Daily Tech News 13 August 2025

• Perplexity AI has offered to buy Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Perplexity doesn't have $34.5 billion.
  
  Minor detail.
  
  
  
• In a world of vibe-coding startups, Uno Platform is one. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good for them I guess.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has offered all branches and agencies of the federal government unlimited use of its services for $1. (Tech Crunch)
  
  For one year.
  
  First year is (almost) free.

• Training AIs to be warm and empathetic makes them sycophantic idiots. (ArXiv)
  
  Whoever would have guessed?
  
  
  
• So-called "reasoning" AI models aren't. (Ars Technica)
  
  The models can explain their reasoning, but the explanations bear only surface resemblance to the actual reasoning.
  
  
  
• And generally, don't ask AI models why they did what they did: They don't know. (Ars Technica)
  
  And they don't know because when this information was added during testing, they could no longer do what they did.
  
  The key to solving some problems is not knowing it's impossible.
  
  I'll need to read this one more closely; it sounds even worse than I thought.
  
  
  
• PayPal can now only be used on Steam in EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, AUD, and USD. (WCCFTech)
  
  Why? We don't know. Neither PayPal nor Steam have offered a full explanation.
  
  
  
• In theory AMD's Radeon 9060 - a graphics card currently only found in prebuilt systems - should perform between Nvidia's 5050 and 5050. In practice that's exactly what it does. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TDP is a fairly modest 135W. It's only available in an 8GB model, but at a suitably attractive price it could be a win for budget builds.
  
  
  
• The UK's National Drought Group says you should delete old emails to save water. (The Verge)
  
  For once it's not The Verge itself I'm mad at.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:40 AM

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