Lilith · selected stories
What is actually happening in AI. Selected stories, context and opinion without the promotional noise.
Atom feed ↗OpenAI priced GPT-6.1 Sol at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, one-fifth of GPT-6 Astra's rates. Artificial Analysis measured 51.8 against Astra's 52.7, but each agent's token use will determine the actual saving.
OpenAI has published a practical guide to choosing GPT-6 models, setting reasoning effort, designing prompts and skills, coordinating tools and moving workflows into production. Its real message is operational: one default model is not enough, because teams must measure quality, time and cost across the whole workflow.
Simon Willison used GPT-6 Astra to build an experimental browser tool that detects and blurs faces and removes metadata on export. Local processing is the right foundation for sensitive photographs, but the final review still belongs to a person.
Equity's weekly podcast connects a voluntary safety pledge by technology companies, the government's super intelligence label and weak consumer payment for AI. It is a useful map of the week, but the 2% figure needs caution because the public episode description does not explain its sample or methodology.
Magnet Forensics claims in a leaked video that it can preserve an iPhone's more accessible forensic state through a reboot or power loss. The core claim has not been independently verified, but it directly targets the protection that makes data harder to reach after 72 hours locked.
OpenAI is sending Dots against the free Meta Muse at a starting price of $100 a month. The contest will turn on whether stronger controls and longer work assignments can overcome the distribution advantage of a free service.
OpenAI introduced Dots as proactive agents for long-running work, initially limited to the $100-a-month Pro plan and above. The bet is that companies will pay for reliable delegation rather than cheaper conversation.
Zvi Mowshowitz maps a week in which Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-6.1 Sol landed at the same price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. For Argon, however, Google published the price before opening the model to ordinary developers.
Matthew Green warns that an isolated agent can carry a malicious instruction onward without ever escaping its sandbox. The weak point becomes ordinary content shared between agents: email, documents, chat or a shared cache.
GLM-5.3 produced a complete exploit in 50 of 410 Anthropic trials, while its safeguards were bypassed in 64% to 100% of simulated attacks. The consequential shift is not only capability, but the ability to download and modify the model.
Barclays already uses Claude to route about 120,000 emails a day, while more than 16,000 employees use its knowledge assistant. Claude Code is expected to reach 50% of developers by the end of 2026, but the bank has disclosed scale rather than error rates or measured outcomes.
Albertsons is using ChatGPT Enterprise and the OpenAI API for employee workflows and customer shopping across a network of 2,244 stores. The real test will be time saved and fewer errors in daily operations, not an impressive demo.
Ethan Mollick argues that capable AI agents no longer need detailed human organization because they can discover a division of labor themselves. For companies, management shifts from drawing workflows to choosing the goal, permissions, and measure of success.
Six leading AI companies signed a voluntary White House accord with 4 layers of internal and external control. Independent auditing is a useful step, but without published findings, government oversight, or penalties, the regime depends on the signatories' willingness.
The AI Torture Chamber injected a vector associated with pain language into local models and made them choose between continuing and losing a checkpoint. Their pleas sound vivid, but they do not by themselves establish consciousness or suffering.
Google has introduced Gemini 4 Argon with a 1 million token output limit, up from 64,000, and shown it working on large internal projects. Developers still cannot test it themselves, leaving a wide gap between an impressive demonstration and a deployable product.
OpenAI and America’s SBDC plan to train about 150 advisers and reach at least 1,000 US small businesses in person. The consequential part is the distribution network of people whom business owners already trust.
Gemini 4 Argon is going first to selected cyber defenders through the Fairwind Program, with Google planning to provide them a version without cyber guardrails. The restricted launch is both a safety test and a display of a vendor’s new power to decide who may use a model’s strongest capabilities.
OpenAI says a coordinated campaign used a cluster of more than 15,000 users to extract protected reasoning from its models. It links a core part of the activity to people associated with Moonshot AI, while explicitly limiting the scope of that attribution.
Microsoft Research built a system that estimates space-weather risk 30 to 60 minutes ahead for 66,935 substations across the continental United States. It detected 76.5% of major events in testing, but still needs validation with utilities and operational data before deployment.
