Teknotum -

Linus Torvalds changes stance on AI coding, welcomes it on Linux

— If somebody has issues with AI, they can do the open-source thing and fork it, Linus says. (Picture: generated)

— Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, he writes in an email to lore.kernel.org, adding that — AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.

He now says that AI isn’t perfect, and there are doubts about the economy of it, but that «anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.»

He goes on saying that «this is NOT some kind of «social warrior» project,» and that they use open source because «it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.»

The top Linux kernel maintainer and founder of the entire project has not always been this kind to AI, The Register reports, shunning the technology as 90% marketing hype in 2024 and saying «I really don’t to go there.»

In his email to the kernel list, he clarifies that AI as tool was not «clear» even just a year ago, but whether «it is useful» is no longer the question.

— This is an area where where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer, he writes, adding that — The solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing «La La La, I can’t hear you.»

Read more: The message to lore.kernel.org, The Register. Discussion on r/Singularity.

OpenAI’s next hardware device is a screenless, smart home speaker

The new device is supposedly «something to take a bite of» per previous reporting, and will look nothing like this. (Picture: generated)

Jony Ive’s first hardware device for OpenAI will be a movable, screen-free speaker with a camera and sensors to understand the environment, Bloomberg reports. It can control other smart home appliances and lets you talk to a customized, more personalized ChatGPT.

The speaker is slated for launch later this year, but won’t actually ship until sometime in 2027. It is one of about five devices slated for launch soon, Bloomberg says.

It will proactively reach out once it gets to know you, comes with a battery to move easily between rooms, and can do things like play music, answer messages or stay chatting, apparently with «personality.»

It will be powered by an advanced version of GPT-Live, and will be more than just talking to ChatGPT. Bloomberg says it will be more of a human-like companion, becoming an «expert on the user» over time.

The speaker also has mechanical elements that move on their own to «connect on a humanlike level with users»

OpenAI believes the device won’t be affected by the recent lawsuit on trade secrets from Apple, Bloomberg says, as it is a new class of devices not found anywhere else. Apple does make speakers, though, like the HomePod.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), Slashdot, MacRumors, TechCrunch, and The Verge.

200 economic, tech leaders warn of «transformation of the economy»

We must «build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI» in a beneficial direction, the letter says. (Picture: Adobe)

Leaders from across the technology and economics spectrum have come together for an open letter saying that «AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,» and that this could drive «an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame.»

— Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt. AI may give us only a ‌few ⁠years, comments Anton Korinek, Economics professor at the University of Virginia, to Reuters. He is part of Anthropic’s economic research team and co-organized the letter.

The letter further says that «economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI.»

Continue reading “200 economic, tech leaders warn of «transformation of the economy»”

Meta kills the Instagram tagging feature on Muse Image after criticism

Letting anyone tag Instagram profiles for AI images had some obvious implications. (Picture: Meta)

The feature letting users take content from any public Instagram feed in AI mashups through newly released Muse Image promptly received backlash from concerned users, pressure groups and actors’ unions.

The idea was that you should be able to tag friends, but celebrities instantly started thinking about protecting their livelihoods and likeness — crucial to their success.

Even the National Center on Sexual Exploitation got on with the criticism, saying it was an obvious tool for sextortion and scammers, spotted by The Verge.

The actors union SAG-AFTRA quickly posted a guide to opting out, pointing to toggles deeply buried in the Instagram settings, while the Creative Artists Agency urged Meta to take a more «reasonable» approach and at least make the feature opt-in, instead of free-for-all.

After a tumultuous week online, Meta finally ceded to its critics, putting out this statement:

— Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way. We’ve heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it’s no longer available.

Read more: Updated Muse Image blog post, Deadline, Variety and The Verge.

Apple sues OpenAI over hardware secrets, calls unit «rotten to the core»

A jury will have to decide if OpenAI is guilty of systematic theft of Apple secrets (Picture: generated)

The lawsuit from Apple is a damning indictment of OpenAI for stealing technology, prototypes, business processes and even partner manufacturers through Apple’s former employees, 9to5Mac reports.

At the heart of it lies OpenAI’s chief hardware officer Tang Tan, who left his role as VP of Product Design at Apple in 2024 to work with Jony Ive, later joining OpenAI in the Io acquisition, and Chang Liu, who spent eight years at Apple as a Senior System Electrical Engineer before leaving for OpenAI in January.

The pair is accused of accessing confidential Apple systems and downloading «detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data,» The Verge reports.

The two have also been holding some interesting job interviews, Apple claims, where hires from Apple have been encouraged to lay out systems planning and to log into confidential systems and share trade secrets and restricted paperwork.

There are 400 ex-Apple employees at OpenAI, and the whole hardware business is «rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,» the lawsuit alleges.

«We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,» OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri tells The Guardian.

