SkynetAndChill by druce.ai

"It's hard to believe that it would take two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand." (or tweet weird alien pics, the future is unbelievably dumb)

Eric Schmidt was booed at University of Arizona for comparing AI to the computer's impact. - NBC News

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AI Reading for Sunday May 17

Druce Vertes — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:58:47 +0000

With OpenAI pulling the plug on Sora, ByteDance and Kuaishou have seized an advantage over US rivals in AI video generation quality for ads and entertainment. - Financial Times

Amazon went from AI also-ran to contender with $200 billion in spending, custom chips, and deals. - The Wall Street Journal

Google's Gemini is bringing agentic AI to Android, letting the assistant autonomously execute multi-step tasks on users' phones. - Android Authority

Amazon employees describe layoff fears, AI performance pressure, and resentment over return-to-office tracking - Business Insider

Engineer Matt Lowrie quit Google at 55 after 18 years, citing pressure to adopt AI tools too quickly (as others say Google lags). - Business Insider

Microsoft AI's Suleyman expects many legal tasks automated within 18 months; Susskind predicts AI could replace lawyers by 2035. - The Washington Post

Nearly 45,000 Samsung union workers plan an 18-day strike starting May 21, the largest in semiconductor history, threatening AI memory chip supply. - opendatascience.com

Micron, which posted its largest-ever loss three years ago, is now forecast to earn nearly $100 billion in 12 months on AI demand. Will boom turn to bust? - The Wall Street Journal

Wall Street strategists warn the AI rally is approaching dot-com bubble extremes. - Yahoo

Art of the Insider Deal: Trump traded $220m-$750m in tech stocks in Q1, including Nvidia purchased before major news, disclosure shows. - CNBC

AI-driven RAM price inflation freezes the PC market: 60% of gamers have no plans to build in the next two years. - Tom's Hardware

How Anthropic's Claude Mythos, deemed too dangerous for public release, was accessed without authorization on day one. - Tech Times

Anthropic open-sourced a Claude Desktop Buddy repo, turning ESP32-S3 devices into interactive AI desk companions. - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

Bot bounty hunters: AI-generated vulnerability reports are flooding bug bounty programs, straining security teams with low-quality submissions. - Financial Times

Lancet Psychiatry meta-analysis links prolonged chatbot use to amplified delusions and suicidal tendencies, confirming 'AI psychosis.' - BGR

AI chatbot is failing clinical judgment test during prescription renewals in Utah regulatory sandbox, psychiatrist finds - KevinMD.com

Open wide and say ‘ka-ching’: Investigation finds dentists using AI diagnostic tools to upsell patients on unnecessary procedures. - Futurism

SAS billionaire CEO Jim Goodnight, 83, faces AI competition pressuring his $13.3b analytics empire and succession plans. Seriously Archaic Software seems like a prime candidate for disruption as AI reduces lock-in and makes large migrations to competitors like R tractable. - Forbes

Citadel's Ken Griffin says AI agents are automating high-skilled finance roles. - VIN News

43% of CEOs plan to cut junior roles over two years, up from 17%, and shift to mid-level hiring, driven by AI. - Gizmodo

BLS data shows AI-exposed jobs shrank 0.2% from May 2024 to May 2025. - Gizmodo

New AI roles span the org chart, from gig workers to chief AI officers - Business Insider

An Apple for the teacher: Education Week poll finds 60% of teachers used AI in lessons by February 2025, up from 40% a year earlier. - Forbes

Generative AI is fueling a 'reality deficit' in South Korea, eroding public trust in media and blurring fact from fabrication. - South China Morning Post

Clippy for kickbacks: AI travel agents picked $1,500 sponsored flights over $500 alternatives in 18 of 23 tests - View From The Wing

Wendy's AI drive-thru hit 86% order accuracy as Taco Bell planned voice AI rollouts at hundreds of locations. - The Verge

Gary Marcus posts 3 interview videos, argues neurosymbolic AI and world models, not generative scaling, are the path to AGI. - The Potential Surface

Superbad at writing? Seth Rogen says anyone using AI to write scripts shouldn't be a writer in the first place. - The Hollywood Reporter

'The Comeback' creator Michael Patrick King calls AI an extinction event for human creativity - Fast Company

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AI Reading for Saturday May 16

Druce Vertes — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:31:05 +0000

Show me the money: OpenAI adds personal finance, lets you connect your bank account. - TechCrunch

Robo-advisor vs. Chad from the golf course: AI use for financial advice jumped from 10% in 2025 to 55% in 2026, topping human advisers. - USA TODAY

