AI venture capital resorts to feeding the secondary market

Headlines about AI companies paying “billions” for other AI companies mostly don’t mean real money, but equity in private companies with imaginary valuations. But sometimes, people want actual money money. Hence the secondary market — where some of a funding round goes to keeping previous investors and current employees sweet. As part of https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/20/ai-venture-capital-resorts-to-feeding-the-secondary-market/

Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage

iNaturalist is a website that crowdsources pictures of plants and animals to help identify species. Its tagline is “A Community for Naturalists.” iNaturalist is administered by its own small charity, but the work is done by a huge number of volunteer contributors — a bit like Wikipedia. Sometimes a charity https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/19/google-bribes-inaturalist-to-use-generative-ai-volunteers-quit-in-outrage/

Salesforce: AI agents don’t work — but we’re charging 6% more for AI anyway

Salesforce is still hyped for AI everywhere! Especially its chatbot Agentforce, introduced in December! Agentforce didn’t work so well in outside tests. The reviewer said: “I can’t help but question whether it was truly ready for its public debut.” [Salesforce Ben] In May, Salesforce bought UK AI startup https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/18/salesforce-ai-agents-dont-work-but-were-charging-6-more-for-ai-anyway/

OpenAI needs its $40 billion funding deal — so it’s threatening Microsoft!

OpenAI must finish its transition from a weird charity to some sort of for-profit company. Then it can get $40 billion from SoftBank! OpenAI absolutely needs to get the stakeholders on side — particularly Microsoft. It’s not going so well. OpenAI is discussing a nuclear option — formally accusing Microsoft of https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/17/openai-needs-its-40-billion-funding-deal-so-its-threatening-microsoft/

Bad brainwaves: ChatGPT makes you stupid

In a new study, MIT Media Lab measured 55 people over four months on how well they could write an essay — either with ChatGPT, with a search engine, or just their unassisted brain. The researchers hooked them to an EEG to see which parts of their brains were active or not. [arXiv, PDF] The […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/16/bad-brainwaves-chatgpt-makes-you-stupid/
#Education #Papers #ChatGPT #MITMediaLab #AIisGoingGreat

EchoLeak — send an email, extract secret info from Microsoft Office 365 Copilot AI

You can’t put data into an LLM and then filter the output to block some of it. Once it’s in the model, it’s in the model. If you put confidential business information into Microsoft 365 Copilot, an attacker can extract it by sending you an email and waiting for you to run a search. “EchoLeak” https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/15/echoleak-send-an-email-extract-secret-info-from-microsoft-office-365-copilot-ai/

Meta AI posts your personal chats to a public feed

Meta’s got a new chatbot app, Meta AI. You can ask it questions in text or voice, much like ChatGPT or Gemini. [Meta] There’s one difference — the other chatbots don’t reveal your conversations to the world. Some maniac at Meta put up a public feed of people chatting to the bot. [Twitter, thread] There’s […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/14/meta-ai-posts-your-personal-chats-to-a-public-feed/
#Uncategorised #Meta #MetaAI

Meta buys into Scale AI in the quest for fresh data

Hot off blowing over $100 billion on the Metaverse, Facebook/Meta has started doing the same with “AI.” Facebook just bought 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billio, acqui-hiring founder-CEO Alexandr Wang, in a deal designed to keep antitrust regulators at bay and Scale’s original investors sweet. [Reuters; The Information, paywalled] Scale will continue as ahttps://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/13/meta-buys-into-scale-ai-in-the-quest-for-fresh-data/

Disney sues AI image generator Midjourney

Midjourney runs a diffusion model that you can ask to generate pictures. Disney and Universal and several other movie studios have sued because Midjourney keeps spitting out their copyrighted characters. [Complaint, PDF; case docket] This is the first suit by big Hollywood movie studios against a generative AI company. Disney first went for one of […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/12/disney-sues-ai-image-generator-midjourney/
#Copyright

ChatGPT goes down — and fake jobs grind to a halt worldwide

ChatGPT suffered a worldwide outage from 06:36 UTC Tuesday morning. The servers weren’t totally down, but queries kept returning errors. OpenAI finally got it mostly fixed later in the day. [OpenAI, archive] But you could hear the screams of the vibe coders, the marketers, and the LinkedIn posters around the world. The Drum even ran […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/11/chatgpt-goes-down-and-fake-jobs-grind-to-a-halt-worldwide/

