Short posts
I usually keep my baseball thoughts to group texts, but $60 million aav for Kyle Tucker is just disgusting
Opus 4.5 result on METR task duration is wild
New from me: Researchers tested AI on hundreds of real freelance jobs. The best system did 2.5% successfully.
New: We got data behind a ChatGPT wrongful death lawsuit. The results are horrifying.
More details here (🎁): https://wapo.st/4qxaGGe
New AI image technique by Qwen is the first I’ve seen that uses layers natively — like actual artists and designers do. Once layer-aware AI gets built into design software, look out.
Qwen-Image-Layered: Towards Inherent Editability via Layer Decomposition
I partnered with @geoffreyfowler.bsky.social to test a bunch of AI editing tools, and something ~very interesting~ happened.
We asked Gemini to generate a professional photo of an actor crying at the Oscars. It did — including a fake copyright notice from a real AP photographer.
Google said it was “refining” its safeguards. The AP didn’t answer questions about whether Gemini had rights to train on its photos.
The full test results 🎁 -> https://wapo.st/48IQawf
How interesting that OpenAI did not have to train a new video model to start generating Disney characters … :| https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement/
Caught up on some blogs post-Thanksgiving and gotta recommend these two gems:
“You should write an agent” I endeavored to do this myself one week, and then somehow just 30 minutes later it was done) -> https://fly.io/blog/everyone-write-an-agent/
“Parsing PDFs with Antigravity” Another win for using AI to do journalism tasks in a reproducible way aka by writing code you can check and rerun ->
Parsing PDFs with Antigravity – Matt Waite’s Collection of Miscellany
Made a chart showing how OpenAI’s lead has evaporated, according to the Artificial Analysis intelligence index
Full story -> 🎁 https://wapo.st/3Xy8Xnz
Interesting study -> New research suggests AI chatbots can shift people’s political views more effectively than campaign ads on TV. https://wapo.st/49RSstP