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
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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

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AI in practice
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Microsoft has added a new audio mode to Copilot, powered by its MAI-Voice-1 model. Users can choose from three modes: Emotive Mode for expressive, free-form delivery; Story Mode for storytelling with multiple voices; and Scripted Mode for exact, word-for-word playback. The tool features a wide range of voices and styles, from Shakespearean performances to sports commentary, and is available in Copilot Labs.

Video: Microsoft

Microsoft recently introduced MAI-1 as its first major language model and signed a deal with Anthropic to integrate its models into Office. Both moves signal that Microsoft is aiming for more independence from OpenAI.

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AI in practice
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Google has added new reporting tools to NotebookLM. Users can now generate structured reports in more than 80 languages and adjust the tone, style, and structure as needed.

Watch the video: Google

The update also includes a blog post format and dynamic suggestions for report types based on the uploaded material. For example, NotebookLM might recommend a white paper format for research documents. Users can also write their own prompts, up to 1,000 words, to control the tone, style, and format of the generated content.

AI in practice
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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.

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AI in practice
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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.

AI and society
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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."

AI in practice
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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.

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AI and society
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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.

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AI in practice

Anthropic claims to lower the entry barrier for advanced AI models with Claude Haiku 4.5

AI research

OpenAI says GPT-5 shows 30 percent less political bias than previous models

AI in practice

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

Google News