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OpenAI Introduces AI-Generated Pets For Its Codex App
It’s like Microsoft’s Clippy, but useful.
How, where to bet on the Kentucky Derby 2026: Get $1,000 in bonuses for TwinSpires, FanDuel Racing, DK Horse
Kentucky Derby betting is in full swing. See exclusive Kentucky Derby promo codes for sites like TwinSpires, FanDuel Racing and 1/ST BET
Georgia health district says IHOP hair incident falls to management, not kitchen code
tonight we're digging into Health standards for restaraunts in georgia...after a photo taken at a restaurant in Fort Olgelthorpe went viral in our area.an anony
The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed
CopyFail threatens multi-tenant servers, CI/CD work flows, Kubernetes containers, and more.
OpenAI's New AI Models Ordered To Never Talk About 'Goblins, Gremlins And Ogres'
OpenAI Codex CLI instructs GPT models not to mention goblins gremlins or similar creatures unless relevant
OpenAI blames ‘nerdy personality’ for ChatGPT obsession with goblins
The company said in a blog post that it ended up retiring the “nerdy” personality entirely, but the issue remained, forcing it to create a specific override code instruction.
In 1987, a Student Set Out to Fix a Mac Problem. The Code Spiraled Out of Control, and He Ended up Creating "Photoshop"
A routine display fix on a 1987 Macintosh mutated into an unwieldy codebase. Industry doors shut. Then a single meeting at Adobe altered software history.
J. Craig Venter, Scientist Who Decoded the Human Genome, Dies at 79
A risk-taking outsider, he brought speed, competition and controversy to one of science’s biggest races.
Linux cryptographic code flaw offers fast route to root
: Patches land for authencesn flaw enabling local privilege escalation
Jacksonville reviewing ‘home occupations’ legislation, covering businesses operated from homes
Jacksonville’s Planning Department is seeking approval to update the city’s zoning code rules for home occupations in Section 656 so they match Florida Statute 559.955.
OpenAI Codex system prompt includes explicit directive to "never talk about goblins"
Directions also include system instructions to act like "you have a vivid inner life."
OpenAI wants its AI to stop talking about goblins randomly
OpenAI included a line in Codex's instructions restricting references to goblins, gremlins, trolls, and ogres, and even Sam Altman joined the memes.
OpenAI wants its AI to stop talking about goblins randomly
OpenAI included a line in Codex's instructions restricting references to goblins, gremlins, trolls, and ogres, and even Sam Altman joined the memes.
Google’s ‘Pixel Glow’ might have several lights as laptop animation surfaces [Video]
Google's new "Pixel Glow" feature has shown up in code with a few more details, including how many lights it has.
Photo of hair being done inside Georgia IHOP goes viral; No health code violations found
A photo showing someone getting their hair done inside a northwest Georgia IHOP is drawing attention online.The image, shared in a public Facebook group, shows
GitHub fixes RCE flaw that gave access to millions of private repos
In early March, GitHub patched a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2026-3854) that could have allowed attackers to access millions of private repositories.
Microsoft opens door to the past by releasing 86-DOS and PC-DOS 1.00
Antiques code show: Back to a time when source repositories were printouts and commits were hand-written notes
GitHub rushed to fix a critical vulnerability in less than six hours
A critical remote code execution vulnerability was discovered using an AI model and patched within hours.
OpenAI Really Wants Codex to Shut Up About Goblins
“Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant,” reads OpenAI's coding agent instructions.
Anthropic doubles estimate for Claude Code token spend
Anthropic now says that the average cost per developer per active day is $13, up from $6 earlier this month.
Lovable launches its vibe coding app on iOS and Android
The app allows developers to vibe code web apps and websites on the go.
This Promo Code Gets You Double the Discounts in Woot's Massive Sale on PS5, Switch, and Xbox Games and Accessories
The best deals are stackable.
T-Mobile launches SuperBroadband for business customers
The service combines T-Mobile's 5G network with SpaceX's Starlink satellites and claims to reach every ZIP code in the U.S.
T-Mobile launches SuperBroadband for business customers
The service combines T-Mobile's 5G network with SpaceX's Starlink satellites and claims to reach every ZIP code in the U.S.
Images of Samsung's rumored smart glasses have leaked
Samsung is reportedly preparing to launch a pair of smart glasses currently codenamed "Jinju." The company is also making a more advanced model with a display.
Exclusive: This is the Samsung Galaxy Glasses
Samsung's first Galaxy Glasses are codenamed 'Jinju' and could launch between $379-$499, with a display version coming in 2027.
