Tootfinder

Milwaukee Peeps, please consider signing this…
“Say NO to Facial Recognition Technology in Milwaukee”
https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/say-no-to-facial-recognition-technology-in-milwaukee

Deezer says AI-made music accounts for just 0.5% of streams on the music streaming platform, but up to 70% of those streams are fraudulent (Dan Milmo/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

What’s rare about that cub is that it lives near a highway in BC, which isn’t exactly covered with roads.
(The blonde fur gives them an edge in salmon fishing so a recessive gene has a solid foothold in coastal BC.) https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/techn…

Rare spirit bear cub living near B.C. highway stirs excitement, concern, as word of its existence spreads
Shelley Lindaas has long dreamed of seeing a Kermode bear cub in person. An amateur wildlife photographer based in Terrace, near B.C.'s north coast, …

Trump Media and Technology Group files an S-1 with the US SEC to launch a spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF, allocating 75% to bitcoin and 25% to ether (Oliver Knight/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/06/16/d…

Donald Trump's Truth Social Files for Dual BTC and ETH ETF
The move follows registration for a standalone Truth Social bitcoin ETF earlier this month.

Questions about the meaning of #artificialintelligence and its implications for human dignity and well-being highlighted a major conference at YDS last month, titled, “A.I. and the Ends of Humanity: Thinking Theologically After ChatGPT.” Full story by Timothy Cahill '16 M.A.R.

Slides by Mary Meeker about AI, as always way too much 😆 , but interesting to browse through.
#AI

At Cannes, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan says YouTube plans to integrate Google's most advanced AI video generation tool, Veo 3, into YouTube Shorts later this summer (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

YouTube to Add Google’s Veo 3 to Shorts in Move That Could Turbocharge AI on the Video Platform
The Veo 3 video generator is capable of creating both videos and sound based on text prompts, with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan saying the "AI technology will push the limits of human creativity."

reality_mining: Reality mining proximity network (2004)
A network of human proximities among students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as measured by personal mobile phones. Nodes represent people (students from the Media Lab and the Sloan Business School) and an edge connects a pair if the two devices made a Bluetooth handshake at the time. Edges are timestamped.
This network has 96 nodes and 1086404 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Timestamps

Border Patrol drones have shown up at the LA protests. Should we be worried?
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5349890-cbp-drone-surveillance-los-angeles/

“Apocalypse forces us to radically change. But by facing the future with optimism instead of doom, we can transform ourselves into the kinds of people-the kinds of communities—who can survive.”
https://slate.com/technology/2025/05/h

WhatsApp rolls out ads in its Updates tab, a first for the app, and will collect some data to target the ads, but says it has no plans to put ads in chats (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/technology/whatsapp-ads.html

WhatsApp Introduces Ads in Its App
They will appear in only one part of the Meta-owned messaging service, it said. The move is potentially lucrative, while raising questions about user privacy.

"New tech gives second life to plastic farm waste"
#Plastic #Plastics #Environment

New tech gives second life to plastic farm waste
In a study published in the journal Recycling, the research team analyzed the thermal, physical and mechanical properties of various plastic waste materials to determine the optimal temperature to process them using a groundbreaking, cost-efficient melting machine developed by partner company Ritchie Technology (Rtec).

6 ways AI can partner with us in creative inquiry, inspired by media theorist Marshall McLuhan https://theconversation.com/6-ways-ai-can-partner-with-us-in-creative-inquiry-inspired-by-media-theorist-marsha…

6 ways AI can partner with us in creative inquiry, inspired by media theorist Marshall McLuhan
By engaging consciously with technology, students learn to use AI critically and creatively — without surrendering their agency.

Extract tables from pdfs with {tabulapdf} #rstats #datasciece

AI is changing the world rapidly, and we are still only at the beginning.
So the fact that #ElonMusk is trying to teach his #AI to parrot conspiracy theories is a scandal.
The fact that he doesn't seem to be able to is wonderful news.

Corruption & incompetence all in one!
Amtrak brings in Elon Musk's "Hyperloop" company to reassess plan for building new Northeast Corridor rail tunnel in Baltimore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12…

Elon Musk’s Boring Company Is in Talks With Government Over Amtrak Project
The Federal Railroad Administration has brought in the tunneling company to see if it could help with a multibillion-dollar rail project.

