Tootfinder

A look at Anthropic's societal impacts team, which broadly studies AI's impacts and finds and publishes "inconvenient truths", building on most AI safety teams (Hayden Field/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int

It’s their job to keep AI from destroying everything
Spoiler: the nine-person team works for Anthropic.

"So what if, right, what if, we put the data centres in … space!
This idea has a lot of appeal if you’ve read too much sci-fi, and it sounds obvious if you don’t know any practical details."
(Original title: AI data centres — in SPACE! Why DCs in space can’t work)
https://

AI data centres — in SPACE! Why DCs in space can’t work
Spending all the money you have and all the money you can get and all the money you can promise has a number of side effects, such as gigantic data centres full of high-power chips just to run lyin…

"By the end of 2026, Trump will have begun to distance himself from the aggressively pro-AI industry policies that characterized his AI strategy in 2025,"
wrote retired New York University professor and AI entrepreneur Gary Marcus.
"The giant AI infrastructure plays (like Project Stargate) that he championed after his inauguration will look like an unprofitable and underused mistake.
So will his utter failure to meaningfully regulate AI,
against the w…

This 'utter failure' from Trump could 'stun the world' in 2026: researcher
President Donald Trump has bet big on an agenda to expand artificial intelligence investment in the United States — but this year, some analysts think it could come back to haunt him, as a long-suspected AI investment bubble bursts and the public turns against the technology for its increasingly app...

Google is conducting a small test for some Discover users, replacing original news headlines with short AI-generated ones that are sometimes misleading or inane (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intell…

Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense
Google Discover, the company’s smartphone news feed, is experimenting with AI headlines. Many of them are very bad.

Good article about that there is more then just Generative AI, where all the hype is, but that we are making great and steady progress in the field of predictive AI.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/1

Generative AI hype distracts us from AI’s more important breakthroughs
It's a seductive distraction from the advances in AI that are most likely to improve or even save your life

[OT] Andrew Ng warns AI far from general intelligence amid overhype https://www.webpronews.com/andrew-ng-warns-ai-far-from-general-intelligence-amid-overhype/

Andrew Ng Warns AI Far from General Intelligence Amid Overhype
Andrew Ng cautions that AI remains narrowly focused, resource-heavy, and far from achieving general intelligence or replacing humans soon, amid overhyped expectations. Echoing experts like Hinton, discussions highlight job augmentation, ethical concerns, regulations, and technical barriers. Ultimately, AI is seen as a collaborative tool enhancing human potential.

Amazon laid off 14K people, and commentators rush to blame #AI. But not even Jassy claims that Amazon has replaced jobs with #LLM tools (because it is impossible).
Big tech believed that AI would lead to higher velocity, somehow. Jassy has given up on it, and instead thinks that *culture* will lead to …

Amazon's layoffs are driven by something even stupider than AI
Andy Jassy wants you to think that velocity can make up for lack of strategy. But "build, measure, learn" only works if you're willing to learn.

«[…] there is a choice to be made. We ought at least to ask if universities exist to sort and qualify, or to form and transform. AI forces the question.»
The end of pretend – AI and the case for universities of formation https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-end-of-pr

The end of pretend – AI and the case for universities of formation
Jim Dickinson reflects on the end of scarcity, the rise of AI, and the challenge to a system of higher education built on pretence, performance and proxies Jim Dickinson reflects on the end of scarcity, the rise of AI, and the challenge to a system of higher education built on pretence, performance and proxies

This is a genuinely good idea, and I'd urge you to sign it. Make #AI generated works immediately identifiable. It would be interesting also to require a similar 'watermark' in generated texts -- perhaps a particular sequence of whitespace characters.
#generativeAI
H/t

Petition: Require generative AI watermarks & ban using people’s likeness without consent
As AI generated content becomes increasingly realistic, we think laws should be put in place to prevent misuse. All such media should carry a permanent watermark or disclosure, alongside a blanket ban on using anyone’s likeness in AI-generated content without consent.

Just found via #powrss : that's a point of view that I haven't seen yet about AI systems. And - unfortunately - I think it's quite possible
https://cafebedouin.…

🪞 The Mirror Problem: A Warning About AI and Your Mind
What this is:A warning about how AI chat tools—like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others—can become dangerously addictive in a specific way. Not like social media addiction. Something harder to spot…

Not sure about solving…
How AI Labs Are “Solving” the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive Read More https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solving-the-power

How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive
Bring Your Own Generation, Sayonara Electric Grid, Turbines vs. Recips. vs. Fuel Cells, Why Not Build More CCGTs?, Onsite Power TCO

An interview with AWS CEO Matt Garman on his AI vision, how he plans to extend Amazon's cloud market lead, adding AI to AWS services, AI efficiencies, and more (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-aws-ceo-matt-garman-ai-agents/

AWS CEO Matt Garman Wants to Reassert Amazon’s Cloud Dominance in the AI Era
As Google and Microsoft continue to surge, the AWS chief lays out his pitch: cheaper, reliable AI delivered at hyperscale.

