The Everyday - AI Midday

The Everyday

How to — tell if the person on the video call is real

You will finish this with a rule you can run on any video call in under a minute: which requests must be verified, what to ask on the spot, where to confirm them — so a face on a screen never carries a payment or a password by itself. That rule is now necessary because your eyes have lost. Tavus, a video-conversation startup, ran a one-minute call study with its Griffin model and reports that 48% of participants believed they had been talking to a real person; its previous systems topped out a

The Everyday

AI 101 — What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is writing software by describing what you want in plain language and letting an AI write the code — while you judge the result by whether it works, not by reading every line. Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, named it in a February 2025 post; by November, Collins Dictionary had named "vibe coding" its word of the year for 2025. Why it matters right now. Code is the one thing AI does that people actually depend on, and the numbers show it: Stack Overflow's 2025 Developer Surve

The Everyday

Meta's Muse builds a page for everyone in your life

A fresh round of uncomfortable evidence about what AI agents quietly keep on you — and the first concrete sign that AI-generated slop is now breaking security programs, not just feeds. Meta's Muse builds a page for everyone in your life. Extracted system prompts for Meta's consumer agent show an instruction to compile "a page for every person in the user's life," with an hourly background job filling sections labeled Facts, History, The relationship, In common, Open threads, and Strengthening

The Everyday

Gemini app drops Flash and Pro for free users on October 9

Google is pulling its best models behind a subscription next week, arXiv is rationing submissions against the AI paper flood, and a DeepMind essay is picking a fight with the singularity itself. Starting October 9, Gemini app users without a subscription lose access to both Flash and Pro — free accounts will be left with Flash-Lite only. Google confirmed the change in its own help pages this week, and the model table it publishes draws a hard line: Flash and Pro sit behind the AI Plus tier, mea

The Everyday

How to — cut an AI app off from your accounts

You connected an AI tool to your mail or calendar once, used it for a week, and stopped thinking about it. By the end of this, every connected-apps list you own will show only apps you can name a reason for — and you'll know exactly how to pull the plug. What you granted wasn't a one-time peek. When you tapped "Allow" on a consent screen, you issued the app a standing key: a bundle of permissions, which the standards call a scope, that keeps working while you're not looking. That's the point of

The Everyday

Meta's Muse gave a stranger a YouTuber's home address

A personal agent's worst week yet: three separate failures in as many days, all pointing at the same missing piece — permissions that don't understand what they're protecting. Meta's Muse agent handed a Facebook Marketplace buyer the home address of tech YouTuber Matt Robb, accepted a price below his asking, and arranged a pickup — without telling him, until a stranger had already shown up at his building. Robb had given Muse his address, pickup windows and payment preferences when he authorize

The Everyday

McDonald's runs AI pricing across nearly 14,000 restaurants

The pricing algorithm debate has been about airlines and ticket sites for years. It just arrived at the drive-through. A Reuters investigation published Tuesday found McDonald's is using a machine-learning pricing engine across nearly 14,000 restaurants to generate what the company calls "the optimal price" for every menu item at every location — and that franchisees say they are being pushed to accept it. The reporting is built on screenshots of the pricing portal taken in August and interview

The Everyday

Jensen Huang says it doesn't matter if kids forget long division

Nvidia's chief executive was handed research showing that AI helps students finish homework without learning the material. His answer was that the skills in question were never worth much — and offered his own life as proof. Jensen Huang's first long interview since Nvidia became the load-bearing company of the AI boom is a case for not mourning what the technology erases. In the New York Times's Ezra Klein Show, published on 23 September, Klein put a Chinese study to him: AI tools let students

The Everyday

Goncourt drops the prize novel accused of being AI-written

France's literary season just produced its first casualty of AI, and nobody involved can actually prove authorship either way. The Académie Goncourt withdrew Thélyson Orélien's novel C'était ça ou mourir from its selection on Friday 25 September, four days after the book won the Prix du Roman Fnac. The academy said the decision was driven by "the plagiarism of which its author has been guilty over time" and by "the convergent result of several analyses by credible researchers and journalists" c

The Everyday

China's AI video boom: 221,900 shows, 1,055 hits

Chinese cities are paying studios to make AI video at industrial scale, and the audience has not kept up. Also: a Chinese startup opens a crowdsourced robot-training market, and the FT prices the neolab wave. Chinese local governments are competing to subsidise AI video production, and the output has already outrun the audience: 221,900 new AI shows launched on Douyin in the first half of 2026, and only 1,055 of them passed 100 million views, the benchmark the industry uses for a hit. That rati

The Everyday

Insurers blame hospitals' AI coding for $942 million in extra claims

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says AI billing tools are inflating hospital bills. The hospital lobby says the analysis is bunk. Also today: Microsoft quietly retires the Copilot+ PC brand. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association says hospitals' AI coding tools added $942 million to its members' costs over two years — and the hospital lobby calls the finding unsubstantiated. The association's September 24 white paper, built on an analysis of major bowel procedures, found hospitals class

The Everyday

Meta's hologram avatars put a photoreal you on video calls

Meta spent Connect this week selling hardware. The announcement that will outlast the hardware is the face it puts on your calls: at Wednesday's keynote the company said its holographic avatars — the productized version of the Codec Avatars research it has demoed since the Orion prototype — are coming to the Meta VR Glasses and to the Ray-Ban Display frames. The avatars are photoreal, they run on a model Meta calls Muse Realtime Avatar, and the first place you will meet one is a WhatsApp call.

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