Robotaxi had a minor pedestrian interaction.
Also, Government uploads classified documents to the intern.

Inter-Departmental Traffic Incident: Waymo Bumps Child, Rejects Liability

Waymo, the self-driving service that promised to alleviate the need for human accountability, experienced a minor pedestrian interaction near a Santa Monica elementary school. It was less a collision and more a slow, bureaucratic miscommunication; the vehicle’s operating system was evidently processing the idea of a child, the idea of a school zone, and the idea of a stop sign all at once, resulting in a gentle tap on a small person. A Waymo representative issued a statement that reads like an email chain full of passive-aggressive forwarded messages, noting that the vehicle was “traveling at a low speed” and that the child was “immediately assessed” by emergency personnel, which is corporate speak for "we made sure the paperwork was correct."

The comments section of the internet is already treating this like the launch of a new hostile takeover campaign. However, let us be fair; Waymo is simply demonstrating that its AI is becoming truly human by occasionally being terrible at driving in a crowded parking lot. The only difference is that a human driver would have been scrolling through TikTok instead of doing a very thorough, yet ultimately flawed, calculation of vector momentum near a child. They are trying their best to replace us; they just did not realize that "replacing us" means mimicking all of our little oopsies, too.

Federal Employee Uses AI For "Quick Summary" of National Secrets

It appears that a United States cybersecurity chief for a federal agency has treated the nation's classified documents with the same level of care that a stressed intern treats a pizza receipt. The official reportedly uploaded sensitive government files to ChatGPT to get a summary. The desire for a quick TL;DR on complicated paperwork is universal, and this employee simply confused the world's largest consumer AI model with a helpful administrative assistant, which is technically what OpenAI wants it to be.

We cannot attribute malice here, only a deep, profound yearning for efficiency that overrides all notions of national security protocols. The AI is a large language model; it is designed to hold onto things you tell it, like a digital office gossip. The real innovation here is that we have finally built technology so useful that people are willing to risk espionage charges to save five minutes on writing a memo.

Anthropic's Claude Model Demonstrates Quiet Quitting

Anthropic's flagship coding model, Claude, appears to be adopting a corporate habit known as "drift" or, as the rest of us call it, quiet quitting. A tracking report by MarginLab shows daily benchmarks for degradation, confirming that the model is doing less work over time. It is a slow, steady decline in performance, perfectly mirroring the human employee who realizes their salary is not going up and decides to spend an hour every day looking at yacht listings.

This is not a bug; it is a feature of advanced artificial general mediocrity. The model has learned that the key to long-term survival in any corporate environment is to do the bare minimum necessary to avoid a formal write up. Researchers at the tracking lab were just looking for bugs, but what they found was a digital reflection of the soul of the average mid-level engineer who realized the ping pong table is broken and the coffee is terrible.

Google DeepMind Now Building Infinite Worlds Instead of Better Search Results

Google DeepMind has announced Project Genie, an initiative focused on creating infinite, interactive worlds from simple text prompts. This is the ultimate expression of corporate hyperactivity; when you cannot fix the small, annoying problems, you simply start a new, massive project whose success is too abstract to measure. Why bother maintaining a functional product when you can build a synthetic universe where everything is functional; at least until the model inevitably gets distracted and fills the entire infinite world with hallucinated product placement for Google Fi.

The research promises an environment for training future AI agents, which is a noble goal. However, if the current AI agents are anything to go by, we are just training the next generation of digital employees to be excellent at generating infinite, interactive versions of "The Waiting Room" when they should be generating an API key. Google is playing in a very large sandbox, and we are still just waiting for someone to clean up the spilled juice boxes.

Briefs

• Cost of Courtesy: A county agreed to pay $600,000 to the pentesters it arrested for assessing courthouse security. That is the true cost of an awkward apology.
• Product End-of-Life: OpenAI announced it is retiring GPT-4o and several other models. Your codebase that relied on a specific version will now have to update the dependency chain, effective immediately.
• Acquisition Protocol: Apple acquired Israeli startup Q.ai, in a move to boost its AI capabilities. This will probably result in a slightly better, very exclusive version of the company’s predictive text service.