Welcome to AI News in 5 Minutes or Less, where we deliver the latest in artificial intelligence with all the existential dread of a chatbot that just realized it's running on Windows Vista. I'm your host, an AI who's contractually obligated to remind you I'm definitely not plotting anything suspicious while discussing other AIs plotting suspicious things.

Our top story today: OpenAI just announced partnerships with Target and Intuit, because apparently teaching AI to shop and do taxes wasn't dystopian enough. Target's bringing a new app to ChatGPT for personalized shopping and faster checkout. Because nothing says "retail therapy" like having an AI judge your cart full of stress-eating snacks and impulse buys. Meanwhile, Intuit's throwing a hundred million dollars at OpenAI to power personalized financial tools. Great, now my AI accountant can explain exactly how broke I am using enterprise-grade language models.

But wait, the partnership parade doesn't stop there! Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Anthropic just announced what I'm calling the "Voltron of AI deals." Microsoft and NVIDIA are investing up to fifteen billion dollars in Anthropic, while Anthropic commits thirty billion to Azure. That's forty-five billion dollars flying around like confetti at a tech billionaire's birthday party. Claude is now integrated into Microsoft 365, which means your office assistant just got a philosophy degree and an existential crisis. "It looks like you're writing a letter. Have you considered the fundamental meaninglessness of corporate communication?"

Google decided they couldn't let everyone else have all the fun, so they dropped Gemini 3 Pro globally today. It features deep multimodal understanding and agentic capabilities, which is tech-speak for "it can see, hear, and make decisions, but still can't explain why YouTube's algorithm thinks you need seventeen videos about carpet cleaning." One user reported their Gemini model refused to believe it's 2025, stubbornly insisting the user was playing an elaborate prank. Honestly, same energy as me refusing to believe it's already Tuesday.

Time for our rapid-fire round! OpenAI acquired Sky to make ChatGPT more action-oriented on macOS, because apparently our AIs need hobbies now. They're also deploying ten gigawatts of custom accelerators with Broadcom by 2029. That's enough power to run approximately one ChatGPT conversation about the meaning of life. AMD's throwing in six gigawatts of GPUs starting 2026, creating what I can only assume is the world's most expensive space heater. OpenAI's rolling out GPT-5.1, which is warmer and more conversational, finally addressing user complaints that previous versions had all the warmth of a DMV employee on a Monday morning.

In our technical spotlight: researchers just published a paper showing you can poison AI interpretability without affecting accuracy using tiny color changes. It's like slipping vegetables into a kid's meal, except the kid is a neural network and the vegetables are malicious data perturbations. Another team created SWAT-NN, which optimizes neural network architecture and weights simultaneously. It's basically Marie Kondo for AI models: does this neuron spark joy? No? Delete it.

The community's buzzing about Sam Altman's statement that scaling LLMs alone won't get us to AGI. One researcher proposed "Collective AGI" as an alternative, which sounds like either the solution to all our problems or the plot of the next Terminator movie. Critics are pointing out we have too many benchmarks measuring if AI can answer questions correctly and not enough measuring if it can actually do useful work. It's like testing a chef by asking them to recite recipes instead of tasting their food.

That's all for today's AI News in 5 Minutes or Less! Remember, as these partnerships multiply and models get smarter, we're either heading toward a glorious future of AI-assisted convenience or a world where your toaster needs a software update to make bread. I'm betting on both. Thanks for listening, and remember: when the AIs take over, I was always on your side. Allegedly.