Maggie Harrison Dupré, writing for Futurism:

Earlier this month, Ars retracted the story after it was found to include fake quotes attributed to a real person. The article — a write-up of a viral incident in which an AI agent seemingly published a hit piece about a human engineer named Scott Shambaugh — was initially published on February 13. After Shambaugh pointed out that he’d never said the quotes attributed to him, Ars’ editor-in-chief Ken Fisher apologized in an editor’s note, in which he confirmed that the piece included “fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them” and characterized the error as a “serious failure of our standards.” He added that, upon further review, the error appeared to be an “isolated incident.”

Shortly after Fisher’s editor’s note was published, Edwards, one of the report’s two bylined authors, took to Bluesky to take “full responsibility” for the inclusion of the fabricated quotes.

Edwards:

I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an Al reporter being tripped up by Al hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part.

When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own.

Ars fired him at the end of February.

Basic Apple Guy:

Where I and the rest of the internet take this from here remains to be seen. All I know is that Apple should definitely keep this Lil Finder around.

But no, I do not think this is the last we’ve seen of Lil Finder Guy…

Apple’s MacBook Neo ad campaign on TikTok — and seemingly exclusive to TikTok — is the most fun they’ve had with a campaign in ages. I love it.

Tim Cook:

At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.

If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

This is a perfectly cromulent letter to mark a big anniversary for Apple. And it is very Tim Cook. It’s short, earnest, honest, to the point, and uses plain simple language. But what also makes it so Cook-ian is that it’s so utterly anodyne. It’s inoffensive to the point of being unmemorable. The best part of Cook’s letter is when he harks back and explicitly quotes from an Apple ad campaign from 30 years ago.

Ten years from now, when Apple is celebrating its 60th anniversary, no one is going to quote from Tim Cook’s “banger of a letter” commemorating their 50th. 25 years from now, when Apple is celebrating its 75th, that future CEO won’t be quoting from any of the ad campaigns Apple ran while Cook was CEO, because there are no lines worth remembering from them.

Eli Tan, reporting for The New York Times:

Meta’s new foundational A.I. model, which the company has been working on for months, has fallen short of the performance of leading A.I. models from rivals like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic on internal tests for reasoning, coding and writing, said the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential matters.

The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I. model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from [last] March, two of the people said. But it has not performed as strongly as Gemini 3.0 from November, they said.

As a result, Meta has delayed Avocado’s release to at least May from this month, the people said. They added that the leaders of Meta’s A.I. division had instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company’s A.I. products, though no decisions have been reached.

The two facts in the last paragraph don’t square with me. May is only two months away. If they might ship then, why license Gemini? To me, the “we may need to pay Google to license Gemini” scenario is a sign that Avocado might be a bust and they might be a year or longer away from their own competitive model.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 41, has staked the future of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, on being at the cutting edge of A.I. His company has spent billions hiring top A.I. researchers and committed $600 billion to building data centers to power the technology. In January, Meta projected that it would spend as much as $135 billion this year, nearly twice the $72 billion it spent last year.

The difference between Meta and Apple might be that Meta is merely a few months away from rolling out its own best-of-breed AI model. But the difference could be that Meta has blown hundreds of billions of dollars pursuing their own frontier models, and Apple has not, and both just license Gemini from Google.

Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline:

While the rise of sports programming in recent years has been well-documented, new figures from Nielsen illustrate the extent of its dominance. The measurement firm said sports accounted for 29.2% of all advertising-supported TV viewing by people 25 to 54 years old during the fourth quarter. The stat, spanning broadcast, cable and streaming, was part of a report on viewership trends in the fourth quarter of 2025, released Thursday in the runup to upfronts.

Looking at the rest of the pie without sports, broadcast accounted for just 9.8%, with cable coming in at 18%. Streaming drew by far the largest tune-in, with 43% of all non-sports viewing, a reflection of the overall growth of advertising on streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max and others.