Ireland enacts basic income for artists, says it creates more than they spend

Basic income schemes are closely watched in case AI supplants jobs at scale. (Picture: Images Money, CC BY 2.0)
After a pilot scheme lasting from 2022-25 with basic income for artists, the Irish Government is moving to make it permanent.

2,000 eligible artists will be randomly selected to get €325 per week, after the pilot found that for every €1 invested, society received €1.39 in return.

It’s not enough to live on, but it is enough to see artists through their arts without taking on side gigs and onerous secondary jobs.

During the pilot, artists reported they had more time for their art, produced more work, experienced a boost in well-being, had greater life satisfaction and that it reduced their anxiety.

— The BIA [Basic Income for Artists] pilot research has consistently demonstrated both the positive impact it has had on those in receipt of it and how difficult it is to work as an artist in Ireland, says Culture Minister Patrick O’Donovan.

This is the first such officially enacted Government-based basic income program in the world, O’Donovan says.

Read more: Irish Government announcement, writeups on IrishCentral and The Guardian.

Britain is launching public probe into children’s use of AI chatbots

It’s for the kids; restricting chatbot harm to children is a high priority for the UK. (Picture: generated).
After starting an investigation against x.com and Grok for creating sexualized images, the UK government is launching a new «consultation» into how chatbots interact with children.

— I am concerned about these AI chatbots… as is the prime minister, about the impact that’s having on children and young people, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall says, according to Reuters.

The first order of business is to make sure the chatbots follow the Online Safety Act, which doesn’t cover one-to-one interactions with chatbots as of today, Reuters says. This is mainly because it was enacted before they were on the radar, and this step will make it possible to regulate them like social media.

The wider consultation will «include examining restrictions on children’s use of AI chatbots,» the government says, and will be conducted over the coming months, ending in a set of proposals by June, 2026.

Read more: UK government presentation, and Reuters, CNBC.

OpenAI introduces Lockdown Mode and Elevated Risk protections

Only secure access is granted in the new Lockdown Mode. (Picture: OpenAI)
ChatGPT can be useful, but also carries some risk — especially when it’s browsing the web or using apps.

That’s why OpenAI is now launching «an advanced, optional setting for higher risk users.»

The idea is to disable tools an adversary might use to «to exploit to exfiltrate sensitive data,» such as prompt injection attacks in files or on the web.

When using Lockdown Mode, web use is limited to cached content only, and no live network access is available outside of OpenAI’s «controlled network»

Most people will never need this feature, OpenAI says, but it might be useful for corporate execs, security teams, journalists and officials.

OpenAI is also launching an «Elevated Risk»-setting, that lets users fine-tune network access for Atlas and Codex.

Both features are coming to users «in the coming months.»

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement.

Anthropic won the Super Bowl ads war

Anthropic’s ad was about ads in chat responses, and it seems to have landed. (Picture: Screenshot)
While the AI Super Bowl ads had generally lower engagement than others — there was a battle over mindshare brewing between them.

Anthropic won that battle, and saw a jump in daily active users of 11%, CNBC writes, quoting BNP Paribas. In comparison, ChatGPT jumped 2.7% and Gemini added 1.4%.

Anthropic also won the battle over social media engagement, with more positive posts (25.5%) after their ad was shown than OpenAI (16.3%) — even though OpenAI led with 25K posts to Anthropic’s 10K.

Measuring through Instagram, OpenAI’s ad scored a 44% positive sentiment from 3,829 engagements on its post, while Anthropic scored 41% on 3,738 mentions, far behind the likes of Pepsi’s 33K mentions.

Read more: CNBC, Business Insider and Digiday.

Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw joins OpenAI, agents to become «core»

OpenClaw, the open agentic platform you can steer from your favorite app to do lots of useful things, went viral over the last the couple of weeks — with millions of views, downloads, and 100k stars on GitHub.

It also spawned Moltbook, and showed the future of intelligent AI agents for all to see — as the founder, Steinberger, was inundated with investment and job offers.

Continue reading “Peter Steinberger of OpenClaw joins OpenAI, agents to become «core»”

Internal OpenAI model aids in physics discovery, answers expert maths quiz

OpenAI contributes to a solution for a physics problem that had long vexed scientists. (Picture: generated)
Having long said that discovery is the next benchmark, the model by OpenAI assisted researchers from the Institute for Advanced Study, Vanderbilt University, Cambridge University and Harvard in determining that gluons in some cases have amplitude, a key finding in quantum research.

The model helped scientists by simplifying expressions and made a simple formula for this general case.

Then it spent nearly 12 hours reasoning the new problem, verifying the formula and «producing a formal proof.»

Continue reading “Internal OpenAI model aids in physics discovery, answers expert maths quiz”

Anthropic closes $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation

Anthropic secures what has become a normally enormous valuation. (Picture: Anthropic)
The round is the second largest tech investment in history, and puts Anthropic close to the top of the valuation range for AI labs, having grown its revenue ten times for every year the last three years.

Their current run-rate revenue sits at $14 billion, they say, well within that range.

Continue reading “Anthropic closes $30 billion funding round at a $380 billion valuation”

OpenAI introduces Codex-Spark, greatly improving coding speed

Codex-Spark is small, fast, and almost as good as the real thing. (Pictures: OpenAI)
Thanks to their recent collaboration with Cerebras, the new model delivers «more than 1000 tokens per second while remaining highly capable for real-world coding tasks.»