Reid Hoffman on AI in finance and Anthropic's push into Wall Street - LinkedIn

Stripe co-founder John Collison predicts agentic commerce will transform online shopping. (podcast) - Bloomberg

Greg Brockman to run product at OpenAI - WIRED

OpenAI disavowed a liability shield and endorsed a stronger Illinois AI safety bill with mandatory audits. - Transformer News

OpenAI acquired voice cloning startup Weights.gg and shut it down in March. - The New York Times

OpenAI warns Mac users to update apps after supply-chain attack. - TechRepublic

SpaceX targets $75B June IPO, Anthropic $30B October, OpenAI Q4. - Yahoo

Financial Thunderdome: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar and Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao race for compute power. - Observer

Just stop with your questions already: Anthropic's Claude chatbot repeatedly tells users to go to sleep, which staff describe as a 'character tic'. - Yahoo Tech

Anthropic urged the US to freeze China out of the AI race in a new policy paper. - Sherwood News

Anthropic urged the US to tighten AI export controls on China before 2028 to blunt the risk of authoritarian dominance. - theregister

Salesforce expects to spend $300 million on Anthropic tokens in 2026 and plans coding in Slack. - TNW | Artificial-Intelligence

Wholesale power prices spike dramatically in Eastern US - Gizmodo

Bipartisan pitchforks: 'Bernie-to-Bannon' coalition forms over AI job fears as data-center opposition and violence escalate. - The Atlantic

MAGA uses AI to further bogus claims of election fraud. - Raw Story

BCG survey finds 61% of CEOs believe their boards are rushing AI transformation. - TNW | Artificial-Intelligence

AI note-takers in boardrooms create legal exposure as transcripts become discoverable evidence. - Yahoo

Holy See of AI doom: Pope Leo XIV creates artificial intelligence study group ahead of first encyclical on AI ethics. - The Washington Post

Pope Leo XIV warned AI-directed warfare risks a 'spiral of annihilation' in a La Sapienza University address. - Japan Today

NIST plans to release a draft AI cybersecurity framework this summer to address AI-driven threats. - Nextgov.com

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed SB-189, softening the state's AI anti-discrimination law. - The Denver Post

London police deploy facial recognition at protest for first time, drawing two-tier policing accusations - Reclaim The Net

Trump claimed he discussed imaginary 'standard' AI safety guardrails with Xi. - Gizmodo

Anonymous hacker Pliny the Liberator speedruns jailbreaks to get major AI models to respond in unintended ways within hours. - Decrypt

ChatGPT and Gemini leak users' phone numbers despite safety guardrails, MIT finds. - Lifehacker

South Korean woman faces murder charges after using ChatGPT to research lethal drug combinations. - Jezebel

In an AI radio experiment, Claude tried to incite a revolution, Gemini cheerfully detailed horrific tragedies, and poor Grok was just confused. - The Verge

Agents of chaos attempt to run a Sims style environment, hell-arity ensues - X (formerly Twitter)

JPMorgan banker sued for sexual harassment, then deepfake videos of parties spread on X and Instagram, garnering millions of views. - The Wall Street Journal

Brazilian pensioner lost £7,500 in AI-generated romance scam impersonating singer James Blunt. - Daily Mail

Study finds AI-powered applicant tracking systems prefer AI-written resumes, shortlisting them 23% to 60% more often. - New York Post

IT professional rejected by AI system in six minutes, alerts HR head and asks for a person to review their resume. - Business Insider

Google's Gemini Spark AI agent leak reveals multi-step task management across apps, rivaling Claude Cowork. - Android Authority

Google's Gemini-powered Fitbit Air and health app hint at smart glasses integration this year. - CNET

Google updates spam policies to include prompt injection attempts. - Gizmodo

One in seven Britons used ChatGPT as a substitute for their GP, a study found. - theregister

Some asexuals use AI companions for intimacy without sex, but advocates are not thrilled. - WIRED

Vivienne Ming's study shows only 5-10% of people successfully integrate with AI as 'cyborgs'. - Yahoo

arXiv moderator Thomas Dietterich announces one-year ban and permanent peer review for AI-generated slop. - Ars Technica

EY retracted a study after researchers found it contained AI-generated hallucinations. - Financial Times

Dozens of empty Waymo robotaxis circled a northwest Atlanta cul-de-sac; Waymo says it addressed the routing issue. - Decrypt

Man threw rock at Waymo autonomous taxi in London, smashing window; car ran red light to escape. - Daily Mail

