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 and society
Update

Anthropic settles landmark AI copyright lawsuit for at least $1.5 billion

AI and society

Google downplays AI's environmental impact in new study

AI and society

Meta's human-like chatbot personas can mislead users and result in real-world harm

Ad
AI in practice
Short

Physicist David Deutsch argues that you can't test for AGI the way you test a piece of software. Instead, what sets humans apart is that they have their own history, shaped by choosing what matters to them in the first place.

"How do we know that people are general intelligences? By telling their story. Human thinking is not about mechanically translating motivations into actions - prompts into output. It is primarily about choosing motivations. Just as science is not about extracting theories from data, but about seeing a problem, guessing at explanations, criticizing and testing them."

Deutsch responds to a test proposed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: if a future GPT-8 could solve quantum gravity and explain why it picked that problem and how it arrived at its solution, Deutsch says that would be convincing evidence of general intelligence.

Ad
Ad
AI in practice
Short

Meta has rolled out "Vibes," a new short-form video feed in the Meta AI app featuring AI-generated clips. Users can create original videos, remix existing ones, or simply scroll through the feed. For now, Meta is partnering with Midjourney and Black Forest Labs, with its own video models still in development.

Meta's "Vibes" feed lets users generate, remix, and browse short AI-created videos. | Video: Meta

Meta is also exploring outside AI tools for other products. The company is reportedly in talks with Google to use fine-tuned Gemini models to improve ad targeting. The move highlights the current limits of Meta's own AI ambitions.

Ad
Ad
AI in practice
Short

Lionsgate's AI deal with Runway is moving slower than planned. The studio wanted to use its film library to train an AI model for movie production, but TheWrap reports the data just isn't enough—even Disney's catalog falls short, according to an insider.

Image: via The Wrap

This challenges a major industry belief: even after decades of making movies, big Hollywood studios don't have enough diverse, large-scale, fully licensed footage to train a top AI video model on their own. Legal roadblocks like actor image rights are also slowing things down. Lionsgate says it's still pursuing AI projects with other partners. Runway had no comment.

The situation also raises questions about where companies like Runway, Google, or OpenAI get the huge video datasets needed for their leading models. So far, they're not saying.

AI in practice
Short

Alibaba has released Qwen3-VL, an open-source language vision model that works with both images and text. The top version, Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B, is available in two variants: "Instruct," which Alibaba reports outperforms Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro on major vision benchmarks, and "Thinking," which scores highly on multimodal reasoning tasks. Detailed benchmark results are available in Alibaba's technical blog.

Qwen3-VL can interact with graphical interfaces, generate code from screenshots, analyze videos up to two hours long, and recognize text in 32 languages, even when image quality is low. The model supports 2D and 3D spatial understanding and is designed to handle math and science tasks.

Video: Qwen3-VL demo shows agentic image processing.

Qwen3-VL is available on Hugging Face, ModelScope, and Alibaba Cloud. Public chat access is available at chat.qwen.ai.

AI in practice
Short

Microsoft is developing a pilot project called the "Publisher Content Marketplace" (PCM), Axios reports. The platform would let publishers sell their content to AI products like Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft presented the idea to a group of US publishers at a partner meeting in Monaco last week, where one slide read, "You deserve to be paid on the quality of your IP." There's no confirmed launch date for the PCM pilot yet. Over time, the marketplace could open up to more partners and other AI buyers.

Up to now, most large AI companies have paid flat license fees instead of royalties based on usage. Microsoft already partners with outlets like Reuters and Axel Springer for Copilot. OpenAI and other AI companies also pay license fees to a select group of publishers—a practice journalism researcher Jeff Jarvis has called "pure lobbying."

Ad
Ad
Google News

Bank details

IBAN: DE88 2507 0070 0053 0014 00
BIC: DEUTDE2HXXX
Account holder: Deep Content GmbH
Purpose: Support THE DECODER
AI in practice

OpenAI suddenly remembers that copyright law exists after a few days of wild Sora videos

AI in practice
Update

OpenAI unveils Sora 2 video model with realistic physics, high-quality audio, and a new social app

AI in practice

Deepmind says video models for visual tasks could become what LLMs are for text tasks

Google News