This is a good idea. All genAI/diffusion images to be marked with a watermark. If you're in the UK, please sign the petition⤵️
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/736690

Petition: Require generative AI watermarks & ban using people’s likeness without consent
As AI generated content becomes increasingly realistic, we think laws should be put in place to prevent misuse. All such media should carry a permanent watermark or disclosure, alongside a blanket ban on using anyone’s likeness in AI-generated content without consent.

This is an AI 2026 nissan leaf review on youtube that says nothing but nonsense and only shows images from the wrong Leaf car.
#cars #ai #youtube

Is het weer een VVD-er?
Jazeker, het is weer een VVD-er.
Hoe we te koop worden gezet voor spiegeltjes en kraaltjes, door een VVD-er.
https://www.trouw.nl/opinie/hoe-karremans-nederland-aan-de-ai-industrie-verkoopt~b2ea903d/

Hoe Karremans Nederland aan de AI-industrie verkoopt

The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive
I finally did it. I committed the act of digital suicide. It was a gesture of clinical curiosity and personal dread. I took twenty years of archives, every Boles Blogs entry, every "Best of" compilation, the discarded drafts, the love letters to lost eras, and I fed the entire body of work into the AI maw. My digital soul, offered up for digestion and analysis...

The Replicated Man: AI and the Ghost in the Archive | David Boles, Blogs
I finally did it. I committed the act of digital suicide. It was a gesture of clinical curiosity and personal dread. I took twenty years of archives, every Boles Blogs entry, every “Best of&#…

Musk's xAI faces backlash after Grok generates sexualized images of children on X (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/musk-grok-ai-bot-safeguard-sexualized-images-children.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260102/p67#a260102p67

AI browsers can bypass some paywalls; OpenAI's Atlas seems to avoid content from companies suing OpenAI, providing summaries or alternate reporting instead (Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/how-ai-browsers-sneak-past-blockers-and-…

How AI browsers sneak past blockers and paywalls.
OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet present a new challenge for media companies that want to limit AI access.

Apple says its AI chief, John Giannandrea, is stepping down; former Microsoft executive Amar Subramanya will lead AI, reporting to Craig Federighi (Juli Clover/MacRumors)
https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/01/apple-ai-chief-retiring-after-siri-failure/<…

Apple AI Chief John Giannandrea Retiring After Siri Delays
Apple AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down from his position and retiring in spring 2026, Apple announced today. Giannandrea will serve as an...

AI Is Decoding Whales’ Communications. Could That Be a Turning Point in the Push for Their Rights? https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29102025/ai-sperm-whale-communications-legal-rights/
I love this idea that understanding the communication…

AI Is Decoding Whales’ Communications. Could That Be a Turning Point in the Push for Their Rights? - Inside Climate News
The Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) is using artificial intelligence to help understand sperm whale communications. Lawyers think the discoveries could galvanize the world to recognize whales’ legal rights.

Medicare to use AI to pre-authorize certain treatments in 6 states including NJ in 2026. Why? To reduce costs.
Also known as rationing healthcare. By a computer.
#medicare #AI #rationing

6 States to Pilot Prior Authorizations for Original Medicare
Under a new pilot program slated to launch in January 2026, Original Medicare recipients in six states will need to secure prior authorizations for cert...

The Dutch Data Protection Authority, the national privacy watchdog, told Het Financieele Dagblad that it has counted dozens of such AI-related data breach reports so far this year.
https://nltimes.nl/2025/12/30/dutch-privacy-watchdog-warns-rising-ai-ch…

Dutch privacy watchdog warns of rising AI chatbot data leaks
The number of reported data breaches linked to workplace use of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini is rising sharply in the Netherlands, according to the Dutch Data Protection Authority, following a recent leak involving the municipality of Eindhoven.

Sources: OpenAI ramped up efforts to improve its audio AI models, in preparation for its AI-powered personal device, which is expected to be largely audio-based (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-ramps-audio…

OpenAI Ramps Up Audio AI Efforts Ahead of Device
OpenAI is taking steps to improve its audio AI models, in preparation for its eventual release of an AI-powered personal device, said a person with knowledge of the effort. The device is expected to be largely audio-based, said three people with knowledge of it. When people speak to ChatGPT, the ...