The drawback is that it’s text-only and only has a 128K context window, and it’s supposed to be used «where latency matters as much as intelligence.»

Continue reading “OpenAI introduces Codex-Spark, greatly improving coding speed”

ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 video generator goes viral, prompts warnings

Kanye West can now sing perfectly in Mandarin, thanks to ByteDance’s new video model. (Picture: screenshot)
The new video generator, released on Thursday, is already being hyped by state media as bigger than the launch of DeepSeek, Reuters reports.

ByteDance has yet to publish any real numbers, but videos of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West singing in Mandarin have gone viral on Weibo and x.com with millions of views.

Continue reading “ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 video generator goes viral, prompts warnings”

Anthropic upgrades Claude’s free tier with file handling, connectors and skills

The free tier on Claude is leveling up, getting the most popular paid features. (Picture: Anthropic)
Using Sonnet 4.5, these features were previously only available on the paid tiers.

But now, Claude can create and manipulate Office files and PDFs for free.

Connectors are also available, which make it possible to link to Slack, Canva and others.

Anthropic is also making Skills free. These are saved prompts and workflows as a kind of template, that can be invoked at any time for repetitive tasks.

Finally, «Compaction» is becoming available on the free tier, which «summarizes earlier context automatically, so long conversations can continue without starting over.»

Together, these comprise «Claude’s most-used features,» Anthropic says.

Read more: Launch thread, writeup on Engadget.

Nvidia standardizing on GPT-5.3-Codex internally for ~30k engineers

OpenAI just scored a big win for its coding platform. (Picture: generated)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been touting the latest Codex coding model all week, praising the team and extolling how excited everyone is. Adoption is also growing, and now Nvidia is voting with their feet:

Codex is now rolling out to all engineers at the company, in close cooperation with the OpenAI team who built in «cloud-managed admin controls» and fail-safe processing.

They even helped onboard the Nvidia team, saying «It’s shocking how quickly they’ve adopted Codex», and that they move like a giant startup.

GPT-5.3-Codex was only launched last week, and is perceived as a possible profit engine, competing with Claude Code for enterprise customers.

ByteDance is developing in-house AI chips, to be manufactured by Samsung

Nvidia chips are available in China, but users need permission to buy them. (Picture: Adobe)
Not much is known about the AI inference chips, or how they compare to Nvidia’s offerings, but ByteDance is going to be making about 100,000 of them «this year,» and then scale up to 350,000 units, according to Reuters.

ByteDance has been known to work with US chip producer Broadcom, and started seriously hiring chip specialists in 2022.

The new chips are set to be produced with Samsung in a deal that includes memory chips, which definitely sweetens the deal.

Production is advanced enough that Reuters’ sources say engineering samples are due by late March, which is the last stage before production.

A spokesperson for the company does not deny the report outright, but claims the information is «inaccurate,» Reuters writes.

Most US frontier labs are developing their own chips, as is Alibaba and Baidu.

Read the scoop at Reuters.

Anthropic’s Cowork app comes to Windows, available to all paid tiers

The Cowork agent app was previously only available as a research preview on the Mac, but it’s now out on Windows for all paid tiers.

The agent lets you create summaries and manipulate files on your computer, and can access Slack, Google Calendar and Office files.

Read more about it here.

EU investigating WhatsApp AI ban, considering «interim actions»

The EU might decide that WhatsApp has to open for competing AI bots sooner rather than later. (Picture: European Commission)
The European Commission said yesterday that it had notified Meta on possible action to open up WhatsApp to rival AI chatbots.

Meta banned all AI chatbots other than Meta AI from WhatsApp on January 15th, and while the EU can take a long time to investigate antitrust allegations — they are considering issuing an early order to «avoid Meta’s new policy irreparably harming competition in Europe,» says Teresa Ribera, The EU’s Executive Vice-President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.

WhatsApp has over 3 billion users worldwide and qualifies as a gatekeeper in EU parlance, subject to rules on equal access.

Meta says that «There are many AI options and people can use them from app stores, operating systems, devices, websites, and industry partnerships,» in a statement to Reuters.

The process following this formal notification is that parties can examine the EU’s files, reply in writing and then receive a hearing. After that, the Commission will consider «interim measures,» such as restoring access for competitors, even as the case moves forward in their systems.

Read more: Statement by the EC, writeup on Reuters.

New «Chat» model coming this week, Altman says in memo to staff

After enjoying great success with GPT-5.3 on Codex, it seems to be ChatGPT’s turn this week. (Picture: generated)
While touting a return to more than 10% monthly growth for ChatGPT and «insane» Codex growth, Sam Altman also said they are preparing to launch «an updated Chat model» this week, writes CNBC.

That would likely be GPT-5.3, debuted last week for Codex. It’s a blazingly fast and more capable successor to 5.2, and is said to be one of the first models used to make itself.

The new Codex model has been a great success, funneling a 60% growth in overall use just last week.

That model is also available to Free and Go users for a limited time, and is now being extended with perhaps reduced limits, Altman says:

— We want everyone to be able to try Codex and start building.

Read the full scoop on CNBC