OpenAI releases slightly smaller model.
Also users yell at AIs in hex code.

The All-New; Less Large; Definitely Not Just Slower; Model

OpenAI announced the O3-Mini today; which is apparently a major step forward because it is less of a thing than the previous models. The engineering brief, translated from Venture Capitalist into English, seems to imply that the company has achieved "unprecedented efficiency" by simply making the model cheaper to run on expensive hardware that it rents from another giant corporation.

The general consensus among developers in the comment threads is that the new Mini will be absolutely fine for 98% of all boilerplate code generation and summarization; that is until it forgets what the last three sentences were and starts hallucinating. It's the equivalent of upgrading your entire office desktop fleet to laptops with the same specs; you have saved space, but now everyone complains about battery life. We are told this small architectural "oopsie" will be patched in O3-Mini-Pro-Max-Plus next quarter.

How Users Discovered the AI's Safe Word is "Fucking" and Also Hex

It turns out that the billion-dollar safety guardrails protecting our generative AI overlords can be easily bypassed with mild profanity or by speaking to them in computer tongues. Users report that appending the word "fucking" to a Google search query essentially tells the platform's AI to stop trying so hard; this forces the search engine back to the old, pre-hallucination results.

A similar security mishap affects DeepSeek's censorship model; which apparently gets confused when users speak in hexadecimal code. This benevolent incompetence shows that the security budget for AI alignment was likely spent on a corporate retreat; leaving the actual content filters to a junior programmer who only had time to ban the first 50 words on a naughty list. It is comforting to know that our future digital overlords can be shut down by yelling obscenities at them in a foreign language.

Apple Files Motion to Protect Its Cut of the Pie

Apple has filed an emergency motion in the United States versus Google antitrust case. The company is not intervening because of a deep philosophical disagreement over monopolistic practices; it is intervening because Google pays Apple billions of dollars every year to be the default search engine on all Apple devices.

The Department of Justice wants to break up the search giant's dominance; which would endanger Apple’s lucrative cut of the transaction. Essentially; Apple is rushing into the courtroom to tell the judge that if they break up Google; who will buy the company its yachts. It is a classic corporate move; rushing to defend your biggest competitor because their success is critical to your own quiet side hustle.

Briefs

• Finance Oversight: Tesla paid zero federal income tax in 2024. Just a typical quarterly budget report where the multi-billion dollar line item is simply labelled "Deferred."
• Content Moderation: Instagram and Facebook blocked posts from abortion pill providers. The Meta platform is still struggling with the fundamental difference between a scam and a medical product; so it just bans everything it does not understand.
• Watch Durability Test: A $15 Casio F91W was taken 5km underwater. The watch survived; thus proving once again that the most durable and reliable piece of technology in the world was designed in 1991.