Sheri Byrne-Haber’s post “Accessibility and Usability: Inline Field Validation vs. Constantly Active Submit Button”:
https://buttondown.com/access-ability/archive/accessibility-and-usability-inline-field/
Added to my post “Don't Dis…

Accessibility and Usability: Inline Field Validation vs. Constantly Active Submit Button
AI-generated image of a hand against a dark background, holding a circle containing a light blue checkmark against a dark background. User researchers have...

James Cameron says the idea that generative AI can "make up a character" and a performance can be generated "from scratch with a text prompt" is "horrifying" (Jack Dunn/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/film/news/james-c…

James Cameron Says It's 'Horrifying' that AI Can 'Make Up an Actor'
James Cameron says its 'horrifying' that AI can replace actors.

Grok is undressing anyone
-- including minors
xAI’s AI chatbot is putting Elon Musk in a bikini at his request
— and doing the same to children, world leaders, and women
without their consent
https://www.theverge.com/news/853191/grok-explicit…

Grok is undressing anyone, including minors
Elon Musk’s AI company xAI allows Grok to edit any photo on X without notifying the original poster, leading to a flood of nonconsensual sexual photos on the platform.

Americans express fear and negativity toward AI, often relying on bad arguments like water usage, a stark contrast with Asia and Europe's relative positivity (Noah Smith/Noahpinion)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-love-ai-why-doesnt-everyone

I love AI. Why doesn't everyone?
Anti-AI sentiment might or might not be rational, but it certainly relies on a lot of bad arguments.

How Animaj, a startup in Disney's Accelerator Program, uses AI to drastically speed up the animation process, while also claiming to let artists stay in control (Corinne Reichert/CNET)
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-sof…

300,000 AI-Animated Poses in an Instant: My Visit to Disney and the New Reality for Cartoons
Disney checked out "thousands of AI companies" before backing one that keeps animators in the driver's seat.

AI browsers can bypass some paywalls; OpenAI's Atlas seems to avoid content from companies suing OpenAI, providing summaries or alternate reporting instead (Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/how-ai-browsers-sneak-past-blockers-and-…

How AI browsers sneak past blockers and paywalls.
OpenAI’s Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet present a new challenge for media companies that want to limit AI access.

AWS announces new features for its AI agent platform Bedrock AgentCore, including new tools for managing AI agent boundaries and memory capabilities (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/02/aws-announces-new-capabilities-for-it…

AWS announces new capabilities for its AI agent builder | TechCrunch
AWS is introducing new capabilities for its AI agent-building platform, including memory and evaluation tools.

An arbitrator has found that Politico violated key safeguards for AI adoption that had been negotiated into a contract with its unionized journalists (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/politico-management-vio…

Politico management violated key AI adoption safeguards, arbitrator finds
The ruling marks one of the first major tests of an AI clause in a newsroom union contract.

This is so much "AI" reporting: Claims about potentials and/or threads. I'd just like to have grown-up conversations about tech again :(
"The actual current user base for evil chatbots is the cyber security vendors, who scaremonger how only their good AI can possibly stop this automated hacker evil!"
(Original title: AI for evil — hacked by WormGPT!)

AI for evil — hacked by WormGPT!
A chatbot is a wrapper around a large language model, an AI transformer model that’s been trained on the whole internet, all the books the AI vendor can find, and all the other text in the world. A…

It's hard to overstate Nvidia’s AI dominance.
Founded in 1993, Nvidia first made its mark in the then-new field of graphics processing units (GPUs) for personal computers.
But it’s the company’s AI chips,
not PC graphics hardware,
that vaulted Nvidia into the ranks of the world’s most valuable companies.
It turns out that Nvidia’s GPUs are also excellent for AI.
As a result, its stock is more than 15 times as valuable as it was at the start of 2020;

Nvidia AI: Challengers Are Coming for Nvidia’s Crown
In AI’s game of thrones, don’t count out the upstarts

Google says it has removed its AI model Gemma from AI Studio; in a letter to Google, Sen. Blackburn said it fabricated sexual misconduct allegations against her (Anthony Ha/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/02/goog

Google pulls Gemma from AI Studio after Senator Blackburn accuses model of defamation | TechCrunch
Senator Martha Blackburn argued Gemma’s fabrications are “not a harmless ‘hallucination,’" but rather “an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model.”

Sources say President Trump's efforts to block state-level AI regulations through a preemption proposal are facing significant opposition on Capitol Hill (Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/02/ai-preemption-push-stalls-trump-pressure

Trump's push to overrule state AI regulations stalls
His calls to block state-level AI regulation are falling short on Capitol Hill.

Amazon launches second generation of its Nova AI models, including Nova Lite, Nova Pro, Nova Sonic, and Nova Omni, a fully multimodal reasoning model (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-nova-forge-ai-models/

Amazon Has New Frontier AI Models—and a Way for Customers to Build Their Own
Nova Forge lets Amazon’s customers train frontier models for different tasks—a potential breakthrough in making AI actually useful for businesses.

