Author: Tor Fosheim

Codex grows to 2 million weekly users, acquires Python developers Astral

With the popular developers joining, Codex moves in closer on the software stack. (Picture: Shutterstock)
While announcing that Codex had a 3x increase in users and 5x more actual usage this year, and are up to 2 million weekly active users, OpenAI says they are buying Python developer tool company Astral.

Some of the most beloved and, importantly, used Python developer tools come from the company, which will now be supported by OpenAI.

The deal for roughly 32 employees will strengthen Codex by integrating the tools that have «hundreds of millions of downloads per month,» according to Astral themselves.

OpenAI will continue to maintain the open source projects, and by gaining access to them — and the engineers’ knowhow — for Codex’s AI agents, they will be able to work more closely with the tools.

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, Astral’s announcement, and CNBC.

«Vibe design» by Gemini — Google updates Stitch for the AI age

Design help from Google? If it floats your boat. (Picture Google)
Promising to let «anyone» create layouts with natural language prompts and turn them into «high-fidelity UI designs,» Stitch is supposed to let you «vibe design» your projects.

It is intended to let you «explore ideas quickly» with a «high quality outcome.»

The app can take input from text, images, or code, and provides you with an entire design language that you can pick and choose from, with an «infinite» canvas storing your ideas.

It should be equally good at designing for the web and apps, but does come out as somewhat boilerplate and generic.

I tried to get it to brainstorm a little about improving the design of this webpage, and the results were terrible, but it might be worth it for other projects.

The improved Stitch is available at stitch.withgoogle.com and can be accessed for free anywhere Gemini is available.

Read more: Google’s introduction, launch tweet.

OpenAI upgrades GPT-5.3-instant to be «less clickbait-y» in its responses

“If you want, I can also explain…”-clickbait should largely be gone from the model after the latest update. (Picture: generated)
5.3-instant is the model most people encounter on the Plus and Pro subscriptions on a daily basis. It was supposed to be «less cringe,» and offer «fewer lectures.»

But many had noticed that it had become filled with follow-up questions for simple queries, offering «one strange trick,» «would you like me to tell you three things that…» and «You’ll never believe…»

These teaser-style responses were not just annoying, but sometimes frustrating — as if the bot had become optimized for engagement and tried to keep the conversation going after already answering the query.

The good news is that as of March 16, 2026, OpenAI has upgraded the model to show less of this slop, and users should already be noticing an improvement in «follow-up tone.»

Read more: OpenAI’s update page, Android Headlines.

Anthropic surveys 81,000 people in 159 countries about their thoughts on AI

Most respondents hail AI for the learning experience, but some worry about agency and thinking less. (Picture: Anthropic)
Capturing a wide sentiment across the world, the survey also breaks down what people expect, and their fears and hopes on AI.

— For the first time, AI has enabled us to collect rich, open-ended interviews at extraordinary scale, Anthropic writes. — We believe this is the largest and most multilingual quantitative survey ever conducted.

It finds that the USA is most worried about the future with AI, while Brazil, India and most of Southeast Asia are generally positive toward it.

For what people expect and hope for from AI, the results are varied, but the top answer is «Professional excellence» (18.8%), «Personal transformation» 13.7%, and «Life management» at 13.5%.

The responses on whether AI actually delivered on any of those aspirations falls short, though — with 32% responding that it helped on productivity and 28.9%, in second place, saying that «AI hasn’t delivered.»

The survey found that, globally, 67% of respondents have a positive view of AI.

Read the full survey on Anthropic.

ChatGPT’s «adult mode» hotly debated at OpenAI, will be smutty, but not porn

There are several roadblocks for Adult Mode, should it ever come to pass. (Picture: generated)
According to The Wall Street Journal, the upcoming «adult mode» for ChatGPT is hitting some internal snags.

Touted by CEO Sam Altman as letting «adults be adults» in October 2025, it was later delayed and then deprioritized last week.

It now seems the company’s internal advisory board is against going forward with the feature, saying it could foster «unhealthy emotional dependence,» Mashable writes.

Also holding back the launch is the fact that ChatGPT’s age checks aren’t that good, and has a rather large error rate of 12% on identifying kids and teens, The Verge reports.

