Hallucination Station: Issue 16

🌟 Editor's Note

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🚀 This Weeks Top Stories in AI

👤 Tim Cook May Step Down as Apple Inc. CEO in 2026

• Internal preparations at Apple indicate a possible CEO transition “as soon as next year” — with the company unlikely to name a successor before its January earnings report.

• John Ternus, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, is widely seen as the frontrunner for the top job.

• While Cook turns 65 this year, he may not fully retire — reports suggest he could stay on as Chairman of the Board, easing the leadership hand-off.

  
  👉 Read All About It

🤖 Google Unveils Gemini 3 in Renewal of AI Rivalry

• Google has released its next-gen AI model, Gemini 3, positioning it at the heart of its search and productivity tools as it intensifies the battle with OpenAI.

• The model introduces features such as deeper reasoning and “thinking mode” within Google Search, signalling a shift from simple response generation to more elaborate interactive assistance.

• This launch comes as Alphabet ramps up AI-capex and search traffic dynamics shift, raising questions about how Google’s core business will adapt in a world where AI may replace page-ranked web results.

  
  👉 Read All About It

📉 AI Stocks Surge While Underlying Fundamentals Wobble

• Equity markets have steeply bid up AI-centric firms, but growing warnings suggest that the hype may have outpaced actual earnings growth and business model maturation.

• Analysts point to a cycle where expectations of “AI winners” are baked into valuations, increasing the risk of corrections if monetisation doesn’t match the excitement.

• Investors and corporate execs alike are being urged to differentiate between speculative “AI hype” and sustainable operational change—for example, automation that genuinely cuts costs or drives incremental revenue.

  👉 Read All About It

💬 Introducing Group Chats in ChatGPT

• ChatGPT now supports group chats, allowing multiple users and ChatGPT to participate in the same conversation.

• Users can invite 1-20 participants via link, add or remove people, set custom instructions for how ChatGPT should respond in each chat, and benefit from features like file uploads, images, and voice dictation if their plan supports it.

• Privacy is emphasized: group chats are separate from your private chats, your personal memory isn’t used or shared in group contexts, and under-18 users have additional content filters and can be managed via parental controls.

  
  👉 Read All About It

🖼️ Google Rolls Out Nano Banana Pro (Powered by Gemini 3 Pro Image)

• Google has launched Nano Banana Pro — an advanced image‐generation and editing model built on Gemini 3 Pro Image — offering higher fidelity visuals, better text rendering, and deeper world knowledge.

• The model supports professional-grade features: resolution up to 4K, control over camera angle/lighting/focus/colour, consistent subject rendering across multiple images, and integration with real-time search data.

• Access is global via the Gemini app free tier (with quotas) and expanded for paid tiers like Google AI Plus/Pro/Ultra, as well as developer access via the Gemini API and Google AI Studio.

  👉 Read All About It

🦄 High Leverage AI Tip of the Week

Use OpenAI’s Atlas to learn/study content more effectively and twice as fast. Here is the prompt I use to achieve this for any topic:

• “Atlas, rewrite the entire content of this page into a highly efficient, fast-to-read version.
  Keep all essential ideas, facts, arguments, and logic from the original page, but:

  • Remove every filler sentence, tangent, repetition, and low-value detail.

  • Compress long explanations into tight, high-clarity prose.

  • Reorder ideas if needed to improve flow and comprehension.

  • Replace complex phrasing with simple, precise language.

  • Preserve nuance without slowing me down.

  The result should read like the ‘half-time’ version of the page — twice as fast to absorb, with zero loss of meaning.
  Do not summarize. Create a full, clean, optimized rewrite designed for maximum comprehension speed.”

🔥Meme-while in AI

PLEASE SEND ME MEMES PEOPLE!

🏆Tool of the Week (not sponsored!!!)

This one is fun - check out bitrig to vibe code mobile apps from your mobile device!

Early hard drives had removable donut-shaped memory modules called “cake packs.”

In the 1960s, IBM’s 1311 Disk Storage Drive stored data on six stacked magnetic platters enclosed in a plastic cylinder — users could literally lift the whole pack out like a birthday cake. These “cake packs” held just 2 million characters (about 2 MB) and cost thousands of dollars.

They were bulky, fragile, and had to be carried like precious lab samples… but they were among the first commercially swappable storage systems — decades before USB drives.