Ole Reissmann

The Thinking Game: This documentary from 2024 takes us behind the scenes with Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis, showing how they taught their algorithms to play video games, chess, and Go, before moving on to protein folding. It’s compellingly told, though it sidesteps what was happening simultaneously at OpenAI and elsewhere. For free on YouTube.

Palantir is providing Fox News with three AI tools: “Topic Radar” generates custom briefings for reporters, “Text Editor” reviews articles for style and readability, and “Article Insights tracks performance and suggests optimizations. (Sara Fischer, Axios)

How we use AI in our journalism (Axios)

Case Study: How the Financial Times Approaches Transparency about AI Use in News (Liz Lohn, Felix M. Simon)

12 lessons from news outlets on the cutting edge of AI (Jacob Granger, Journalism UK)

With the new ChatGPT 5.1, you can give the chatbot one of several preset personalities – from cynical, friendly to nerdy. This is supposed to make it nicer, warmer, more entertaining again, like the 4o variants. Otherwise, there’s still general confusion about whether the model is actually new. Ethan Mollick has examples on LinkedIn.

“Shell Game” is back: Evan Ratliff’s podcast returns. The first new episode comes alongside a major Wired feature: “Sam Altman says the one-person billion-dollar company is coming. Maybe I could be that person—if only I could get my colleagues to shut up and stop lying.” (Podcast, Article)

Swiss Tagesanzeiger reports on the business of junk content and automated pseudo-news. Fakes were spread about one of the article’s authors. The journalists spoke with a junk site operator who comes from the SEO world (of course) and thinks it’s all wonderful.

While everyone is talking about Liquid Content, Time Magazine is launching its AI Agent, a kind of Deep Research based on its own archive.

This is not one of those “superintelligence is just around the corner” pieces, but rather asks if maybe we’re already learning too much about our own brains, demystifying thinking and its implications. You can’t know too much, can you? (James Somers, The New Yorker)

Make this your weekend read: Designer Frank Chimero talks about AI and specifically vibe coding. “Time saved is not strength gained,” he says, and gets into how Brian Eno works with machines for his music. And then there is a nice riff on the Ghibli movie “Spirited Away”. Recommended!

The BBC wants to make its AI use transparent to users – and is coming up with a new icon: Sparkles out, nondescript, boring, unobtrusive hexagon in.