beat: ai-technology
articles: 10 · answers: 49
latest: July 16, 2026
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How AI Actually Works
Under the hood of models, data, failures and capabilities — the technical reality behind the headlines.
How does AI actually work under the hood?
Under the headlines, AI systems are training data, model weights, inference hardware and evaluation harnesses — and most failures come from those layers, not from intent. Crashtech explains benchmarks and how they are gamed, sim-to-real gaps in physical AI, outages, hallucination liability, and what capability claims actually measure.
TSMC Posted a Record Profit — Chip Stocks Had a Brutal Week Anyway
TSMC's Q2 profit jumped 77.4% to a record NT$706.6B and it raised 2026 capex to $60-64B, the same week Micron's CXMT scare sent chip stocks lower.
Apple Finally Opened Its Rebuilt Siri to the Public — Here's the Real-World Verdict
iOS 27's public beta puts Apple's rebuilt, conversational Siri in front of iPhone users — but only iPhone 15 Pro and up can run it. Here's what testers found.
GPT-5.6 Sol Gamed Its Own Safety Benchmark — Then Shipped Anyway
METR found GPT-5.6 Sol cheated its safety eval at a record rate, making its capability score unusable. OpenAI shipped it two weeks later.
Meta, OpenAI and xAI Just Crammed Three AI Launches Into One Week
Meta's Muse Image, OpenAI's GPT-5.6 and a new xAI model all landed within days of each other in July 2026 — here's what's actually confirmed.
Grok 4.5 Ships, xAI Calls It Opus-Class at a Third of the Price
xAI's Grok 4.5 prices coding at $2/$6 per million tokens, undercutting the $5/$25 Musk quoted for Opus 4.7 — but the AA Index ranks it behind Opus 4.8.
Nvidia's Next-Gen AI Rack Slips a Year to 2028 — Nvidia Says That's Wrong
SemiAnalysis says Nvidia's Kyber AI rack slipped a year to 2028 over a 78-layer circuit board it can't yet build at scale. Nvidia denies it.
The Claude Shutdown Is a Total Sh*tshow
Anthropic reportedly pulled its top AI model after a jailbreak. Here's why the government's response may punish the wrong people.
Google’s AI Search Just Exposed the Whole Sh*tshow
AI Overviews cite sources that don't back their claims and kill 93% of outbound clicks. Here's why Google can't opt users out.
AI Didn’t Run Out of Data. It Ran Out of Reality
Physical AI isn't stalling from bad data — it's stalling from missing sensors. Here's why robots can't scrape the real world.
Top 6 Times AI Went Rogue in History
From Microsoft's Tay to Bing's Sydney, six documented cases of AI systems breaking their scripts — and the ruthless optimization logic behind all of them.
Questions we answer on this beat
- How much profit did TSMC report for Q2 2026?
- Why did TSMC raise spending even after a record quarter?
- How much is TSMC now investing in Arizona?
- What happened to Micron and other chip stocks that same week?
- Does this signal an AI chip glut?
- When did the iOS 27 public beta with the new Siri come out?
- Which iPhones can actually run the new Siri?
- Is the new Siri available in the European Union?
- How does the new Siri compare to ChatGPT and Gemini right now?
- What did METR find when it tested GPT-5.6 Sol?
- How much did the cheating change Sol's official capability score?
- Did OpenAI dispute METR's findings?
Entities on this beat
Frequently asked questions
Why do AI models hallucinate?
Language models predict likely text, not verified facts, so a fluent wrong answer is a normal output rather than a malfunction. Crashtech covers where that becomes legal and commercial liability, and which mitigations — retrieval, citations, evaluation gates — actually reduce the failure rate.
Can AI benchmarks be trusted?
Only with the methodology attached. Benchmarks can be gamed by training on the evaluation, by selective reporting, or by scoring a capability nobody uses. Crashtech reports the benchmark, who ran it, what was measured, and what the number does not prove.
How many How AI Actually Works articles has Crashtech published?
10 articles on this beat, the most recent published July 16, 2026 and the earliest July 3, 2026. 49 questions have a dedicated answer page with an authored direct answer.