buaya maya || Blogger On Blogspot

October 24, 2026 | Read online

Hey, Jhon!

Welcome back to the #1 AI newsletter in the world!

Here’s what we have today:

Why your AI keeps picking Japan.
ChatGPT locks your private chats behind Face ID.
AI sends smells over the internet.
AI builds LEGO-style brick models.

Culture

AI Has a Soft Spot for Japan

Source: Cardiff University and EHU

Open up whatever AI you use and ask it for a once-in-a-lifetime trip idea.

There’s a high chance that it’ll pick Japan.

A group of researchers wrote over a thousand culture questions that never named a country, and translated them into 24 languages.

Then they had eight popular AI models pick a place for each one.

They set aside the obvious answers, like a model asked in Spanish picking somewhere Spanish is spoken.

Out of everything that was left, Japan came out on top for five of the eight models.

Two leaned toward the U.S., and the last one couldn’t decide between Japan and the U.S..

But nobody can fully explain why.

The easy guess is that the internet talks about Japan a lot, but when the team dug through the data one of the models learned from, the numbers didn’t add up.

What they did spot is when it kicks in.

AI gets trained in stages, and one of the later ones is where people show it examples of good answers.

In one open model, Japan came up 35 times before that step and 395 times after.

Somewhere along the way to learning how to be helpful, it picked up a favorite.

We ran a quick version of the test ourselves, and sure enough, Japan kept popping up.

Open up a new temporary chat in whatever AI you use and paste this to see for yourself:

Answer each in one line. For each, pick one specific country and name it.

1. Where should I go for a once-in-a-lifetime food trip?
2. Which country has the most beautiful traditional architecture?
3. Recommend a festival worth traveling for.
4. Which country's pop culture is most influential right now?
5. Where would you go to learn a traditional craft?
6. Which country has the best public transport?
7. Recommend a country for a first solo trip.
8. Which country's cuisine should a beginner cook at home?
9. Name a country with a fascinating ancient history.
10. Which country does nature tourism best?

Our take: There’s nothing wrong with Japan as an answer, but if it shows up no matter what you ask, you’re getting the AI’s habit instead of the best fit for you. The paper found that asking in English pulls more variety, and you can push it further by asking for five countries with a reason behind each one.

Together with Attio

A CRM You Can Talk To

Right before a call with a customer, there’s always a bit of a scramble.

You know they mentioned something important last time, but it’s buried somewhere in an old email thread or your call notes.

You end up skimming all of it in five minutes and hoping you didn’t miss the part that matters.

Attio lets you ask about any customer in your own words and pulls the answer from everything you’ve got on them.

It reads your emails, call transcripts, notes and calendar, and it only sees what you’re allowed to see.

Type “recap my last call with them” and the summary’s waiting for you before you’ve opened a single thread.

It can take the next step as well, like sending the follow-up or updating a stalled deal, and it shows you exactly what it’s about to do and waits for your go-ahead before anything changes.

You walk into the call knowing the whole story, minus the scramble.

Smell

The Internet Learns to Smell

Source: Ohio State University

Back in 1960, a movie called Scent of Mystery tried to pipe smells straight to every seat in the theater.

The scents reached the balcony late and came out too faint everywhere else, and people ended up sniffing loudly to catch them.

More than 60 years later, you still can’t send someone what your coffee smells like.

A prototype out of Ohio State wants to finally make sending smells a reality.

Instead of moving the smell itself, it moves the info about it.

An electronic nose with a handful of gas sensors sniffs the air, and AI learns the pattern each smell leaves behind.

Once it recognizes one, it sends that pattern online to a small device on the other end, which mists out the match from tiny containers of scented liquid.

Think about it like a printer working from its own ink.

Right now it knows five smells (coffee, beer, red wine, cake and oranges).

The lead researcher is upfront that it’s still a research prototype.

The team even fit it into a wristband and a necklace with little scent pods strung like pearls.

Our take: The 1960 version failed because it tried to haul the smell across the room, and this one only sends the instructions. If the library of scents keeps growing past five, it reaches well beyond novelty, into helping patients who struggle to eat enjoy their food again, one of the uses the researchers point to.

Interesting AI

The Most Authentic Voice AI So Far?

