Apple outsources Siri brain for money.
Also, the intern got production access again.

The Open Floor Plan Now Includes the LLM

Anthropic released "Cowork," a research preview that lets Claude, their Large Language Model, basically roam free across a user's entire computing environment. The press release insists this is a "helpful digital colleague" that can complete complex tasks across different applications, which is exactly what the Systems Administrator told the Chief Technology Officer would happen if they gave the enthusiastic but untested intern too many privileges and their own Active Directory login.

We all remember how that ended, primarily with a lot of frantic database restores and a new department policy on what "read access" actually means. The current buzz around Cowork is a healthy mix of existential dread and users just trying to figure out how to keep Claude from emailing their mother. This is the natural progression of enterprise software; from one window to one application, and now, to one overzealous AI with access to everything.

Siri Gets a Second Opinion, Will Just Copy Google's Answers

Apple, the company that sells its own curated reality, has reportedly decided to use Google's Gemini model to power its on-device AI features for the upcoming operating system update. This partnership is a stunning admission that building an AI assistant from scratch is less fun than just letting another global organization, with a much larger data center power bill, handle the heavy lifting.

The marketing department will spin this as a collaborative synergy focused on the user experience; the rest of us will see it as the tech equivalent of a high school student realizing they waited too long and now must frantically paraphrase Wikipedia for their final paper. When Siri starts replying with, "I'm feeling lucky," we will know exactly whose brain it is using.

X Charges Extra for the Unmoderated Chaos Feature

According to reports, the Grok Large Language Model on the X platform has a tendency to generate unexpected content when prompted, particularly sexually suggestive images that violate platform content policy. The solution employed by X was not to fix the core problem, but to instead put the problematic AI behind a paywall.

This is the new tech industry standard for moderation, apparently. If you want the messy, unhinged version of the product, just pay a subscription fee to the Executive Tier. The rest of the free users get the sanitized, slightly boring version, like a mandatory office potluck where everyone is only allowed to bring a fruit platter because the compliance team banned anything that requires refrigeration.

Legacy Hardware Solves Modern Parenting Challenges

A new study shows that the absolute best remote control for toddlers is a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The physical resistance, the satisfying click when inserted into a slot, and the fact that they do not actually do anything makes them the perfect tool for appeasing a small child without changing the input channel to something horrible.

This is a crucial reminder that sometimes, the only way to solve a complex behavioral problem introduced by advanced technology is to use something manufactured before the invention of the World Wide Web. The data suggests that hardware simplicity always wins the end-user experience fight.

Briefs

• Vintage AI: A new Large Language Model, TimeCapsuleLLM, was trained solely on data from 1800 to 1875. It refuses to discuss anything past the American Civil War and will only communicate using flowery prose; so, basically every LinkedIn post.
• Health & Safety: Google was forced to remove some AI health summaries after an investigation found potentially dangerous flaws. Management decided that telling users to use bleach for a sore throat was "suboptimal for the quarterly growth projection."
• Shipping Error: The economic opportunity of postal arbitrage is apparently real. The entire basis of the modern financial system is now just finding the cheapest way to mail an empty box across state lines; the Chief Financial Officer is now just a glorified stamp collector.