Tootfinder

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.

This is the sort of crap that sounds smart until you think about it for five minutes.
Was the solution to COVID really ultimately technological? What about the social measures that got us to the point where the vaccine was ready? What about the different vaccination rates between Europe and the US? No social aspects to getting a population vaccinated? What about the emergence of Omicron: maybe luck was part of it?
The same goes for Ozempic, and the same will be true of Climate ch…

The Indian government says it has not issued any directive to withhold the Reuters X account in the country (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/go…

Government says no order to withhold Reuters handle on X in India
India has denied ordering the blocking of Reuters’ X account, saying no such directive was issued. As per notification on the X account, it was withheld “in response to a legal demand,” sparking criticism from journalists and free speech advocates. An official spokesperson said that the government is working with X to resolve the issue amid growing censorship concerns.

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 :

A look at India's push to compete in the global AI race, as the country's vast linguistic diversity poses a core challenge to building foundational AI models (Shadma Shaikh/MIT Technology Review)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/0

Inside India’s scramble for AI independence
Structural challenges and the nation’s many languages have made it tough to develop foundational AI models. But the government is keen not to be left behind.

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

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

Gemini referencing real-life moments when prompted to write a birthday letter shows how effectively Google is leveraging user data to craft personalized content (Lila Shroff/The Atlantic)

Investigation: preprint research papers on arXiv from 14 academic institutions in eight countries had hidden prompts telling AI tools to give positive reviews (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Techn

'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers
Instructions in preprints from 14 universities highlight controversy on AI in peer review

Velvet Sundown, an AI‑created band with ~850,000 monthly Spotify listeners and two recent albums, shows how some listeners are turning to anodyne AI music (Ian Bogost/The Atlantic)

My Road Trip With the Velvet Sundown
“​​Rubber burns, the map fades away / Chasing the ghosts of yesterday.” Sure, fine.