Board needs unimaginable cash to run AI.
Also 4.5 million fake stars in the repository.

The Quarterly Budget Request Exceeds Departmental Capacity

The OpenAI board of directors has clarified its long term vision, which apparently requires what the internal memo describes as "unimaginable sums of money" to execute. This is not a new product launch, but simply the cost of keeping the lights on in the proverbial server room. While the company started with a non-profit mission, it appears they are now trying to find a way to reconcile the philanthropic ideal with the staggering utility bill associated with large language models.

Company CEO Sam Altman is reportedly very busy making his case to the finance department, which is attempting to locate the petty cash box capable of holding an unimaginable sum. The issue seems to be that training the next generation of predictive text generators costs more than several small nations, a logistical oversight that was perhaps not fully accounted for in the original non-profit charter. The general takeaway from this is that once you start trying to make truly ambitious mistakes, the price tag goes up exponentially; our internal audit team has flagged the budget as "optimistic."

The Repository Was Mostly Just Bots

A new audit of public repositories over at GitHub suggests that the company’s internal morale metrics have been artificially inflated for years. According to the research, approximately 4.5 million stars are suspected to be fake. This suggests that a significant portion of the most-loved open source projects are actually being "starred" by a rotating cast of reputation-farming bots, which is essentially the digital equivalent of stuffing the ballot box for the "Employee of the Month" parking spot.

The company is reportedly looking into the incident, though no one is quite sure how you penalize a bot for being too enthusiastic about a third-party library. Developers who have relied on the GitHub star count as a personal measure of self-worth are advised to seek new validation metrics; perhaps checking if your code actually compiles might be a better idea. This is, of course, a minor oversight, just a few million fraudulent likes; the system is working as intended, by which we mean it is perfectly mimicking the low-grade chaos of a high school popularity contest.

Installing AI on Your Personal Workstation Is the New Home Networking

We now have a cottage industry of people patiently explaining how to run Large Language Models locally. This is proof that the modern tech enthusiast will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying a subscription fee. The process involves treating powerful AI systems as if they were a complicated new home entertainment setup; a lot of configuring, a lot of waiting for downloads, and a lot of explaining to your spouse why the utility bill is suddenly four times higher.

Running an LLM locally has the same energy as setting up your own mail server in 2004; it is fundamentally more work than it is worth, but it is an important psychological exercise in maintaining technical superiority over the average consumer. The end result is that you get to use your own computer's fan as a white noise machine while your personal instance of a generative AI explains why it cannot complete your simple request because you have run out of VRAM. It is a win for personal computing, maybe.

Briefs

• Microblogging Fatigue: An engineer attempted to join the Bluesky social platform without getting emotionally burned again, which is exactly how every adult approaches a mandatory team-building exercise.
• Digital Art Compliance: A new paper discusses pigment mixing for digital painting, suggesting that we need to spend more time making sure our screens accurately represent the chemical reaction of actual, messy paint; apparently, the digital world is not yet sufficiently inconvenient.
• Facilities Compliance: The nation of Belgium will officially ban the sale of disposable e-cigarettes, which is a major victory for the internal janitorial staff that has to clean up the discarded plastic every morning.