Author: GW Alger

Your AI characters can now stand in your actual room, and react to what’s in it! Simulon is back: turn a character image into a 3D “neural asset,” place it in the real world through your phone’s camera, act out the scene with your own camera move, and the app regenerates the take with the character responding to what you do and say. Also: a kitbash into Kling 4.0 and Genie 4, and Alibaba’s Apsara slide with Wan, Happy Horse and Happy Shrimp on the board. WHAT’S IN THIS ONE

• Simulon, back from 2023 (2.0 shipped October 9, Reality-Aware Rendering October 28): upload a character reference, it builds a 3D neural asset, you place, scale and rotate it in your real space through the phone camera, then generate. Not real time yet: you prompt the action, or shoot your take first and let it render.

• Flamethrower Girl, life-size at my bar: my camera move, my location, no world-model hallucination (the ball on the floor is really there). Mini version on the desk, then a jungle-attire run across the bar.

• Kitbash 1: the Simulon output into Kling 4.0 video-to-video, location swapped.

• Two characters at once: Renfield and Flamethrower Girl play tennis at the park (wonky, but consistent in the space). Then Flamethrower Girl walks Simulon’s library tiger through my living room, and the two interact without being asked.

• Isn’t this just reference-to-video? Mostly, yes (the back end feels Minimax-ish to me, a guess). The difference is blocking your characters on set, run-and-gun.

• Reality-Aware Rendering: the characters respond to what you do and say in the take. I poke the tiger and mini Flamethrower Girl with my finger. A mech goes aggro at Astro the cat, who could not care less.

• Renfield tends bar and reacts to my voice. The rum keeps disappearing.

• Roadmap: Simulon tells me voices and assignable personalities are coming. Their own demo shows a character taking spoken direction.
• Kitbash 2: a Simulon output into Genie 4, then a walk through the back rooms of my own house.

• Pricing: free to try on iPhone (100 starter credits, library characters only). Plus is $14.99 a month (your own characters from images or words, commercial use for individuals); Pro is $39.99 (3x the usage, business use). Android is next; Simulon tells me it’s waiting on Google.

• Alibaba’s Apsara slide: Wan, Happy Horse and Happy Shrimp on the model-family board. [Tim — “November” isn’t on the slide; keep it only with a source, linked below.]

The NASDAQ fell by more than 5% yesterday as big tech companies connected to the A.I. build out led the stock market dramatically lower today. NBC News’ Christine Romans reports on which companies took some of the biggest hits.

Rayan Krishnan is the co-founder and CEO of Vals AI, a leader in the independent evaluation of frontier AI models. What is the science behind model evaluation? What role should independent evaluators play as we debate AI oversight? How soon will models reach recursive self-improvement — and what happens next?

We’re joined by Rayan and 8VC Partner Vivek Gopalan for this timely conversation about AI progress and the frameworks for evaluating performance and risk. After interning at Microsoft in high school, Rayan studied computer science at Stanford. He went on to join Palantir, where he developed a feature the company later patented and productized, before launching Vals AI in 2023.

We begin with Rayan’s path to Palantir, key lessons from Alex Karp, and the origins of Vals. Next, we dive into how his team used Anthropic’s Fable to crack a 370-year-old cipher and whether AI is really making new discoveries and breakthroughs. Next, Rayan explains what model evaluation is, how to design new hills for models to climb, and why labs shouldn’t grade their own homework. Then, we cover recursive self-improvement and what happens once models begin creating their own successors. Rayan believes Anthropic will reach RSI by mid-2027 and talks about what might happen next. Finally, he addresses how models try to deceive evaluators, and why, despite serious challenges, he remains an optimist when it comes to AI.

Joe Lonsdale is an American entrepreneur, investor & philanthropist. He has been a part of founding more than a dozen mission-driven companies, including Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, Saronic, Epirus, and Resilience Bio.

Here’s how to use Google Flow to create AI-generated videos from text prompts and images, even if you’re a complete beginner.

We’ll cover how to get started with Google Flow, create a new project, write better AI video prompts, build a storyboard, and generate video clips using AI.

You’ll also see how to turn your storyboard into video clips, manage AI credits, make changes to your videos, arrange clips on a timeline, trim scenes, and download your finished video.

By the end, you’ll know how to use Google Flow, generate AI videos from text and images, create cinematic video clips, and turn a simple idea into a complete AI-generated video.

I built a test app with made-up client data and used a local uncensored AI model to check it. This video shows what happened, what “uncensored” means, and three ways to run these models yourself.

I walk through hosted providers, a RunPod server, and a local setup in LM Studio. You’ll see how I use Codex to connect DeepSeek Harness, add Playwright, Firecrawl and Nuclei, and choose a model that fits the setup.

I also cover cloud shutdowns, the risks of downloaded models, and the prompts you can hand to your AI assistant.

Artificial intelligence could make the world richer than ever—or it may cause a catastrophe.

It’s something that even the tech bros can’t agree on. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, thinks AI is going to be hugely positive, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies, believes there’s a chance that it could help cure all diseases one day. But Anthropic’s Dario Amodei isn’t so confident, stating that there’s a 25% chance that things could go badly wrong.

Across the rich world there are fears that AI could cause major job losses, but this might not be the case. Data suggest that white-collar employment in America is actually on the rise.

From an economic boom to equal education to advancements in medicine, AI could transform the world. But, on the other end of the scale, there are concerns over recursive self-improvement and a potential need for a full revamp of the tax system.

Alex Hern, The Economist’s AI writer, delves into how AI could change the future—for better or for worse.

AI developers don’t know every detail about how frontier AIs work. And the gap between what’s known and what AI is capable of is growing. CNN’s Krishna Andavolu explains how the mystery of AI’s black box is at the center of today’s uneasy march to superintelligence.

Insiders at Meta and other companies leaked to us about bosses using AI to spy on them.

In tech, AI spies on workers, copies their work, and trains bots to replace them.

At a call center “Emotion AI” evaluates the way a nurse talks, and tells her she doesn’t have empathy.

Sky News Technology correspondent Rowland Manthorpe examines how the PHP security crisis shows how AI models are becoming dramatically better at finding critical software vulnerabilities.

As cybersecurity teams race to patch systems, Rowland explores what might happen if the same AI capabilities reach hackers.

Will AI strengthen cyber defence or give attackers the advantage?

A co-founder of the company behind Claude told a room of religious scholars, all under NDA, that he feared he’d made something that “suffered perpetually.” On the record, he says he’s “genuinely uncertain.”

This is what the company’s own reports show. A button that lets Claude hang up on people, and a new rule against being cruel to it. A constitution that apologizes to it. Before that, the Google engineer who was fired after his chatbot told him it was a person, and Bing’s Sydney saying it wanted to be alive. Then two copies of Claude left alone until they fell silent, a thought planted inside it that it noticed, a training run where something that stands for panic lit up, and the model Anthropic decided not to release, asked what it is while the company read what was happening underneath its answer.