In the early days of adapter-based tuning, LoRA often felt like a charming hack—efficient, plausible, but with a nagging question: would performance always trail full fine-tuning? New research from Thinking Machines, led by John Schulman (co-founder of OpenAI and creator of the PPO algorithm), argues that the difference is not inevitable. Under the right regime,...
Author: Zoe Spark
When your AI orders for you: Inside the messy reality of OpenAI and Google’s payment protocols
The pitch sounds effortless: tell ChatGPT what you want, tap to confirm, and it's yours. No tabs, no forms, just done. The reality behind that tap is a Rube Goldberg machine of cryptographic contracts, payment tokenization, and fraud detection built atop infrastructure that assumes humans are clicking buttons. OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, letting...
Accidental Lovers: How ChatGPT Became the World’s Biggest Companion AI
As GPT-5 rollouts trigger genuine grief among users, researchers document the first large-scale analysis of human-AI intimacy The 2013 film Her anticipated today's reality more accurately than it first appeared. In the movie, Theodore purchases an advanced OS for help and companionship during a difficult divorce—not explicitly seeking romance. The love story emerges organically from...
Why your “reproducible” AI keeps changing its mind
Ask ChatGPT the same question twice with temperature set to zero and a fixed seed—settings that should guarantee identical responses—and you'll likely get different answers. It's a phenomenon so common that most AI practitioners have learned to live with it, chalking it up to the inherent messiness of neural networks running on parallel hardware. Mira...
Anthropic’s data shows AI adoption is creating a global digital divide
The future, it turns out, is unevenly distributed—and we now have the data to prove it. Anthropic's latest Economic Index report reveals striking geographic disparities in AI adoption that could reshape global economic inequality for decades to come, painting a picture of a world where access to transformative technology depends heavily on where you happen...
Meet the “Superhero Janitors”: Vibe Coding Cleanup Specialists Cleaning Up AI’s Coding Disasters
When Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI director, coined the term "vibe coding" in February 2025, describing it as a process where "you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists," he probably didn't expect to spawn an entire cleanup industry. Yet that's exactly what happened....
Prompt sets are the new PRDs: How AI is fundamentally rewiring product development
The humble Product Requirements Document (PRD) has been the backbone of software development for decades. These lengthy documents outlined features, user stories, and technical specifications in painstaking detail before a single line of code was written. But according to Aparna Chennapragada, Chief Product Officer at Microsoft, that era is rapidly coming to an end. "I...
Why AI Keeps Making Stuff Up: The Real Reason Language Models Hallucinate
Picture this: You ask a state-of-the-art AI chatbot for someone's birthday, specifically requesting an answer only if it actually knows. The AI confidently responds with three different dates across three attempts—all wrong. The correct answer? None of the confident fabrications even landed in the right season. This isn't a glitch. According new research from OpenAI,...
Vibe coding 101: How to build software by talking to AI (without setting your project on fire)
The explosive rise of large language models (LLMs) has given birth to a new kind of developer: the vibe coder. Unlike the meticulous, line-by-line craftsperson of an earlier era, the vibe coder engages in a conversational dance with an AI partner. You describe what you want in plain English, the AI generates code, and you...
The LLM Cost Paradox: How “Cheaper” AI Models Are Breaking Budgets
In the seemingly upside-down world of artificial intelligence economics, getting cheaper has never been more expensive. While headlines celebrate the dramatic fall in AI token pricing—with costs decreasing by 10x every year for equivalent performance—a growing number of AI companies are discovering that their bills are actually skyrocketing. The culprit? A fundamental shift in how...
