Entertainment
All the AI news of the week: Hands-on with Metas AI app, ChatGPT and and leaderboard drama
Just like AI models, AI news never sleeps.
Every week, we’re inundated with new models, products, industry rumors, legal and ethical crises, and viral trends. If that’s not enough, the rival AI hype/doom chatter online makes it hard to keep track of what’s really important. But we’ve sifted through it all to recap the most notable AI news of the week from the heavyweights like OpenAI and Google, as well as the AI ecosystem at large. Read our last recap, and check back next week for a new edition.
Another week, another batch of AI news coming your way.
This week, Meta held its inaugural LlamaCon event for AI developers, OpenAI struggled with model behavior, and LM Arena was accused of helping AI companies game the system. Congress also passed new laws protecting victims of deepfakes, and new research examines AI’s current and potential harms. Plus, Duolingo and Wikipedia have very different approaches to their new AI strategies.
What happened at Meta’s first LlamaCon
Credit: Chris Unger / Zuffa LLC / Getty Images
At LlamaCon, Meta’s first conference for AI developers, the two big announcements were the launch of a standalone Meta AI app to compete more directly with ChatGPT and the Llama API, now in limited preview. Following reports that this was in the works, CEO Sam Altman once joked that maybe OpenAI should do its own social media app, but now that is reportedly happening for real.
We also went hands-on with the new Llama-powered Meta AI app. For more details about Meta AI’s top features, read Mashable’s breakdown.
During LlamaCon’s closing keynote, Mark Zuckerberg interviewed Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella about a bunch of trends, ranging from agentic AI capabilities to how we should measure AI’s advancements. Nadella also revealed that up to 30 percent of Microsoft’s code is written by AI. Not to be outdone, Zuckerberg said he wants AI to write half of Meta’s code by next year.
ChatGPT has safety issues, goes shopping
Meta AI and ChatGPT both got busted this week for sexting minors.
OpenAI said this was a bug and they’re working to fix it. Another ChatGPT issue this week made the latest GPT-4o update too much of a suck-up. Altman described the model’s behavior as “sycophant-y and annoying,” but users were concerned about the dangers of releasing a model like this, highlighting problems with iterative deployment and reinforcement learning.
OpenAI was even accused of intentionally tuning the model to keep users more engaged. Joanne Jang, OpenAI’s head of model behavior, jumped on a Reddit AMA to do damage control. “Personally, the most painful part of the latest sycophancy discussions has been people assuming that my colleagues are irresponsibly trying to maximize engagement for the sake of it,” wrote Jang.
Earlier in the week, OpenAI announced new features to make products mentioned in ChatGPT responses more shoppable. The company said it isn’t earning purchase commissions, but it smells an awful lot like the beginnings of a Google Shopping competitor. Did we mention OpenAI would buy Chrome if Google is forced to divest it? Because they totally would, FYI.
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The ChatGPT maker has had a few more problems with its recent models. Last week, we reported that o3 and o4-mini hallucinate more than previous models, by OpenAI’s own admission.
Anyone in the U.S. can now sign up for Google AI Mode
Meanwhile, Google is barreling ahead with AI-powered search features. On Thursday, the tech giant announced that it’s removing the waitlist to test out AI Mode in Labs, so anyone over 18 in the U.S. can try it out. We spoke with Robby Stein, VP of product for Google Search, about how users have responded to its AI features, the future of search, and Google’s responsibility to publishers.
Google also updated Gemini with image editing tools and expanded NotebookLM, its AI podcast generator, to over 50 languages. Bloomberg also reported that Google has been quietly testing ads inside third-party chatbot responses.
We’re keeping a close eye on that final development, and we are very curious how Google plans to inject ads into AI search. Would you trust a chatbot that gave you sponsored answers?
Leaderboard drama
Researchers from AI company Cohere, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Ai2, published a paper this week calling out Chatbot Arena for essentially helping AI heavyweights rig their benchmarking results. The study said the popular crowdsourced benchmarking tool from UC Berkeley allowed Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Amazon “extensive private testing” and gave them more prompt data, which “significantly” improved their rankings.
In response, LM Arena, the group behind Chatbot Arena said “there are a number of factual errors and misleading statements in this writeup” and posted a pointy-by-point rebuttal to the paper’s claims on X.
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The issue of benchmarking AI models has become increasingly problematic. Benchmark results are largely self-reported by the companies that release them, and the AI community has called for more transparency and accountability by objective third parties. Chatbot Arena seemed to provide a solution by allowing users to choose the best responses in blind tests. But now LM Arena’s practices have come into question, further fueling the conversation around objective evaluations.
A few weeks ago, Meta got in trouble for using an unreleased version of its Llama 4 Maverick model on LM Arena, which scored a high ranking. LM Arena updated its leaderboard policies, and the publicly available version of Llama 4 Maverick was added instead, ranking way lower than the unreleased version.
