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Matthias Bastian

Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER, exploring how AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between humans and computers.
Read full article about: Anthropic supports California's AI law - because Washington is too slow

Anthropic backs California's SB 53, a state bill that would force large developers of advanced AI to be more transparent and secure—apparently because they see Washington as too slow to act. Anthropic says SB 53 could serve as a solid starting point for national rules.

"While we believe that frontier AI safety is best addressed at the federal level instead of a patchwork of state regulations, powerful AI advancements won’t wait for consensus in Washington."

Anthropic

The bill would require affected companies to publish security policies, disclose risk analyses, report security incidents within 15 days, share internal assessments under confidentiality, and follow clear whistleblower protection rules. Violations could mean fines. The rules target only companies running highly capable models, aiming to keep the burden off smaller providers. Anthropic says their decision comes after reflecting on the lessons from California's failed SB 1047 effort.

Read full article about: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discovers there really are a lot of LLM-run Twitter accounts

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has picked up on a trend: "it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now." No punchline here.

Image: Altman via X

The Dead Internet Theory is a conspiracy theory that claims the internet is no longer driven by real people, but mostly by bots and AI-generated content. According to this idea, most online activity—comments, posts, and articles—is fake, created to manipulate public opinion and control users.

Read full article about: Gary Marcus calls the belief in LLM understanding one of "the most profound illusions of our time"

LLM hype critic Gary Marcus argues in a conversation with chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov that large language models only create the appearance of understanding, not genuine intelligence.

"It's one of the most profound illusions of our time that most people see these systems and attribute an understanding to them that they don't really have."

Gary Marcus

He explains that while language models can, for example, mimic the rules of chess by generating text based on examples, they can't actually play the game because they lack any real internal sense of what's happening on the board.

"They will repeat the rules, because in the way that they create text based on other texts, they'll be there. [...] But when it actually comes to playing the game, it doesn't have an internal model of what's going on."

For Marcus, this gap between surface-level performance and true comprehension is at the heart of the AI "illusion of intelligence."

Read full article about: Alibaba unveils Qwen3-Max-Preview, its largest language model yet

Alibaba unveils Qwen3-Max-Preview, its largest language model yet, featuring more than one trillion parameters. The model is available through Qwen Chat and the Alibaba Cloud API. According to Alibaba, Qwen3-Max-Preview outperforms the previous top model, Qwen3-235B-A22B-2507, in internal benchmarks and with early users. Improvements show up in knowledge, conversation, task handling, and instruction following, with reduced "model knowledge hallucinations."

Image: Qwen

Qwen3-Max-Preview accepts up to 258,048 input tokens and generates up to 32,768 output tokens. Pricing starts at $2,151 per million input tokens and $8,602 per million output tokens. The model does not support image processing.

Read full article about: Apple is being sued by US authors who accuse it of using pirated books to train its AI models

Apple is facing a lawsuit in California from authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, who claim the company violated their copyrights by using their books to train AI models like OpenELM and Apple Intelligence. The lawsuit alleges Apple used the Books3 dataset, a collection of more than 196,000 pirated books that includes works by both authors. The complaint also accuses Apple of using its Applebot web crawler to copy website content and pull material from so-called shadow libraries.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages and a court order barring Apple from using their works. This case follows a recent lawsuit against Anthropic, which ended in a settlement after similar copyright claims.

Read full article about: ElevenLabs releases version 2 of its AI sound effects model with longer clips and better audio quality

ElevenLabs has updated its AI sound effects model to version 2, adding support for clips up to 30 seconds, seamless looping, and a 48 kHz sampling rate. Sound effects are generated using text prompts, either through the web interface or the API. Looping options are now built into the ElevenLabs Studio audio editor. You can try it out here.

The SFX library has been expanded and reorganized, with improved search, a favorites list, and a remix feature. The SB-1 soundboard now supports the updated model and offers MIDI connectivity.

Read full article about: OpenAI buys analytics startup Statsig and makes its founder the CTO for applications

OpenAI has acquired the analytics startup Statsig and named its founder, Vijaye Raji, as CTO for applications. Raji will report to Fidji Simo and take over technical leadership of ChatGPT and Codex.

Statsig, which focuses on A/B testing and feature management, is expected to speed up OpenAI's development cycles. OpenAI has already been using Statsig internally and now plans to fully integrate the platform. For now, Statsig will remain a separate unit in Seattle, with all employees joining OpenAI. The deal is valued at $1.1 billion, according to Bloomberg.