(NOTE: This article is part of an ongoing series documenting an experiment with using AI to fill the NCAA brackets and see how it fares against years of human experience. The original article is as follows.)
With the first two days of play completed, I am in better shape in my pool than I usually am. I asked ChatGPT to create two brackets: one to predict the actual winner, and one to win my pool. So far, both are doing OK. I am tied for fifth out of sixty brackets with one entry and twentieth with the other.
Chat GPT didn’t do any better than I would have at predicting some of the upsets, because the reason that one team is seeded fifth and the other twelfth is that the committee expected the higher seed to win.
But it has been right about 80% of the time. Of the three teams that I was rooting for, two (UCLA and Gonzaga) won, Santa Clara, a ten seed, lost a buzzer-beater to Kentucky.
Most importantly, my Sweet Sixteen, Elite Eight, and Final Four picks are all still standing. This weekend will tell us a lot about how well the ChatGPT modeling worked.
In my “win the pool” bracket, my Final Four picks feature a bunch of #2 seeds, UConn, Houston, and Purdue, with Houston beating Purdue for the Championship.
In my “be right” bracket, I have the #1 seeds prevailing with Duke winning the whole thing outright.
One theme in the commentary around this year’s tournament is the extent to which NIL money and the transfer portal are tasking Cinderella out of the game. There is a growing sense that the top ten or fifteen teams can buy the top talent and are deep in the NBA lottery picks. We’ll see if that proves true, but it’s intriguing.
Come back on Monday, see whether my Sixteen is Sweet or sour.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).