Tor Fosheim, Author at Teknotum

Friday news roundup – what you might have missed

Openai's future models will be deemed "high risk" for biology content. — OpenAI is putting additional guardrails on future models — as they are too good at biology. (Picture: OpenAI)

Google training AI on Youtube videos?
YouTube’s owner sits on an archive of over 20 billion videos, now being tapped to train its Veo 3 video model. But creators are alarmed about their content appearing in AI-generated outputs, raising red flags over copyright and IP rights. Google says it only uses a small subset of the repository and has «guardrails» in place:
«we’ve invested in robust protections that allow creators to protect their image and likeness in the AI era,» they say to CNBC.

Midjourney’s new Video model is only $10/month
While other video generation tools come with premium price tags, Midjourney’s new model is pitched as the first truly accessible option: «The first video model for everyone.» It animates either uploaded photos or AI-generated art, comes with a prompt field for control, and outputs 5-second clips. Early reactions: it excels at cartoons and stylized animation.
Read more at The Verge, their launch post on X, blog post, and check out the gallery here.

Biology in future OpenAI models getting so good, they pose a «high risk»
OpenAI warns that some successors to its current o3 models will cross thresholds in biological reasoning that trigger a «high risk» classification—raising concerns about misuse in synthesizing harmful materials. «They won’t be able to create bioweapons per se,» said safety lead Johannes Heidecke, «but extra safeguards will be deployed.»
Read more: A report on Axios and the blog post from OpenAI discussing the issue.

Eutelsat is creating a Starlink competitor
Europe is making a bold move to counter SpaceX dominance. Struggling satellite firm Eutelsat has secured $1.55 billion to expand its OneWeb network –€717M of that from the French state, which now holds a ~30% stake. «We must invest now,» Macron’s office said, «or risk dependence on foreign powers.»
Read more: France24 digs deep, Bloomberg is paywalled.

YouTube Shorts to get Veo3 integration «later this summer»

At the Cannes Lions 2025 festival, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan announced big updates to the short-form video platform, which is now the largest in the world with some 200 billion daily views.

Mohan said the Veo3 integration «will open new creative lanes for everyone to explore,» hailing the other AI functions on the platform.

Users can already use AI to translate across 9 different languages, expanding with 11 more «soon.»

Continue reading “YouTube Shorts to get Veo3 integration «later this summer»”

Amazon says it will reduce headcount due to AI efficiency

Amazon will reduce headcount as AI agent take over common tasks — Andy Jassy from a previous event. (Picture Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a company-wide email to workers yesterday, touting the progress they are making on AI implementation.

In it, he says AI agents are coming, and coming fast — and «it should change the way our work is done.»

Using AI everywhere
He wrote that Amazon has been on the bleeding edge of the revolution and is using AI in «virtually every corner of the company,» and goes on to list everything from intelligent shopping assistants to Alexa+.

Amazon has more that 1 000 generative services and applications built or in progress, Jassy says.

Continue reading “Amazon says it will reduce headcount due to AI efficiency”

OpenAI announces $200 million DoD deal, launches government group

OpenAI's Pentagon contract will be for national security, but also day to day efficiencies — OpenAI will work on critical national security for the Pentagon, and wants to be part of their daily work. (Picture, OpenAI)

The company is pooling all its government functions into a new group, «OpenAI for Government,» aimed at «deploying tools in the service of public good.»

The first partnership will be a $200 million Pentagon deal to «identify and prototype» AI across a wide range of functions, from healthcare to acquisitions and cyber defense.

National security «and enterprise»
According to CNBC, quoting the The Department of Defense, the awarded contract will deal with «critical national security challenges in both war fighting and enterprise domains.»

Continue reading “OpenAI announces $200 million DoD deal, launches government group”

New vaccine combines nanotech and mRNA to eradicate pancreatic cancer

Mixing nanoparticles and mRNA produces a vaccine that wors on anyone. — A promising vaccine for pancreatic cancer is a strong fighter. (Illustration: ChatGPT)

The promising new research by scientists at Case Western Reserve University and The Cleveland Clinic unlocks a new vaccine that could potentially eliminate the disease.

