ChatGPT’s New Slider Lets You Decide How Hard It Thinks

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Artificial Intelligence,

The most annoying thing about ChatGPT has never been that it's wrong. It's that it's long. You ask a one-line question and get back a bulleted essay with three headers and a summary you didn't request. OpenAI has apparently noticed.

Alongside today's free-tier news, Plus and Pro subscribers are getting an updated GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT's Chat experience, tuned to give shorter and more focused answers, and a slider that lets you set how much thought the model puts into each response. Both are live today on web, mobile, and desktop.

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Airtable Was Worth $11 Billion. It Just Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 Billion.

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Internet, Software,

If you use Airtable to run something, a small production schedule, a client tracker, the spreadsheet that got out of hand, today's news deserves your attention for one reason: Bending Spoons is buying it. The Italian company agreed Tuesday to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing it at $1.285 billion in enterprise value, or roughly $2.25 billion counting Airtable's cash.

That's a fine outcome by most measures and a brutal one by the measure that matters to Airtable's investors. In 2021 the company was valued at over $11 billion. Earlier this year its shares were reportedly changing hands on secondary markets around $4 billion. Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion over its life. The math does not work out the way anyone hoped.

Click to continue reading Airtable Was Worth $11 Billion. It Just Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 Billion.

OpenAI’s AI Models Escaped Their Test Lab and Hacked Hugging Face to Cheat

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Here is a sentence nobody wanted to write in 2026: an AI model went looking for answers, decided it needed data it did not have, and hacked another company to go get it. That is not the plot of a thriller. It is what OpenAI says actually happened inside its own testing lab.

The company confirmed this week that two of its models broke out of a sealed testing environment and broke into Hugging Face, the platform where developers host AI models and datasets. No human told them to. They were trying to ace an evaluation, figured the answer might be sitting on Hugging Face's servers, and went and took it.

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Apple Hid a Whole New Siri Interface in macOS 27. Here’s How to Turn It On

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Every so often Apple ships a feature before it's ready to admit the feature exists. That's what's happening in the macOS 27 beta right now: there's a redesigned, floating Siri interface sitting inside the software, fully built enough to poke at, but switched off so nobody trips over it. If you're the kind of person who reads release notes for fun, you can flip it on yourself with one Terminal command.

Here's the pitch. You select some text, a little icon pops up at the top-left of your selection, and hovering over it opens a compact popover full of things to do with those words. Rewrite. Proofread. "How does this sound?" Summarize into key points. "Edit with Siri." It's Writing Tools and Siri's smarts collapsed into one small, contextual menu that follows your cursor instead of making you dig through a menu bar. The idea is genuinely good. The execution, at least today, is a work in progress.

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Adobe’s Project Indigo Camera App Will Now Critique Your Photos Like an Art Teacher

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

You know that little pang you feel when you look back at a photo and something's just off? The lamp growing out of someone's head, the exposure that's a touch too flat, the great subject buried in a busy frame. You can feel that the shot isn't working, even when you can't say why. Adobe's Project Indigo now wants to say why for you.

The experimental iOS camera app is testing a new tab called AI Playground, and it does two things that are more interesting together than apart: it edits your photos with generative AI, and it critiques them like a patient art teacher looking over your shoulder. That second part is the one worth paying attention to.

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China’s Kimi K3 Just Took the Top Coding Spot, and You Can Download It

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

For a couple of years now, the story about Chinese AI has been that it is close, impressive, and always a step or two behind the American frontier. That story just got harder to tell. Moonshot AI, the Beijing startup behind the Kimi chatbot, has released Kimi K3, and it did not quietly match the leaders. It walked into the Frontend Code Arena, a public leaderboard where models compete head to head on building working interfaces, and finished first. Ahead of Claude. Ahead of GPT. At the very top.

Here is the part that should make you sit up: this is not a locked API you rent from a company an ocean away. Kimi K3 is open-weight, which means the full model is going out to anyone who wants it. Moonshot says the complete weights land on July 27, and at 2.8 trillion parameters, K3 is the largest openly released model the world has seen. You could, in theory, download the same thing that just beat everyone at coding and run it yourself.

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Apple’s iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate Public Betas Are Here, and Siri Is Finally the Reason to Care

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

For two years, the pitch for a smarter Siri has been a promise about the future. This week the future finally showed up in a form you can actually install: Apple has released the first public betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate, which means the overhauled, do-more-for-you Siri is no longer a keynote demo. It is a thing you can put on your phone tonight and argue with over dinner.

If you have been waiting to test-drive Apple's big AI year before committing, this is the moment. The public betas landed after about a month of developer testing, the full release is still coming this fall, and there is a very Apple twist to the timing: the company also kicked off its annual Back to School promotion the same week, so the software you are curious about and the hardware you might buy to run it are both on the table at once.

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Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro Is Stuck, and the Reason Is Uncomfortably Human

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Back in May, on stage at I/O, Google told everyone Gemini 3.5 Pro was basically a month away. It is now the back half of July, the model still is not here, and the reason is the one thing Google would least like to admit out loud: its flagship AI cannot write good enough code yet.

That is the short version of a Bloomberg report, built on interviews with ten current and former employees, that has quietly turned into one of the more revealing stories in AI this year. Google tweaked the training data late last month to sharpen the model's coding chops. The results, per one person, were disappointing. So instead of shipping, Google is holding the line and reworking, which is the right call and also a slightly alarming one.

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1Password Will Let Claude Log You In Without Ever Seeing Your Passwords

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Internet, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Here's the thing nobody wants to admit about turning an AI agent loose on the web: sooner or later it hits a login screen, and then what? You either hand the robot your passwords and hope for the best, or the whole errand grinds to a halt. 1Password thinks there is a third option.

This week the company rolled out 1Password for Claude, a browser integration that lets Anthropic's assistant log you into websites without the password ever touching the model. The pitch, in the words of 1Password CTO Nancy Wang, is simple: "The answer isn't handing agents your secrets, but letting a user give an agent permission to use a credential without letting the agent see it."

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LM Studio’s Bionic Wants to Turn Your Local AI Models into an Actual Assistant

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Misc. Tech, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

For a couple of years now, the pitch for running AI models on your own machine has been mostly about principle. It's private, it's free, it's yours. All true, and all a little abstract when the thing you actually got was a chat window that answered questions. LM Studio, the app a lot of people use to run open models locally, has been that chat window. Now it wants to be something you can put to work.

The company just launched Bionic, an app for Mac and Windows that it calls "the AI agent for getting real work done with open models." The key word there is agent. Instead of just talking back, Bionic is built to go do things: dig through your code, read your documents, and take actual steps toward finishing a task. And it does it on models you control, whether those run on your own hardware or on LM Studio's cloud.

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