Elon Musk built Grok as the anti-woke alternative to ChatGPT and Gemini. According to a new analysis of AI political values, it would probably have voted for Biden.
The Economist put five major AI models through a global values survey normally reserved for humans. Every model, including Grok, landed left of centre on questions about wealth, merit and inequality.
Twenty-three minutes. That is how long it takes a social media account set up to look like a 16 to 18 year old boy to be shown misogynistic content, according to the audit Tanya Plibersek, Federal minister for social services, cites in this piece. Not sought out. Delivered.
Plibersek’s argument is blunt: young men are not choosing this content, they are being stalked by it. Everyday frustrations, rejection, loneliness, a bad week, get reframed by the algorithm as proof of a system rigged against men. Writing in The Saturday Paper, she traces how that reframing hardens into grievance, and how fast grievance gets monetised.
Every month SBS publishes a wall of text listing what is about to vanish from On Demand. Every month it mixes Studio Ghibli classics in with season 7 of some cooking show and a documentary about sharks, all sorted by date, none sorted by whether they are any good.
As I did in previous months I leaned on Claude to build a searchable and sortable page to make it easier to figure out what I really want to watch. SBS really should do this for their audience.
I pulled the full July list, stripped out the series and the reality TV, ran every standalone film past its IMDB rating and kept the ones at 7.0 or above. That left 94 films. The result is a single sortable, searchable page you can filter by rating, genre or leaving date.
Same hardware. Same model. Same quality output. Up to four times faster. And you don’t have to spend anything to get it.
That’s DSpark - a new text generation technique just published by DeepSeek. If you run AI models locally, this is going to matter to you.
Text to speech (TTS) is a brilliant service for those who would otherwise be literally speechless. Lost Voice Guy on Britain’s Got Talent rather humorously demonstrated the challenge.
But TTS has broad use. DIY personal podcasts. Read some text when on a walk or in the car. Share a personal update with someone who is more of a listener than a reader.
The good news is you don’t need to pay for a service like ElevenLabs to get quite good TTS. At least not on a Mac. (Don’t ask me about Windows — that’s for someone else to untangle).
Meta has a court order stopping Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her own book. She cannot talk about it, cannot criticise the company, cannot even sit near a bookshop that stocks it without risking a fine. So let me do the promoting for her.
The book is Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Wynn-Williams spent six years as Facebook’s global director of public policy. Her memoir is a first-hand account of what the company is like from the inside, and it is not flattering: allegations of sexual harassment, of courting Beijing with censorship tools, of contempt for the very users whose teenagers it studied.
Three days after Anthropic shipped its best ever model, the US government switched it off for everyone outside America. So I went looking for the next best thing, and OpenRouter reckons it has one.
Alan Turing taught himself electronics from an RCA vacuum tube manual on a ship crossing the Atlantic in 1943. Within months he was in a Nissen hut in the English countryside, building a working voice encryption device that shrank a 50,000 kilogram Bell Labs room-filling machine down to three shoebox-sized units. Donald Bayley was a young electrical engineering graduate who arrived at Hanslope Park in 1944. He found Turing’s soldered circuits looking like a “spider’s nest” and promptly dragged him through breadboarding boot camp.
TL;DR - The most powerful AI models from Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (GPT-5.5) are no longer clearly ahead. An open-weight challenger, Z.AI’s GLM 5.2, now matches the priciest flagships, beats Anthropic’s mainstream workhorse outright, and costs a fraction as much. At the same time the closed labs are quietly ending the all-you-can-eat deal on their heaviest models and moving to pay-per-use as they chase profit. If you pay for the top tier out of habit, now is the moment to check whether you still need to.
A quick orientation for anyone who does not live in this stuff. “Frontier” models are the biggest, most capable AI systems, the ones the headlines are about. Anthropic’s Claude Opus. OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. They are closed: you rent access, you cannot see inside them, and you cannot run them yourself.
“Open-weight” models are the opposite. The company releases the actual model so anyone can download it, run it on their own hardware or host it cheaply through a dozen competing providers. Z.AI’s GLM 5.2 is one of these.
I read Austin Henley’s post Automating my job away on a Friday night and did the laziest possible thing with it.
Henley’s whole piece builds to one prompt. A friend who runs a startup tells his team don’t do anything three times - if a task comes round more than twice, automate it. Henley took that to its logical end and pointed his coding agent at its own history.
So I copied his idea, swapped “Copilot” for “Cowork”, and pasted this in: