标签：#chat

Stripe introduces a benchmark suite to evaluate whether AI agents can build real-world Stripe integrations across backend, frontend, and browser-based checkout workflows. The study examines end-to-end software engineering capability, focusing on execution, testing, and validation gaps in agentic systems under production-like constraints. By Leela Kumili

Companies’ increasing reliance on AI chatbots isn’t making the customer service experience smarter. It’s just making it more infuriating.

The device is weirdly described as involving "mechanical elements that can move on their own" and the Bloomberg report includes the detail that the device is designed to "feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT."

There’s more to Google’s messaging app than you might realize.

Here is a reliable test: find a prompt that isn't working. Read it carefully. Now ask yourself — at which specific sentence did the model get permission to do what it did wrong? You will almost always find it. A hedged instruction. A missing constraint. An ambiguous scope. The model did not misunderstand you — it followed the most statistically probable interpretation of what you wrote. That interpretation was not the one you intended. These are not beginner mistakes. They are structural patterns that reappear at every experience level, because they look reasonable when you write them and only reveal themselves in the output. TL;DR: Prompts fail because they hand interpretive control to the model on dimensions where you had a specific requirement. Each of the seven mistakes below is a different way of doing that — and each has a specific, testable fix. Mistake 1: Placing Critical Instructions in the Middle of the Prompt Language models process all tokens simultaneously through attention mechanisms , but the effective weight any individual token receives depends heavily on its position. Instructions near the beginning and end of a prompt receive disproportionately more attention weight than those in the middle. This is not a quirk — it is a consequence of how positional embeddings interact with self-attention across long contexts. This effect is well-documented. The "Lost in the Middle" study (Stanford / UC Berkeley, 2023) showed that retrieval accuracy from long-context windows degrades significantly for information placed in the middle — even in capable models. The same mechanism applies to instruction prompts: GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet both exhibit measurably lower constraint adherence for instructions buried mid-context compared to those at the leading or trailing position. Open-weight models including DeepSeek-V3 and Llama 3 display the same positional bias — this is not a proprietary model quirk, it is a structural property of the transformer architecture. T

ChatGPT is hiring a dedicated product manager to build experiences for families, caregivers, and older adults, according to a job posting.

My GPT got dumber after the update" gets blamed on the model regressing, or on you prompting worse. Both are unfalsifiable, and both send you to fix the wrong layer. The layer that actually moved is the one you can pin. "The model" is two layers. The weights — the trained network, slow to change, and when they do change it's announced under a new name. And the wrapper — the router that picks which model answers, the system prompt, the default reasoning effort, verbosity caps. The wrapper changes silently, on its own schedule, per product. It's almost always what moved under you. So stop re-tuning prompts to chase it. Pin the wrapper: Force the route. Don't leave it on Auto — set Thinking (or say "think hard") so the router can't quietly demote your prompt to a faster, weaker model. OpenAI's own GPT-5 launch post describes exactly this router (it scores prompts "simple" vs hard); after the backlash they put the picker back (Auto/Fast/Thinking — TechCrunch, Aug 2025). Pin the version. If you build on a model, call its exact versioned ID via the API. A model ID's weights don't change — new versions ship under new IDs — so router and system-prompt churn can't reach you. Own the harness. Running agents? Set the system prompt, reasoning effort, and verbosity yourself instead of inheriting a default. Anthropic's own April 23 post-mortem is the proof: six weeks of "Claude Code got worse" traced to three wrapper changes (a reasoning-effort downgrade, a reasoning-history bug, a verbosity cap their ablations put at ~3% quality) — API weights never touched. A real weights change — a new model — will still move behavior. But that's announced, and you choose when to adopt it. The silent stuff is all wrapper, and the wrapper is the part you can pin. Sources: OpenAI GPT-5 launch (router + "think hard"); TechCrunch, Aug 2025 (model picker reinstated); Anthropic April 23 post-mortem (anthropic.com/engineering/april-23-postmortem); InfoQ and VentureBeat (corroboration); Claude platfor

OpenAI's latest family of models promises improvements across a range of areas, including cybersecurity.

OpenAI is sunsetting its AI-powered browser after less than a year. But it's moving some agentic browsing features to its desktop app and a Chrome extension.

Rebranded Codex promises independent workflows that can run "for hours if needed."

