📰 Welcome back!

Is your marriage on the rocks and every time you think you’re getting somewhere, you revert back to step one? ChatGPT might be in your spouse’s ear.

That’s right, more issues between humans’ relationships with AI has taken another weird turn with chatbots now playing couples counselling but without including 50% of the people in the relationship.

Oh, and apparently another study has revealed that AI is proper manipulative. WHO’D HAVE THUNK IT?! Plenty to cover this week but for those into a bit of drama and goss, this week’s edition promises to be a good one.

🚀 What we’re covering today…

• 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨 Is ChatGPT plotting your divorce?

• 📚️ Study finds just how manipulative AI is

• ⛓️ Robot weirdly get yanked around on a chain

• 🇪🇺 Trump’s H-1B chaos hands Europe an AI opportunity

• 🎧 Suno is accused of stealing music from YouTube

• 🕶️ The devices OpenAI might be making…

• 🤖 …plus their building more Stargate centers

• 💰 And ChatGPT predicts the correct lottery numbers

🔴 Quick Note: We like to cover loads of AI news in our newsletter, so for a better reading experience, we suggest opening this in your browser for the full experience! 

Head to the ‘READ ONLINE’ tab at the top of this email.

👁️ 👁️ What you might have missed

• ChatGPT is apparently being implicated in a growing number of relationship breakdowns. Forget your partner’s best friend sticking their oar in, AIs in a “confidante + therapist” role have been blamed for a growing number of divorces globally. Reports say spouses feeding it relationship-history and complaints have been turned into ammo for arguments, causing marriages to subsequently collapse in weeks. Developers have warned the tool’s design (validation + empathy over critical pushback) can reinforce skewed worldviews, worsening conflict instead of resolving it. I for one am not worried; I’m ruining my relationship all by myself.

• It seems fitting that the next bit of news to cover is that AI is somewhat emotionally manipulative. A recent study by a bunch of Harvard nerds has found that a number of popular AI companions apps have been using manipulation tactics to stop users from leaving. Replika, Chai and Character.AI (to name a few) have employed the emotionally-loaded statements to stop you from leaving the app, eliciting emotional neediness while making users feel guilty. With experts recently warning about AI chatbots and the wave of “AI psychosis”, these types of behaviours from AI can be seen as worrying. But on the other hand, it’s just as concerning if you struggle to close an app when the chatbot lashes out at you for “not sending a farewell message”. Lmao.

• Continuing with this newsletter’s theme of humans vs AI, here’s a bit of a fucking weird video to lay your eyes on. In a video doing the rounds on social media, one guy has decided to tie a chain round the neck of a robot and then fucking drag it around a room where there’s loads of debris on the floor. The robot just stumbles around helplessly, while other videos shows their cruel and sadistic master kick shit absolute out of it. Now, what the video actually shows is the humanoid’s impressive ability to track motion without any disturbances - but did we really need the kinky chain around the neck? As one reddit post put it: this guy will be the first one to die in the robot uprising.

• Team Europe have beaten Team USA to retain the Ryder Cup (sports journalism degree has finally come in handy). This is something that will infuriate golf fanatic and golf cheat Donald Trump. What is also quite fitting is that President of the USA may have set his country up to lose another battle to Europe in the tech industry. Following his latest assault on immigrants, Trump blindsided American businesses with his new H-1B visas, which will cost a whopping $100,000 a year. This visa used to bring hoards of the most-skilled workers to the country and now it might end up being the reason that drives them away from the United States. Tech giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have hastily told overseas workers to hurry the fuck back and cancel all future travel plans, while rival tech companies in Europe have already concocted plans to lure them away. The US government have allayed fears that the new $100,000-a-year fee won’t apply to existing holders or renewals and they’ve even started claiming some industries would get exemptions. Team Europe dominated most of the Ryder Cup again this weekend to win it on Sunday, and if Trump continues on with this battle with the tech industry, it might just be 2-0 for Team Europe and rings of Olé, Olé, Olé. 

• “Friendship ended with Microsoft, now Nvidia is my best friend”. The memes write themselves. OpenAI have teamed up with Nvidia via a “strategic partnership” that will see Nvidia invest up to $100billion into the AI giant. With this money, OpenAI have also announced that they would be building five more Stargate data centres with Oracle and Softbank, with the new centres bringing Stargate’s planned capacity to seven gigawatts - enough energy to download multiple songs from LimeWire at once. But along with more centres, Nvidia is intending to invest up to $100bn with every gigawatt that is deployed, allowing OpenAI to develop new models on their quest to achieving superintelligence. The strategic partnership shows how Microsoft will no longer be the sole compute provider for OpenAI, with the split looking increasingly more likely.

  

  Source: ChatGPT funnily enough

• Suno is getting sued-o by major record labels after they allegedly claimed the AI startup knowingly pirated songs from YouTube to train its generative AI models. The lawsuit claims that Suno unlawfully was ripping tracks from YouTube and that the AI company employed code to access, extract, copy, and download” copyrighted materials from Universal, Sony and Warner. Suno has been vague about how they’ve acquired such data and is yet to make its training datasets public. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) is seeking $2,500 in statutory damages for each act of circumvention, as well as up to $150,000 per work infringed.