Benoit Richer, Assassin's Creed Codename Hexe game director, leaves Ubisoft
In-development title loses third major team member as Richer becomes game director at new studio Servo Games
Nessus Agent Vulnerability on Windows Enables Arbitrary Code Execution with SYSTEM Privileges
A newly disclosed security vulnerability in Tenable's Nessus Agent for Windows could allow attackers to execute malicious code with the highest level of system privileges, raising serious concerns for enterprise security teams relying on the widely-deployed vulnerability assessment platform.
Kalshi Referral Code SBWIRE | Get $10 Bonus for NBA, NHL, Politics Trading & More (April 26)
Sign up with Kalshi referral code SBWIRE, trade $10 and get $10 in credit. Trade the NBA Playoffs, Stanley Cup Playoffs, MLB, politics, crypto and more.
‘But I’m lasting like 40 seconds or something’: Nikhil Kamath shares health hacks he swears by to stay in shape
From sleep to cold showers, expert decodes whether these popular wellness habits actually work.
Microsoft explains why Windows 11 File Explorer scrolls smoothly in some places, but not everywhere
Microsoft has finally explained why Windows 11 File Explorer lacks smooth scrolling in all folders, blaming legacy code and complex features.
Kalshi Referral Code SBWIRE | Get $10 Bonus for NBA, NHL, Politics Trading & More (April 25)
Sign up with Kalshi referral code SBWIRE, trade $10 and get $10 in credit. Trade the NBA Playoffs, Stanley Cup Playoffs, MLB, politics, crypto and more.
How I went from BCG consultant to AI startup founder by age 25
Oscar Brisset, 25, used most of his vacation days to learn to code. He left BCG to launch a YC-backed AI robotics company.
Pokemon Z development build found, footage released
Brand new footage of Pokemon Z – which was never released – has now been shared. It goes without saying, but this was an extremely early development build. MDTravisYT posted about the discovery on social media. It’s noted that the source code has an “upper_fake” branch that compiles as VERSION_Z. This has a “unique” title screen alongside some “new” mega...
Gog Dynasty Buffet shutters for staff training, deep cleaning after health inspector citations
Health inspectors found zero health code violations one week after finding 16.
AI may be approaching a new phase in healthcare, on two fronts
Artificial intelligence is becoming so user-friendly that doctors can code custom clinical workflow tools. But AI-driven vulnerability discovery is fast reshaping cybersecurity imperatives for IT leaders.
Anthropic acknowledges Claude Code issues, denies 'nerfing'
Anthropic said it found three issues with Claude Code after users complained the AI tool deteriorated.
Ranked: AI Models U.S. Businesses Pay For
OpenAI has long been the leader for paid usage by U.S. businesses, but Anthropic has closed the gap with tools like Claude Code and Cowork.
Ph.D. student combines science and leadership while pushing cancer research forward
Oluwaferanmi Ogunleye's work focuses on DNA "barcodes" that track specific proteins in cells and could reveal more information on how cell behave, interact and change.
The fiery effects of political memes
Despite their simplicity, memes can both inspire new political voices and reinforce false narratives and are affecting online discourse around the globe.
Malicious KICS Docker Images and VS Code Extensions Hit Checkmarx Supply Chain
Malicious KICS Docker tags and VS Code versions 1.17.0, 1.19.0 enabled data exfiltration, risking exposed infrastructure secrets.
A Powerful New ‘QR Code’ Untangles Math’s Knottiest Knots
With a newly discovered mathematical tool, researchers are hoping to gain unprecedented insight into the structure of complex knots.
Gulf of Maine Research Institute applies ocean science to help communities, ecosystems
Its work is split into two main parts.
City of Rochester released final zoning code proposal
It's part of a years-long effort to overhaul the city's zoning code and map.
Tax relief on the horizon: How federal rescheduling could reshape cannabis business taxes
Rachel Carr Shreves and Crystal Howard of Spencer Fane discuss the proposed federal rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III and considerations stemming from potential relief from the limitations on certain deductions under Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code.
OpenAI Takes Aim at Google with New Image Model
If you’ve been on X or Reddit in recent weeks, you’ve likely seen images created by an upcoming model from OpenAI floating around. Sharp-eyed people have pointed out that the new model is potentially being tested with some ChatGPT users and on leaderboards under code names.The images generated ...
ECMO Support Saves Trevor's Life
Trevor Adams coded for nearly 40 minutes. At 35 years old and otherwise healthy, Trevor spent seven days on ECMO life support.
3D printing is now possible inside living cells
For the first time, researchers have 3D-printed tiny objects directly inside of living cells, including an elephant and barcode tags.
Dreaming in Cubes
Generating Minecraft Worlds with Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE) and Transformers
Can Claude Write Z80 Assembly Code?