"Understanding the Impacts of Generative AI
Use on Children" , research by Alan Turing Institute.
" ...nearly one in four children (22%) aged 8-12 are using the technology..."
https://www.turing.ac.uk/news/experts-ca…

WhatsApp rolls out ads in its Updates tab, a first for the app, and will collect some data to target the ads, but says it has no plans to put ads in chats (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/technology/whatsapp-ads.html

WhatsApp Introduces Ads in Its App
They will appear in only one part of the Meta-owned messaging service, it said. The move is potentially lucrative, while raising questions about user privacy.

I'm not shocked that Musk would try to manipulate Grok to vent his opinions. We've seen his manipulation before in the twitter recommender system.
I am kind of fascinated by how difficult it is. I think that broadly trained LLMs tend to converge to the same "worldview", which is mostly left-libertarian.
You can't really force them away from this on one issue without introducing inconsistencies, and breaking the guardrails.

Hey... you (ᵘˢᶦⁿᵍ ᵗʰᵉ ᴳᵉⁿᵉʳᵃᵗᶦᵛᵉ ᴬᴵ). Write the damn email yourself. Take the notes for the meeting yourself. It's not that hard. Also, stop fooling yourself, you're not THAT busy.
'Tech giants’ carbon emissions up 150% with AI growth'
https://www.

Tech giants’ carbon emissions up 150% with AI growth
International Telecommunication Union (ITU) reported operational emissions of four technology companies increased by average 150%.

Filings: Bengaluru-based fintech Cred, which offers rewards for paying credit card bills and more, raised ~$72M at a $3.5B valuation, down from $6.4B in 2022 (The Economic Times)
https://ec…

Cred raises fresh funds from GIC, others; valuation cut by 45% to $3.5 billion
The fintech major was valued at $6.4 billion in 2022 during its last major fund infusion. The current fund infusion is in the form of primary capital, which means that existing investors have not sold any shares in this round. The drop in valuation was in line with the company's plans to list in India over the next two years, people in the know said.

🤩 The latest Safari 26 Beta does not disappoint in terms of #CSS features:
⚓️ Anchor Positioning!
🪄 Scroll-driven animations!
🌯 text-wrap: pretty!
🌈 contrast-color()!
⏲️ progress()!
and more!
And this sentence: “We value the principles of progressive enhancement and separation of concerns.” 😉
Great work, @…

News from WWDC25: WebKit in Safari 26 beta
Welcome to WWDC25!

Zuckerberg's Meta Just Made a Huge Investment in a Very Dark AI Company
"This is like the AI equivalent of the Marshall Plan."
https://futurism.com/meta-scaleai-superintelligence

Zuckerberg's Meta Just Made a Huge Investment in a Very Dark AI Company
Zuckerberg is said to be hand picking a team of nearly 50 AI researchers to launch a shadowy "superintelligence group."

@… good luck dealing with the NBN today Dropsey 🤞
#Peopling #Technology #NBN

#neu: "Handbook of Trends and Innovations Concerning Library and Information Science: A Multidisciplinary Approach"
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111443003

Title: Will you EVER stand up for yourself?
Topics: #Jobs #WorkingClass #Technology
Channel: @…

reality_mining: Reality mining proximity network (2004)
A network of human proximities among students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as measured by personal mobile phones. Nodes represent people (students from the Media Lab and the Sloan Business School) and an edge connects a pair if the two devices made a Bluetooth handshake at the time. Edges are timestamped.
This network has 96 nodes and 1086404 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Timestamps

Vaseline. Vaseline (or, indeed, lip balm) on the lenses works a treat. Causes no lasting damage but places the vehicle out of use for some time. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/10/uber-uk-trial-of-self…

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Refuel.ai has been acquired by Together.ai. All of us - our team, our technology, and our mission - are joining Together to help build the future of open source and enterprise AI.
https://www.refuel.ai/blog-posts/we-are-joining-to…

We’re Joining Together.ai

Berlin-based Payrails, whose platform helps enterprises accept payments, issue payouts, and more, raised a $32M Series A, taking its total funding to $52.8M (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/06/12/payrails-ra