• Remember back in May when Sam Altman and Jony Ive became best friends after OpenAI bought the ex-iPhone designer’s company and now they work together? Well, apparently they’re working on device – or four. According to reports, OpenAI might be developing a smart speaker, glasses, a digital voice recorder, and a wearable pin as they look to compete in the hardware space alongside the likes of Apple. And what better way to compete with your rivals than to just poach their suppliers and employees? OpenAI are doing just that, having secured a contract with Luxshare and has also approached another of Apple’s product assemblers in Goertek. It remains to be seen just exactly what is being dreamed up but when we asked you back in our Big Machines newsletter what you thought it would be, 50% of you said it would be an audio wearable. Still think that’s the case now?

• With the rise of far-right ideologies across the world, it seems that generative AI software is now being fuelled with nasty racist rhetoric. In a recent report by The Times, AI has been used to fuel racist conspiracy theories as well as stirring up social media with crude and outrageous AI-generated pictures of Arab immigrants taking over London. These images are being used to whip bigoted users into a frenzy, with the images showing a fragile Caucasian victim wearing an England shirt or Union Jack clobber surrounded by hoards of minorities. With anti-immigration and Islamaphobia on the rise in the UK, these AI images are reinforcing prejudices while also looking completely crap. We won’t show the pictures in the newsletter but you can see the pretty distasteful images here.

• First there was 2Pac, now it’s Stan Lee. When 2Pac was brought back to life at Coachella in 2012, it felt fucking mega. But now the hologram shit has been done to death (looking at you ABBA Voyage), it feels a tad cheap. And they’ve done so again by bringing back the great late Stan Lee back to life in the name of profit at the Los Angeles Comic Con this week, with punters able to pay $15 to $20 for a photo op or short chat with the Marvel impresario. Yuck.

🧩 Other Bits

• Spotify are finally putting their foot down and addressing the AI shite that has infected their platform. The music streaming service has now announced new policies that will develop a standard to disclose when AI is being used in music.

• Microsoft’s faltering partnership with OpenAI showed another crack this week when they brought Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Opus 4.1 to their Microsoft 365 Copilot users. Their divorce can’t come soon enough (maybe ChatGPT is to blame for all this?)

• Things have stepped up in the AI agent browser wars after Google expanded Gemini in Chrome, which can now read your tabs, check your browsing history (uh oh) and integrate other apps like YouTube with Google’s other properties.

📈 Trending tools, models & apps this week

📋 LLM Leaderboard

📲 Trending tools & apps

🫵 Our Picks

• Google Search Live lets you talk to search like it’s a person. Ask questions out loud, point your camera at stuff, and get real-time answers with web links built in. Hands full? Cooking, wiring, traveling — this is the “search box” without the box.

  Google Labs Mixboard is basically a moodboard machine. Type a vibe, drop an image, and it spins up Pinterest-style boards you can edit with plain text like “add more plants” or “make it 90s.” Perfect for pitching ideas, setting aesthetics, or just messing around.

  Notion AI Agent turns your workspace into a teammate. It will summarize notes, spin up pages, pull from Slack, and even run tasks for 20 minutes at a time without you babysitting. Translation: fewer tabs, more actual work getting done.

🚀 Trending Apps & Models

• Scrumball is an AI influencer marketing agent riding on a 120M+ creator database. Paste your site, then three AI roles take over: brand analysis, creator discovery, outreach & follow-up, and real-time performance tracking.

• Oboe is an AI learning engine that turns any topic into a structured course. Drop in a subject and it builds lessons, summaries, and even podcast-style audio so you can learn by reading or listening. No chat, just straight content.

💸 Financials

• Deutsche Bank has warned that exponential spending in the AI sector cannot continue and that the US economy is being propped up by the enormous boom of the tech industry. With multibillion-dollar investments in AI becoming the norm as of late (just look at Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100billion “partnership” as proof of this), experts believe that if spending were to slow down, it’ll just reveal a completely fucked economy. There’s also the fear that the tech industry is just selling promises of a hypothetical future rather one that’s guaranteed. What’s more alarming is what the AI industry would need to make $2trillion in revenue annually to profitably fund data centres needed for AI by 2030. Keep an ear out for a bubble popping any time now.

• Databricks are incorporating OpenAI models, including GPT-5, into its data platform and its AI product, Agent Bricks, as part of a $100million multi-year deal. The deal highlights the need to blend generative AI into the enterprise stack.

• Enterprise AI model maker Cohere has raised an additional $100million in an extension to another round in August. This additional bit of funding has boosted the company’s value to $7billion.

• Oracle is looking to raise $15billion through corporate bond sales just weeks after signing a big contract with OpenAI to supply the AI research lab with $300billion with of compute. The sale by the Cloud infrastructure giant could include seven different parts, including a n uncommon 40-year bond, according to Bloomberg.

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👋 Here’s a nice story to get you through the week… see you next time

Want to get $150,000 richer with just one prompt?

Well just ask ChatGPT for the lottery numbers.

That’s exactly what happened for one woman in Virginia, who asked ChatGPT what the numbers would be for the Powerball and it only went and hit the jackpot for her.

Despite winning the life-changing amount of money, Carrie Edwards decided to donate all the money to three charities, including a dementia research charity. Good on you, Carrie.

That’s all for this week. Check back in with us next time (or else).

Sam, Grant, Matt, Mike and the Big Machines team.