Betteridge’s law applies, but with help and guidance by a human who knows his stuff, [Ready Z80] was able to get a functioning game of Wordle out of the French-named LLM, which is more than w…
How One Line Of TF2 Code Ruined This Simple Feature
Ever encountered a minor annoying bug in a video game? How about one dating back to 2018? Usually, you have no hope of fixing it, but this time is different. [Joey Cheerio] shows the first-time pro…
CKD Screening With Mobile Health Units Reveals Disparities
Study investigator, Phillip Levy, MD, discusses the reality of how a zip code can impact CKD risk and treatment options.
Schematik Is ‘Cursor for Hardware.’ Anthropic Wants In
Schematik is a program that aims to help people vibe code for physical devices. Hopefully, it won’t blow anything up.
Texas woman moving to Spain AI codes furniture marketplace
Johanna Abzug tried selling her furniture on Facebook Marketplace, but said buyers were "uncommitted." She decided to vibe code her own platform.
7 AI Tools That Run Your Entire One-Person Business While You Sleep (No Staff, No Code)
These seven tools execute for you — I'll demo each live with prompts so you can build a business that runs even when you're offline.
Can your zip code impact your heart health?
Dr. Deeb Salem from Tufts Medical Center spoke with NewsCenter 5 about the data.
Hoboken zoning overhaul targets business growth
The Hoboken Business Alliance and city launch a zoning code modernization effort to streamline permitting and expand commercial uses.
Hackers are abusing unpatched Windows security flaws to hack into organizations
A security researcher published details of three security vulnerabilities in Windows Defender, and the code used to exploit them. Now, hackers are taking advantage of the vulnerabilities in real life attacks, according to a cybersecurity firm.
OpenAI takes aim at Anthropic with beefed-up Codex that gives it more power over your desktop
OpenAI's agentic coding tool has gotten a major makeover, with a variety of new powers and abilities.
New Codex features include the ability to use your computer in the background
An in-app browser allows visual feedback while building websites and more.
OpenAI’s Codex Mac app adds three key features that go beyond agentic coding
OpenAI is releasing a new version of its Codex desktop app today. The latest Codex update adds three key features...
OpenAI's latest Codex update builds the groundwork for its upcoming super app
OpenAI is pushing out a major update to Codex that significantly expands what that software can do, and offers a glimpse of what OpenAI hopes to build with its upcoming super app.
OpenAI’s big Codex update is a direct shot at Anthropic’s Claude Code
Codex can now use your macOS apps on its own.
Rumour: Red Dead Redemption May Be Getting A Rubbish 'Code-In-A-Box' Release
Out to pasture
4 New Apple Intelligence Features Found in Apple Code, Likely in iOS 27
iOS 27 is likely to introduce at least four new Apple Intelligence features that function within system apps, based on backend code discovered by Nicolás Alvarez and confirmed by MacRumors. First up, Apple is expected to lean more heavily into Visual Intelligence in iOS 27, since the company is reportedly developing AI wearable devices that will leverage the feature. Apple is reportedly working on smart glasses, AirPods with cameras, and a wearable AI pin or pendant.
Browning High School Students to Showcase Mental Health App at National Science Fair
Throughout the school year, Aiyahna Green, Sophia Guerrero-Gobert and Kalani SunRhodes met during their lunch periods, hunching over their phones. The three Browning High School seniors were building an app that could help provide mental health resources for teenagers. The girls represent the Browning High School chapter of Code Girls United, a nonprofit that since […]
How Dangerous Is Anthropic’s New AI Model? Its Chief Science Officer Explains.
Just how fast is the future coming at us, and how worried should we be? Last week, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos, the latest in what has become the leading family of AI models. In a very short time, AI models from Anthropic and other companies have become shockingly powerful at coding. But Mythos stands out because it is not just able to write code that can hack into critical systems, like those that run financial companies, but also to analyze systems and find and string together vulnerabilities in them, allowing Mythos to evade even sophisticated defenses. Anthropic chose to release Mythos to only about 40 leading corporations, so they could analyze the model’s capabilities and prepare countermeasures, in an effort it calls Project Glasswing. The release of Mythos—and the prospect of similarly powerful AIs to follow—has caused tremors at the top levels of Washington and corporate America. Jared Kaplan, co-founder and chief science officer at Anthropic, is at the center of this breakthrough. We sat down with Kaplan so he could walk us through just how powerful Mythos is, what the implications are for issues like our personal privacy, and what comes next. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Fischer: For the layman, how is Claude Mythos different—more powerful, more dangerous—from previous models released by Anthropic? Jared Kaplan: I think most people have experienced the fact that our computers get faster and faster over time and over many decades. There’s this very smooth trend where every 18 months, maybe, computer processing power doubles. I think AI is on a trend in which it’s improving maybe 10 times faster than that. A lot of the earliest work that I did in AI was around identifying this scaling trend in AI. Claude Mythos is the latest model from Anthropic, but it’s not different because it’s qualitatively different. It’s really just kind of the culmination of the trend of AI models getting smarter and smarter at all kinds of general capabilities, from reasoning to software engineering to scientific research to knowledge work. For us, it was the first model to demonstrate very elite-level cybersecurity capabilities. It wasn’t because we trained Claude Mythos to focus on cybersecurity, but it was because, as a byproduct of its general intelligence and its general ability with software, it’s particularly good at identifying vulnerabilities in software and how to exploit them.
Weekly Entertainment Report: Music and lively arts, April 16-19, for Southern NH » Nashua Ink Link
Live music and entertainment is the stuff that connects us to one another. Go out and find some!
Apple Pushes Siri Programmers to Adopt AI Coding Tools
Apple plans to send “a significant chunk” of its Siri programmers to a weekslong bootcamp to learn to code using artificial intelligence, The Information
AMD Linux Graphics Driver Introducing "Power Module" To Better Match Windows Behavior
With the set of today's AMDGPU kernel graphics driver Display Core (DC) patches is a rather curious addition with wiring up the Linux code to a 'power module' that looks like it will better match Microsoft Windows behavior with the AMD Radeon driver around display-related power savings features.
Siri Engineers Sent to AI Coding Bootcamp as Apple Prepares to Deliver Siri Overhaul
Apple is sending a large portion of its Siri engineers to a multi-week bootcamp to learn to code using AI, reports The Information. Apple's decision to teach its programmers to better use AI for coding comes just two months before Apple is expected to unveil a smarter, more capable version of Siri at WWDC. While employees attend the coding bootcamp, around 60 members of the Siri development team will stick around to work on Siri, and an additional 60 will evaluate how Siri is performing.
We tested Anthropic’s redesigned Claude Code desktop app and 'Routines' -- here's what enterprises should know
For the enterprise, the Desktop GUI is likely to become the standard for management and review, while the CLI remains the tool for execution.
Adobe takes Creative Cloud into Claude Code-esque territory
This is a big step in a new strategic direction for Adobe.
To Keep Climate Science Alive, Researchers Are Speaking in Code
Words considered "woke" are vanishing from National Science Foundation proposals. Grist tracked the changes.
3 Central Florida restaurants shut down after health inspections
The Department of Business and Professional Regulation shut down three Central Florida restaurants for health code violations during the week from April 5-11.
Want a Cheat Code for Starting a Business? A New Study of 1,334 Cities Suggests It's Hiding in Plain Sight
I like things that are easy.
VA announces intent to reorganize the Veterans Health Administration
The Department of Veterans Affairs is restructuring the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to eliminate administrative hurdles and grant local hospital directors greater autonomy, the VA said in an announcement on Dec. 15, 2025. The shift aims to modernize the system, ensuring veterans receive consistent, high-quality care regardless of the VA facility they visit. The VA said this isn’t a reduction in force or an attempt to reduce VHA staffing levels. The department said the goal is to improve veteran health outcomes and ensure policies are applied consistently throughout all facilities. As part of the reorganization, the VHA Central Office will have responsibility for setting policy goals and conducting financial management, oversight and compliance, and operation centers and Veterans Integrated Service Networks (VISNs) will take policy direction from the VHA Central Office to develop operational, quality and performance standards. The changes aim to provide clearer guidance for delivering health care throughout the VA. For DAV’s statement on VHA reorganization, scan the code or visit qrs.ly/q9h7shd. For DAV’s statement on VHA reorganization, visit dav.org/learn-more/news/2025/dav-statement-on-vha-reorganization/.
The Pixel 10 is getting a major security boost you'll never actually see
Google is bringing memory-safe Rust code to the Pixel 10 modem to protect users from remote hacking and memory-safety vulnerabilities.
Google shoehorned Rust into Pixel 10 modem to make legacy code safer
Cellular modems are complex black boxes of legacy code, but Google is making them safer with Rust.
Scientists decode the dynamic heart of elephant grass chromosomes
Centromeres act as the control centers of chromosomes, ensuring accurate genetic inheritance during cell division, yet they remain among the least understood genomic regions due to their repetitive structure.
I use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT every day—here's the only one you should pay for
The battle of the bots.
The Linux kernel now allows AI-written code, but you're on the hook for it
Your AI-generated code is still your code.
Female students, leaders gather for Business of Her conference
More than 200 students and other female leaders gatehred at McKenna Hall for the Business of Her conference.The day was full of panels, breakout sessions, insp
$10,000 bounty on the implementation of rollback netcode for Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 placed by Maximilian Dood
It's been nearly 15 years since Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was released on November 15, 2011. Funnily enough, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was released about nine months after Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (February 15, 2011), which spawned ...
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
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