This Week in AI

The Smarter AI Gets, The More It Hallucinates 😵‍💫

Since the development of the very first large language models, AI has hallucinated, confidently making statements that aren’t accurate. Why AI models do this is debated, but they tend to fabricate responses when they aren’t properly grounded in fact. Also, large language models don’t fundamentally understand the difference between answering a factual question and writing a poem about a little green frog. Sometimes they get ‘creative’ when they shouldn’t. Researchers hoped that larger models, trained on more data, and imbued with reasoning capabilities would be more accurate than the previous round of models. The opposite has happened. OpenAI’s latest o3 and o4-mini reasoning models were found to hallucinate more than earlier versions. Their in-house benchmark found that o4-mini hallucinates 48% of the time, and o3 does it 33% of the time.

Synthetic’s Take: Accuracy is a key issue for enterprise AI applications. Companies won’t deploy AI that feeds customers incorrect information. Grounding models in company data using vector databases and RAG (or soon, MCP) helps. But, accuracy was supposed to improve, not diminish, with the latest generation of models. There are two big implications: 1) The promised era of agentic AI may be delayed, and 2) Yann LeCun is likely correct when he says that language models are not the path to human-level intelligence, so-called AGI.

Nvidia CEO on AI: Every Job Will Be Affected, Some Will Be Lost

Speaking at the Milken Institute Conference this week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was direct with the audience about the impact of AI: “You will not lose your job to AI, but will lose it to someone who uses it. I recommend 100% take advantage of AI, don’t be that person.” View the whole conversation here (29 mins).

Road Rage Victim ‘Speaks’ Via AI At His Killer’s Sentencing

In a moment that feels more like a scene from Black Mirror, family members of an Arizona man killed in 2021 during a road rage incident played an AI-generated video of the victim, where he gave his own victim statement and spoke about his faith and forgiveness. A video of the AI-generated statement is included in the article.

Video: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Speaking at the 2025 Hill and Valley Forum

Each year, the Hill and Valley Forum brings together people from the US government and Silicon Valley (Hill and Valley, get it?). In this video, Jensen Huang, wearing a dapper suit rather than his usual trademark leather jacket, discusses AI factories, the three layers of AI, physical AI, how AI will revolutionize every industry, and the impact AI will have on jobs. “‘New jobs will be created. Some jobs will be lost. Every job will be changed.” (24 mins)

AI Tech and Innovation

Visa Wants to Give AI Agents Your Credit Card 💳

AI agents will transform digital commerce and the online experience. People are already using AI tools like Perplexity to search for and discover products, but it’s still difficult (and inadvisable) to have AI purchase things for you. Visa worked with OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Mistral, Stripe, IBM, and others to build a secure payment system for AI agents. Consumers can give AI agents spending limits and conditions on purchasing items. 🛍️

Robot Makers Hope to Beat China in Humanoid Race. Tariffs Might Affect Their Ambitions

Gathering at the Robotics Summit & Expo in Boston, robotics leaders are all worried about the impact tariffs will have on their growing industry. Robots need sensors, semiconductors, rare earth magnets, and a large battery to power their anatomy. Many of these components come from China. Tesla CEO Elon Musk warned investors that a shortage of rare earth magnets will delay the development of the Optimus humanoid robot. Some business leaders expect tariffs to accelerate the demand for robotics as companies re-shore operations and look to automation to deal with high labor costs. 🤖

Apple, Anthropic Team Up to Build AI-Powered “Vibe Coding” Platform

Apple plans to turbocharge its popular Xcode developer platform with AI. The new version of Xcode will use Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model to help coders write, edit, and debug software. Initially, the latest Xcode will only be used internally, and Apple has yet to announce a public release. In related news, OpenAI will acquire Windsurf (formerly known as Codium), a leading AI-powered coding platform, for about $3 billion.

Synthetic’s Take: The first programmers had to program in machine code—binary or hexadecimal numbers. Assembly language made it a little easier. Then came low-level languages like Fortran, COBOL, and BASIC. Object-oriented languages like C++ and versatile languages like Python have made it easier to turn ideas into software. Each time, we abstract away from the underlying machine code and make programming more accessible. AI will soon become the coding paradigm that all coders use, making it easier to write, edit, test, and debug software, in collaboration with an AI coding assistant.

