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Bluesky’s new app is an AI for customizing your feed
The latest app from the team behind Bluesky is Attie, an AI assistant that lets you build your own algorithm. At the Atmosphere conference, Bluesky's former CEO, Jay Graber, and CTO Paul Frazee, unveiled Attie, which is powered by Anthropic's Claude and built on top of Bluesky's underlying AT Protocol (atproto). Attie allows users to create custom feeds using natural language. For example, you could ask for "posts about folklore, mythology, and traditional music, especially Celtic traditions." To start these custom feeds will be confined to a standalone Attie app. But the plan is to make them available in Bluesky and other atproto apps. … Read the full story at The Verge.
AI on deck: assessing impact of MLB's new ball-strike system
Bob Dylan opened a new Patreon page to share AI content
General AI
'Fruit Love Island': AI-generated TikTok parody of reality series goes viral
Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/television/fruit-love-island-tiktok-ai-dating-show-45219f6a Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566438 Points: 2 # Comments: 3
Google Released Lyria 3 Pro to Google AI Studio
Article URL: https://aistudio.google.com/app/new_music?model=lyria-3-pro-preview Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566347 Points: 1 # Comments: 0
Attie: The Future of AI Should Serve People, Not Platforms
Article URL: https://theliquidfrontier.leaflet.pub/3mi5pwkoqx22g Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47567592 Points: 2 # Comments: 1
When product managers ship code: AI just broke the software org chart
Last week, one of our product managers (PMs) built and shipped a feature. Not spec'd it. Not filed a ticket for it. Built it, tested it, and shipped it to production. In a day. A few days earlier, our designer noticed that the visual appearance of our IDE plugins had drifted from the design system. In the old world, that meant screenshots, a JIRA ticket, a conversation to explain the intent, and a sprint slot. Instead, he opened an agent, adjusted the layout himself, experimented, iterated, and tuned in real time, then pushed the fix. The person with the strongest design intuition fixed the design directly. No translation layer required. None of this is new in theory. Vibe coding opened the gates of software creation to millions. That was aspiration. When I shared the data on how our engineers doubled throughput, shifted from coding to validation, brought design upfront for rapid experimentation, it was still an engineering story. What changed is that the theory became practice. Here's
Geno Auriemma takes aim at the NCAA over the women's double-regional format in March Madness - AP News
Geno Auriemma takes aim at the NCAA over the women's double-regional format in March Madness AP News
Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds
Bluesky’s new app Attie uses AI to help people build custom feeds the open social networking protocol atproto.
Stanford study outlines dangers of asking AI chatbots for personal advice
While there’s been plenty of debate about AI sycophancy, a new study by Stanford computer scientists attempts to measure how harmful that tendency might be.
When AI turns software development inside-out: 170% throughput at 80% headcount
Many people have tried AI tools and walked away unimpressed. I get it — many demos promise magic, but in practice, the results can feel underwhelming. That’s why I want to write this not as a futurist prediction, but from lived experience. Over the past six months, I turned my engineering organization AI-first. I’ve shared before about the system behind that transformation — how we built the workflows, the metrics, and the guardrails. Today, I want to zoom out from the mechanics and talk about what I’ve learned from that experience — about where our profession is heading when software development itself turns inside out. Before I do, a couple of numbers to illustrate the scale of change. Subjectively, it feels that we are moving twice as fast. Objectively, here’s how the throughput evolved. Our total engineering team headcount floated from 36 at the beginning of the year to 30. So you get ~170% throughput on ~80% headcount, which matches the subjective ~2x. Zooming in, I picked a cou
Elon Musk’s last co-founder reportedly leaves xAI
All but two of Musk's 11 xAI co-founders departed before this week.
Suno leans into customization with v5.5
Slop yourself. | Image: Suno Suno just released one of its biggest updates yet with v5.5 of its AI music model. Where previous updates focused mostly on improving fidelity and creating more natural vocals, v5.5 is about giving users more control. It includes three new features: Voices, My Taste, and Custom Models. In the release notes, Suno says that Voices is its most requested feature. It lets users train the vocal model on their own voice. They can upload clean accapellas, finished tracks with backing music, or just sing directly into the mic on their phone or laptop. The cleaner and higher quality the recording, the less data is required. And to prevent someone fro … Read the full story at The Verge.
