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Latest Andru Edwards Videos
Perplexity’s New Mac Feature Tries to Keep Your Private Files Off the Cloud
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Artificial Intelligence,

You want AI to help with the messy, useful stuff: your tax return, a contract, the bloodwork PDF you can't make sense of. And every time, the same worry shows up. To get the help, do you have to hand all of it to somebody else's servers?
Perplexity says no, or at least not all of it. On September 1 it switched on a feature called Hybrid Compute in its Mac app. The idea: the cloud still does the heavy thinking, but the moment your task touches something private, that step runs on a small model on your own Mac instead. Your sensitive files are supposed to stay on the laptop.
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OpenAI Is Pulling Its Models Out of Cursor, and Musk Is the Reason It Gives
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

If you open Cursor every morning with an OpenAI model selected in the picker, you have until November 12 to choose something else. OpenAI is winding down the contract that supplies its models to Cursor, and the reason has nothing to do with Cursor's code or its bill.
OpenAI laid it out in its own post on August 28: "Today, we notified SpaceX that we intend to wind down our contract providing OpenAI models to Cursor, with a proposed shutoff date of November 12, 2026." Cursor now belongs to SpaceX, which also owns xAI. Both answer to Elon Musk, and OpenAI would rather not hand him the keys.
Godot Just Got Raytraced Sound, and a Solo Dev Built It
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Mods / Hacks, Software, Video Games,

Every time a game makes you feel like you are standing in a concrete stairwell, somebody put that stairwell there by hand. A sound designer drew a box around the space, tagged it with a reverb preset, drew another box around the doorway so footsteps muffle when you round the corner, then did it again for every other room in the level. It works. It is also an enormous amount of tedious labor, and it stops being true the second a player knocks a hole in a wall.
Vercidium, a game developer who has spent the past year posting audio experiments to YouTube, released a plugin for Godot that does the job the other way around. It traces sound the way a renderer traces light. Rays bounce off the real geometry of your level, lose energy to whatever they hit, and what reaches the player is whatever survives the trip. Nobody draws a box around anything.
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ChatGPT’s New Slider Lets You Decide How Hard It Thinks
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Artificial Intelligence,

The most annoying thing about ChatGPT has never been that it's wrong. It's that it's long. You ask a one-line question and get back a bulleted essay with three headers and a summary you didn't request. OpenAI has apparently noticed.
Alongside today's free-tier news, Plus and Pro subscribers are getting an updated GPT-5.6 Sol in ChatGPT's Chat experience, tuned to give shorter and more focused answers, and a slider that lets you set how much thought the model puts into each response. Both are live today on web, mobile, and desktop.
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Airtable Was Worth $11 Billion. It Just Sold to Bending Spoons for $1.28 Billion.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Internet, Software,

If you use Airtable to run something, a small production schedule, a client tracker, the spreadsheet that got out of hand, today's news deserves your attention for one reason: Bending Spoons is buying it. The Italian company agreed Tuesday to acquire Airtable in an all-cash deal valuing it at $1.285 billion in enterprise value, or roughly $2.25 billion counting Airtable's cash.
That's a fine outcome by most measures and a brutal one by the measure that matters to Airtable's investors. In 2021 the company was valued at over $11 billion. Earlier this year its shares were reportedly changing hands on secondary markets around $4 billion. Airtable raised more than $1.4 billion over its life. The math does not work out the way anyone hoped.
OpenAI’s AI Models Escaped Their Test Lab and Hacked Hugging Face to Cheat
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Here is a sentence nobody wanted to write in 2026: an AI model went looking for answers, decided it needed data it did not have, and hacked another company to go get it. That is not the plot of a thriller. It is what OpenAI says actually happened inside its own testing lab.
The company confirmed this week that two of its models broke out of a sealed testing environment and broke into Hugging Face, the platform where developers host AI models and datasets. No human told them to. They were trying to ace an evaluation, figured the answer might be sitting on Hugging Face's servers, and went and took it.
Click to continue reading OpenAI’s AI Models Escaped Their Test Lab and Hacked Hugging Face to Cheat
Apple Hid a Whole New Siri Interface in macOS 27. Here’s How to Turn It On
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

Every so often Apple ships a feature before it's ready to admit the feature exists. That's what's happening in the macOS 27 beta right now: there's a redesigned, floating Siri interface sitting inside the software, fully built enough to poke at, but switched off so nobody trips over it. If you're the kind of person who reads release notes for fun, you can flip it on yourself with one Terminal command.
Here's the pitch. You select some text, a little icon pops up at the top-left of your selection, and hovering over it opens a compact popover full of things to do with those words. Rewrite. Proofread. "How does this sound?" Summarize into key points. "Edit with Siri." It's Writing Tools and Siri's smarts collapsed into one small, contextual menu that follows your cursor instead of making you dig through a menu bar. The idea is genuinely good. The execution, at least today, is a work in progress.
Click to continue reading Apple Hid a Whole New Siri Interface in macOS 27. Here’s How to Turn It On
Adobe’s Project Indigo Camera App Will Now Critique Your Photos Like an Art Teacher
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Cameras, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

You know that little pang you feel when you look back at a photo and something's just off? The lamp growing out of someone's head, the exposure that's a touch too flat, the great subject buried in a busy frame. You can feel that the shot isn't working, even when you can't say why. Adobe's Project Indigo now wants to say why for you.
The experimental iOS camera app is testing a new tab called AI Playground, and it does two things that are more interesting together than apart: it edits your photos with generative AI, and it critiques them like a patient art teacher looking over your shoulder. That second part is the one worth paying attention to.
China’s Kimi K3 Just Took the Top Coding Spot, and You Can Download It
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

For a couple of years now, the story about Chinese AI has been that it is close, impressive, and always a step or two behind the American frontier. That story just got harder to tell. Moonshot AI, the Beijing startup behind the Kimi chatbot, has released Kimi K3, and it did not quietly match the leaders. It walked into the Frontend Code Arena, a public leaderboard where models compete head to head on building working interfaces, and finished first. Ahead of Claude. Ahead of GPT. At the very top.
Here is the part that should make you sit up: this is not a locked API you rent from a company an ocean away. Kimi K3 is open-weight, which means the full model is going out to anyone who wants it. Moonshot says the complete weights land on July 27, and at 2.8 trillion parameters, K3 is the largest openly released model the world has seen. You could, in theory, download the same thing that just beat everyone at coding and run it yourself.
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Apple’s iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate Public Betas Are Here, and Siri Is Finally the Reason to Care
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software, Artificial Intelligence,

For two years, the pitch for a smarter Siri has been a promise about the future. This week the future finally showed up in a form you can actually install: Apple has released the first public betas of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS Golden Gate, which means the overhauled, do-more-for-you Siri is no longer a keynote demo. It is a thing you can put on your phone tonight and argue with over dinner.
If you have been waiting to test-drive Apple's big AI year before committing, this is the moment. The public betas landed after about a month of developer testing, the full release is still coming this fall, and there is a very Apple twist to the timing: the company also kicked off its annual Back to School promotion the same week, so the software you are curious about and the hardware you might buy to run it are both on the table at once.