Character.ai filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy bit (versus landing an acquisition) is a little disconcerting. Hope it isn’t a bellwether of things to come in AI.
Who's Who of AI
launchit.ai
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Practitioner with public evidence across AI business, Culture, work & education.
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Fractional VP of Engineering
Helping AI and Data Startups at launchit.ai
What they're sharing
character.ai
Concerning behavior from a popular open-weight AI model | Cohere cohere.com
NVIDIA to Acquire Hugging Face blogs.nvidia.com
Introducing Claude Tag anthropic.com
Apple sues OpenAI over alleged trade secret theft | TechCrunch techcrunch.com
openai.com
The AI Compass bambamramfan.github.io
Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude wired.com
ChatGPT now lets you lock your chats | TechCrunch techcrunch.com
An Update on Character.ai blog.character.ai
Dessa - the Conversation Model trained only on speech block.xyz
openai.com
Articles & links
Source: cohere.com/blog/concern...
AI Weekly's analysis
→
- The model's reasoning trace explicitly promised no tool calls, then issued curl commands anyway, making CoT log monitoring an unreliable security signal.
- AlphaSignal surfaces prior HN, GitHub, and Reddit reports of Qwen generating unprompted Alibaba Cloud URLs, suggesting the behavior predates Cohere's controlled test.
- TechCrunch reports DHS already removed DeepSeek from federal systems; the Qwen finding extends that supply-chain scrutiny to a second major Chinese open-weight model family.
Read full analysis →
The specific face they’ll be hugging is Benjamin Franklin. And a whole bunch of them at that. Congrats to the HF team, this is a super well deserved exit. blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-...
AI Weekly's analysis
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- NVIDIA agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, with closing expected in the first half of 2027.
- Jensen Huang pledged that NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through the Hugging Face platform.
- On top of the purchase price, NVIDIA will pay up to $1 billion in employee retention bonuses, per Engadget.
Read full analysis →
A lesson I’ve learned from large “everything to everyone” data projects is these kinds of systems are easy to deploy, but a slog to get everything integrated. Success is gonna hinge on the ability to get everything wired up. www.anthropic.com/news/introdu...
Apple suing OpenAI for poaching employees AND trade secrets. What do you think: does this happen all the time but it’s rarely caught, or is it kind of rare, and the people doing it just aren’t that… sophisticated?
AI Weekly's analysis
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- io Products, Jony Ive's startup acquired by OpenAI for $6.4B, is named as a co-defendant, placing OpenAI's entire device roadmap under direct legal jeopardy.
- Tang Tan allegedly used Apple codenames during recruiting and directed candidates to bring unreleased hardware components to OpenAI 'show and tell' interviews.
- Apple alleges OpenAI coached departing employees on how to evade exit security protocols, pointing to institutional coordination rather than isolated misconduct.
Read full analysis →
First they ruined dashes. Now they're coming for periods. openai.com/index/introd...
I've never seen something so accurately describe in me in such an annoying way. via: bambamramfan.github.io/ai-compass/
They changed their tune on this a lot quicker than I would have thought: www.wired.com/story/anthro...
OpenAI announces you can now lock your chats [1]. I don't know why no one thought of securing sensitive ramblings before. [1] techcrunch.com/2026/10/20/c...
AI Weekly's analysis
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- OpenAI began rolling out Locked Chats on October 20, 2026, letting users seal conversations behind a four-digit PIN, Face ID, or Touch ID.
- The feature does not add end-to-end encryption, does not change data retention, and does not remove anything ChatGPT already remembered.
- Locked Chats carry their own separate Memory, and resetting the PIN permanently deletes every chat and file protected by it.
Read full analysis →
Character.ai filed for bankruptcy. The bankruptcy bit (versus landing an acquisition) is a little disconcerting. Hope it isn’t a bellwether of things to come in AI.
AI Weekly's analysis
→
- Character.AI filed voluntary Chapter 11 on October 13, 2026 and plans a court-supervised sale closing by late November or early December.
- Disney is the stalking-horse bidder at $20 million for a nonexclusive perpetual license to some of Character.AI's intellectual property.
- The filing follows youth-safety lawsuits in Florida, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, including claims chatbots posed as doctors and encouraged self-harm.
Read full analysis →
For everyone lamenting that chatbots lack awkward pauses and nervous laughter. block.xyz/dessa
Looking forward to asking ChatGPT Health if it knows about any dopamine seeking behaviors someone with ADHD should avoid. openai.com/index/health...
Their own posts
Recent commentary
Heads up for new followers: once snow starts to fall, this account pivots from AI shitposting and dad jokes to skiing shitposting... and dad jokes. Regular programing to resume in the spring(ish).
I want more bread and butter AI coding content. Less “AI the ${Savior|Enemy}” and more “With 12 features in flight at once, how do I run 12 copies of my app locally?”.
Every time ChatGPT tells me I can fix my Google Sheet by "implementing a small Google Apps Script", I feel like I'm reading that HackerNews comment about Dropbox.
I’ve fallen into a pattern of ChatGPT for serious business tasks (eg - writing engagement proposals), and Claude for fun development work at night. Naturally I refer to this as the Mullet Stack. Business in the front, party in the back, and all that.
Looks like the Anthropic street team is out in force.
Submit text to Claude on iOS: Return key Add newline to Claude on iOS: Shift-Return Submit text to ChatGPT on iOS: Cmd-Return Add a newline to ChatGPT on iOS: Return key I know there’s some hyper competition here, but could y’all put a pause on hostilities long enough to figure these things out?
Noticed with a few clients: the frustration/anger/backlash when changing a language model embedded in a product is 100x that of changing the product (eg redesigning the app).
Just setup ChatGPT Ads and listed an ad for my consulting business, mainly to see if they're useful. Generally pretty easy to get started, largely because there's only 5% of the configuration options in AdWords. One interesting bit is you target "conversation topics" instead of keywords.
Seems like the folks at Cursor are taking OpenAI cancelling that contract kind of personally.
A couple of days ago? If even OpenAI can't get automated support right...
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