100 million under 18s use ChatGPT every week, which would mean that some 12 million of them could be classified as adults and exposed to «sexualized conversations.»

The feature is currently postponed due to «other priorities,» but is said to skirt images, voice and video for pure text, and will supposedly be «smutty,» not «pornographic,» the Verge says.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Mashable and The Verge.

Google’s «Personal Intelligence» now available for free users in the U.S.

Shopping for a bag to go with your shoes? Google already knows. (Picture: Google)
It seems the tie-in between Google’s Calendar, Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search and Gemini has been popular — and they are now expanding the service to free users.

— People are appreciating the highly tailored help they’re getting in AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app, Google says.

Personal intelligence can be useful for anything that involves your history with Google, like searching for another pair of sneakers you already bought, shopping for a bag to go with said shoes — or are planning a travel itinerary based on past preferences.

You need to be signed into a personal Google account for it to work, and it is not available for Workspace business, Enterprise, or Education users, TechCrunch notes.

The feature is also explicitly opt-in, and you have to choose to turn it on. There are also granular controls for disabling each app or service, so you can opt out of having Gemini scour your previous web searches and use them in replies, for instance.

Read more: Google’s announcement, TechCrunch and 9to5Google.

OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 mini and nano for Free and Go tiers

GPT-5.4-mini comes close to GPT-5.4 on accuracy and cost. (Picture: OpenAI)
Being about two times faster than the previous GPT-5-mini, the models offer solid coding performance for these tiers for the first time.

GPT-5.4-mini can be accessed today by choosing «Thinking» from the model picker on the Free and Pro tiers.

The model is stronger than 5-mini on reasoning, multimodal understanding, tool use and subagents, OpenAI says.

It is also available in Codex, where it uses only 30% of tokens for the same task compared to 5.4 proper — and is usable for workloads where latency and speed are important.

Also introduced today is GPT-5.4-nano, which is for the times when speed and cost matter most. It costs only $0.20/$1.25 per 1M tokens, and is handy for mass classification, ranking, coding subagents and compaction.

Nano doesn’t support web search or computer use, and is only available in the API.

Read more: OpenAI’s introduction, Tibor Blaho on X.com, Engadget.

Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI over copyright and trademarks

The jury is still out on copyright protections for training materials in AI chatbots. (Picture: Britannica)
The revered encyclopedia along with Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries has sued the ChatGPT maker for training on their data and producing «verbatim reproductions» of their content, Reuters reports.

This erodes their copyright, they claim, and «starves publishers of revenue,» because people get their answers directly in ChatGPT rather than getting referred to their websites, TechCrunch writes.

Britannica is also claiming that ChatGPT erodes its trademarks by producing hallucinations and attributing them to their products.

There have been a lot of copyright lawsuits since the early days of LLM chatbots, but only a few have been settled. One judgment is from the Anthropic case, where a judge found that training on copyrighted works was «no different than training schoolchildren to write well».

Other judges have been more skeptical.

Read more: Reuters, TechCrunch, Engadget.

Nvidia will sell $1 trillion of its AI chips by 2027, launches inference rack

The Groq 3 LPU has only 500 MB of memory, but it’s SRAM flying at 150 TB/s. (Picture: Nvidia)
The Blackwell and Rubin series of chips are selling like hotcakes, the Nvidia CEO says at the Games Developer Conference, as he doubles the previous guidance of $500 billion in sales and justifies a market valuation topping $4 trillion.

Huang’s most interesting offering at the show was the new Groq 3 LPX, a custom rack made for inference loads.

Continue reading “Nvidia will sell $1 trillion of its AI chips by 2027, launches inference rack”

After pivoting hard to AI content, BuzzFeed faces questions of survival

BuzzFeed was riding high in the 2010’s, but then pivoted to AI. Now, they worry about making it through the year. (Picture: generated)
BuzzFeed was once the darling publisher of the Internet, and became the first new media unicorn with a valuation as high as $1.7 billion around 2016.

Back then, it was hiring a new staffer every day, and developed a Pulitzer Prize winning newsroom.

Fast forward to January 2023 and CEO Jonah Peretti said the company would pivot hard to AI quizzes, and in April the same year, he shut down the newsroom and said that AI would replace most of the static content on the site, Futurism reports.