Just 13% of pancreatic cancer patients make it through five years, making it the deadliest cancer of all. It affects some 500,000 patients globally per year.

But the new treatment, combining an mRNA vaccine with nanoparticle delivery resulted in 50% of test subjects becoming cancer-free within months of the jab.

Continue reading “New vaccine combines nanotech and mRNA to eradicate pancreatic cancer”

Yes, there’s an AI ad out there — but the tech can do so much more

Google's Veo3 is used for a lot of "AI slop," but look carefully and you can find some real gems — A still from a Veo 3 video shared on r/VEO3. Yes, it’s supposed to look like that.

While big brands cautiously test the waters on national TV, Reddit’s r/VEO3 and X’s #Veo3 shows us what AI video is really capable of — and it’s not just ‘slop.’

It’s the weekend film festival you didn’t know you needed, running 24/7 in your browser.

Internet awash in short AI videos
Ever since Google launched Veo3 at I/O 2025, the internet has been awash in hundreds of thousands — maybe even millions — of photorealistic video clips made with the tool, of varying quality.

Continue reading “Yes, there’s an AI ad out there — but the tech can do so much more”

Google Workspace now auto-summarizes PDFs for you

Starting June 12th, Google’s Workspace customers will get summaries in the sidebar every time they open a PDF from Drive, according to Google’s blog.

The idea is that you won’t have read the whole thing, of course, but the feature also adds a couple of handy commands in the sidebar.

Performs actions
You can then perform actions, like «Draft a sample proposal,» or «List interview questions based on this resume.»

The PDF summary will open automatically, and there is a way to opt out in the Drive settings, if you think AI is getting a bit too intrusive in your life.

The feature is available in 20 languages, and should be available for many already — but Google says it might take as many as 15 days to fully roll out.

Read more: Google’s launch blog, and a writeup on The Verge

Google experiments with audio overviews in Search results

The feature, only available for Labs users in the US in English, lets you generate «quick, conversational audio overviews» for «certain» search queries.

That should let the audio play for you while you are multitasking or turning attention elsewhere.

«It gives a lay of the land», Google says, and The Verge notes it can also be set to a feature known to many NotebookLM users — with two simulated «podcast hosts» enthusiastically debating the results for you.

You can opt into the feature on Google Labs, and the feature will then pop up as an alternative under Google’s AI overviews on the results page.

Read more: Google’s blog announcement, and a summary at The Verge

Meta invests $14.3 billion in infrastructure company Scale AI, rivals leaving

Met Acquires 49% of Scale AI. — After weeks of speculation, Meta’s Scale AI deal is finally done. (Picture: Ishmael Daro, CC BY 2.0)

Hoping to straighten out its AI efforts, the Facebook owner forks out a stunning amount for 49% of the company. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang now joins Meta in a new «superintelligence» group.

With Meta calling it a «strategic partnership,» Wang is expected to be joined by «a small number of Scale AI employees,» writes CNBC.

Continue reading “Meta invests $14.3 billion in infrastructure company Scale AI, rivals leaving”

Quick Friday news roundup

Google can predict hurricanes with accuracy unheard of before — Google has launched a freakishly accurate Hurricane forecast, currently being tested with the U.S. National Hurricane Center. (Picture: Screenshot)

Nvidia is building in Europe!
The AI chip maker announced at the GTC Paris conference that they are working with partners in European countries to build both infrastructure and factories, marking probably the largest AI investment so far on the continent.
More at Investor’s Business Daily, and Nvidia’s press release.

A novel approach to the AI embargo in China
Chinese AI companies have found a route around the embargo of advanced AI chip sales to the country. Much like the early days of desktop publishing, they have taken to flying suitcases full of high density hard drives to neighboring Malaysia, to hook them up to a nicely unrestricted supercomputer and process the data.
More at The Wall Street Journal. See also: Sneakernet.

