Amazon-owned MGM Studios' decision to drop the OpenAI movie is just part of AI and film industries becoming increasingly intertwined. On, we take a look at where this is all headed. This week on Uncanny Valley, our hosts discuss Amazon's controversial decision to drop Luca Guadagnino's film about OpenAI's Sam Altman--which reportedly did not paint him in a favorable light. Alongside Google DeepMind's $75 million brand new partnership with indie film studio A24, how much of a dent is AI actually having in the films we see? They also dive into the recent upheaval of workers--from electricians to software engineers--against data centers. Plus: Meta's program to track employees' data gets paused after a massive leak, and Anthropic is now getting along with the government thanks to CEO Dario Amodei no longer being in the room. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Before we start, two quick things. If you've been enjoying listening to the show, we would appreciate it if you took a second to rate it in your podcast app of choice. It really helps us reach more people. And second, if you have any questions related to tech, privacy, or politics that you would like me, Zoë, and Leah to take on, now is the time to submit them to [email protected] . It doesn't matter how big or how small, we want to hear from you and get you answers. We're discussing Amazon's MGM Studios' sudden decision to drop the OpenAI biographical movie just as they were wrapping up production.

OpenAI will initially only release ChatGPT 5.6 to government-approved customers OpenAI will initially only release ChatGPT 5.6 to government-approved customers You may not be able to use the new ChatGPT 5.6 as soon as it's finished. According to a report in, OpenAI plans to stagger the release of its new AI model, and the first users will only be parties that are approved by the federal government. The publication's sources said that, according to a staff memo from CEO Sam Altman, federal leaders will be approving access customer by customer during this preview period, hopefully followed a couple of weeks later by a more general release of the 5.6 model. We've made clear to the US government that this is not our preferred long term model, and will work with them and others in industry to achieve a more sustainable approach for future releases, Altman reportedly told employees in the memo. Several agencies appear to be involved in directing the change in course from OpenAI.

GPT-5.5 Instant is now more capable at processing complex questions. OpenAI has updated GPT-5.5 Instant, the model you interact with the most when you use ChatGPT, to be better at understanding context and adapting to queries as you alter them to add more conditions or clarifications. The company updated ChatGPT's default model to GPT-5.5 Instant in May. Back then, it said that the model produced 52.5 percent fewer hallucinated statements during testing and 37.3 percent fewer factual errors. Now, the model has been upgraded to be more capable when it comes to identifying the underlying goal of a task or a question and carrying context over across multiple back-and-forths as you talk to it.

Indie movie fans are upset about Google DeepMind's $75 million investment in the studio, which comes as AI companies are deepening their influence in Hollywood. Backrooms, the recent horror movie mega-hit, is a film replete with ideas about repetition and degradation. Its central theme--the horror of a world that seems to be mindlessly, monstrously, ripping off our own--was regarded in some circles as a critique of generative AI . The idea has clearly struck a nerve. Recently passing $300 million at the global box office, has become the biggest hit yet for its buzzy boutique producer and distributor, the New York company A24.

OpenAI and Broadcom have unveiled the design for Jalapeño, their first jointly-made chip. The pair of companies announced plans to collaborate on a making a custom AI accelerator in October 2025. In its blog post today, OpenAI called Jalapeño its first Intelligence Processor: an accelerator architected around OpenAI's vision for the future of LLM inference. In other words, the processor is designed to run its large language models. The AI company claims that so far, Jalapeño is offering performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art in chip technology.

OpenAI's new Daybreak initiative will help open-source projects fend off bugs OpenAI's new Daybreak initiative will help open-source projects fend off bugs Patch the Planet will pair security researchers with open-source projects. OpenAI has launched Patch the Planet, a new initiative part of its Daybreak cybersecurity program, which was designed to serve the open-source community. The company is working with cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits that has committed its entire security research organization for the project. In its own announcement, Trail of Bits said that while models like GPT-5.5-Cyber can produce a firehose of security findings for users, project maintainers, who are already stretched thin, will have to sift through all of them to identify real vulnerabilities from false positives. Patch the Planet is meant to reduce project maintainers' burden by putting them in contact with security researchers, who use OpenAI's top models and Codex Security to identify vulnerabilities and review findings before they even reach the maintainers.

Although numerous Artificial Intelligence Generated Image (AIGI) detectors have been proposed, often reporting high accuracy, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios remains questionable. To bridge this gap, we introduce AIGIBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the robustness and generalization capabilities of state-of-the-art AIGI detectors. AIGIBench simulates real-world challenges through four core tasks: multi-source generalization, robustness to image degradation, sensitivity to data augmentation, and impact of test-time preprocessing. It includes 23 diverse fake image subsets that span both advanced and widely adopted image generation techniques, along with real-world samples collected from social media and AI art platforms. Extensive experiments on 11 advanced detectors demonstrate that, despite their high reported accuracy in controlled settings, these detectors suffer significant performance drops on real-world data, limited benefits from common augmentations, and nuanced effects of preprocessing, highlighting the need for more robust detection strategies. By providing a unified and realistic evaluation framework, AIGIBench offers valuable insights to guide future research toward dependable and generalizable AIGI detection2.

This paper proposes a novel scene understanding task called Visual Jenga. Drawing inspiration from the game Jenga, the proposed task involves progressively removing objects from a single image until only the background remains. Just as Jenga players must understand structural dependencies to maintain tower stability, our task reveals the intrinsic relationships between scene elements by systematically exploring which objects can be removed while preserving scene coherence in both physical and geometric sense. As a starting point for tackling the Visual Jenga task, we propose a simple, data-driven, training-free approach that is surprisingly effective on a range of real-world images. The principle behind our approach is to utilize the asymmetry in the pairwise relationships between objects within a scene and employ a large inpainting model to generate a set of counterfactuals to quantify the asymmetry.

Watermarking is a crucial technique for identifying these AI-generated images and preventing their misuse. In this paper, we introduce Shallow Diffuse, a new watermarking technique that embeds robust and invisible watermarks into diffusion model outputs. Unlike existing approaches that integrate watermarking throughout the entire diffusion sampling process, Shallow Diffuse decouples these steps by leveraging the presence of a low-dimensional subspace in the image generation process. This method ensures that a substantial portion of the watermark lies in the null space of this subspace, effectively separating it from the image generation process. Our theoretical and empirical analyses show that this decoupling strategy greatly enhances the consistency of data generation and the detectability of the watermark. Extensive experiments further validate that Shallow Diffuse outperforms existing watermarking methods in terms of consistency.

OpenAI Launches Full-Scale Effort to Patch Open-Source Bugs as It Takes on Anthropic's Mythos Amid concerns about AI models' cybersecurity capabilities, OpenAI revealed an improved version of GPT-5.5-Cyber and its "Patch the Planet" initiative to fix open-source software bugs. As fears about AI hacking capabilities grow, OpenAI on Monday made a slew of cybersecurity-focused announcements, including an improved version of its limited-access security-specialized model GPT-5.5-Cyber, As advances across the AI industry leave critical open-source projects at increasing risk of falling behind, though, the company also said on Monday that it is launching an effort known as Patch the Planet, founded with the prominent research-focused security firm Trail of Bits and in collaboration with vulnerability management firms HackerOne and Calif. The project has already begun its work offering free security consulting services to open source maintainers to not only help them find and patch vulnerabilities, but also support them in strengthening their code bases and incorporating AI security tools into their development process. The idea is to give individualized support to as many open-source projects as possible to improve both their current security and long-term resilience in a way that will actually be sustainable.