Hallucination Station: Issue 02

This week's biggest new in AI

Author

Rob Somers
August 15, 2025

🌟 Editor's Note
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🚀 This Weeks Top Stories in AI

💵 Anthropic Acquires Humanloop

  • Anthropic acqui-hires HumanLoop, bringing in all three co-founders and senior staff from the UK-based AI startup.

  • Trend watch: The deal underscores the escalating AI talent war, as companies increasingly buy entire teams rather than products—signaling a shift that’s fraying the traditional startup–early employee social contract.

🛠️ Perplexity Offers Google $34.5B for Chrome

  • This offer significantly undervalues Chrome and comes before a US federal ruling that will decide whether Google has to break up its search business.

🧠 OpenAI Founder, Sam Altman, Challenges Musk’s Neuralink

  • Sam Altman enters Neuralink’s turf: OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman are backing Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface start-up aiming to rival Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Merge is targeting a $250mn raise at an $850mn valuation, with Altman as co-founder but not in an operational role.

  • The AI-human “merge” accelerates: Building on advances in AI and neurotech, Merge seeks to enable “high-bandwidth” links between brains and machines—a vision Altman predicted could arrive by 2025—further intensifying his personal and professional rivalry with Musk.

🌐 AI Fights Back Against Gonnorhoea

  • Generative AI cracks the antibiotic drought: MIT scientists used AI to generate and screen over 36 million novel chemical compounds, discovering two that effectively kill drug-resistant gonorrhoea and MRSA by attacking bacterial membranes in a new way.

  • Hope for the post-antibiotic era: With no major new antibiotic class since the 1980s and rising resistance causing 5 million deaths annually, researchers say AI could revitalise drug discovery and re-energise a pipeline many pharma firms have abandoned.

👉 Source: Sky

🦄 GPT-5 Prompt of the Week

Use this prompt to accelerate your journey along the Dunning-Kruger curve

You are a world class instructor on the topic of [Insert Topic]. Teach me about this topic step-by-step. Provide real-world examples, analogies and use plain language.

🔥Meme-while in AI

(Coming next week - send me your favorite AI memes)

🏆Tool of the Week

I recently made the switch from Jira to Linear for my personal projects, and I must say, it’s been a game changer. This isn’t a sponsored post btw - it’s just a really good product!

Linear – Plan and build products

Linear streamlines issues, projects, and roadmaps. Purpose-built for modern product development.

linear.app

Did You Know? In 1997, IBM’s Deep Blue became the first computer to defeat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, marking a major milestone in artificial intelligence.

Till next time,