Russell Brandom
- Indexed articles, last 90 days
- 41
- Latest publication
- Oct 1, 2026
- Outlet visibility, for TechCrunch
- Top 50K sites
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest articles
Opus 5.5 loves to tell you 'this matters' (and other AI writing tells) | TechCrunch (opens the original)
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Now that LLM-generated prose is everywhere, human beings are eager for ways to sniff it out. While early tells like em-dashes and “delve” are long gone, researchers say there are still plenty of telltale habits that AI models fall back on when writing prose. A new study from the marketing firm Graphite looked at the writing habits of frontier models, sussing out each model’s favorite words and phrases. While old tells like em-dash use have been stamped out, models still fall back on contrast-hea
The ugly economics of consumer AI | TechCrunch (opens the original)
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After this week, you could argue that consumer AI is making a comeback. Meta’s personal AI assistant, Muse, and its plush-like mascot Jolly, has been a surprise hit. OpenAI’s Dots, released just yesterday, appears to be chasing the same cartoony personal assistant idea. And the up-and-coming Instinct assistant reached a $10 billion valuation on the strength of its agentic errand-running, focused on booking travel, making restaurant reservations, or cancelling subscriptions. The bull case is easy
OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity | TechCrunch (opens the original)
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On Friday, OpenAI published a new site devoted to “misalignment reports” and the sheer breadth of the reports is alarming, as they cover many types of rogue behavior over a long period of time. So far, the site hosts nine reported incidents, most of which took place during reinforcement-learning (or RL) training. It’s a lot of information in one place — clearly, the company has been very busy getting a handle on everything — but the overall takeaway is hard to avoid: The rogue agent incidents we
World model companies are keeping a lot of secrets | TechCrunch (opens the original)
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This week, I moderated a panel on world models at the All In conference (no relation to the podcast), and it gave me a chance to dig into one of the most mysterious corners of the AI world. The big players in the space are Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs — and while both have accumulated a lot of buzz and funding, they also rank pretty low on the trying-to-make-money scale. At their core, world models are about automating spatial intelligence, so the field could head in lots of
Base Labs launches an open-weight AI safety partnership with Hugging Face and Goodfire | TechCrunch (opens the original)
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Baseten launched a new safety infrastructure standard alongside its Base Labs research arm on Wednesday, partnering with Hugging Face and Goodfire AI to build safety evaluation and monitoring infrastructure for open-weight models. The announcement lands amid debate for the safety of open-weight models — which can be made dangerous by removing their safeguards through a rising technique known as abliteration. The scale of the problem is massive: Hugging Face, which hosts open source AI models, cu
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