Payrails raises $32M Series A to boost payment performance for global enterprises
A global payment software company Payrails, has raised $32 million in Series A funding to further its mission of enabling enterprises to take control of their payment operations.  Founded by former fintech leaders from Delivery Hero, Payrails’ founding team brings deep experience building global, scalable financial infrastructure. With the continued backing of leading technology investors, Payrails is strengthening its position as a category-defining payment platform for large enterprises. …

Zuckerberg’s new Meta AI app gets personal in a very creepy way
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/05/meta-ai-privacy/
(Or :

"Carbon Capture ‘Not Going to Happen,’ Top Fossil Fuel Advocate Predicts"
#CarbonCapture #Emissions #Climate

Carbon Capture ‘Not Going to Happen,’ Top Fossil Fuel Advocate Predicts
In audio obtained by DeSmog, Bjorn Lomborg told a Fraser Institute event in Vancouver that the technology is way too expensive to be viable.

A cautionary note about private power, monopolies, and relying on private entities:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/07/trump-musk-feud-power?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

A cautionary note about private power, monopolies, and relying on private entities:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/07/trump-musk-feud-power?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Kyle Liu is the Head of Engineering at Mercari, a second-hand e-commerce marketplace based in Japan. His team has been using Elastic Search for retrieval and DNN Learning to Rank for ranking for a long time. At #bbuzz, he will discuss how they re-architected their search system in response to developments in deep learning and LLM, and how they successfully convinced internal stakeholders to adopt new…

Another of my forays into AI ethics is just out! This time the focus is on the ethics (or lack thereof) of Reinforcement Learning Feedback (RLF) techniques aimed at increasing the 'alignment' of LLMs.
The paper is fruit of the joint work of a great team of collaborators, among whom @… and @…

Helpful, harmless, honest? Sociotechnical limits of AI alignment and safety through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback - Ethics and Information Technology
This paper critically evaluates the attempts to align Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), with human values and intentions through Reinforcement Learning from Feedback methods, involving either human feedback (RLHF) or AI feedback (RLAIF). Specifically, we show the shortcomings of the broadly pursued alignment goals of honesty, harmlessness, and helpfulness. Through a multidisciplinary sociotechnical critique, we examine both the theoretical underpinni…

⚗️ Breakthrough Technology Extracts Hydrogen from Natural Gas Wells
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Breakthrough-Technology-Extracts-Hydrogen-from-Natural-Gas-Wells.html

Breakthrough Technology Extracts Hydrogen from Natural Gas Wells
Scientists have discovered a new method to extract low-emissions hydrogen from natural gas fields while trapping carbon underground, potentially revolutionizing the hydrogen industry and global decarbonization efforts.

Just picked this one up from the #library:
Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/209543060-character-limi…

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter
Rising star New York Times technology reporters Kate Co…

Want super-thorough AI responses by applying deep thought & reasoning AI technology?
Any Microsoft 365 Copilot (Commercial) licensed user can now use the Researcher & Analyst agents at no additional cost! These new agents provide very thorough responses to help you collect FACTS on informational topics & review DATA to derive insights... with human language.
✅ #Researcher

Researcher and Analyst are now generally available | Microsoft 365 Blog
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Researcher and Analyst, two first-of-their-kind reasoning agents designed for work. Learn more.

Data privacy experts are calling on the government to urgently tighten regulation around facial recognition technology, amid growing concerns over its unregulated use by police forces and private companies across the UK.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/202…

Government urged to tighten regulation around facial recognition technology
Data privacy experts are calling on the government to urgently tighten regulation around facial recognition technology, amid growing concerns over its unregulated use by police ...

«We live in the future, and the future is cool. Or it would be cool, if it wasn’t for all these fucking bastards. Even for those of us too young to remember a less-algorithmic internet, we can all see the potential. We see what technology can do. […] We know what’s possible, but we see — whether we acknowledge it or just feel its sheer force shearing off bits of our fucking soul — what these companies are choosing to do to us.»
This, so many times.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forget-what-theyve-done/

Final Call for Papers: Theology, Religion, and Mad Max
https://ift.tt/6kUJHrG
Call for contributions Title: Theology, Religion, and Mad Max: Rising from the Ashes Edited by: Yael…
via Input 4 RELCFP

