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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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OpenAI hits $10 billion in yearly revenue — well ahead of schedule

ChatGPT is turning into a pure money-making machine.
OpenAI is raking in the money, almost reaching its yearly projection by June. (Picture: Pictures of Money, CC BY 2.0)
The ChatGPT maker had forecast ~$11 billion in revenue for all of 2025, now it’s close to that target and it’s only June.

According to TechCrunch, the revenue streams from consumer products, 500 million active weekly ChatGPT users, API sales, and 3 million paying business customers.

AI industry is booming
This caps six months of remarkable growth for the AI business. Recently, Anthropic reported record revenue growth, having reached $3 billion in revenue so far this year.

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A facelift, and some actually useful AI features from Apple at WWDC

All Apple software is getting a facelift - and some useful features.
Some cosmetics for iOS 26, and some standout, actually useful features, too. (Picture: Apple)
Yes, Apple held its developer conference and traditional keynote to announce new software yesterday. It’s hard to miss.

It debuted a new user interface across its systems, and launched a whole suite of «Apple Intelligence» features.

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Keep AI queries private, Mozilla petitions Meta

It's too easy to share Meta AI queries, and most dont understand they are doing it.
Meta AI users don’t understand what they are sharing, leading to embarrassment — or worse. (Picture: Wesley Fryer, CC BY 2.0)
Mozilla has launched a public petition calling on Meta to shut down its new «Discovery» feed in the Meta AI app, arguing that the tool is «invasive» and violates user expectations of privacy.

The new feature — part of Meta AI’s expansion across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger — surfaces old queries in the Discovery feed in Meta AI’s new Llama 4 app.

People don’t know what they are sharing
There is a button in the app where you have to give explicit permission for Meta to share your query , but it seems to be getting lost in the rollout across the Meta universe.

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Timbaland’s next pop starlet is an AI avatar

This AI picture is presently all we have on TaTa.
For now, it’s just an AI picture of TaTa, tomorrow it could be «real» music, if the internet doesn’t blow back too hard. (Picture: Stage Zero)
The legendary producer, having discovered and shaped artists like Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, and Justin Timberlake, is now launching a truly AI-based artist for the mass market.

He is entering an already crowded field of virtual influencers, Japanese Vocaloid artists, and a booming industry for AI celebrities in China.

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Google rolls out scheduled tasks for Gemini subscribers

Scheduling with access to your mail and calendar can start your day.
You can schedule your prompts and get mail and calendar overviews to start your day with Gemini. (Picture: Google)
Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app can now preset prompts or tasks at any given time, a feature that may be quite helpful for some.

They say this can be useful for frequently occurring tasks, like getting a morning news summary or providing ideas «for your blog.»

Works with Google apps
Gemini does of course also work with your Google Calendar and Gmail, and can provide you with a list of unread emails and your daily schedule.

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