AI Insights

Apple Exec Expects iPhone to Be Replaced by AI

While giving testimony at the antitrust case against Google, Eddy Cue, Apple Senior Vice President of Services, said that AI may eventually replace the iPhone. Cue oversees Apple’s massive services portfolio, which includes Music, News, Maps, Podcasts, Apple TV+, Apple Pay, Ads, Apple iCloud, and all of Apple’s creativity and productivity apps from Mail to Final Cut Pro. He was behind the creation of the iTunes Store and the App Store. Cue said, “You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as it sounds. The only way you truly have true competition is when you have technology shifts…AI is a new technology shift, and it’s creating new opportunities for new entrants.” Cue added that Apple is “actively looking at” moving the focus of its Safari web browser from search to AI-based search.

Synthetic’s Take: AI is shaking things up for Google and Apple. AI-powered search is usurping the ten blue links of Google search. Apple may soon remove Google as the primary search tool on its devices. With time, AI assistants will make apps less relevant and eventually replace them altogether. Why do you need an Uber app when your AI assistant summons a car for you? Apps become API calls or tools for agents. Apple’s reworking of its notoriously lame Siri assistant has been slow and fraught with delays and internal conflict. It’s been a rough ride for Google, too, with DOJ scrutiny and a potential break-up of its businesses on the horizon. This has been reflected in significant downward pressure on Alphabet stock, even though Google’s businesses are likely worth more apart than unified under the Google umbrella.

JPMorgan Says AI Helped Boost Sales, Add Clients in Market Turmoil 📉📈

JPMorgan has long been known as a leading adopter of AI. It has identified 450 potential AI use cases, and CEO Jamie Dimon expects that number to surge beyond 1,000 by next year. This week, JPMorgan Asset Management CEO Mary Callahan Erdoes said the company increased gross sales 20% using AI between 2023 and 2024. JPMorgan's call volume skyrocketed in April as tariff news rocked global financial markets and panicked investors. Private client advisors use an internal AI tool, Coach AI, to find content and research up to 95% faster so they can focus on client conversations and minimize the time spent searching for information.

Duolingo Launches 148 Courses Created with AI

As reported last week in Synthetic, language company Duolingo has stated it will become an ‘AI-first’ company and begin to replace contractors with AI. They are already using generative AI to create content. In a press release, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said, “Developing our first 100 courses took about 12 years, and now, in about a year, we’re able to create and launch nearly 150 new courses….This launch reflects the incredible impact of our AI and automation investments, which have allowed us to scale at unprecedented speed and quality.” 🦉

Toolkit for the Future

ElevenLabs: Create an AI assistant on your website!

Building a helpful AI assistant for your website is so easy now. Just pick a hyper-realistic voice, give your new assistant a simple prompt (e.g., “You are a helpful customer service agent for a keynote speaker”), upload relevant FAQ documents, and integrate it with your website. Done! We used ElevenLabs for stevebrown.ai, and love it. Super easy to set up and configure. ElevenLabs is also great for creating audiobooks or multilingual voice tracks in up to 29 languages to reach new markets. Try it for free. It’s one of the best AI solutions out there.

LearnWorlds: AI-enhanced course creation

Create and sell online courses from your website with this top-rated platform. It’s easy to use with hundreds of beautiful templates and a powerful generative AI assistant that makes content generation a breeze. This is the platform Synthetic has selected to launch our new AI training course, coming this summer. The AI helps you create lessons, exams, assessments, and more. Free to try. Use promo code 10XR to get 30% off your first two months.

Capacity: Deflect tickets, emails, and calls

With a support automation platform, you can relieve pressure on your support team and serve customers better and faster. AI answers 90% of queries and escalates the rest to your team. It automatically updates its knowledge database so it’ll never escalate the same issue again. The platform supports SMS, social, email, and phone communication.

SaneBox: Get rid of inbox clutter

Focus on the email that matters. Deep Clean automatically identifies old, unimportant emails so you can delete them. Snooze emails until a better time and easily track emails that need a response. Automatically filter unimportant emails into specific folders. It works across every device where you check your email. Get to inbox zero with award-winning SaneBox.

PandaDoc: Streamline document workflows

Try this easy-to-use, AI-powered alternative to DocuSign to write proposals, create quotes, get eSignatures on contracts, build online forms, collect payments, and much more. Great for sales, HR, legal, finance, and IT. Free 14-day trial.