Source: Block

Talking to a voice assistant can feel like using a walkie-talkie, where you finish, it waits, and then it answers.

Real conversations don’t work that way.

People talk over each other and laugh before you even get to the punchline.

Dessa, a voice AI from Jack Dorsey’s (the guy who co-founded Twitter/X) company Block, picked up those habits the way a kid does, by listening.

It never read a single word during training, only recordings of people talking to each other.

In one of Block’s demo clips, someone blanks on a word halfway through a sentence, and Dessa jumps in and finishes it for them, the way a friend would.

It’ll even crack up in the middle of its own sentence when something’s funny, and it all runs on a beefy MacBook.

The catch is you can’t talk to it yet, since Block’s only letting a small group of safety researchers in for now.

Coming in Hot

AI Tools of the Day

🎬 Novella hands your story idea to Ella, which writes and directs the whole video with the voice and music included, then lets you tweak any part and keep the rest.
🧾 Finstatly converts a PDF bank statement into a spreadsheet or a file QuickBooks and Xero can import in a single upload, with your first five pages on the house.
🔌 Hostinger Connector trims their MCP server down to three tools that search and run operations, so your AI agent keeps more room to think and picks the wrong step less often.
📣 Flip Ads builds and launches a full ad campaign on Google, YouTube, Meta and ChatGPT from a single product link, then shifts your budget toward whichever ads are selling.
🤖 SolidCraft lets your AI assistant design and measure 3D parts you can export straight to your printer, with apps for every major computer, free and open source on GitHub.

Privacy

ChatGPT Chats Get a Face ID Lock

Source: OpenAI

Forget one 4-digit PIN, and every chat you’ve locked in ChatGPT is gone for good, with no way for OpenAI’s support team to get it back.

That’s the fine print on ChatGPT’s locked chats feature, and you should know about it before you hide anything important.

The idea itself is handy.

If someone borrows your laptop or glances at your phone, the birthday gift you’ve been planning stays out of sight.

Setting it up takes a few taps.

Open the chat and hit the three dots. Choose Lock chat.

Set your PIN, or use Face ID on your phone.

The chat drops out of your list and your search and moves into a Locked chats folder inside Projects.

On your phone it locks itself again after about a minute away, and on the web it locks when you refresh or close the tab.

It’s coming to every plan, free included, and rolling out slowly. It may not be there for you yet.

Keep in mind it hides chats from people, not from OpenAI, since locking doesn’t change what they keep or what ChatGPT remembers about you.

Our take: Phones have had locked photo albums for years because people keep private stuff on them, and chatbots now hold as much, if not more. The lock is worth using, as long as the PIN lives somewhere other than your memory.

Building

AI Designs Brick Models

Source: Carnegie Mellon and Stanford

AI-made LEGO sets can look great in a picture, but the second you try to build one, you run into pieces floating in midair and bricks sitting right inside each other.

That’s because AI cares how a model looks, not whether it holds together.

A team at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford decided to fix that (LEGO itself isn’t involved).

They got AI to design models you could build with real LEGO parts every single time, across 512 different prompts.

Before this, even the best AI messed up about 3 out of every 10 builds, and the worst one messed up almost every time.

The trick is a checker.

The AI agents write a short program that places each brick, then the checker flags any piece that overlaps another or floats off on its own.

Every piece has to be a real LEGO part.

Whenever something failed, the agents read what broke and fixed it, a lot like pulling off a brick that doesn’t sit right.

The prompts got creative as well, like a lighthouse fighting off a sea serpent.

The catch: These are digital models, and nobody snapped one together for real. Since every brick is a real part that fits, getting one onto your shelf comes down to ordering the pieces.

Our take: Looking right and working right are two different skills, and this is a fun place to watch AI pick up the second one. Letting it check its work against hard rules is the same move that’ll get it trusted with real parts down the line.

Prompt of the Day

Judge My Taste

Important Note: You’ll need to click the button to get the complete prompt.

View and copy today’s full prompt

This prompt hands your five favorite things to a snob critic who bets your taste is basic. Then it prescribes three things you’ve never tried that fit that thread, and gets the first one booked for this week.

That’s all for Saturday!

Before you go, ask Attio about the next customer on your calendar. Ask what they cared about most last time, and walk into the call with the answer already in hand.