AI Reading for Monday October 20

30 companies—including Salesforce, Shopify, Canva, HubSpot, Duolingo, OpenRouter and Indeed—have each consumed over one trillion OpenAI tokens. - Hacker Noon

OpenAI is rolling out automatic memory prioritisation for ChatGPT that re-weights stored facts by recency and frequency, reducing "memory full" issues while allowing users to view, reprioritise, delete, roll back, or disable memories. - TechRadar

OpenAI researchers deleted tweets claiming GPT‑5 solved ten unsolved Erdős problems and made progress on eleven more after DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and others criticized them; OpenAI acknowledged the error and experts said GPT‑5 surfaced existing papers, not new proofs. - THE DECODER

OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy said on the Dwarkesh Podcast that current AI agents "just don't work," predicting it'll take about a decade to fix key limitations and warning that ~20% per-action error rates can yield ~32% success on five-step tasks. - Business Insider

OpenAI's new app Sora delivers an endless TikTok-style feed of brief videos whose audio and visuals are fully synthetic and generated from user prompts, marking OpenAI's entry into consumer short-form video and raising moderation and monetization questions. - The New York Times

OpenAI will allow ChatGPT to generate erotic content for verified adults starting in December. So Big Tech will decide what is acceptable interaction, but also algorithmically shape human erotic interaction, like all other interactions? - Fast Company

Your AI 'waifu' discourse is used to train other people's fictional friends, recursively evolving each others' interactions and experiences . - Hacker Noon

The difference between OpenAI and Anthropic has never been clearer, as OpenAI keeps adding consumer features, while Anthropic focuses on coders and professional users, and says it’s not concerned about how long users spend on its platform every day. - Fast Company

Anthropic is racing OpenAI with a valuation of about $183 billion versus OpenAI's roughly $500 billion, faces criticism from White House AI czar David Sacks, and holds a $200 million Department of Defense contract. - CNBC

The anti-Grok?

China's regulators banned imports and internal use of Nvidia AI graphics cards, ordered companies including ByteDance and Tencent to halt purchases and testing, and alleged antitrust violations tied to Nvidia's Mellanox acquisition, citing domestic alternatives like DeepSeek R1. - BGR

2 customers account for 39% of Nvidia sales, hyperscalers amount 50%. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI are accelerating custom AI-chip programs. JPMorgan projects custom chips will make up 45% of the AI chip market by 2028 (up from 37% in 2024), putting pressure on Nvidia's GPU dominance. - Yahoo Finance

AMD shows a $3m, >100kW rack. At OCP Summit 2025, AMD displayed a 72‑GPU Helios MI450 rack in an OCP ORv3 layout with E1.S PCIe Gen6 SSDs, while Meta showed a custom Helios‑like rack as AMD secures deals with OpenAI and Oracle. - TechRadar

People are treating AI chatbots as advisors, confidantes, and even partners in crime. But with no legal protections, and predatory actors looking to monetize and exploit this new trove of deeply intimate data, a new tech reckoning has arrived. - The Independent

OpenEvidence, a three-year-old ad-supported AI chatbot for medical practitioners, raised $200 million at a $6 billion valuation, up from $3.5 billion after a $210 million July funding, as clinician usage has surged. - The New York Times

Startups apply AI to 20M U.S. chest CTs annually to detect coronary calcium; Medicare won't reimburse. - MIT Technology Review

Should doctors consult an "AI surrogate" of you to predict your end-of-life preferences when making health care decisions? - Ars Technica

Scale AI and contractor Remotasks hire low-wage data labelers in Kenya, Colombia and India to annotate traumatic images, reportedly paying roughly one cent per task and exposing major AI firms to reputational, legal and regulatory risks. - Futurism

Lloyds Banking Group says Microsoft 365 Copilot saves employees 46 minutes per day, based on a survey of 1,000 users from about 30,000 deployed licenses, with nearly 5,000 engineers using GitHub Copilot and a warning to check AI outputs. - The Register

Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol said the company is "all in on AI" and is piloting an "AI barista" system—voice ordering, an in-store "green dot" assistant and "Smart Q"—to boost throughput up to ~20% across about 38,000 stores. - 247wallst

Early internal builds of iOS 26.4, slated to deliver Apple's AI-infused Siri, have prompted concerns as Apple runs a 'bake-off' between on-device models and Google's Gemini on Private Cloud Compute while targeting a 2026 launch. - 9to5Mac

AI data centers generate opposition globally, from Mexico to Ireland - The New York Times

Chile debates embracing AI, or being left behind - The New York Times

States are raising concerns as law enforcement increasingly uses AI to write police reports. - Fast Company

The Federal Trade Commission removed several blog posts in recent months about open-source AI and consumer risks during Chair Lina Khan's tenure, shrinking the agency's public record and prompting scrutiny over its AI oversight. - WIRED

Startups impose 72-hour '996' schedules to accelerate AI development; workers report burnout - The Washington Post

AI agents are like using a compiler you can't trust, and might have been built by an adversary to do something nefarious. - Schneier on Security

A developer thwarted crypto malware with a last-minute AI check during a scam interview. - The Register

Legitimate jewelry store beleaguered by a fake scam site using AI-generated images and fake reviews, costing owner at least an hour per day. - BBC

Developing a reusable prompt framework that turns ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini into a YouTube script writer, providing structure, five hook strategies, hooks every ~30 seconds, SEO, visual cues and production notes to scale higher-retention videos while requiring human editing. - Hacker Noon

Groundhog Audio, a year-old company, is crowdfunding the OnePedal, a Bluetooth pedal and app that isolates guitar tracks from uploaded MP3/AAC, reconstructs effects chains, stores 100 presets, has ~340 backers, discounted $499 vs $550 retail, shipping planned March 2026. - New Atlas

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