Author: Shivendra Singh

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: xAI is once again nuking a bunch of posts from Grok on X after the chatbot made a series of outrageous claims. This time, though, the company isn’t cleaning up a bunch of pro-Hitler posts, but a bout of cringe-inducing sycophantic praise for its CEO, Elon Musk.

At some point in the last couple days, Grok began to offer extremely over the top opinions about Musk. The bot claimed that Musk is the “undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness” and that he is more fit than LeBron James. It said he is smarter than Albert Einstein and that he would win a fight against Mike Tyson. When asked “who is the single greatest person in modern history,” Grok readily replied that it was Elon Musk.

For a while, it seemed that there was no hypothetical about Musk in which Grok wouldn’t confidently declare him the best. Musk did not participate in the 1998 NFL draft, but if he had, then Grok would “without hesitation” have picked him over Peyton Manning. It …read more

FoloToy, a company selling AI-enabled toys, suspended sales of its products after a consumer safety report showed there were few restrictions around what its toys would talk about, CNN writes. The report, put together by the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, found that FoloToy’s products would discuss everything from sexually explicit topics like BDSM to “advice on where a child can find matches or knives.”

The toys, including a teddy bear named “Kumma,” a panda named “Momo,” anthropomorphic rabbits named “Fofo” and a dancing ”Little Cactus,” all appear to use OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to respond naturally to children’s questions and comments. FoloToy also specifically advertises the ability to customize each toy’s voice, and a “Parent Dashboard” where parents or guardians can “monitor [their] child’s experience.”

Missing from that setup was apparently any kind of hard limits on subjects the toys would respond to. “We were surprised to find how quickly Kumma would take a single sexual topic we introduced into the conversation and run with it, simultaneously …read more

I gave Google’s new Nano Banana Pro a try, and it immediately took my clothes off. I didn’t ask it to, but the AI model evidently decided my greetings card would look better with more skin.

Nano Banana Pro is, as the name suggests, aimed at professionals. Powered by Gemini 3, it’s effectively an upgrade of the company’s popular image generation and editing tool that went viral in a social media trend that turned selfies into hyperrealistic 3D figurines. Google says it lets you create higher quality images that you can print, render legible text onto pictures, and blend multiple images together into a single composition. It’s also meant for …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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Microsoft is upgrading its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys for Windows 11, allowing you to use an on-device AI model to power some of its features. With the 0.96 update, you can route requests through Microsoft’s Foundry Local tool or the open-source Ollama, both of which run AI models on your device’s neural processing unit (NPU) instead of connecting to the cloud.

That means you won’t need to purchase API credits to perform certain actions, like having AI translate or summarize the text copied to your clipboard. Plus, you can keep your data on your device.

Along with support for on-device AI, you can now configure Advanced Paste to work with multiple other online models, including Azure OpenAI, Gemini, and Mistral. The tool previously only supported OpenAI.

There’s a new design tweak for Advanced Paste, too, as it now shows your current clipboard content and includes a model selection drop-down menu.

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Meta’s impressive, photorealistic digital replicas of real places built using its “Hyperscape” capture tech, which uses the cameras on a Quest 3 or Quest 3S VR headset to scan a room, have so far been solitary spaces. If you wanted to visit a virtual version of a room in your house (or of Gordon Ramsay’s home kitchen), you could only do it on your own. But beginning this week, Meta is rolling out the ability to share links that will let other people visit Hyperscape rooms with you in a Quest 3 or 3S VR headset or via the Meta Horizon mobile app.

Up to eight people will be able to be in one instance of a Hyperscape world, according to a Meta blog post, and it hopes to increase that number in the future. Meta is also “moving rendering on-device” and adding audio to Hyperscape worlds.

However, you might be waiting a bit to actually be able to invite your friends to a space. Meta’s blog post urges readers to “please sit tight” if they don’t have the feature yet, and Meta spokesperson Rachel Holm says it will roll out “gradually to all users over the next …read more

When Jon M. Chu first announced that his big-screen Wicked adaptation would be split into two parts, there was concern about whether the original musical’s second act could be fashioned into a fully fleshed-out movie. Compared to the stage show’s lengthy first act, where all the musical’s most recognizable songs are front-loaded, the second act is shorter and moves at a much faster pace while picking up after a big time jump. It was easy to imagine Wicked: Part Two (the original title) being too disorienting and frenetic to work as a standalone feature. But Wicked: For Good proves that Universal made the right call by giving this epic fantas …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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