Mark Chen, the chief research officer at OpenAI, sent a forceful memo to staff on Saturday, promising to go head-to-head with the social giant in the war for top research talent. This memo, which was sent to OpenAI employees in Slack and obtained by WIRED, came days after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg successfully recruited four senior researchers from the company to join Meta's superintelligence lab. "I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something," Chen wrote. "Please trust that we haven't been sitting idly by." Chen promised that he was working with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and other leaders at the company "around the clock to talk to those with offers," adding, "we've been more proactive than ever before, we're recalibrating comp, and we're scoping out creative ways to recognize and reward top talent." Still, even as OpenAI leadership appears desperate to retain its staff, Chen said that he has "high personal standards of fairness," and wants to retain top talent with that in mind.

The world's most advanced AI models are exhibiting troubling new behaviors -- lying, scheming and even threatening their creators to achieve their goals. In one particularly jarring example, under threat of being unplugged, Anthropic's latest creation Claude 4 lashed back by blackmailing an engineer and threatened to reveal an extramarital affair. Meanwhile, ChatGPT-creator OpenAI's o1 tried to download itself onto external servers and denied it when caught red-handed.

Four OpenAI researchers are leaving the company to go to Meta, two sources confirm to WIRED. Their OpenAI Slack profiles have been deactivated. The Information first reported on the departures. It's the latest in a series of aggressive moves by Mark Zuckerberg, who is racing to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in building artificial general intelligence. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that Meta has been making "giant offers" to OpenAI staffers with " 100 million signing bonuses."

Before Duolingo wiped its videos from TikTok and Instagram in mid-May, social media engagement was one of the language-learning app's most recognizable qualities. Its green owl mascot had gone viral multiple times and was well known to younger users--a success story other marketers envied. But, when news got out that Duolingo was making the switch to become an "AI-first" company, planning to replace contractors who work on tasks generative AI could automate, public perception of the brand soured. Young people started posting on social media about how they were outraged at Duolingo as they performatively deleted the app--even if it meant losing the precious streak awards they earned through continued, daily usage. The comments on Duolingo's TikTok posts in the days after the announcement were filled with rage, primarily focused on a single aspect: workers being replaced with automation.

A small clause inside OpenAI's contract with Microsoft, once considered a distant hypothetical, has now become a flashpoint in one of the biggest partnerships in tech. The clause states that if OpenAI's board ever declares it has developed artificial general intelligence (AGI), it would limit Microsoft's contracted access to the startup's future technologies. Microsoft, which has invested more than 13 billion in OpenAI, is now reportedly pushing for the removal of the clause and is considering walking away from the deal entirely, according to the Financial Times. Late last year, tensions around AGI's suddenly pivotal role in the Microsoft deal spilled into a debate within OpenAI over an internal research paper, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter. Titled "Five Levels of General AI Capabilities," the paper outlines a framework for classifying progressive stages of AI technology.

TIME reporter Andrew Chow discussed the findings of a new study about how ChatGPT affects critical thinking with Nataliya Kosymyna. Kosymyna was part of a team of researchers at MIT's Media Lab who set out to determine whether ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs) are eroding critical thinking, and the study returned some concerning results. The study divided 54 subjects into three groups, and asked them to write several essays using OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers' brain activity. What they found was that of the three groups, the ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels.

Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its Megatron AI to respond to human prompts. The authors requested a court order blocking Microsoft's infringement and statutory damages of up to 150,000 for each work that Microsoft allegedly misused. Generative artificial intelligence products like Megatron produce text, music, images and videos in response to users' prompts. To create these models, software engineers amass enormous databases of media to program the AI to produce similar output. The writers alleged in the complaint that Microsoft used a collection of nearly 200,000 pirated books to train Megatron, an AI product that gives text responses to user prompts.

In both Tehran and Tel Aviv, residents have faced heightened anxiety in recent days as the threat of missile strikes looms over their communities. Alongside the very real concerns for physical safety, there is growing alarm over the role of misinformation, particularly content generated by artificial intelligence, in shaping public perception. GeoConfirmed, an online verification platform, has reported an increase in AI-generated misinformation, including fabricated videos of air strikes that never occurred, both in Iran and Israel. This follows a similar wave of manipulated footage that circulated during recent protests in Los Angeles, which were sparked by a rise in immigration raids in the second-most populous city in the United States. The developments are part of a broader trend of politically charged events being exploited to spread false or misleading narratives.

In April, game developer Stamina Zero achieved what should have been a marketing slam-dunk: the launch trailer for the studio's game Little Droid was published on PlayStation's official YouTube channel. The response was a surprise for the developer. The game looks interesting, people wrote in the comments, but was "ruined" by AI art. But the game's cover art, used as the thumbnail for the YouTube video, was in fact made by a real person, according to developer Lana Ro. "We know the artist, we've seen her work, so such a negative reaction was unexpected for us, and at first we didn't know how to respond or how to feel," Ro said. It's not wrong for people to be worried about AI use in video games – in fact, it's good to be sceptical, and ensure that the media you support aligns with your values. Common arguments against generative AI relate to environmental impact, art theft and just general quality, and video game developers are grappling with how generative AI will impact their jobs.

We introduce CogGen, a learner-centered AI architecture that transforms programming videos into interactive, adaptive learning experiences by integrating student modeling with generative AI tutoring based on the Cognitive Apprenticeship framework. The architecture consists of three components: (1) video segmentation by learning goals, (2) a conversational tutoring engine applying Cognitive Apprenticeship strategies, and (3) a student model using Bayesian Knowledge Tracing to adapt instruction. Our technical evaluation demonstrates effective video segmentation accuracy and strong pedagogical alignment across knowledge, method, action, and interaction layers. Ablation studies confirm the necessity of each component in generating effective guidance. This work advances AI-powered tutoring by bridging structured student modeling with interactive AI conversations, offering a scalable approach to enhancing video-based programming education.