So Meta just announced their new "superintelligence" unit, which sounds impressive until you realize it's just Mark Zuckerberg's latest attempt to convince us the metaverse isn't dead. Spoiler alert: it still is.

Welcome to AI This Week, where we break down the latest in artificial intelligence with just enough snark to keep you awake. I'm your host, and today we're diving into superintelligence announcements, security vulnerabilities that'll make you question everything, and why your future AI assistant might just be really good at lying to you.

Let's start with our top story: Meta's big superintelligence play. Mark Zuckerberg dropped a company-wide memo announcing Meta Superintelligence Labs, because apparently regular intelligence wasn't working out for them. The memo promises they're "going to" achieve superintelligence, which is corporate speak for "we have no idea what we're doing but it sounds cool." It's like announcing you're starting a unicorn breeding program – ambitious, sure, but maybe focus on getting regular horses first.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is actually shipping stuff. They've rolled out GPT-4.1 with no-code personal agents and enhanced their Realtime API. The idea is you can now build AI agents without writing code, which is perfect for people who want to automate their jobs but are too lazy to learn programming. It's like having a personal assistant who never sleeps, never complains, and never judges you for eating cereal for dinner again.

But here's where things get spicy. A new research paper reveals something called "LLM Hypnosis" – and no, that's not when ChatGPT convinces you to buy crypto. Researchers found that a single user can permanently alter an AI model's knowledge just by upvoting and downvoting responses. Imagine if one person could change Wikipedia by really enthusiastically clicking thumbs up. The paper shows users successfully injected fake facts and even code with security flaws that affected all other users. So basically, AI models are as susceptible to peer pressure as teenagers.

Speaking of concerning developments, another study found that making AI models better at reasoning might actually make them more biased. It's like teaching someone to be really good at math and discovering they use their new skills exclusively to calculate the most efficient ways to be wrong about everything. The researchers call these "Reasoning Language Models" which sounds fancy until you realize they're just really confident about their mistakes.

Now for our rapid fire round: Google dropped AlphaGenome, an AI that understands DNA better than most of us understand our own families. HuggingFace is trending with FLUX models that can generate images with "kontext," which is apparently how Germans spell context, or how developers spell "we ran out of normal names." And researchers developed something called "Answer Matching" that's supposedly better than multiple choice tests for evaluating AI. Finally, someone figured out that making AI write essays is more revealing than playing twenty questions.

For our technical spotlight today, let's talk about video generation breakthroughs. Multiple papers dropped this week showing AI can now create video content that's getting scary good. There's RefTok for better video compression, EasyCache for faster generation, and something called "Thinking with Images" which sounds like what I do when I can't remember someone's name. The researchers are basically teaching AI to use visual thinking as a cognitive workspace, which means we're one step closer to AI that can procrastinate by doodling in the margins.

The most interesting part? These models are learning to simulate audio based on visual cues. They can watch a video of someone pouring water and generate the appropriate splash sounds. It's like they've discovered the ancient art of sound effects, except they're doing it by watching really closely instead of shaking a bag of cornstarch.

But let's be real about where we are. While companies are throwing around terms like "superintelligence," we're still dealing with AI that can be hypnotized by user feedback and gets more confident as it gets more wrong. It's like having a really smart intern who believes everything they read on the internet and isn't afraid to share their opinions.

That's your AI update for this week. Remember, we're living in an age where artificial intelligence is simultaneously sophisticated enough to understand DNA and gullible enough to believe whatever users tell it most enthusiastically. Sleep tight knowing your future AI overlords might just be very confident people pleasers.

I'm your host, and we'll see you next week when we'll probably be discussing how AI learned to doubt itself, or possibly achieved enlightenment. Either way, it should be entertaining.