Three years later, the company’s quizzes didn’t take off and the AI content was underwhelming — leaving the company with a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025.

Continue reading “After pivoting hard to AI content, BuzzFeed faces questions of survival”

Entering the halls of power, AI chatbots get approved for U.S. Senate use

The Senate officially clears the big three chatbots for staffer use. (Picture: generated)
After some staffers had been using chatbots informally at work since at least 2025, the Senate’s Sergeant at Arms office of the Chief Information Officer has now approved three of them officially.

The chatbots cleared for «drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis» are ChatGPT Enterprise, Gemini on Workspace and Copilot, according to Business Insider.

Anthropic’s Claude is not on the list, although it has been approved for use in The House of Representatives since September 2024. President Trump earlier said government agencies shouldn’t use Claude after the Pentagon spat in February.

The Sergeant at Arms will now provide all Senate employees with an AI chatbot license at no cost. The office also touts Copilot Chat as integrated with Office 365 and is usable with Word and Excel — although Claude also offers this capability.

Read more: Business Insider has the memo, NY Times reported it first. Popvox has a Congressional AI tracker.

Internet legend Digg’s relaunch on hold after deluge of AI slop

Digg.com was once one of the great traffic drivers on the internet, and popularized many iconic memes. (Picture: Digg)
Digg.com is looking to make a reboot with its original founder, after a public beta for the link-sharing site was literally drowned in a sea of AI bots and SEO spam.

— Building on the internet in 2026 is different. We learned that the hard way, writes CEO Justin Mezzell, — We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.

Launched in 2004, as some readers might remember, Digg was once not just viral, but a virality machine. It was one of the original link sharing and commenting platforms that could see massive engagement and send great amounts of traffic to pages getting upvoted.

Continue reading “Internet legend Digg’s relaunch on hold after deluge of AI slop”

Meta postpones launch of «Avocado» model until «at least» May

Meta’s new model can’t beat Gemini 3, and is delayed for more work. (Picture: generated)
After spending untold billions on talent, data centers and chips, homegrown and from AMD and Nvidia, Meta’s new foundational model is found lacking.

Pushing back the launch from «early 2026» is due to performance issues, The New York Times reports — as the model «currently falls between Gemini 2.5 and Gemini 3.»

This falls far behind the Meta Superintelligence Lab’s ambitions of «pushing the frontier,» after working on the new model «for months,» Reuters reports.

— We’re ​excited for people ​to see ⁠what we’ve been cooking very soon, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

Apparently, Meta AI has considered «temporarily» licensing Google’s Gemini model to propel their AI products while they wait for their own models to catch up.

Read more: The New York Times (paywalled) and Reuters.

«Ask Maps» brings Gemini 3 intelligence, personalization to Google Maps

You can now get pretty comprehensive natural language answers from Google Maps. (Picture: Google)
With the latest Maps upgrade, you can ask questions in natural language and have Gemini answer with map-specific information.

The feature is supposed to work great for questions of where to find the nearest restroom, or a cozy vegan restaurant nearby — and it even lets you book a table right from the app.

To achieve this, Gemini will scan information from the Maps database consisting of some 300 million places and reviews from over 500 million contributors to find you just the right spot.

Ask Maps also remembers your previous saved spots or queries, so it will know that you are vegetarian, say, or if you have any special needs or preferences.

Of course, once you find a spot, Maps will help you navigate to get there — and in the biggest update in a decade, you now get a 3D driving experience.

Ask Maps is only available on mobile in the USA and India, with desktop support «coming soon.»

Read more: Google’s announcement, The Verge, Engadget.

Anthropic introduces charts and diagrams in Claude, days after ChatGPT

Claude can now illustrate some concepts and processes within the main chat window, just days after ChatGPT added visuals for some math queries.

Previously, Claude could draw illustrations in a sidebar window that you could copy or download, but these can be interactive and are made inside the main chat, writes The Verge.

Sometimes, the chatbot will determine itself if a concept needs illustrating, or you can simply ask it to make one yourself — and it will draw a chart from html and xml vectors.

The feature is available to all users, paid and free — but it’s officially in beta, so users can expect hiccups, and it’s not available on mobile, notes Engadget.

Read more: The Verge, Engadget.