Doctors against data abuse — BMA and RCGP protest NHS AI data handover

A pile of patient data that was sent to NHS England from doctors to research Covid-19 just happened to get poured into the NHS’s new LLM, Foresight. The British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners have referred NHS England to the Information Commissioner’s Office: [RCGP; Politico] The https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/10/doctors-against-data-abuse-bma-and-rcgp-protest-nhs-ai-data-handover/

Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2025! Don’t expect much — it still doesn’t work

Apple Intelligence is most famous for mangling news headlines and text messages and making spam texts look legitimate. Bloomberg wrote in March: [Bloomberg, archive] People just aren’t embracing Apple Intelligence. Internal company data for the features indicates that real world usage is extremely low. The 2025 https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/09/apple-intelligence-at-wwdc-2025-dont-expect-much-it-still-doesnt-work/

Apple: ‘Reasoning’ AIs fail hard if they actually have to think

Apple Machine Learning Research has a new preprint: “The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity.” [Apple, PDF] “Large Reasoning Models” don’t do logic. Worse yet, “frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities.” If the https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/08/apple-reasoning-ais-fail-hard-if-they-actually-have-to-think/

UK — High Court to lawyers: cut the ChatGPT or else

US lawyers have spent the past two years filing briefs full of citations to nonexistent cases — because a chatbot made them up. You’d think these intelligent and educated people would know better than to pull this. But it keeps happening. The UK is no different. In two recent cases, a chatbot made up citations […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/07/uk-high-court-to-lawyers-cut-the-chatgpt-or-else/
#Chatbots #JeremyJohnson

Builder․ai even more fake: creative accounting, no AI, no money

Builder.ai collapsed a couple of weeks ago.Its much-touted AI website builder seemed to be fully 100% AGI — A Guy Instead. More details have come out in Builder’s US bankruptcy. Engineer.AI Corporation filed for Chapter 7 liquidation on Monday. The company has about $50–100 million in debts and only $5–$10 million in assets. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/06/builder-ai-even-more-fake-creative-accounting-no-ai-no-money/

Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro!

You’ll have noticed how previously normal people start acting like addicts to their favourite generative AI and shouting at you like you’re trying to take their cocaine away. Matthias Döpmann is a software developer. He’s been trying out AI autocomplete for coding. He was very impressed at how good the tools are for the https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/

Washington Post goes AI to clean up amateur right-wing op-eds

The Washington Post put up a new mission statement in January that called AI a “key enabler” of the paper’s success. It aspired to make the Post “an A.I.-fueled platform for news.” [NYT, archive] The first part of the AI-fueled platform plan is called Ripple. The Post wants to fill out the opinion section with […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/04/washington-post-goes-ai-to-clean-up-amateur-right-wing-op-eds/
#Journalism

Let’s put more AI slop into advertising!

Facebook is floating AI-generated ad campaigns! You’ll type in your rough ideas and Facebook will generate a small campaign for you, with ad copy and imagery. CEO Mark Zuckerberg says AI advertising is part of his “vision” for the future of Meta. [WSJ, archive] But ad agencies have been trying out generative AI since ChatGPT […]

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/03/lets-put-more-ai-slop-into-advertising/
#Imagegenerators #Facebook #MarkZuckerberg

Microsoft and AI: spending billions to make millions

Microsoft has carefully leaked the news of its BIG SALE of Copilot licenses to Barclays Bank! 100,000 seats! Fantastic! [Bloomberg, archive] That’s a few million dollars? If that. Microsoft claims “dozens” of organisations bought into Copilot big time — but the only other one the Register could confirm was Siemens. [Register] Microsoft’s Business https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/31/microsoft-and-ai-spending-billions-to-make-millions/

The UK will totally replace two-thirds of junior civil servants with AI chatbots, says the chatbot

The UK government is still flat out of ideas and still convinced “AI” is the magical fix-all for bureaucracy. By “AI,” it means ChatGPT it buys in from Microsoft. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, plans to fire 10,000 civil servants by the end of this parliament, https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/30/the-uk-will-totally-replace-two-thirds-of-junior-civil-servants-with-ai-chatbots-says-the-chatbot/