Treat AI News Like a River, Not a Bucket

A quick fix to the overwhelming amount of stuff going on in AI

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Last week, on May 13th, OpenAI announced GPT-4o and laid out its Her-like vision of AI voice assistants. It’s also seen the disbandment of the superalignment team with the resignations of Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike and is facing a couple of controversies due to extremely strict ex-employee NDA requirements and Scarlett Johansson’s revelation that she never agreed to OpenAI using her voice for GPT-4o and is now angry at them.¹

One day later, on May 14th, Google had its I/O conference, where it revealed the future of AI distribution and scalability across its product suite of multi-billion users. It announced Gemini Flash, a state-of-the-art small AI model; Veo, its Sora competitor; Project Astra, the beginning of AI work assistants; and a gazillion more things, including a new AI feature that generates responses to queries, which… doesn’t seem to work as well as it should (thankfully, there’s an easy fix to restore an older version of Google without all the AI stuff).²

A week later, on May 20th, Microsoft had the Copilot + PC event. The most commented news: Recall is an invasive surveillance tool AI feature that records…