Pause for a Cause 🤖🚫

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover the non-launch of OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Astra. The latest model was deemed not safe for public release, but what is OpenAI’s logic here? Are they trying to present themselves as responsible through all the bad press, or are those fears genuine? We also have news on Muse AI being housed on a new gadget that has every 90s kid collectively thinking “Tamagotchi,” a cool app for iPhone Duo that brings back the Walkman, YouTube allowing custom feeds, AI solving Turing’s ‘other’ test, and more!

🎬 Our Top Take

🤖🚫 AI – OpenAI Pauses Release of New Model Over Safety Fears

We feel we’ve been running a bit of a weekly, episodic soap opera with all this AI safety furor over the last month, but it might just be the most important ongoing story of modern times, so we feel compelled to keep highlighting it. The big news this week is that OpenAI has stopped the release of its latest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, citing safety concerns. It comes after the Australian government announced that an OpenAI agent hacked its Medicare systems. The question, of course, is to what extent OpenAI is doing this so that it looks like a responsible purveyor of AI agents amid all that bad publicity, or whether it’s for genuine safety fears. We guess that it is probably a bit of both. In related news, NVIDIA has announced a new platform. Its purpose? To rein in AI agents. The platform offers a toolkit of software and hardware products to keep those agents contained in their testing environments. It sounds fine, but it doesn’t address the bigger-picture fear: that bad actors will start using AI agents to wreak havoc. As an aside, Anthropic has added information about the “existential AI risks to humanity” in its IPO documentation. That’s quite a pitch to make to Wall Street. #PauseForThought Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: Duo-Man

The iPhone Duo (Apple’s new foldable smartphone) is not yet released to the public, but that hasn’t stopped some intrepid devs from having fun with new app ideas to suit the new generation of iPhones. One such example is Duo-Man, which turns your foldable phone into a 1980s-style Sony Walkman. You have to see it to get a real idea of what we are talking about, and as it is not yet available in the App Store (presumably it will arrive not long after the iPhone Duo is released on October 23), you can check out the little demo video from creator Vidit Bhargava below. Great stuff.

🧐 Stat of the Week: 20B Videos

📈📉 YouTube – Build Your Own Algorithm with AI Custom Feeds

Custom Feeds are all the rage on socials right now. X is doing it (we believe they nicked the idea from Bluesky), allowing you to choose from around 70 topics to build a feed with the help of Grok. YouTube is now on board, promising a whole new experience across the 20 billion (!!!) videos now on its platform. The function basically involves asking Gemini to build your feed through a few prompts. YouTube has marketed the idea as something you could do before, say, a flight or exam prep. Anyway, it’s a cool idea, and we love that it’s catching on across socials. A tonic for doomscrolling? #CustomFeeds Read more here.

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

So you’ve reached the end of our newsletter. You hopefully enjoyed it then! We’ve been running What’s Appening for around four and a half years and are considering its future. Should we keep going? Is it worth it? Is it time to wrap it up? We love seeing it come together, and it’s been a great way to keep in touch with all of you. We’d love to hear what you think, or if you’ve got any ideas to fund it moving forward. Sponsorship? New stewardship? Open to all your thoughts.

Of course, you could always support the newsletter by hiring us or referring us! 💚