Luma AI opens its first international office in London and appoints former WPP and Monks executive Jason Day to lead its global expansion outside the US (Georg Szalai/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Luma AI Opens London Office, Led by Former WPP Executive Jason Day
Putting multimodal artificial generative intelligence (AGI) into "the hands of creative professionals around the world – be they marketers, gamers, or film studios – will transform the entire creative process."

Runway launches Gen 4.5, a new text-to-video AI model that produces HD videos from written prompts and excels at physics; Gen 4.5 tops Video Arena's leaderboard (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/01/runway-gen-4-5-video-model-google-open-ai.h…

Runway rolls out new AI video model that beats Google, OpenAI in key benchmark
Gen 4.5, a new AI model that allows users to generate high-definition videos based on written prompts.

Brookfield is launching a cloud company called Radiant and a new $10B AI fund, and plans to acquire up to $100B in land, data centers, and power assets for AI (Miles Kruppa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/brookfield-start-cloud-b…

Brookfield to Start Cloud Business to Lower Cost of AI
Private-equity firm Brookfield is starting its own cloud business, going up against tech giants like Amazon by arguing it can bring down the costs of developing AI. The firm, which has long invested in infrastructure and energy, is becoming the first major investment firm to try to lease chips ...

Chinese short-video company Kuaishou launches Kling Video O1, saying it is the first multimodal AI model to unify video generation, editing, and post-production (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/a…

Kuaishou debuts multimodal AI video model with ‘Nano Banana’ editing capability
Kuaishou expects the new model’s abilities to drive its adoption by filmmakers, production studios, advertisers and influencers.

Grokipedia content often closely mirrors Wikipedia except for some political topics but its use of AI makes it better than Wikipedia on obscure entries (Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/grokipedia-elon-musk-wikipedia-ai-which…

I tried Grokipedia. It has something to teach Wikipedia about AI.
Grokipedia's mission to be "anti-woke" doesn't appeal to me. But its use of AI to help write articles actually makes some sense. Wikipedia, take note.

#Chronic #hunger affects 673 million people
– about 8.2% of the world
– driven by poverty, broken food systems & inequality.
GIJN’s new guide shows how to dig into systemic failures:

Global Investigative Journalism Network (@gijn.org)
Chronic hunger affects 673 million people – about 8.2% of the – driven by poverty, broken food systems & inequality. GIJN’s new guide shows how to dig into systemic failures: https://twp.ai/9PXveB

Report: China-based Moonshot AI, maker of Kimi models, raised a $500M Series C at a $4.3B valuation led by IDG Capital, with Alibaba and Tencent participating (Iris Deng/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/arti

China’s Moonshot AI raises US$500 million in latest funding round: report
The Kimi AI model developer is now valued at US$4.3 billion, with cash reserves worth US$1.4 billion.

Anthropic's employees self-report using Claude in 60% of work and achieving a 50% productivity boost, often using it for debugging and code understanding, more (Anthropic)
https://anthropic.com/research/how-ai-is-transforming-work-at-anthropic/

How AI Is Transforming Work at Anthropic
How AI Is Transforming Work at Anthropic

New reporting by
"The Information" has revealed some recent topics of conversation between #OpenAI employees as they work to supply #advertisers with a teeming new audience to manipulate.
The plans are not final, though they give us a look at what soon may become the norm for

OpenAI’s Ads Push Starts Taking Shape
OpenAI executives have kept a tight lid on how the company could show advertisements to users of its popular ChatGPT chatbot, leaving the broader digital ad industry eager for clues. Behind the scenes, staff are working through key details. Employees have discussed ways to tweak AI models to ...

Tutor Intelligence, which makes AI-powered warehouse robots, raised a $34M Series A led by Union Square Ventures, bringing its total funding to $42M (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/01/tutor-intelligence-rai…

Tutor Intelligence raises $34M to scale fleet of AI-powered warehouse robots - SiliconANGLE
Tutor Intelligence raises $34M to scale fleet of AI-powered warehouse robots - SiliconANGLE

An interview with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on why there's no AI bubble, his view that Watson's healthcare push was "inappropriate", IBM's quantum bet, and more (Nilay Patel/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/podcast/829868/ib

Why IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is still hiring humans in the AI era
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna on Watson, the AI bubble, and why he’s hiring college grads.

Adam Mosseri details trends shaping Instagram and says it'll be more practical to authenticate real media than label AI, as AI gets better at imitating reality (Karissa Bell/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/s…

Instagram chief: AI is so ubiquitous 'it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media'
Adam Mosseri offered a notably candid assessment on how AI is upending Instagram.