Read more: The actual filing. More on 9to5Mac, The Verge, The Guardian, TechCrunch and Daring Fireball. Discussion on r/Singularity and Hacker News.

ChatGPT desktop to become much-hyped superapp with new Work agent

The new ChatGPT desktop app puts all of OpenAI’s eggs in the same basket. (Picture: OpenAI)

UPDATE: OpenAI seems to have removed the chat history and put the chat itself in a popup window. If you don’t like this in the new app, and a lot of people don’t, it leaves the ChatGPT Classic app untouched, which can be used for pure chats like the old version. It will still recieve updates and won’t become obsolete.

—

Along with the release of GPT-5.6 today comes a new app that looks unremarkable at first, but is a one-stop-shop for all of OpenAI’s features.

The latest addition is called ChatGPT Work, which is billed as an agent that gathers information from your apps and workflows and turns them into spreadsheets, presentations, docs or PDFs and just about anything you want — even web apps.

It’s getting integrated into a much more interesting, upgraded ChatGPT desktop app that will combine Codex, Work, agentic browsing and the normal chat interface.

Continue reading “ChatGPT desktop to become much-hyped superapp with new Work agent”

OpenAI releases GPT-5.6 globally, with this pricing and availability

GPT-5.6-Luna is competitive with recently launched cheap models, while Sol is more expensive. (Picture: OpenAI)

GPT-5.6 was, as promised, released widely to all of OpenAI’s customers today — and will take around 24 hours to fully propagate.

The model reaches state-of-the-art status through many benchmarks, beats Fable and Mythos often, and scores a record on Arc-Agi-2 of 92.5% while being the first to actually solve a puzzle on Arc-Agi 3, measuring how it handles completely unknown situations.

GPT-5.6 comes in three versions; Sol as the flagship, top rated model, Terra as the mid-tier GPT-5.5-level model at half the price, and Luna as the dirt cheap model, likely comparable with GPT-5.4.

The pricing for Sol is at $5 input/$30 output, Terra is at $2.50 input/$25 output, and Luna ticks in at $1 input and $6 output, placing it in a good position to compete with the recently released Grok 4.5 and Muse Spark 1.1.

The Free and Go tiers on ChatGPT only get access to the Terra model, while Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise can choose between all three, and set effort levels.

Pro and Enterprise users get Sol Pro in addition, which provides «the highest quality results on complex tasks.»

API users get access to the whole lot.

Read more: GPT-5.6 launch page.

Meta launches new Muse Spark, a «significant upgrade» on par with frontiers

The new Muse is not just dirt cheap, but sometimes matches the top tiered AIs. (Picture: Meta, generated)

The new Muse Spark 1.1 performs on level with, and sometimes surpasses, GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8 in benchmarks.

It is specifically built for agents and coding, being able to write, debug and refactor large codebases and add features on the fly.

The agentic capabilities are very competitive, Meta says. It can work with little human intervention and sometimes scores better than Fable on these tasks.

On computer use, Meta claims it understands workflows and can write scripts when it’s faster and work directly when it’s simpler.

Perhaps the biggest selling point is the cost, and just like Grok 4.5 yesterday, competition on price and speed is picking up. Muse Spark 1.1 is only $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million out, and is, as Zuckerberg puts it, at a very low cost.

The new Spark is available in Thinking mode on Meta AI through meta.ai and the app, while U.S. developers can access it in public preview through the new Meta Model API, where there is a waitlist. There is no word on when it is coming to Europe.

A new Grok 4.5 is out, competing on price and efficiency

The latest Grok is more efficient than other frontier models, at less than half the cost. (Picture: generated)

The latest model from SpaceXAI, previously X.ai, compares well to Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on benchmarks, but where it really shines is on token efficiency and cost.

The model was trained on «tens of thousands of GB300 GPUs» with a particular focus on per-token intelligence, leading to 4.2x lower token use than Opus 4.8 on the same tasks.

The model otherwise does what you would expect of a modern AI, being proficient in coding, science, engineering and math — along with doing complex models in Excel and navigating PowerPoint and Word.

The second standout performance for the model is the price, ticking in at merely $2 per million input tokens and $6 for a million in output.

Compare this to Claude Opus 4.8 at $5 per million inputs and $25 for a million out at twice the token use and slower speed, and Grok starts looking reasonable.

The model was developed in collaboration with recently acquired Cursor and is available on all their plans, as well as in Grok Build and the SpaceXAI console, but not in Europe, where it is expected to launch in mid-July.

Read more: SpaceXAI’s presentation, Elon Musk’s X post 1, post 2. Writeups on TechCrunch and Gizmodo. Discussion on r/Singularity and Hacker News.

OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT’s voice model for more natural speech

GPT-Live is better at waiting for its turn to speak, and you can interrupt for a better back-and-forth. (Picture: OpenAI)

150 million people use their voice to interact with ChatGPT per week, OpenAI says, and many have waited patiently since 2024 for an upgrade.

The new GPT-Live uses a «full duplex architecture» that separates out the underlying language model and continuously processes speech.

This means it can do «mmm’s» and «yeah’s» during a conversation to indicate it is actively listening, but more importantly it can listen and speak at the same time.

OpenAI says GPT-Live makes decisions «many times per second» on whether to speak, listen, pause or interrupt, letting it engage more naturally in conversations — and do live translation.

The new model delegates more complex tasks to «the latest frontier model» (currently GPT-5.5) for reasoning or web search and gets back to you as soon as it is ready, sometimes showing cue cards for at-a-glance responses in the app.

GPT-Live is available today by tapping the Voice-button in the app or on the web for Go, Plus and Pro subscribers, and there is a GPT-Live-1 mini for the free tiers.

Read more: OpenAI’s presentation, launch thread, writeups on TechCrunch, The Verge, and Engadget.

GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna are set for general release on Thursday

OpenAI has announced the general release of GPT-5.6 tomorrow. (Picture: OpenAI)

GPT-5.6 was officially unveiled a little over a week ago, but got hampered by a US government intervention for cyber risks and national security, having been shown in benchmarks to beat Anthropic’s Mythos.

At launch, it got released only to some 20 «trusted partners,» and OpenAI promised a general release «in the coming weeks.»

Now those weeks have passed, the government has lifted its restrictions without further explanation, and both OpenAI’s X account and CEO Sam Altman are posting that it will «launch publicly this Thursday.»

This comes after extensive testing by the Center for AI Standards and Innovation within the Department of Commerce, aided by experts from OpenAI, who stayed on call for «potential questions,» Axios reports.

No account has been given as to what specifically caused the delayed launch or what conditions the government had for its release.

Read more: Teknotum: On the launch, On the restrictions. OpenAI’s X post, Altman’s X post. Writeup on Axios.

Meta launches Muse Image generator, teases video model

A sample from Muse Image, Alexandr Wang as a plushie. (Picture: Meta)

Muse Image catapulted directly to the second place on Arena.ai’s leaderboard in the categories for Text-to-Image and Image Edit, ahead of Nano Banana 2 and just behind GPT-Image-2.

It’s the first image generator from the Superintelligence Lab and pairs with Muse Spark to reason, search the web, and plan before it generates an image.

Meta also says it knows you from your Facebook and Instagram feeds, giving it a layer of contextual awareness, and it lets you tag any Instagram account for inclusion in your images.

The latter is automatically enabled, meaning anyone on Meta.ai can tag your Instagram content in AI generations, unless you explicitly opt out.

Continue reading “Meta launches Muse Image generator, teases video model”

Claude Cowork heads to mobile and the web; is mostly used for office tasks

Cowork is moving to the cloud, where it can be accessed from everywhere. (Picture: Anthropic)

Anthropic is freeing Cowork from the computer, transferring relevant files, emails and notes to continue your tasks in the cloud long after you’ve left the home/office.

That means you can now set up Cowork on your computer, close it, and have projects run independently, sending updates and confirmation requests to your phone or the web.

While releasing this update, Anthropic is also revealing a few usage stats for the app. It turns out, it is hardly used for coding or software design at all.

Rather, 90% of usage is knowledge work and business operations; things like drafting memos and reports from raw data, or turning a contacts list or transcripts into sales leads.

These are routine tasks that involve a lot of data parsing or housekeeping that are essential parts of office work, but is rarely advertised. Anthropic calls it «work around the work.»

The new features should be available on claude.ai and in the sidebar of the iOS or Android apps, rolling out «over the next several weeks» for Max users, with «more plans to follow.»

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, launch thread, TechCrunch and The Verge.

ByteDance, Alibaba ditch emotional chatbots after Chinese regulation

The insanely popular custom chatbots become a thing of the past in China. (Picture: generated)

The popular chatbots Doubao and Qwen are shutting down their personalization features after China enacts the world’s first regulation of «anthropomorphic» AI agents.

They had both offered the ability to create custom agents and chatbots that would establish emotional bonds with users, and act as humanlike companions.

As of July 15, this becomes illegal in China, after the awkwardly specifically named «Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services» goes into effect.

This is the first regulation of its kind, and bans bots that «simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction,» The South China Morning Post writes.

The personalized service of the two chatbots were used by millions, many of them kids, and often replaced real-life human interaction, as one in seven young adults in China used them to form romantic relationships, Decrypt.io writes.

UNICEF has hailed the new law, calling it a «pioneering policy [that] marks a significant global step towards regulating AI powered emotional interaction services.»

Read more: The South China Morning Post, Decrypt.io, Wikipedia, and UNICEF.