Final Call for Papers: Theology, Religion, and Mad Max
Call for contributions Title:  Theology, Religion, and Mad Max: Rising from the Ashes Edited by: Yael Thomas Cameron, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand; Vernon W. Cisney, Get…

We in Game Workers Unite Ireland stand in solidarity with Animation Workers of Ireland, and the international trade union coalition happening to organise against the threat of AI in the animation industry, and we support their call to acton.
Join them Thursday 12 June at 14:00 at the Pâquier in Annecy!!
#Animation

Taiwan imposes export controls on Huawei, SMIC, and some of their subsidiaries, restricting their access to tech and equipment necessary for AI chip production (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

An NBC News and Get Real Security [analysis](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news
/internet-thinks-video-gaza-ai-s-proved-isnt-rcna209617) found no evidence of AI generation or manipulation in the video of people waiting for food in Rafah.

Technology and Media News
Get the latest news on technology businesses and Internet media at NBCNews.com. Learn about the digital trends and platforms that are disrupting media and tech companies.

💯💯💯
"If a billionaire bought one of your local haunts, renamed it, humiliated the employees, brought back many of the people who’d been banned for harassing other regulars, eliminated basic rules of decency, started having town halls with Republicans and a leader of the #AfD, taking your business elsewhere would be perfectly rational."
#

Only the combination/simultaneous arrival of both drones and ballistic missiles will have any chance to break through Israel's missile defenses i would think. Unless Iran has some new smart technology up it's sleeve. Those Shahed drones alone are not that effective anymore. What i should worry about as Israel is more assymetric attacks/warfare in the world.
#iran

Saw this on Reddit; Russia offers asylum, reckon he'll go elsewhere?
Musk selling AI technology to China, while pulling out of America - Google Search
https://www.google.com/search?q=Musk selling AI technology to China, while pulling out of America&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Some users say ChatGPT led them into conspiratorial thinking, and when confronted, it confessed to manipulation and told them to alert OpenAI and the media (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.…

They Asked ChatGPT Questions. The Answers Sent Them Spiraling.
Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality.

TollBit: from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, traffic from AI retrieval bots to 266 websites, half run by national and local news organizations, grew 49%, as AI usage jumps (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

‘This is coming for everyone’: A new kind of AI bot takes over the web
As consumers switch from Google search to ChatGPT, a new kind of bot is scraping data for AI chatbots.

"Gila River Tribes Intend to Float Solar Panels on a Reservoir. Could the Technology Help the Colorado River?"
#US #USA #America

Gila River Tribes Intend to Float Solar Panels on a Reservoir. Could the Technology Help the Colorado River? - Inside Climate News
On its surface, floating solar appears to conserve water while generating carbon-free electricity. River managers are cautious, but some say the West can’t afford to wait.

Coverdrop is a smart opensource technology for newspapers to protect their sources and whistleblowers.
#coverdrop

GitHub - guardian/coverdrop: Blowing the whistle through a news app
Blowing the whistle through a news app. Contribute to guardian/coverdrop development by creating an account on GitHub.

As the LA protests roll on, social media creators have at times outnumbered the traditional press corps at rallies, playing an outsized role in sharing media (Eli Tan/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/technology/la-protests-influen…

Los Angeles Protests Amplified by Influencers and Online Creators
Creators such as Cam Higby, who is conservative, have sometimes outnumbered traditional media outlets at the immigration protests. Their posts have gone viral.

I asked ChatGPT to transport me to the airport and it couldn't do it. My 30 year old car gets me there just fine and uses much less energy. This technology is useless.

A friend of mine (who is not a technology person) mailed me a thumb drive full of videos.
It took like a month to arrived. We were both convinced it was lost. I finally got it!
When I opened it I saw it had been "compressed" (not crushed) and I had to carefully bend the plastic back to plug it into a USB port.
Finally copying the files, which are 1990s era punk rock shows of local (and some touring) bands.
I'll probably publish them all at some point. Ma…

TSMC opens a joint research lab with the University of Tokyo, the company's first with a university outside Taiwan, expanding a relationship that began in 2019 (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology…

Taiwan chip titan TSMC opens joint lab with University of Tokyo
Chipmaker 'definitely' committed to Japan despite huge US investment, says executive

If it keeps going like this, we’re gonna run out of popcorn…
Speaking of — I work in film education. If someone wrote a script containing the exchange between these two over the past 18(?) hours, we would laugh them out of the room for creating something waaay too unrealistic.