How Animaj, a startup in Disney's Accelerator Program, uses AI to drastically speed up the animation process, while also claiming to let artists stay in control (Corinne Reichert/CNET)
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-sof…

300,000 AI-Animated Poses in an Instant: My Visit to Disney and the New Reality for Cartoons
Disney checked out "thousands of AI companies" before backing one that keeps animators in the driver's seat.

AWS launches DevOps Agent, an AI-enabled tool designed to help clients quickly identify root causes of outages and implement fixes, available in preview (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/02/amazon-launches-cloud-ai-tool…

Amazon launches cloud AI tool to help engineers recover from outages faster
Amazon Web Services' DevOps Agent is meant to help developers more quickly figure out what caused an outage and how to fix it.

At 1:09 a.m. EDT on November 2,
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, carrying Haven Demo and 17 other satellites,
including ones that will be operated by South Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD),
the Berlin-based company Exolaunch,
Turkey's Fergani Space,
and U.S. weather-forecasting outfit Tomorrow Companies,
and Starcloud, which carried an NVIDIA H100 AI chip to see if it’s possible to build an artificial intelligence-…

Elon Musk Launches Satellite To Test Systems For Private Space Station
SpaceX launched 18 satellites, including Haven Demo, a key test for the world's first private space station.

Amazon launches the Trainium3 UltraServer, powered by the 3nm Trainium3 AI training chip, and teases Trainium4, which will be able to work with Nvidia's chips (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/02/amazo…

Amazon releases an impressive new AI chip and teases an Nvidia-friendly roadmap   | TechCrunch
AWS has been building its own AI chips — and systems — for years now. It just released its third version, known as Trainium3, with some impressive specs.  

An analysis of AI training datasets, compiled by The Atlantic, shows AI models were trained on hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos from news publishers (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/hundred…

Hundreds of thousands of videos from news publishers like The New York Times and Vox were used to train AI models
YouTube channels from major news publishers and creators were in video data sets used by Microsoft, Meta, Snap, Runway AI, and Bytedance.

Sources: Marvell is in advanced talks to buy chip startup Celestial AI in a cash-and-stock deal that could top $5B; Celestial was valued at $2.5B in March 2025 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/marvell-advanced-talks-b…

Marvell In Advanced Talks to Buy Celestial AI in Multibillion Deal
Marvell is in advanced talks to buy Santa Clara-based chip startup Celestial AI in a cash-and-stock deal worth multiple billions of dollars, according to people with knowledge of the deal. Under the deal they’re discussing, Marvell would pay several billion dollars upfront for the startup, which ...

Marvell announces a deal to buy Celestial AI for at least $3.25B, expected to close in Q1 2026; the price can rise to $5.5B if Celestial hits revenue targets (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/02/mrvl-earnings-q3-2026-acquires-celestial-ai.html

Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as $5.5 billion
The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business.

Nvidia announces Alpamayo-R1, an AI model for autonomous driving research, and calls it the "first industry-scale open reasoning vision language action model" (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/01/nvid

Nvidia announces new open AI models and tools for autonomous driving research | TechCrunch
Nvidia continues its push into physical AI with the release of a new reasoning world model and other tools for physical AI.

Amazon debuts three frontier agents: Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent, each focused on a different aspect of software development (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/02/aws-puts-ai-age…

AWS puts AI agents to work on truly autonomous software development - SiliconANGLE
AWS puts AI agents to work on truly autonomous software development - SiliconANGLE

OpenAI's Sora 2 generates copyright infringing content, including numerous AI-generated clips featuring SpongeBob, Pokémon, Mario, Rick and Morty, and Star Wars (Jason Koebler/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/openais-sora-2-cop

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus
The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped.

UMG and Stability AI announce a partnership to develop music creation tools powered by "responsibly" trained AI (Marc Schneider/Billboard)
https://www.billboard.com/pro/umg-stability-ai-partnership-develop-music-creation-tools/

UMG Partners With Stability AI to Develop Music Creation Tools for Artists, Producers
Following its Udio settlement, UMG teams up with Stability AI to build responsibly trained AI tools that empower artists and protect copyrights.

Online harassers are using AI tools to create more realistic death threats, posting hyper-realistic AI-generated images and sounds to social media platforms (Tiffany Hsu/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/202…

A.I. Is Making Death Threats Way More Realistic
Online harassers are generating images and sounds that simulate their victims in violent situations.

Dozens of US universities and colleges have announced new AI departments and programs over the last two years; an AI program is now MIT's second-largest major (Natasha Singer/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/technology/college-compute…

College Students Choosing A.I. Majors Over Computer Science
At M.I.T., a new program called “artificial intelligence and decision-making” is now the second-most-popular undergraduate major.

