Meta plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems, the company announced today. Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we'll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," says Meta. The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes.

OpenAI announced today that it is releasing a new family of artificial intelligence models optimized to excel at coding, as it ramps up efforts to fend off increasingly stiff competition from companies like Google and Anthropic. The models are available to developers through OpenAI's application programming interface (API). OpenAI is releasing three sizes of models: GPT 4.1, GPT 4.1 Mini, and GPT 4.1 Nano. Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, said on a livestream that the new models are better than OpenAI's most widely used model, GPT-4o, and better than its largest and most powerful model, GPT-4.5, in some ways. GPT-4.1 scored 55 percent on SWE-Bench, a widely used benchmark for gauging the prowess of coding models.

Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence models and software, announced today that it has acquired Pollen Robotics, the French startup behind the bug-eyed, two-armed, humanoid robot called Reachy 2. Hugging Face plans to sell the robot and will also allow developers to download, modify, and suggest improvements to its code. "It's really important for robotics to be as open source as possible," says Clément Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face. "When you think about physical objects doing physical things at work and at home, the level of trust and transparency I need is much higher than for something I chat with on my laptop." Simon Alibert and Rémi Cadene are research engineers in AI and robotics at Hugging Face. In videos shared by Pollen Robotics, Reachy 2 can be seen performing tricks like tidying coffee mugs and picking up fruit.

'The Big Weekend Show' co-hosts discuss Tinder user traffic peaking during'Dating Sunday.' A New Jersey woman is accused of hiring a man she met on Tinder to kill her police officer ex-boyfriend and his daughter, according to authorities. Camden County Prosecutor Grace C. MacAulay charged Jaclyn Diiorio, 26, with two counts of attempted first-degree murder, one count of conspiracy to commit murder and one count of third-degree possession of a controlled dangerous substance in connection with the alleged crime. Diiorio, of Runnemede, allegedly told a confidential informant she met on Tinder that she wanted her ex, a 53-year-old Philadelphia Police Department officer, and his 19-year-old daughter killed, Gloucester New Jersey Township Police said in a news release. The informant and Diiorio allegedly exchanged several phone calls and text messages after meeting on the dating app and later in person at a Wawa, according to court documents obtained by Fox News Digital.

Samsung's Ballie will go on sale in the US and South Korea this summer, the company announced today. What's more, through a partnership with Google Cloud, the diminutive robot will ship with a Gemini AI model. Samsung didn't state the specific system that powers Ballie, but in combination with the company's own proprietary language models, it says the robot has multimodal capabilities, meaning Ballie can process voice, audio and visual data from its sensors. According to Samsung, Ballie can also manage your smart home devices and even offer health and styling recommendations, if you're inclined to seek that type of advice from a robot. Samsung has yet to announce pricing for Ballie, though with the uncertainty around the Trump administration's recently announced tariffs, you can't blame Samsung, can you?

Hours after I published our Friday newsletter, debating the price of Nintendo's new console, the company announced it would delay US pre-orders for the Switch 2 as it wrestled with a new set of tariffs introduced by President Trump. "Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the US will not start April 9, 2025, in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions," Nintendo told Engadget. It added that the console is still set to launch on June 5, however. Last week, the Trump administration announced a set of new tariffs on a swath of countries, including Japan (Nintendo's base of operations), China and Vietnam. Those last two countries, where Nintendo manufactures much of its hardware, will be subject to import duties of 54 percent and 46 percent.

Meta has released the first two models from its multimodal Llama 4 suite: LLama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick. Maverick is "the workhorse" of the two and excels at image and text understanding for "general assistant and chat use cases," the company said in a blog post, while the smaller model Scout could tackle things like "multi-document summarization, parsing extensive user activity for personalized tasks, and reasoning over vast codebases." The company also introduced Llama 4 Behemoth, an upcoming model it says is "among the world's smartest LLMs" -- and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said we'll be hearing about a fourth model, LLama 4 Reasoning, "in the next month." Both Maverick and Scout are available to download now from the LLama website and Hugging Face, and they've been added to Meta AI, including for WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram DMs. Scout has 17 billion active parameters with 16 experts, Meta says.

Following the release of rival Anthropic's Claude for Education, OpenAI has announced that its 20 ChatGPT Plus tier will be free for college students until the end of May. The offer comes just in time for final exams and will provide features like OpenAI's most advanced LLM, GPT-4o and an all-new image generation tool. "We are offering a Plus discount for students on a limited-time basis in the US and Canada," the company wrote in a FAQ. "This is an experimental consumer program and we may or may not expand this to more schools and countries over time." On top of the aforementioned features, ChatGPT Plus will offer students benefits like priority access during peak usage times and higher message limits.

Central bank communication plays a critical role in shaping economic expectations and monetary policy effectiveness. This study applies supervised machine learning techniques to classify the sentiment of press releases from the Bank of Thailand, addressing gaps in research that primarily focus on lexicon-based approaches. My findings show that supervised learning can be an effective method, even with smaller datasets, and serves as a starting point for further automation. However, achieving higher accuracy and better generalization requires a substantial amount of labeled data, which is time-consuming and demands expertise. Using models such as Na\"ive Bayes, Random Forest and SVM, this study demonstrates the applicability of machine learning for central bank sentiment analysis, with English-language communications from the Thai Central Bank as a case study.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been delayed again. Publisher Paradox Interactive announced today that it is now targeting release in October 2025 instead of the first half of this year. "Paradox Interactive and The Chinese Room are committed to delivering this game, and we believe that ensuring great technical quality is more important than sticking to a specific date," the company said. Creating the sequel has been a trial of endurance that would test even an immortal undead's patience. Paradox parted ways with the game's original developer, Hardsuit Labs, in 2021.