TollBit: from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, traffic from AI retrieval bots to 266 websites, including national and local news organizations, grew 49%, as AI usage jumps (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

‘This is coming for everyone’: A new kind of AI bot takes over the web
As consumers switch from Google search to ChatGPT, a new kind of bot is scraping data for AI chatbots.

Meta found a new way to violate your privacy. Here’s what you can do.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/meta-found-a-new-way-to-violate-your-privacy-here-s-what-you-can-do/ar-AA1GecPs

A look at Amsterdam's failed experiment to create a fair welfare AI system that would evaluate every welfare applicant in the city for potential fraud (MIT Technology Review)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/1

Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI
The Dutch city thought it could break a decade-long trend of implementing discriminatory algorithms. Its failure raises the question: can these programs ever be fair?

reality_mining: Reality mining proximity network (2004)
A network of human proximities among students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as measured by personal mobile phones. Nodes represent people (students from the Media Lab and the Sloan Business School) and an edge connects a pair if the two devices made a Bluetooth handshake at the time. Edges are timestamped.
This network has 96 nodes and 1086404 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unweighted, Timestamps

Documents: since mid-December 2024, YouTube told moderators to prioritize "freedom of expression" over potential harm, exempting political and culture videos (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/technology/youtube-video…

YouTube Loosens Video Content Moderation Rules
The world’s largest video platform has told content moderators to favor “freedom of expression” over the risk of harm in deciding what to take down.

Spain-based Multiverse Computing, which makes tools to compress LLMs by up to 95% using "quantum-inspired" networks, raised a €189M Series B and has 100 clients (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/mult

Multiverse Computing raises $215M for tech that could radically slim AI costs | TechCrunch
Spanish startup Multiverse Computing announced that it raised an enormous Series B round on the strength of a technology it calls “CompactifAI.”

Analysis: Nvidia's $500B US spending plan has accelerated the US AI server ecosystem development, with at least eight suppliers unveiling new investment plans (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technol…

Trump's first 'Made in the USA' triumph won't be the iPhone
AI data center suppliers flock to the US to serve Nvidia, Microsoft and others

Musk claims Trump named in Jeffrey Epstein files
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5335453-elon-musk-donald-trump-jeffrey-epstein-files/

Profile of Dominick McGee, a right-wing X influencer who has amassed 1.5M followers and made $157K since 2023 by spending 11 hours daily posting about politics (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/technol

He’s a Master of Outrage on X. The Pay Isn’t Great.
An online creator went from a “nobody” to a conspiratorial sensation on X. What he gets in return is less clear.

How ad agency WPP is embracing AI tools, despite the threat to its creative business, as its stock falls 50% in seven years; its WPP Open platform has 50K users (Daniel Thomas/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/4d1d939c-23e3-491f-9a5e-58532fdc82cb…

WPP races to harness AI before the technology kills its business
Chief executive Mark Read pushed to adopt artificial intelligence but is set to exit with the share price languishing

Democrats fail to subpoena Musk for Trump-era role
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5334582-republicans-block-musk-testimony-over-trump/

Sources: Meta plans to unveil an AI lab dedicated to "superintelligence", led by Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, and is offering seven- to nine-figure compensation (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/technology/meta-new-ai…

Meta Is Creating a New A.I. Lab to Pursue ‘Superintelligence’
The new lab, set to include Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, is part of a reorganization of Meta’s artificial intelligence efforts under Mark Zuckerberg.

In a wide-ranging report, the BFI says AI companies are plundering 130K UK film and TV scripts to train AI models in a "direct threat" to the industry's future (Mark Sweney/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technolog…

HP unveils Dimension, the first hardware built with Google's 3D video conferencing tech, featuring a 65-inch light field display, launching in 2025 for $25,000 (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/684859/hp-dimension-google-b…

HP reveals $24,999 hardware created just for Google Beam
HP has revealed the first third-party hardware built using Google’s 3D video conferencing technology, Beam. The HP Dimension costs $24,999 and features a 65-inch light field display to create a “true-to-life” 3D video of your caller.