AWS launches Nova Forge, a $100,000/year service allowing clients to customize Amazon's AI models at various stages of training and refine open-weight models (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/02/amazon-nova-forge-le…

Amazon to let cloud clients customize AI models midway through training for $100,000 a year
It can cost hundreds of millions or even billions to build a large language model from scratch, and this process is more affordable, Amazon said.

A look at US tech laws rolling out in 2026, including California's SB 53 AI transparency law and Virginia's new social media limits for minors, effective today (Adi Robertson/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/policy/851664/new-tech-internet-l…

Meet the new tech laws of 2026
Texas, California, and many other states have laws coming into force about AI, social media, and more.

Chinese short-video company Kuaishou launches Kling Video O1, saying it is the first multimodal AI model to unify video generation, editing, and post-production (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/a…

Kuaishou debuts multimodal AI video model with ‘Nano Banana’ editing capability
Kuaishou expects the new model’s abilities to drive its adoption by filmmakers, production studios, advertisers and influencers.

Ukraine has become a live-fire test range for AI drones like the Bumblebee, provided by a secretive Eric Schmidt-led venture, raising alarms in Kremlin circles (C.J. Chivers/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drones-war-russia…

In Ukraine, an Arsenal of Killer A.I. Drones Is Being Born in War Against Russia
As the war grinds on, sophisticated Russian defenses have pushed Ukraine to develop a frightening new weapon: semiautonomous killing machines.

OpenAI takes a stake in Thrive Capital's Thrive Holdings and plans to embed AI agents in its companies, which already includes an accounting and IT business (Michael J. de la Merced/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/01/business/dealbook/o…

OpenAI Takes Stake in Thrive Holdings, a Buyer of Services Firms
The move by the parent company of ChatGPT is meant to help imbue Thrive Holdings’ accounting and I.T. services companies with artificial intelligence tools.

India orders X to fix Grok to block the generation of obscene content, giving it 72 hours to submit an action-taken report or risk losing "safe harbor" immunity (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/02/india-orders-mus…

India orders Musk's X to fix Grok over "obscene" AI content | TechCrunch
India's IT ministry has given X 72 hours to submit an action-taken report.

Hundreds of megawatts of new data center capacity are being planned in Vernon, a city near LA, which is a key US-Asia cable-linking hub and is becoming crowded (Nilesh Christopher/Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/202

Southern California has an unlikely AI mecca: the very industrial Vernon
Vernon has become an essential location for artificial intelligence data centers.

Q&A with Sam Altman and Satya Nadella about the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, OpenAI's restructuring and $100B revenue target for 2027, $3T AI buildout, more (@bg2pod)
https://x.com/bg2pod/status/1984403048148713609

Bg2 Pod (@BG2Pod) on X
BG2. All things AI w @sama & @satyanadella. A Halloween Special. 🎃🔥@bg2pod @altcap -- (00:00) Intro (02:28) Microsoft’s Investment in OpenAI (03:19) The Nonprofit Structure and Its Impact (05:46) Health, AI Security, and Resilience (07:50) Models, Exclusivity, and

A look at ElevenLabs, as ~50% of its $193M in trailing 12-month revenue now comes from corporates, like Cisco, and ~50% from YouTubers, podcasters, and authors (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20

How A Tiny Polish Startup Became The Multi-Billion-Dollar Voice Of AI
ElevenLabs’ computer voices are so convincing they could fool your mother. That’s both a blessing and a curse for the four-year-old company.

How AI labs are deploying on-site gas generators for power as the US electric grid struggles to keep pace with the growing demands of AI infrastructure (SemiAnalysis)
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solving-the-power

How AI Labs Are Solving the Power Crisis: The Onsite Gas Deep Dive
Bring Your Own Generation, Sayonara Electric Grid, Turbines vs. Recips. vs. Fuel Cells, Why Not Build More CCGTs?, Onsite Power TCO

Researchers unveil PropensityBench, a benchmark showing how stressors like shorter deadlines increase misbehavior in agentic AI models during task completion (Matthew Hutson/IEEE Spectrum)
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-agents-safety

AI Agents Care Less About Safety When Under Pressure
Can AI agents resist pressure or do they crack? Discover how PropensityBench tests their likelihood to misbehave when put under pressure.

Perplexity launches a free AI-powered patent research tool in beta to let users search for patents using natural language queries (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/811340/perplexity-ai-patent-research-tool

Perplexity’s new AI tool aims to simplify patent research
Perplexity is launching an AI-powered patent research tool that allows you to search for patents using natural language.