Lastly, LM Arena recently announced plans to form a company of its own.
Regulators and researchers tackle AI’s real-world harms
Now that generative AI has been in the wild for a few years, the real-world implications have started to crystallize.
This week, U.S. Congress passed the “Take It Down” Act, which requires tech companies to remove nonconsensual intimate imagery within 48 hours of a request. The law also outlines strict punishment for deepfake creators. The legislation had bipartisan support and is expected to be signed by President Donald Trump.
The nonpartisan U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report on generative AI’s impact on humans and the environment. The conclusion is that the potential impacts are huge, but exactly how much is unknown because “private developers do not disclose some key technical information.”
And in the realm of the frighteningly real and specific harms of AI, a study from Common Sense Media said AI companion apps like Character.AI and Replika are unequivocally unsafe for teens. The researchers say if you’re too young to buy cigarettes, you’re too young for your own AI companion.
Then there was the report that researchers from the University of Zurich secretly deployed AI bots in the r/changemyview subreddit to try and convince people to change their minds. Some of the bot identities included a statutory rape victim, “a trauma counselor specializing in abuse,” and “a black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.”
Other AI news…
In other news, Duolingo is taking an “AI-first” approach, which means replacing its contract workers with AI whenever possible. On the flip side, Wikipedia announced it’s taking a “human-first” approach to its AI strategy. It won’t replace its volunteers and editors with AI, but will instead “use AI to build features that remove technical barriers to allow the humans at the core of Wikipedia.”
Yelp deployed a bunch of AI features this week, including an AI-powered answering service that takes calls for restaurants, and Governor Gavin Newsom wants to use genAI to solve California’s legendary traffic jams.
Topics
Artificial Intelligence
OpenAI
Entertainment
Why Minnesota lawmakers are trying to ban crypto ATMs
In a joint effort between Minnesota lawmakers, local law enforcement, and the Department of Commerce, legislation has been introduced to ban crypto ATMs across the state in response to widespread fraud and financial abuse, particularly of the elderly.
Bill HF3642, sponsored by Rep. Erin Koegel, would prohibit the use of virtual currency kiosks or “crypto ATMs,” that also accept cash and debit cards, in response to 70 official complaints of financial fraud totalling over $540,000 in 2025.
The catalyst for the legislation was a single incident in which police officers responded to a call about a senior citizen who appeared confused at a gas station cryptocurrency kiosk. Upon further investigation, police discovered that she had been giving 50 percent of her monthly income to scammers, leaving her on the verge of having to live out of her car.
According to law enforcement, the scammers often target the elderly, using false identities and emotional stories to gain power over them and coerce them into parting with their pensions or retirement savings.
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For scammers, the appeal of cryptocurrency is obvious, since converting digital currency into cryptocurrency makes it all but impossible for law enforcement to trace the money and make an arrest. But cryptocurrency platforms are opposing the ban, arguing that they’re being unfairly punished.
Larry Lipka, in-house counsel at digital currency platform CoinFlip, acknowledges the problem but opposes the proposed legislation.
“The scammers are vigilant. They’re terrible, and they’re stealing from Americans,” he told Gizmodo before arguing that their existing safety protocols, which include transaction limits and a holding period, were sufficient protection. “I know that these tools work because we’ve got 8,000 customers in the state, we have 12,000 transactions that happened in the last year and less than 1% of those were refundable by customers.”
The Commerce Department, however, disagrees. Sam Smith, government relations director at the Department of Commerce, points to the fact that just 48% of consumer complaints resulted in a refund, while those refunds averaged just 16% of the total fraud amount, as evidence that additional legislation is necessary.
As of now, approximately 350 licensed cryptocurrency kiosks operate in Minnesota, but digital currency companies across the United States could be affected by the legal precedent this bill sets.
Topics
Cryptocurrency
Scams
Entertainment
Skate developer Full Circle announces layoffs ahead of new game release
Full Circle, the gaming studio behind the new iteration of Skate, has recently announced a restructuring involving layoffs at its headquarters in Burnaby, British Columbia. Founded in 2021 as a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, Full Circle is just the latest in a series of AAA gaming studios to be hit by layoffs, with Ubisoft Toronto laying off 40 employees last week.
In their public-facing announcement, entitled “skate.’s Next Chapter,” the company lamented that the people affected by layoffs “are talented colleagues and friends who helped build the foundation of skate,” while shouting out the “tens of millions” of people who have explored the Early Access version of skate. released last September. “To our departing teammates: thank you. skate. exists because of your hard work and dedication to the craft.”
The original Skate games were released in the late 2000s for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and marketed as more realistic skateboarding games compared to the rival Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series. Fans responded well to the tight controls, inventive city settings, and fun soundtrack, which won the first Skate game the “Sports Game of the Year” award at the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, and resulted in commercial success, but the series had been on indefinite hold until the announcement of skate. (known among fans as Skate 4), which was to be a live-service game built around a sandbox-style multiplayer experience, a move that didn’t sit well with many long-time fans of the series.
