been gaining ground with enterprise customers recently and currently leads in coding with Claude Code. OpenAI recently announced a renewed focus on the coding business with Codex and a consolidation of its products into a single super app.

Comment Source: Reuters

Matthias Bastian

Mar 23, 2026

Short News

Mark Zuckerberg is building a personal AI agent to help him run Meta. The tool is still in development, but, according to the Wall Street Journal, already helps him pull up information faster, bypassing the multiple layers of employees he'd normally have to go through.

The project is reportedly part of a broader reorganization at Meta. The company, which currently has around 78,000 employees, wants to flatten its hierarchies, build leaner teams, and keep pace with AI-native startups. Zuckerberg's long-term vision: everyone inside and outside Meta gets their own AI agent, and the company operates as efficiently as an AI startup, the WSJ reports.

That connects to a bigger picture: According to Reuters, Meta is planning to cut up to 20 percent of its workforce. The layoffs are reportedly tied not to efficiency gains already realized but directly to the company's massive investments in AI infrastructure. A Meta spokesperson called the report speculation.

Comment Source: Wall Street Journal

Matthias Bastian

Mar 22, 2026

Short News

Karpathy spent months hand-tuning his GPT-2 training setup. Then he let an autonomous agent take over for a single night. The agent discovered fine-grained adjustments Karpathy had overlooked, tweaks that also interact with each other in ways that are easy for a human to miss but straightforward for a systematic search to catch.

Karpathy's takeaway is that researchers should remove themselves from the loop, at least in areas where objective metrics exist. "To get the most out of the tools that have become available now, you have to remove yourself as the bottleneck. You can't be there to prompt the next thing," Karpathy says. Researchers at major AI labs, he argues, place too much unfounded trust in their own intuition and are ultimately in the process of systematically automating themselves out of a job. Which, Karpathy notes, is also their stated goal.

While models keep getting better at coding and other easy-to-verify tasks, Karpathy doesn't think these gains will carry over smoothly to less measurable domains. "Anything that feels softer is, like, worse," he says.

Comment Source: No Priors Podcast