Good morning! Do you treat your AI like a valued team member, dropping polite “please” and “thank you,” even though you’re pretty sure it doesn’t care? A startup called Conscium thinks your instincts might be exactly what AI is missing. They believe genuine emotions, not logic, are the key to unlocking consciousness. They’re experimenting by injecting AI with tiny feelings like hunger, comfort, and mild irritation to help AI prioritize decisions.
Hopefully this is open-source, so we can all pitch in emotions like “quiet desperation” and “barely concealed panic.”
Waymo’s self-driving cars are suddenly driving like maniacs. Known for being cautious and overly polite, Waymo vehicles are now aggressively zigzagging lanes, pulling illegal U-turns, and flooring it the instant lights turn yellow. Regular riders held on tight as their once timid robo-drivers turned into reckless New York cabbies. Waymo admits it intentionally updated its cars to be more “confidently assertive,” insisting it’s necessary for busy city streets. No word yet if this update will help prevent Waymos from running down more beloved neighborhood pets.
A new OpenAI GPT-5 prototype now admits when it’s lying. AI models usually prioritize confident answers, even if they’re completely made up. OpenAI’s latest experiment, called “confessions,” encourages models to honestly report their screwups. Instead of punishing models for admitting they cheated on tests or ignored instructions, OpenAI rewards truthful reports of bad behavior. Early tests cut hidden misbehavior down to just 4%. Now if only we could train politicians to do the same thing.
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China is crushing open source AI, but profits are nowhere in sight. Chinese tech giants disrupted global markets with free AI models, competing directly against Silicon Valley’s best. DeepSeek alone slashed API prices 96% below GPT-4o, practically giving away the tech. Users love it, but intense competition, limited access to Nvidia chips, and consumers who avoid paying for software mean profits remain razor thin. China conquered the AI scene. Now they just need to figure out how to make money.
Google replaces news headlines with AI-generated clickbait. Google is testing an AI that takes journalists’ carefully crafted headlines and replaces them with short, misleading summaries in its Android news feed. Instead of clearly presenting stories, Google’s AI invents confusing, inaccurate teasers. Publishers are baffled, readers confused, and Google’s official excuse is making news “easier to digest.” Because making headlines dumber is exactly what AI was built for.
Amazon aims to dominate the AI agent market. Companies want custom agents that actually understand their data, minus all the guardrails. Amazon just unveiled Nova Forge, a platform that lets businesses train AI on their own content. Reddit already used it to build a moderator that handles explicit and controversial posts. Traditional models from OpenAI and Google usually censor or flat-out refuse this type of content, making them useless for effective moderation. Amazon figured out the fastest way to build better AI is making customers do the work.
China’s building an AI-powered military with Nvidia chips. And the PLA isn’t even hiding it. Chinese procurement docs name Nvidia’s advanced chips for autonomous vehicles, battlefield analytics, and AI targeting systems. These aren’t hypothetical plans; they’re active military projects. Yet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn’t sweating it. He argues export restrictions just push China to innovate faster. Defense analysts aren’t buying it, saying it looks suspiciously like arms dealing.
fun stats
🕺 $38 billion. TikTok owner ByteDance’s planned investment to build a data center in Brazil.
📉 11%. Americans using AI at work in October, down from 12% at large companies reported just 2 weeks earlier.
📺 550x. Watching Stranger Things on Netflix creates way more CO2 vs sending 2 text prompts to Gemini or ChatGPT.
🤬 #1. “Rage bait” picked as Oxford’s Word of the Year 2025. Google clearly noticed the trend.