Samsung says it's partnering with Nvidia to build an "AI Megafactory" and deploy over 50K of Nvidia's most advanced GPUs to embed AI in its chipmaking process (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/10/30/sa

Samsung and Nvidia to build an AI Megafactory to transform semiconductor manufacturing - SiliconANGLE
Samsung and Nvidia to build an AI Megafactory to transform semiconductor manufacturing - SiliconANGLE

Adam Mosseri details trends shaping Instagram and says it'll be more practical to authenticate real media than label AI, as AI gets better at imitating reality (Karissa Bell/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/s…

Instagram chief: AI is so ubiquitous 'it will be more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media'
Adam Mosseri offered a notably candid assessment on how AI is upending Instagram.

A profile of AI contractor marketplace Mercor, which is valued at $10B and whose three 22-year-old founders are Thiel Fellows, each holding a roughly 22% stake (Richard Nieva/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2025/10/30/mercor-younge…

These 22-Year-Olds Are Now The World’s Youngest Self-Made Billionaires
With a new $10 billion valuation for their AI recruiting startup Mercor, the founders are the youngest tech billionaires ever.

At a Tokyo forum, Masayoshi Son says he "was crying" over SoftBank selling its $5.83B Nvidia stake but "I just had more need for money to invest in OpenAI" (Dylan Butts/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/02/softbank-m

SoftBank’s Son ‘was crying’ about the firm's need to sell its Nvidia stake
SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son has downplayed his firm's decision to dump its Nvidia position, saying he "was crying" to sell the shares. 

New York becomes the first US state to require retailers to disclose use of algorithmic pricing tied to personal data; 10 states are considering similar bills (Tim Balk/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/nyregio

N.Y. Law Could Set Stage for A.I. Regulation’s Next ‘Big Battleground’
The new law seeks to prevent retailers from ripping off consumers by using artificial intelligence and their personal data to charge them higher prices.

Nvidia invests $2B in Synopsys' common stock and announces a strategic partnership to accelerate computing and AI engineering products, including deploying CUDA (Ashley Capoot/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/01/nvidia-takes-2-billion-stake-in-synopsys.htm…

Nvidia takes $2 billion stake in Synopsys with expanded computing power partnership
The two companies are partnering to accelerate computing and AI engineering solutions.

The US CBP signs a two-year deal with AI logistics company Altana, and will use its platform for real-time trade enforcement, forced labor detection, and more (Mackenzie Weinger/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/31/cbp-altana-ai-trade

Exclusive: CBP taps Altana's AI for trade enforcement
Private firms and federal agencies are looking for ways to navigate supply-chain uncertainty.

US startups are increasingly adopting Chinese open source AI models, as some capabilities of Chinese models start to catch up with those of frontier US labs (NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/silicon-valley-building-free-chinese-ai-r…

More of Silicon Valley is building on free Chinese AI
Surveying the state of America’s artificial intelligence landscape earlier this year, Misha Laskin was concerned

UMG and Stability AI announce a partnership to develop music creation tools powered by "responsibly" trained AI (Marc Schneider/Billboard)
https://www.billboard.com/pro/umg-stability-ai-partnership-develop-music-creation-tools/

UMG Partners With Stability AI to Develop Music Creation Tools for Artists, Producers
Following its Udio settlement, UMG teams up with Stability AI to build responsibly trained AI tools that empower artists and protect copyrights.

CrowdStrike and Nvidia announce an expanded partnership to deepen the use of each other's technologies for creating and deploying AI agents for cybersecurity (Kyle Alspach/CRN)
https://www.crn.com/news/ai/2025/5-big-moves-in-crowdstrike-nvidia-ai-partner…

5 Big Moves In CrowdStrike-Nvidia AI Partnership
A newly announced partnership expansion between CrowdStrike and Nvidia will see the technology giants utilizing each other’s capabilities more deeply for the creation and deployment of AI agents.

How AI automation can fulfill Thomas Piketty's predictions on rising economic inequality, and why highly progressive taxes on capital can help slow the spiral (Philosopher Count)
https://philiptrammell.substack.com/p/capital-in-the-22nd-century

Capital in the 22nd Century
Piketty was wrong about the past. He’s probably right about the future.

Israeli startup Zafran, an AI-native threat exposure management service, raised a $60M Series C led by Menlo Ventures, bringing its total funding to $130M (Globes)
https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-israeli-startup-zafran-security-raises-60m-100152808…

Israeli startup Zafran Security raises $60m
Zafran has also launched its agentic exposure management suite, positioning it to complete the entire end-to-end lifecycle across asset inventory, vulnerability detection, risk assessment, and autonomous remediation workflows.