News publishers say OpenAI hid tools and datasets that could identify copyrighted journalism in ChatGPT outputs, escalating their lawsuit with a new motion for sanctions.

Here's the problem nobody talks about: the reason most AI outputs are mediocre isn't the model — it's that you asked for a final answer and got one. A model with no friction produces the path of least resistance. It pattern-matches to "good-enough" and stops. It doesn't know what your bar for quality is. It doesn't know what logic you'd push back on, what tone would make your audience tune out, or what structural flaw a sharp reader would catch in the first 30 seconds. It just fills the token space with the most statistically probable response and calls it a day. So the output hits your clipboard. You read it. You sigh. Then you spend 40 minutes editing something that should have come out right the first time. There's a better way — and it exploits the fact that AI critique is significantly sharper than AI generation. The Core Insight: Models Are Better Critics Than They Are Authors This sounds counterintuitive, so stay with me. When you ask an LLM to generate something from scratch, it operates in "produce plausible content" mode. The pressure is to fill the blank. But when you ask a model to critique an existing piece — especially if you hand it a specific evaluative persona — it switches into "find the gap between what is and what should be" mode. That's a fundamentally different cognitive task, and it's one where models consistently perform better. Research on iterative self-refinement in LLMs (Madaan et al., 2023) shows that when models are given their own output and asked to improve it with explicit feedback criteria, quality scores improve substantially across writing, code, and reasoning tasks. The key variable wasn't model size or prompt verbosity — it was the presence of a structured feedback loop. The mechanism is simple: the critique generates tokens that constrain and guide the rewrite. Those critique tokens become working context. The model rewrites against them. The output is necessarily better-fitted to the evaluation criteria than anything a single-

A while back I was researching a topic I didn't know much about — the kind of casual, late-night "let me just ask the AI a few questions" session. A few messages in, I asked a follow-up that only made sense in the context of what we'd just been talking about. I didn't restate the subject, because... why would I? We were three messages into the same conversation. The answer came back completely off-topic. It had lost track of what "it" referred to, latched onto the wrong noun, and confidently explained something I hadn't asked about at all. Not a small tangent — a whole paragraph about the wrong thing. My first reaction was annoyance at the model. My second, more useful reaction came a bit later: I'd been treating it like a person who remembers what we were just discussing and fills in the gaps naturally. It doesn't do that the way a human conversation partner does. If I don't restate the subject, it's genuinely not there for the model — it's not being lazy, there's just nothing to work with. So I started over-specifying. Every follow-up got longer: restate the subject, restate what I actually wanted, restate the constraint I cared about. It worked, but some days I didn't have the energy for it — I'd just take the mediocre answer, say "ok thanks," and move on. Which meant I was quietly leaving useful answers on the table half the time, just because typing out the full context felt like a chore. Eventually I stopped thinking of it as "the AI being difficult" and started treating it as a simple rule: if I want it to know something, I have to say it. It won't infer the unstated stuff the way a person would , no matter how obvious it feels to me. Once that clicked, a few concrete habits followed. Restate the subject, every time Not "what about the second one" — the actual name of the thing. It costs three words and removes an entire failure mode. Say what you actually want, not just the topic "Tell me about X" and "I'm trying to decide whether X is worth the switching co

Elon Musk's tech company released the newest version of Grok on Wednesday, promising a cheaper, more efficient alternative to other powerful AI models.

OpenAI says its new voice mode can speak and listen at the same time, a key ability for live translation.

Joshua Achiam spent nearly nine years at OpenAI researching AI safety and made a memorable appearance in the Musk v. Altman trial.

