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.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Stop asking ChatGPT to rewrite your drafts. Turn ChatGPT into a writing coach rather than a ghostwriter with this prompt. So you've drafted a cover letter for a job application, but it just doesn't feel right. Maybe your writing is a little flat (it's hard to write about yourself, after all) or the letter just comes across as unfocused.

Anthropic accuses Alibaba of'illicitly' accessing AI models Alibaba's American depositary receipts sank to a session low on the news, falling more than 3% to $99.10 at 3:38 p.m. in New York on Wednesday. Anthropic accused Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group Holding of waging a large-scale effort to "illicitly" access its Claude artificial intelligence model using thousands of fraudulent accounts that undermine the U.S. AI developer's decision to keep its products out of China. Anthropic claimed that a campaign by operators linked to Alibaba's Qwen AI lab targeted Claude's most prized capabilities, including software engineering and agentic reasoning, according to a letter that the AI startup sent to several U.S. senators and White House officials. The company said it was the biggest attempt so far by a Chinese company to piggyback on the work of top U.S. labs. In its letter, Anthropic claimed that the effort involved 28.8 million exchanges with Claude between April and June through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts, according to people familiar with the document and a copy seen by Bloomberg News. The company said the Alibaba campaign resembled past efforts by other Chinese developers that Anthropic flagged in a blog post earlier this year.

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.

Modeling and sampling from the underlying distribution of asynchronous event sequences are crucial in various real-world applications, including social networks, medical diagnosis, and financial transactions. Existing autoregressive methods suffer from error accumulation during multi-step generation, while non-autoregressive diffusion methods are typically limited to fixed-length output sequences. In this paper, we propose Latent Block-Diffusion Temporal Point Processes (LBDTPP), a novel semi-autoregressive TPP framework that introduces a latent block diffusion mechanism for high-quality and variable-length event sequence generation. The core idea is to define an autoregressive probability distribution over event blocks in latent space and perform Gaussian diffusion within each block. By sequentially generating blocks while simultaneously sampling events in each block, LBDTPP preserves the length flexibility of autoregressive TPPs and inherits the parallel high-quality generation capability of diffusion models. Theoretically, we derive Wasserstein error bounds showing that, under suitable local approximation and prefix-stability assumptions, block-wise generation can reduce error accumulation compared with event-wise autoregressive generation. Extensive experiments on six real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that LBDTPP outperforms state-of-the-art TPP baselines in both unconditional and conditional generation tasks. Further empirical analyses verify the benefits of latent-space diffusion and block-wise generation, and reveal the trade-off between generation quality and block size. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zh-Shuai/LBDTPP.

Learning effective policies for adaptive data acquisition remains challenging: posterior-based methods rely on surrogate models and posterior approximations that can be misspecified or biased, while direct policy-learning methods map from historical observations and fail to exploit available model representations, making learning harder. We introduce policy learning with belief representations (POLAR), based on the insight that optimal data acquisition depends on the observation history only through a sufficient belief state. Specifically, POLAR decouples representation learning from policy learning by leveraging pretrained predictive foundation models as belief-state encoders, training a policy head on top of their representations. This yields a simple, unified amortised policy learning framework for Bayesian experimental design, Bayesian optimisation, and active learning, differing only in the task-specific utility used to train the policy. Empirically, we find that POLAR outperforms state-of-the-art amortised methods across diverse tasks while requiring far fewer training samples, demonstrating a significant step in the scalability and efficiency of amortised data acquisition.

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.

Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot may require some users to upload government-issued ID, passport, or driver's license starting July 8th for account verification. PCWorld reports this identity verification aims to prevent fraud and ensure terms of service compliance, handled by third-party service Persona. Similar ID verification policies by Discord, Reddit, and ChatGPT previously faced significant user backlash over privacy concerns. Anthropic has updated its privacy policy for its AI chatbot Claude. Starting July 8th, the company may--in certain situations--require users to verify their age or identity by uploading a copy of a government-issued ID card, passport, or driving license, reports TechCrunch .