TikTok’s policy for AI ads isn’t working
Samsung, like many companies using generative AI in their advertising, hasn’t placed an AI label on several videos shared through its TikTok accounts, and the fine print doesn’t always contain the answers. | Image by Samsung I've been struggling to tell whether the ads appearing in my TikTok feeds have been made with generative AI tools. As someone who spends a great deal of time scrutinizing images and videos for the usual "tells" that something was synthetically generated, some of the promotions I've seen have definitely sparked suspicion. For several weeks, I didn't see any examples with the AI disclosure required by TikTok's advertising policies, however, so I had no way of knowing for sure. What irks me is that someone knows for sure if the content is AI-generated. They're just not telling the rest of us. And if companies that claim to support AI-labelling … Read the full story at The Verge.
This high school dropout was cleaning offices for $14 an hour before he used AI to build a $1 million business
Rick Chorney was working long days but still had emails at night. "I went a little crazy," he said. "There came a day where I was just like, 'I am done.'"
The rise of ‘social offloading’—when AI replaces your boss’s empathy
AI isn’t the problem, says leadership expert Leena Rinne; it’s social connection and emotional intelligence instead.
AI news from 200+ sources
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Sora’s shutdown could be a reality check moment for AI video
Is this just normal corporate strategy, or are we about to see a broader pullback on AI-generated video?
Anthropic’s Claude popularity with paying consumers is skyrocketing
Estimates for total Claude consumer users are all over the map (we've seen figures ranging from 18 million to 30 million). Anthropic hasn't disclosed this data, but a spokesperson did tell TechCrunch that Claude paid subscriptions have more than doubled this year.
Why OpenAI killed Sora
On Tuesday morning, everything was business as usual at OpenAI. By the end of the day, the company had announced that it would scrap its video-generation app, Sora, and reverse plans for video generation inside ChatGPT; it would wind down a $1 billion Disney deal; it would shuffle the role of a high-level executive; and it would raise an additional $10 billion from investors, adding up to more than $120 billion total for its latest funding round. OpenAI is now in a frenzy to turn a profit, or at least lose less money. Since its launch, Sora seems to have taken up a massive amount of compute without the financial return to justify it. Indus … Read the full story at The Verge.
AI #161 Part 1: 80,000 Interviews
The major technical advances this week were in agentic coding, as covered yesterday. The major non-DoW political and alignment developments will be covered tomorrow. The DoW vs. Anthropic trial continues. Judge Lin was very not happy with the government’s case, which makes sense since the government has no case and was arguing a variety of Obvious Nonsense. The question now is how much preliminary relief Anthropic is entitled to. Assuming we find that out this week, I plan to cover that on Monday. Beyond that, we have new iterations of questions we’ve dealt with time and again. The debate on jobs gets another cycle. Anthropic asked over 80,000 people what they think about AI, and has published those findings, nothing shocking but interesting throughout. OpenAI is raising money again, although the terms raise some eyebrows. Elon Musk is announcing a grand chip project, but it was already kind of announced and it’s not like we should believe him when he says such things. I used this
Business & Industry
What if superintelligence is just weak?
In response to “2023 Or, Why I am Not a Doomer” by Dean W. Ball. Dean Ball is a pretty big voice in AI policy – over 19k subscribers on his newsletter, and a former Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the Trump White House – so why does he disagree that AI poses an existential danger to humanity? In short, he holds the common view that superintelligence (ASI) simply won’t be that powerful. I strongly disagree, and I think he makes a couple of invalid leaps to arrive there. Better Than Us Is Enough His main flawed argument is that he implies AI must be omnipotent and omniscient to wipe us out and then explains why that won’t be the case. He states: “one common assumption… among many people in ‘the AI safety community’ is that artificial superintelligence will be able to ‘do anything.’” He then argues that “intelligence is neither omniscience nor omnipotence,” and that even a misaligned AI with “no [..] safeguards to hinder it” would “still fail” because taking over the world “involves too m