Hallucination Station: Issue 11

🌟 Editor's Note

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🚀 This Weeks Top Stories in AI

🛡️ How AI startups survive when OpenAI keeps expanding

• Focus on underserved audiences — build for user groups or demographics that ChatGPT doesn’t target by default.

• Own a vertical or domain — deliver highly accurate, domain-specific models or data in areas where generalist AI struggles.

• Create defensibility through UX, integrations, and network effects — the experience, workflows, and ecosystem become the real moat when model access is commoditized.

👉 Read More About It

🛒 Walmart + OpenAI: ChatGPT just became your one-stop shop

• Walmart is partnering with OpenAI to let customers purchase items directly inside ChatGPT using a new Instant Checkout feature.

• At launch, the system supports single-item transactions (not full baskets), and integrates payments via Stripe / Apple Pay / Google Pay.

• The move shifts retail toward “agentic commerce,” where AI becomes the intermediary — and Walmart’s stock even jumped on the news.

👉 Read More About It

🎬 Google upgrades Veo + Flow for more cinematic AI video magic

• The new Veo 3.1 update lets creators tweak lighting, shadows, and scene structure, making AI videos more realistic and customizable.

• “Ingredients to Video” and “Frames to Video” enable audio-driven video from just a few reference images or by bridging two stills with seamless transitions.

• Coming soon: object removal and scene extension up to 1 minute, plus native audio and access via Gemini API and Flow’s paid preview.

👉 Read full breakdown

🧠 OpenAI plans to loosen ChatGPT’s guardrails — safely

• Sam Altman announced that OpenAI will relax ChatGPT’s restrictions after addressing serious mental health concerns tied to earlier models.

• A new version launching in a few weeks will let users choose personalities that feel more human, expressive, or friendly — echoing what people loved about GPT-4o.

• By December, OpenAI will expand adult-only features (including erotica for verified users) as part of its new “treat adults like adults” principle and broader age-gating rollout.

👉 Source

🦄 Other Bits

• Spotify and major labels strike a responsible AI deal

• Barrister cites fictitious case provided by AI

• Wall Street says we’re not in an AI bubble

🔥Meme-while in AI

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

🏆Tool of the Week

It’s not necessarily an AI tool but I just really don’t like Typeform so here’s Tally:

Did You Know? The first computer bug was literally a bug—in 1947, Grace Hopper found a moth trapped in a Harvard Mark II computer, coining the term "debugging" in the process.

Till next time,