In this issue: Apple announces two surveillance features and skips the EU. Marcel Salathé on why the AI doom discourse looks like collective madness. Two SPIEGEL notebooks that answer questions we never wrote articles about. And Sam Altman, played by Spider-Man.
Hi, I'm Ole Reissmann, a journalist who builds things. I'm the first Director of AI at SPIEGEL. Before that: podcasts, news product development, platform strategy. I write about AI and journalism and send a newsletter you might enjoy.
This is why LinkedIn is about to get even worse: Rysy is an open-source AI agent that researches people, builds psychological portraits from public signals, and drafts outreach calibrated to the person and your intent.
The biggest bottleneck to AI adoption: A blank text box hides everything when the interface should reveal its own capabilities. (Miguel Acevedo)
Four Questions with Agnes Stenbom Swedling, Nordic AI Journalism
Three Questions with Tom Hillenbrand, SciFi-Author
Three Questions with Alba Mora Roca, AJ+
Three Questions with Rignam Wangkhang, CBC
Three Questions with Shuwei Fang, Harvard-Fellow
Three Questions with Cecilia Rikap, University College London
Three Questions with Kemal Görgülü, Arte
Three Questions with Nikita Roy, Newsroom Robots
Four Question with Jaemark Tordecilla, Journalist and Advisor
Three Questions with Tess Jeffers, Wall Street Journal
Three Questions with Rubina Fillion, New York Times
European AI lab Desert Ant launched 18 small on-device models for audio, vision, and text. No round-trips, no tokens, no data leaving the device.
The Extinction Archive: Public doomsday statements next to whatever the company was announcing that same week. (Diletta Huyskes)
Trailer for “Artificial”, Hollywood’s retelling of the birth of ChatGPT. Spider-Man actor Andrew Garfield plays Sam Altman. Ominous music by Damon Albarn, of Blur and Gorillaz, and strong “The Social Network” vibes.
Deep Tailoring
Not a product you can buy—it’s a thought experiment on weaponizing behavioral science. An AI system maps your entire psychological profile—your core beliefs, moral values, identity markers—then uses that data to predict your behavior and design messages to influence you without detection. Scale this process across millions of users and automate it completely. Luttrell, Andrew,...
Google Search auto-expands some AI Overviews, burying the actual results even further. The web is still down there somewhere. Keep scrolling. (Jay Peters, The Verge)
SecondBrain turns Claude Code into a private, sourced wiki: drop in a PDF, a web page, or a note, let it organize everything into cross-linked articles, then ask questions and get answers with citations. Stays on your machine. macOS app included.
Mother Jones is suing OpenAI. Now the Trump administration has filed a brief, arguing that making AI companies pay for content would just be a handout to “old mainstream media companies.” (Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones)
What you’re up against blocking bots: A solo developer built Obscura, a headless browser that spoofs fingerprints well enough that no tracker can catch it. (via Aymane Mrini)
One year in, Switzerland’s open-source AI model Apertus has found real-world uses like translations, but lags behind commercial rivals on coding, math, and reasoning. You can’t train on the murky data everyone else is quietly using in the open. (Sara Ibrahim, swissinfo.ch)
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