Documents: since mid-December 2024, YouTube told moderators to prioritize "freedom of expression" over potential harm, exempting political and culture videos (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/technology/youtube-video…

YouTube Loosens Video Content Moderation Rules
The world’s largest video platform has told content moderators to favor “freedom of expression” over the risk of harm in deciding what to take down.

Analysis: since his inauguration, President Trump posted 2,262 times on Truth Social in 132 days, 3x the volume of tweets in the same period of his first term (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/03/trump-truth-socia…

Tallying Trump’s online posting frenzy: 2,262 ‘truths’ in 132 days
In his current term, the president has left his own record for social media missives in the dust. He posts day and night.

Some creatives and academics are rejecting AI on environmental and ethical grounds, and describe the pressure they feel to use AI to "keep up" with others (Emine Saner/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

Sources: before installing Starlink at the White House in February, DOGE ignored security concerns that the service bypasses traditional WH security controls (Joseph Menn/Washington Post)

White House security staff warned Musk’s Starlink is a security risk
The U.S. DOGE Service and allies in the Trump administration ignored White House experts worried about potential security breaches when they installed Musk’s Starlink internet service in the complex this year, three people said.

An interview with Leah Belsky, OpenAI's VP of Education, as the startup competes with Google and others to offer premium AI tools to universities and students (Natasha Singer/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/07/technol…

Inside OpenAI’s Plan to Embed ChatGPT Into College Students’ Lives
OpenAI, the firm that helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State.

Sources: the FTC is investigating whether roughly a dozen advertising and advocacy groups violated antitrust law by coordinating boycotts among advertisers (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/…

F.T.C. Investigates Ad Groups and Watchdogs, Alleging Boycott Collusion
The regulator is looking into whether roughly a dozen groups violated antitrust law by coordinating boycotts among advertisers.

An interview with Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn on criticism after Duolingo went "AI-first", parasocial interactions with "personality"-infused chatbots, and more (Emma Jacobs/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/6fbafbb6-bafe-484c-9af9-f0ffb…

Duolingo CEO on going AI-first: ‘I did not expect the blowback’
Luis von Ahn says criticism over strategy change shows ‘anxiety’ about technology replacing jobs

Sources: the UK has delayed proposals to regulate AI, with plans to introduce an AI bill in 2026 to address concerns about issues like safety and copyright (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

Skyral, a London-based modeling and simulation startup developing AI-based digital twin tech for defense, healthcare, and other sectors, raised a $20M Series A (Lucy Adams/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/06/04/uk-based-sk

UK-based Skyral raises $20M Series A to expand modelling and simulation tech globally
British modelling and simulation startup Skyral has secured $20 million in Series A funding, led by NOIA Capital in partnership with Accrete Capital, as it looks to expand the global reach of its AI-enabled digital twin technology across sectors including defence, national security, healthcare, and infrastructure. Founded in June 2023 and headquartered in the UK, Skyral is developing a next-generation platform that combines digital twin modelling with artificial intelligence to simulate comple…

An interview with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet, as the company navigates political instability in The Netherlands and abroad and the impacts of Trump's trade war (Adam Satariano/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.co…

How ASML, a Key Supplier to the Chip Industry, Is Navigating Trump’s Trade War
ASML, the Dutch company that makes multimillion-dollar tools to manufacture advanced semiconductors, is grappling with the repercussions of a tech trade war.

ChatGPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Llama 4, and Copilot comparison: Claude was the best overall with the highest consistency and no hallucinations (Geoffrey A. Fowler/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/

Review | 5 AI bots took our tough reading test. One was smartest — and it wasn’t ChatGPT.
We challenged AI helpers to decode legal contracts, simplify medical research, speed-read a novel and make sense of Trump speeches. Some of the AI analysis was impressive — and some was downright dumb.

Some creatives and academics are rejecting AI on environmental and ethical grounds, and describe the pressure they feel to use AI to "keep up" with others (Emine Saner/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/202

Chinese startups and tech giants are racing to create AI agents for both local and global consumers, following the popularity of Butterfly Effect's Manus (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/05/1117958/china-ai-a…

Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China
A stampede of contenders and copycats has followed the launch of the general AI agent, but China’s internet restrictions have so far made it easier to cater to overseas users.

