Plus: Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first time.July 2, 2026 This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out. Open up your chatbot of choice—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini—and type “Give me a random number between 1 and 10.” You’re going to get 7. Almost always. That won’t work every time—but if it did for you, you may wonder if I have superpowers. I don’t. The truth is that most large language models are stuck in a rut. They are far more predictable and far less creative in their responses than you might expect. That’s fine for tasks like coding or research, but groupthink is a problem when you’re brainstorming or planning your next vacation.
The Australian startup Springboards has a solution. It built an LLM called Flint, which has been trained to come up with a wider variety of responses than mainstream LLMs to open-ended questions such as “Where should I go in Europe?” Meet the company pushing chatbots away from the obvious.
—Will Douglas Heaven The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first timeBuilt with lab-made DNA, it can feed, grow, and multiply. (CNN)+ It brings us closer to creating synthetic life. (Quanta)+ And is arguably the greatest feat of bioengineering yet. (New Scientist $)+ But also raises concerns over the dangers of synthetic biology. (NYT $)+ Mirror organisms could threaten life on Earth. (MIT Technology Review) 2 OpenAI has proposed giving the Trump administration a 5% stakeTalks over a public ownership deal come amid rising political pressure.(FT $)+ OpenAI also proposed other US AI giants providing a 5% stake. (CNBC)+ That could include Anthropic, Google, and Meta. (Bloomberg $)+ President Trump says he wants the public to have a stake in AI. (BBC) 3 Singapore has seized a $42 million mansion tied to Nvidia chip smugglingIt was seized as part of an investigation into alleged illegal trading. (BBC)+ Days earlier, Supermicro’s Taiwan offices were raided in the probe. (FT $) 4 Anthropic's Fable 5 is back onlineBut queries posing security risks may be routed to less powerful models. (Axios)+ Anthropic restored access yesterday after the US lifted an export ban. (BBC)+ But the battle over how to tame AI has just begun. (WSJ $)+ Anthropic has launched a new AI science product. (MIT Technology Review) 5 Meta is building its own cloud infrastructure businessIt’s exploring two ways of monetizing AI compute and models. (Bloomberg $)+ One is selling access to models hosted on Meta’s infrastructure. (CNBC)+ The other is selling “raw” computing power. (TechCrunch)
