FDA has suppressed studies on COVID-19 vaccines and Shingrix, a shingles vaccine.
Rumors of Anthropic acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence, co-founded by Lachy Groom, were partially true, with talks held this spring. This highlights the intense AI acquisition race and the strategic importance of robotics for superintelligent systems, especially given OpenAI's prior investment in Physical Intelligence.
Jack Dorsey's Block has launched Buzz, a new open-source group chat platform for workplaces. It integrates AI agents and GitHub project management, aiming to challenge Slack by offering a model-agnostic, decentralized, and self-sovereign workspace for human-AI collaboration.
Instagram has launched a "Replace Audio" tool, enabling users to change music on published feed posts and carousels without losing likes or comments. This update provides creators with more creative control, addressing a previous limitation and contrasting with recent controversial feature removals.
Neill Blomkamp released "Nightborne," a 13-minute sci-fi short made entirely with ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 text-to-video generator, through his new AI startup, Barley Studios. Despite human input, the film, loosely based on Peter Watts' "Echopraxia," has been met with significant backlash for its poor quality and "slop" characteristics, raising questions about AI's role in future filmmaking.
Substack is rolling out a new tool, powered by Pangram, to help users identify AI-generated text in posts, notes, replies, and comments. The feature aims to increase transparency and trust on the platform amid growing AI prevalence.
Meta is piloting StoryKit, an AI app that generates personalized children's stories with custom characters, settings, lessons, and music, requiring no writing from parents. The app, available in select countries, aims to craft imaginative storybooks for kids but faces criticism for outsourcing human creativity.