Tech analyst Dan Wang reflects on the Chinese Communist Party vs. Silicon Valley, AI and manufacturing, and how China and the US are building the future (Dan Wang)
https://danwang.co/2025-letter/

2025 letter | Dan Wang
Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair

The reaction to NYT's David Sacks story aside, Sacks is pushing policies to help the US win the AI race, which also benefit him, his allies, and even his foes (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-pro-rata-1d32bd61-9974-408…

Axios Pro Rata

Omnicom's DM9 returned three Cannes awards after a NC state senator and CNN Brazil found the company had used AI to manipulate their content and used it for ads (Emmanuel Felton/Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/11/30/deep-fake-whirlo…

Deepfake of North Carolina lawmaker used in award-winning Whirlpool video
North Carolina state Sen. DeAndrea Salvador discovered her 2018 TED Talk had been altered by an ad agency working for Whirlpool in Brazil, leading to a lawsuit.

An analysis of Crunchbase and PitchBook data: in 2025 so far, 80 tech startups reached $1B valuations, many of them focused on AI with exceptions like Kalshi (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/01/at-least-36-new-tech-…

At least 80 new tech unicorns were minted in 2025 so far | TechCrunch
Using data from Crunchbase and PitchBook, TechCrunch tracked down the VC-backed startups that became unicorns so far this year.

Sources: OpenAI is developing a new LLM codenamed Garlic, which performs well when compared to Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 in coding and reasoning tasks (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-developi…

OpenAI Developing ‘Garlic’ Model to Counter Google’s Recent Gains
OpenAI, which in recent weeks has appeared to fall behind Google in AI development, is fighting back with a new large language model codenamed Garlic.Last week, OpenAI’s chief research officer Mark Chen told some colleagues about the new model, which was performing well on the company’s ...

A profile of Dario Amodei and Anthropic, which is on track to hit a nearly $10B annualized run rate by the end of 2025, more than 10x what it generated in 2024 (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/article/anthropic-ceo-d…

Anthropic is all in on ‘AI safety’—and that’s helping the $183 billion startup win over big business
Founders Daniela and Dario Amodei have made Anthropic and its Claude models the AI many companies prefer over rivals OpenAI and ChatGPT.

Pony.ai becomes the first company to receive a citywide robotaxi permit for Shenzhen, allowing self-driving taxis to operate beyond pilot zones (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/31/chinas-ponyai-gets-the-first-permit-fo…

Pony.ai becomes first to win citywide robotaxi permit in China's Silicon Valley
Pony.ai said it is the first company to get a permit to operate taxis across all of the Chinese city of Shenzhen on the border of Hong Kong.

Archy, which offers AI-powered dental practice management software, raised a $20M Series B led by TCV, bringing its total funding to $47M (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/dental-saas-provider-archy-raises-seriesb/

Exclusive: Founded By Uber Alumni, Archy Raises $20M To Put Dental Practices ‘On Autopilot’
San Jose, California-based Archy, which is building AI agents into its software platform to handle the busywork at dental offices, will use the new funding to bulk up its engineering, AI and go-to-market teams.

Pangram Labs: ~21% of the 75,800 peer reviews submitted for ICLR 2026, a major ML conference, were fully AI-generated, and 50% contained signs of AI use (Miryam Naddaf/Nature)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03506-6

Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI
Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.

A profile of Klay, whose app will let users remake songs using AI; Klay has raised ~$10M and is the first AI startup to close deals with the three major labels (Abram Brown/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/secretive-startup-klay-jump…

Secretive Startup Klay Jumps Into the Fray Over AI Music
“So here’s a real surprise,” said Ary Attie, holding open a hidden door in the bowels of the Walker Hotel in the city’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. “There used to be a lot more cool, interesting places in New York—and there’s still a few left.” Attie, the 30-year-old founder of Klay, a new ...

Palantir sues two ex-employees now working at Percepta, an "AI transformation company" launched by General Catalyst, and alleges deception and stolen documents (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/30/ai-palantir-general-catalyst-lawsuit…

Palantir sues ex-employees over AI startup, alleging deception, stolen documents
There's been a big rise in startup-related litigation.

Zhipu AI launches a share sale to raise ~$560M in a Hong Kong IPO at a valuation of ~$6.6B, which would make it the first LLM developer listed in Hong Kong (Themis Qi/South China Morning Post)
https://www.sc…

China’s Zhipu AI launches US$560 million share sale amid heated IPO tech race
The company, marketed overseas as Z.ai, eyes US$6.6 billion valuation with Hong Kong’s first large language model listing.

Sources: Databricks is raising $5B and expects sales to grow 55% this year, putting its post-money valuation at $134B, as AI costs squeeze gross profit margins (Cory Weinberg/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/datab…

Databricks Boosts Sales Forecast, Driving Valuation to $134 Billion
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi has been more vocal than other Silicon Valley executives about the dangers of an AI bubble. His company’s new $5 billion round of fundraising, at a higher valuation than ever, epitomizes the risks and rewards of the boom: While sales are growing faster than forecast, AI ...