FeedCity

Jason Snell:

After last year, Apple could’ve been forgiven for wanting to soft-pedal this year’s Apple Intelligence announcements and regroup. It didn’t do that, nor did it double down on last year. Instead, it’s chosen a middle ground — a bit safe and familiar but also a place where Apple can feel a bit more like itself. In the long run, it needs to get this right. In the short term, maybe it should focus on meeting its users where they are, rather than pretending to be something it’s not.

Agree with Snell’s take completely, I do.

Link: sixcolors.com/post/2025/06/apple-intelligence-shifts-gears/

Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement

This is a big one. It's very easy to demonstrate that Midjourney will output images of copyright protected characters (like Darth Vader or Yoda) based on a short text prompt.

There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding through the US court system—including a class action lawsuit visual artists brought against Midjourney in 2023—but this is the first time major Hollywood studios have jumped into the fray.

Here's the lawsuit on Document Cloud - 110 pages, most of which are examples of supposedly infringing images.

Tags: ai-ethics, midjourney, generative-ai, training-data, ai, law

Breaking down ‘EchoLeak’, the First Zero-Click AI Vulnerability Enabling Data Exfiltration from Microsoft 365 Copilot Aim Labs reported CVE-2025-32711 against Microsoft 365 Copilot back in January, and the fix is now rolled out. This is an extended variant of the prompt inje...

Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement

This is a big one. It's very easy to demonstrate that Midjourney will output images of copyright protected characters (like Darth Vader or Yoda) based on a short text prompt.

There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding through the US court system—including a class action lawsuit visual artists brought against Midjourney in 2023—but this is the first time major Hollywood studios have jumped into the fray.

Tags: ai-ethics, midjourney, generative-ai, training-data, ai, law

Stephen Hackett has a list of the Intel Macs that MacOS 26 Tahoe supports, and the ones they’re dropping support for this year. Apple has gone through three CPU architecture transitions in the Mac’s history: 68K to PowerPC starting in 1994 PowerPC to Intel starting in 20...

Giving up on the idea that truth matters is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.

Malleable software New, delightful manifesto from Ink & Switch. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs. Modification becomes routine, not exceptional. Adaptation happens at the point o...

Since Jevons' original observation about coal-fired steam engines is a bit hard to relate to, my favourite modernized example for people who aren't software nerds is display technology. Old CRT screens were horribly inefficient - they were large, clunky and absolutely guzzl...

Anohni is a singer and songwriter originally from England, who started putting out music in 2000. She’s released 6 albums, and won the Mercury Prize. She’s also been nominated for two Brit Awards, and an Oscar. For this episode, I talked to her about the song "4 Degrees," fr...

[on the cheaper o3] Not quantized. Weights are the same.

If we did change the model, we'd release it as a new model with a new name in the API (e.g., o3-turbo-2025-06-10). It would be very annoying to API customers if we ever silently changed models, so we never do this [1].

[1] chatgpt-4o-latest being an explicit exception

— Ted Sanders, Research Manager, OpenAI

Tags: generative-ai, openai, o3, ai, llms

(People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)

— Sam Altman, The Gentle Singularity

Tags: sam-altman, generative-ai, ai-energy-usage, openai, chatgpt, ai, llms

Tight 7-minute video at the WSJ (and also at YouTube):

Apple’s AI rollout has been rocky, from Siri delays to underwhelming Apple Intelligence features. WSJ’s Joanna Stern sits down with software chief Craig Federighi and marketing head Greg Joswiak to talk about the future of AI at Apple — and what the heck happened to that smarter Siri.

Update: Here’s the full 24-minute interview. Just an excellent job by Stern.

Link: wsj.com/video/series/joanna-stern-personal-technology/apple…

AI-assisted coding for teams that can't get away with vibes This excellent piece by Atharva Raykar offers a bunch of astute observations on AI-assisted development that I haven't seen written down elsewhere. Building with AI is fast. The gains in velocity are important, bec...

o3-pro OpenAI released o3-pro today, which they describe as a "version of o3 with more compute for better responses". It's only available via the newer Responses API. I've added it to my llm-openai-plugin plugin which uses that new API, so you can try it out like this: llm i...

Oh, I never linked to Florian’s full gallery of Beyond Tellerrand 2025 photos. You might spot me in those!

As someone who has been using their iPad for most of their mobile computing tasks, I very much welcome all those new updates coming with iPadOS 26.

OpenAI just dropped the price of their o3 model by 80% - from $10/million input tokens and $40/million output tokens to just $2/million and $8/million for the very same model. This is in advance of the release of o3-pro which apparently is coming later today.

This is a pretty huge shake-up in LLM pricing. o3 is now priced the same as GPT 4.1, and slightly less than GPT-4o ($2.50/$10). It’s also less than Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 ($3/$15) and Opus 4 ($15/$75) and sits in between Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro for >200,00 tokens ($2.50/$15) and 2.5 Pro for <200,000 ($1.25/$10).

I’ve updated my llm-prices.com pricing calculator with the new rate.

How have they dropped the price so much? OpenAI's Adam Groth credits ongoing optimization work:

thanks to the engineers optimizing inferencing.

Tags: generative-ai, openai, o3, llm-pricing, ai, llms

I’ve had this album on my radar already. But it needed their fantastic live gig at this year’s Rock Hard festival to remind me to give it another listen. And I missed out! Great melodies, all the instruments deserve being listened to, and above all is this great emotional voice.

Bandcamp

Magistral — the first reasoning model by Mistral AI Mistral's first reasoning model is out today, in two sizes. There's a 24B Apache 2 licensed open-weights model called Magistral Small (actually Magistral-Small-2506), and a larger API-only model called Magistral Medium. Mag...