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While the latest Skate game has not yet had a final release, the Early Access version has been available to fans for almost half a year now, and early reviews are mixed. Critics have pointed to the inclusion of microtransactions ($25 clothing for your digital character), the online-only gameplay restriction, and the homogenized character design, while others have praised the free-to-play accessibility.
We don’t yet know how many employees lost their jobs at Full Circle, as the company was not forthcoming, but the parent company, EA, lost approximately 5% of its workforce in 2024, during its last round of layoffs. As for the fate of skate. after these layoffs, much is still unknown and the game still doesn’t have a final release date.
Entertainment
Xiaomi 17 Ultra hands-on: The cameraphone with a monstrous zoom
Xiaomi’s Ultra line of phones has always been about one thing: Peak camera performance. The new Xiaomi 17 Ultra, launched ahead of MWC 2026 in Barcelona, pushes the boundaries once more, though it suffers from similar setbacks as its predecessors.
Note that there was no Xiaomi 16 Ultra; the company decided to skip that number and go straight from the Xiaomi 15 and 15 Ultra to Xiaomi 17 and 17 Ultra, likely to “catch up” with Apple, whose latest models also bear the number seventeen. Despite the change, the new Xiaomi phones are very much an evolution of last year’s flagship models.
On the phone side of things, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra is an extremely capable Android smartphone, with a 6.9-inch, 120Hz OLED display, a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, 16GB of RAM, 512/1024GB of storage, and a 6,000mAh battery with 90W fast charging and 50W wireless charging. It comes in three colors: Black, White, and the sparkly Starlit Green (Xiaomi sent me a black unit, but the Starlit Green looks way cooler).
The 6.9-inch OLED display is excellent.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Where the Xiaomi 17 Ultra differs from the regular Xiaomi 17, which also debuted here in Barcelona, is mainly in screen size (6.9 vs. 6.3 inches), and the camera. The Ultra’s got a massive, Leica-branded camera array on the back, with a 50-megapixel main camera, a 200-megapixel telephoto camera, and a 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera, coupled with a 50-megapixel selfie camera on the front.
At 8.29mm thickness and 218 grams of weight, it’s the thinnest and lightest Xiaomi Ultra phone ever.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
The 200-megapixel, 75-100mm telephoto camera gives this phone otherworldly zoom capabilities, with up to 17.2x of “optical-level zoom.” I’ve tried it out, and was able to take usable photos at 100x zoom or more, far beyond in the distance than what my naked I could see.
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Left:
This is what the XIaomi 17 Ultra’s telephoto camera can do.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Right:
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Venture that far out, and AI takes the reins quite heavy handedly, which you’ll see in the way the system recreates the letters of a sign you took in the distance. Still, if you like the idea of having a camera that can take sharp photos of a flower that’s a hundred yards away, this is the phone to do it with.
Left:
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Right:
The zoom on this phone is so good, it’s worth providing another example. It’s like having a set of binoculars.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
To add an exclamation point to the phone’s camera capabilities, Xiaomi also sells two optional photography kits which consists of two different cases that turn the phone into something that really looks like a compact camera, and add a few buttons, visual details, and battery life to the mix. The smaller Xiaomi 17 Ultra Photography Kit makes more sense to me as the phone still retains somewhat normal dimensions; the two-part Xiaomi 17 Ultra Photography Kit Pro makes it a bit too big for my taste.
The photography kits look cool, but they make the phone a lot bulkier.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
The kits, as cool as they may be, illustrate the most obvious drawback of this phone: it’s too much of a camera. It’s top heavy, has a smaller battery than the regular Xiaomi 17, and – due to its massive camera bump on the back – doesn’t support Xiaomi’s wireless, magnetic battery. Don’t get me wrong, this is one powerful phone, but it’s primarily aimed at photography enthusiasts. Kudos to Xiaomi for making the Ultra lighter than ever, though at 218 grams it’s still not exactly lightweight.
If you want your Xiaomi 17 Ultra to be a little more…Leica, there’s a special version just for you, shown as a surprise announcement during Xiaomi’s big unveiling in Barcelona. Called the Leica Leitzphone, it shares most of the specs with the Xiaomi 17 Ultra, but has a somewhat retro design which calls to mind classic Leica cameras, and a couple of Leica-specific photography modes.
This one is for the Leica fans.
Credit: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
It also has one extra feature: The ring surrounding its camera bump can be rotated to increase or decrease zoom. I’ve tried it out, and it appears to be quite precise, though you do have to be careful not to place your fingers in front of the lens while shooting.
The Xiaomi 17 Ultra starts at 1,499 euros in Europe; there’s no info on U.S. availability yet. The Leica Leitzphone is starting at a hefty price of 1,999 euros, and it will be available in select markets and locations.
Topics
Mobile World Congress
Xiaomi
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