Massive Google Cloud outage affects just about everyone
Google’s cloud service went down from 11:46 until 14:23 PST yesterday, affecting a lot of internet services, like Spotify, Cloudflare, Discord and Snapchat. It also affected certain login features at OpenAI, impacted most services at Anthropic and, of course Google’s own Gemini, listing the entire time span as «full outage.»
More at: TechCrunch, and r/singularity.

Google AI with high precision hurricane forecasts
Google DeepMind & Google Research have launched a model that simulates 50 storm scenarios up to 15 days out, now being trialed with the U.S. National Hurricane Center. Early results show forecasts are ~87 miles more accurate than Europe’s ECMWF model. It’s a smarter, data-rich companion to traditional physics systems—and a potentially big step forward in saving lives.
More at The Verge and check it out at Google’s weather lab.

Altman sees mass job loss — and plans to counter with more AI

Altman: Whole classes of jobs going away. — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns about the very hard parts of the coming AI train. (Picture: OpenAI)

In what was surely supposed to be an inspirational essay from Sam Altman, he drops a few more tidbits around his «scary times ahead» warning from earlier this month.

Whole categories of jobs will be wiped out, he writes — but then says AI will bring us so many benefits and new policy options we won’t care much:

— There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before, he writes.

Continue reading “Altman sees mass job loss — and plans to counter with more AI”

Wikipedia scraps AI summaries after editor pushback

No more AI summaries for Wikipedia unless they figure out editorial control. — Wikipedia’s editors wanted editorial control over the AI summaries, and wanted to ensure accuracy. (Picture: Wikipedia)

You’ve probably seen lots of AI summaries on articles by news sites all over the web by now, but when Wikimedia thought it would be a good feature, its editors rebelled.

— This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source, one editor wrote in the discussion about the announcement, as reported by 404 Media.

The experiment was supposed to run on 10% of the mobile site for two weeks to gather reactions and responses, but it was canned early due to an onslaught of comments like this.

Continue reading “Wikipedia scraps AI summaries after editor pushback”

OpenAI’s open weights model now coming «later this summer»

OpenAI's open weights model is set for a slightly later summer release. — Sam Altman at an earlier event. (Picture: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0)

The company first announced that it will be launching an open weights model on a generous license in April 2025 — and now it has a slightly delayed, yet slightly firmer release date.

The timeline for the release was originally slated for early summer, writes TechCrunch.

Announced to compete with Llama, DeepSeek
An open weights model basically means you can run the AI on your computer, tinker with it, and modify the «weights,» whitch means the leveling, the priorities and instructions of the model itself.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s open weights model now coming «later this summer»”

OpenAI launches o3-pro, drops o3 API prices by 80%

O3-pro makes you wait a little longer, but it's worth it, OpenAI says — OpenAI’s new o3-pro model is slower, but better, they say

ChatGPT o3-pro is designed to think longer and «provide the most reliable responses.»

According to OpenAI’s release notes, it scores about 10% better than o3 in select benchmarks.

It is available for Pro and Team users, replacing the o1-pro model. It should be available to Enterprise and Edu users next week.

o3-pro also has access to tools, and can therefore search the web, analyze files, take visual inputs and use Python, OpenAI says.

Continue reading “OpenAI launches o3-pro, drops o3 API prices by 80%”

ChatGPT had «partial outage» lasting seven hours

OpenAIs outage seems to be compounding. — Service issues across the board, across the earth. (Picture: Screenshot)

Responses of «Hmm… something seems to have gone wrong» were permeating on ChatGPT’s services across the globe, but the issues have largely been resolved.

The outage was affecting everything from the web service, to iOS/Android/Windows and macOS apps, across GPTs, Deep Research, Operator, Codex, Sora and Image Generation.

Intensifying errors
Downdetector collected reports on the outage since 0900 CET/0300 EST, and it seemed to peak in the early hours today.

Continue reading “ChatGPT had «partial outage» lasting seven hours”