Nephew saw a YouTube ad. Someone was selling a "secret prompt" for ₹199, claiming ChatGPT and Claude can analyze the stock market and place trades with 90% accuracy — no technical analysis, no fundamentals, just paste this prompt. He brings it straight to Uncle. The Ad 👦 Nephew: Uncle, I saw an ad on YouTube. Some guy was saying, "Use ChatGPT and Claude AI for stock market analysis, take trades with 90% accuracy. You don't even need to know technical analysis or fundamentals — just use this prompt and you'll get all the results." Is that actually possible? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: (laughs) Ah, here we go. This is exactly how a lot of scams happen — and honestly, it's rarely because of some clever new invention. It's because of a lack of understanding, and people treating these models as a magic black box. 👦 Nephew: So are they scamming us? Or genuinely fooling themselves too? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Not exactly a straightforward scam, and not exactly genuine either. Here's the honest split: they're maybe 30% correct, and 70% wrong. 👦 Nephew: What does that even mean? 👨‍🦳 Uncle: I'll accept this much — there genuinely are AI models out there that can do a solid job predicting stock trends or running fundamental analysis, because that kind of prediction is heavily mathematical, numerical work. But — and this is the important part — ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are not that kind of model. 👦 Nephew: Why not? It can literally write code. It can do math inside code. Why can't it just... do math for stock prediction too? I genuinely don't get it. 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Come, sit. This needs a proper, from-scratch conversation. We're going to dig all the way down to what these models actually are , and by the end, you'll understand exactly why ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are the wrong tool for this specific job — not a scam exactly, but sold by people who never actually opened the box themselves. Part 1: What Is an LLM, Really — In One Honest Sentence 👨‍🦳 Uncle: Before anything else, one sentence, and hold onto i

FTC urged to reject Elon Musk’s bid to end X monitoring amid AI concerns.

A ChatGPT subscription starts at $20 a month and is one of the cheapest ways to run inference. OpenAI has also been fairly relaxed lately about third-party agents using them , which makes the deal even better for a lot of us. But a subscription can't be used as freely as pay-per-token access , and the providers police the difference. Anthropic recently narrowed its subscriptions to first-party apps; OpenAI has its own limits. Here's what will get you banned from an OpenAI subscription. Sharing your subscription A ChatGPT subscription is strictly personal. One subscription, one user. Sharing yours breaks OpenAI's terms of service. That also covers account pooling and account rotation, where several people share the same credentials to dodge rate limits. Running it in automation Automation (CI, runners, schedulers) should run on per-token pricing, not a subscription . Once a system calls the OpenAI API with your token while you're not in the loop, the usage stops being personal. No unattended production system should run on a ChatGPT subscription. Serving other users For now, you can point an autonomous agent like OpenClaw or Hermes at your ChatGPT subscription, as long as it only talks to you. The moment that agent starts chatting with other people, or serving them in any way, it turns into a team use case , and that inference should be paid per usage. Putting it in a commercial product Same logic here. Making an LLM call authenticated with an individual ChatGPT subscription inside a product you ship breaks OpenAI's terms. That access is subsidized, and reselling it in any form isn't what it's meant for. If you've built something just for yourself and you're the only user, you're probably fine. The bottom line A ChatGPT subscription is personal . Anything that stretches past personal use can get you restricted or banned. If you're not sure your usage counts, move it to pay-as-you-go. If you want to keep the subscription for your own work and fall back to per-token pr

You've got a folder of a few hundred screenshots and you want the text out of each one. Or you want to generate a batch of images for a side project. Or you just want to drop a single "summarize this" call into a script you're writing on a Sunday afternoon. So you open the pricing page for the official API, do the math on per-token billing plus setting up keys and a payment method, and it's hard to justify, because the exact same model will do the exact same thing for free in a browser tab. There are really two ways to get a model like ChatGPT or Gemini to do work for you. The web UI is free, or already covered by a subscription you're paying for anyway, but you drive it by hand. The API is scriptable, but you pay by the token. Most of the time that trade-off is fine. But for a whole category of work like hobby projects, throwaway scripts, research, or anything that doesn't need production-grade reliability, you're stuck picking between "free but manual" and "automated but paid." Which raises the obvious question: why not automate the free web UI? It's just a webpage. You open it, type in the box, click send. It turns out that hides a few fiddly problems, which I ran into enough times that I eventually built a small library for them. In this article we'll work through what it takes to automate these UIs, and at the end I'll show how little code it comes down to. 1. What it takes to drive a chat UI A single round trip with ChatGPT or Gemini breaks down into four jobs: Get your text into the input box Optionally attach a file Wait for the model to finish answering And read the answer back out. Every one of these is harder than it sounds, because the page is a modern single-page app that was never built to be driven by a script. We'll use Selenium with undetected-chromedriver, and for now assume the browser is already open (we'll get to launching it in the next section). To keep the code readable I'll show whichever of the two platforms makes each problem clearest, and