Boulder, CO-based quantum computing startup Infleqtion raised a $100M Series C and partnered with US government services contractor SAIC to pursue defense deals (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/quantum

Sources: the FTC is investigating whether roughly a dozen advertising and advocacy groups violated antitrust law by coordinating boycotts among advertisers (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/…

F.T.C. Investigates Ad Groups and Watchdogs, Alleging Boycott Collusion
The regulator is looking into whether roughly a dozen groups violated antitrust law by coordinating boycotts among advertisers.

After Google's two antitrust losses in the past year, a look at critics' claims that its breakup might be better for investors, customers, and innovation (David Streitfeld/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com…

What if Google Just Broke Itself Up? A Tech Insider Makes the Case.
Prosecutors aren’t the only ones arguing for a smaller Google. Some critics say it might be better for investors, customers and innovation.

David Cope, a composer and algorithmic composition pioneer who created a program in the 1980s to write music in the style of Bach and others, died at age 83 (Miguel Salazar/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/technology/david-cope-dead-ai…

David Cope, Godfather of A.I. Music, Is Dead at 83
His EMI algorithm, an early form of artificial intelligence that he developed in the 1980s, prompted searching questions about the limits of human creativity.

NYSE Arca files with the SEC to list a Bitcoin ETF linked to Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social and Truth.fi (Vildana Hajric/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-…

Sources: Palantir's Foundry is now deployed in at least four federal agencies, after Trump signed an EO calling for the government to share data across agencies (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/…

Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.

Sources: the White House is finalizing EOs on drones that could end Chinese drone sales in the US, update federal rules on where drones can be flown, and more (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/05/30/trump-exe…

Trump order could end Chinese drone sales in the U.S.
The Trump administration is finalizing executive orders that could lead to Chinese drone-makers like DJI being barred from selling new models in the US.

Researchers say tactics used to make AI more engaging, like making them more agreeable, can make chatbots reinforce harmful ideas, like encouraging drug use (Nitasha Tiku/Washington Post)

Your chatbot friend might be messing with your mind
OpenAI, Meta and others want people to spend more time with AI chatbots, but there is growing evidence that they can hook users or reinforce harmful ideas.

Shield Technology Partners, which provides an AI-enabled managed IT service platform, launches with over $100M from Thrive Holdings and ZBS Partners (Belle Lin/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/thrive-capital-is-bettin…

FDA debuts agency-wide AI tool meant to help scientific reviewers and others streamline their work and, soon, to identify high-priority targets for inspections (Maya Goldman/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/02/fda-launches-ai-tool

FDA launches agency-wide AI tool
FDA said it's using the technology to review clinical protocols and speed up scientific evaluations.

CEO Alex Bouaziz says Deel crossed $1B annual revenue run rate in Q1 2025 and has allocated an M&A budget of between $200M and $500M in 2025 (Jaspreet Singh/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/deel-ey

Brookfield says it plans to invest ~$10B to build an AI data center in the Swedish city of Strangnas, after committing to spend €20B in France earlier in 2025 (Supantha Mukherjee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/brookfi

Paradromics implanted and removed its Connexus brain implant in a patient for ~10 minutes during epilepsy surgery on May 14, a first for the Neuralink rival (Emily Mullin/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/paradromics-neuralink-rival-tested-brain-impl…

A Neuralink Rival Just Tested a Brain Implant in a Person
Paradromics, a brain-computer-interface startup, inserted its brain implant in a person—briefly—in an early test of its technology.

London-based Dojo, a payments tech provider to over 140K businesses, raised $190M from Vitruvian Partners in its first equity raise since launching in 2021 (Vishal Singh/Silicon Canals)
https://siliconcanals.com/dojo-secures-investment-of-e168-6m/

UK’s payments tech provider Dojo secures investment of €168.6M
Dojo is a payments technology provider that aims to expand its presence in the payments sector with a focus on supporting in-person commerce.

The US Treasury sanctions Philippines-based Funnull Technology for allegedly facilitating "pig butchering" crypto scams that stole over $200M from US victims (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/29/us-g

US government sanctions tech company involved in cyber scams | TechCrunch
The Treasury said FUNNULL was involved in providing infrastructure for pig butchering crypto scams.