Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Generative AI


Anthropic buys Super Bowl ads to slap OpenAI for selling ads in ChatGPT

The Japan Times

Anthropic is going on the offensive against rival OpenAI by spending millions on commercials during Sunday night's National Football League championship game to criticize the latter's plan to sell ads on its ChatGPT chatbot. Anthropic is spending millions of dollars to air commercials during Sunday night's National Football League championship game to slam rival OpenAI for its plan to sell ads on its ChatGPT chatbot, in one of the biggest public spats between the big artificial-intelligence companies. One 30-second spot expected to air on the NBC television network during Super Bowl LX from Anthropic takes a thinly veiled jab at OpenAI's intentions to introduce ads to its AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. The commercial features a scrawny twenty-something doing pull-ups in the park, and asking a muscular bystander for advice about achieving six-pack abs. The man replies in a robotic way that suggests he is a chatbot, offering to provide a personalized strength-training plan. But first, he slips in a promotion for shoe inserts that help "short kings stand tall" -- prompting a puzzled response from the twenty-something.



Battle of the chatbots: Anthropic and OpenAI go head-to-head over ads in their AI products

The Guardian

AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI have launched a war of ads trying to court corporate America during one of the biggest entertainment nights of the year. Ahead of the Super Bowl, Anthropic has launched a series of ads going hard at its rival. For the scrawny 23-year-old who wants a six-pack, a ripped older man who is supposed to depict a chatbot suggests insoles that "help short kings stand tall" because "confidence isn't just built in the gym". And for the man trying to improve communication with his mom: his therapist prescribes "a mature dating site that connects sensitive cubs with roaring cougars" in case he can't fix that relationship. From'nerdy' Gemini to'edgy' Grok: how developers are shaping AI behaviours All four ads end with the same tagline: "Ads are coming to AI. There's no explicit mention of ChatGPT, but the subtext is clear. But he also called the ads "so clearly dishonest" before diving into a lengthy critique on X . "Our most important principle for ads says that we won't do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them," Altman wrote. "We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that." Altman stressed that OpenAI's decision to include ads, announced last month, makes the product more accessible. "We believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access," he wrote. "Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people.



In Japan, generative AI takes fake election news to new levels

The Japan Times

Some AI-generated content is easy to spot as fake and is marked as such, but others are convincing enough that anyone scrolling through social media could easily be misled. Two leaders of a fledgling Japanese political party unveil a red logo reminiscent of Chinese Communist Party imagery. Grannies vent in public about what they see as political nonsense. Whatever the outcome of Sunday's Lower House election, the race will be remembered not least for having witnessed the full-blown debut of AI slop in Japanese politics. As more voters in Japan turn to social media for political updates and policy debates, the internet is increasingly looking like a dumping site for fake and dubious news and content. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.


Data Kernel Perspective Space Performance Guarantees for Synthetic Data from Transformer Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Scarcity of labeled training data remains the long pole in the tent for building performant language technology and generative AI models. Transformer models -- particularly LLMs -- are increasingly being used to mitigate the data scarcity problem via synthetic data generation. However, because the models are black boxes, the properties of the synthetic data are difficult to predict. In practice it is common for language technology engineers to 'fiddle' with the LLM temperature setting and hope that what comes out the other end improves the downstream model. Faced with this uncertainty, here we propose Data Kernel Perspective Space (DKPS) to provide the foundation for mathematical analysis yielding concrete statistical guarantees for the quality of the outputs of transformer models. We first show the mathematical derivation of DKPS and how it provides performance guarantees. Next we show how DKPS performance guarantees can elucidate performance of a downstream task, such as neural machine translation models or LLMs trained using Contrastive Preference Optimization (CPO). Limitations of the current work and future research are also discussed.


Anthropic promises no ads in Claude, upsetting ChatGPT's CEO

PCWorld

Anthropic announced its Claude AI chatbot will remain completely ad-free, contrasting sharply with OpenAI's recent decision to test advertisements in ChatGPT. PCWorld reports that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticized Anthropic's stance, calling Claude an "expensive product for the rich" despite Claude also offering free access. This creates a clear market divide between ad-supported and ad-free AI assistants, with Google's Gemini currently aligning with Anthropic's no-ads approach. A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it would begin testing display advertisements in ChatGPT responses . Shortly afterwards, Google promised no ads in Gemini (for now) .


What does the disappearance of a 100bn deal mean for the AI economy?

The Guardian

He has said privately the deal was'non-binding'. He has said privately the deal was'non-binding'. What does the disappearance of a $100bn deal mean for the AI economy? Apparent collapse of Nvidia-OpenAI tie-up raises questions about circular funding and who will bear the cost of AI's expansion Did the circular AI economy just wobble? Last week it was reported that a much-discussed $100bn deal - announced last September - between Nvidia and OpenAI might not be happening at all.


The Download: the future of nuclear power plants, and social media-fueled AI hype

MIT Technology Review

AI is driving unprecedented investment for massive data centers and an energy supply that can support its huge computational appetite. One potential source of electricity for these facilities is next-generation nuclear power plants, which could be cheaper to construct and safer to operate than their predecessors. We recently held a subscriber-exclusive Roundtables discussion on hyperscale AI data centers and next-gen nuclear --two featured technologies on the MIT Technology Review 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2026 list . You can watch the conversation back here, and don't forget to subscribe to make sure you catch future discussions as they happen. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, summed it up in three words: "This is embarrassing." Hassabis was replying on X to an overexcited post by Sébastien Bubeck, a research scientist at the rival firm OpenAI, announcing that two mathematicians had used OpenAI's latest large language model, GPT-5, to find solutions to 10 unsolved problems in mathematics.


ChatGPT is back up after an outage disrupted use this afternoon

Engadget

Claude also went down for many users earlier today. If you had trouble using ChatGPT today, you aren't alone. The AI chatbot experienced a partial outage for many users this afternoon, with Down Detector saw reports reaching more than 12,000 reports around the peak point of the issue today.. OpenAI issued a status update shortly after noting that elevated error rates were occurring for ChatGPT and Platform users. That problem was marked as resolved at 5:14PM ET. While the initial outage may be repaired, OpenAI does still have an active status alert up. But the end may also be in sight for that final issue, because the current statement from the company is We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovering.