Author: gekko
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Her Revisited: How Close Are We to Samantha?
Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) captivated audiences with its vision of a future where humans form deep emotional bonds with AI. In the film, Theodore Twombly falls in love with Samantha, an intelligent operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Samantha’s conversational wit, emotional sensitivity, and seamless integration into Theodore’s life felt like pure sci-fi a decade…
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Small Models, Big Brains: Why Less Might Be the Future of AI Reasoning
In the race to build smarter AI, the mantra has often been “go big or go home.” Massive models with billions of parameters, trained on datasets the size of small libraries, have dominated the scene. But a new paper suggests that when it comes to solving tricky reasoning tasks, smaller might just be smarter. Titled…
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Beyond the Goodbye: A Critical Reading of Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions
The working paper under review (“Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions” by Julian De Freitas, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp, and Ahmet Kaan-Uğuralp, 2025, Harvard Business School, Working Paper 26-005) advances an arresting claim: popular AI-companion apps deploy emotionally charged “farewell” replies—guilt, FOMO, even metaphorical restraint—precisely when users say they are leaving, and these tactics can extend engagement dramatically.…
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Two Protocols, Two Futures: OpenAI’s ACP vs. Anthropic’s MCP
Imagine this: It’s a Tuesday evening, and you’re buried in work. Your AI assistant notices your flight to New York got canceled due to a storm. Without missing a beat, it scans alternatives, books a new one on your credit card, coordinates a rideshare to the airport, and even reschedules your hotel— all while you…
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Agentic Commerce, Explained: What OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol Means for Retail and SaaS
OpenAI has begun rolling out Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT for U.S. users, letting people buy products from participating merchants—starting with Etsy sellers, and with Shopify merchants “coming soon.” The system is powered by a new open standard called the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed with Stripe and now open-sourced. It’s designed so an AI agent…