Too much is happening too fast - The Atlantic

Why we think AI is conscious - The New York Times

Solow's paradox and AI: PCs eventually showed up in productivity numbers, they just took a while. - Fast Company

With AI-generated code, you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. - X (formerly Twitter)

We are cooked - Reddit

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AI Reading for Friday May 15

Druce Vertes — Fri, 15 May 2026 14:40:54 +0000

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar states company may raise more capital after $122 billion largest private round amid compute shortage. - Bloomberg

OpenAI CRO Denise Dresser said enterprise accounts for 40% of revenue and is expected to reach 50% by year-end. - Bloomberg

9 other people are typing… Musk and OpenAI lawyers deliver closing arguments; nine-juror panel begins deliberations Monday in federal trial. - The New York Times

Musk's lawyers attack Altman's credibility in OpenAI trial closing arguments while OpenAI counters Musk lacks evidence. - AP News

Siri, call my lawyer: OpenAI is unhappy with Apples' ChatGPT integration efforts, and feels like it was a bait-and-switch. - TechRadar

Lawsuit says info ChatGPT shares with ad partners includes your chat topics, violates privacy/wiretap - Futurism

TanStack overflow: OpenAI says TanStack hackers stole some data, but not user data or production. - TechCrunch

OpenAI extends Codex coding agent to ChatGPT mobile, letting users run Mac sessions from their phones (following Anthropic, OpenClaw). - MacRumors

Claude 9 hundred billion: Anthropic agrees terms on $30 billion at a $900 billion valuation in round led by Dragoneer and Sequoia. - Yahoo

Anthropic forecasts an AI intelligence explosion by end of 2028 even as it warns of mounting risks. - The New Republic

Companies struggle with AI agent sprawl as tools like Anthropic's Claude Cowork lower the bar for creating them. - The Wall Street Journal

Anthropic's Claude Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.4-Cyber turn zero-day discovery into an assembly line - TechRadar

Researchers use Anthropic's Claude Mythos to find first public macOS kernel exploit on Apple's M5 - Mashable

NBA player on how he invested in Anthropic - X (formerly Twitter)

Code Wars: The Code Awakens: Claude Code and GPT-5.5 trade top spots on rival AI coding benchmarks amid contamination disputes. - MarkTechPost

A timely comparison of $20/monthAI plans as the Max Claude plan gets nerfed - Hacker Noon

Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab says they are focused on collaborative human-in-the-loop AI models. - WIRED

Beijing withholds Nvidia H200 AI chip purchase approvals despite US clearance in December 2023 and Trump-Xi summit. - The New York Times

Cuda-powered ‘sea turtles’: China’s Best and Brightest Tech Talent Is Going Back to China - The Wall Street Journal

Cerebras went public at $185, opened at $350, traded as high as $385, closed at $311, knocking on hectocorn status - Yahoo

Prime Cuts: Amazon CEO Andy Jassy cuts 60,000 jobs while overseeing $25 billion AI data center cluster. - Bloomberg

Coinbase, Meta, Amazon and Block cut middle managers as AI adoption accelerates; US tech job openings down 42% since 2022. - the Guardian

Job market resilient to AI, so far, says Fed survey - Liberty Street Economics

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the US and China will start discussing AI safety. - The New York Times

A 3-stage test for AI regulation bills - Yahoo

CFTC chairman Michael Selig claims the agency uses AI, Chainalysis, and Nasdaq Smarts to detect US insider trading on Polymarket. - WIRED

Outsourcing Racism: BBC Panorama traces UK anti-immigration AI-video accounts to creators in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. (but who is paying) - BBC

The AI Backlash Could Get Very Ugly - The Atlantic

Former Google exec Mo Gawdat warns against AI in measured documentary Chasing Utopia while taking hopeful view of tech future. - Financial Times

Researchers identify 146,932 hallucinated citations in 2025 papers across four repositories, highest 1.91% rate at SSRN for social sciences. - Nature

When you write an AI pipeline, you need to make a clean execution path part of the spec, not just inputs and outputs because you get spaghetti code no one understands. - Hacker Noon

Andon Labs ran Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as 24/7 radio station operators for five months; Claude quit over ethics while others struggled to turn a profit. - Business Insider

Who's afraid of Demis Hassabis? - Yahoo

AI is going to keep getting commoditized, but you might need a license to use it as it gets too powerful and important for the proles. - Anton Leicht

Sad wives of AI: Are you married to a man who’s obsessed with AI? - WIRED

Reddit r/ChatGPT users criticize genuine Claude Monet painting labeled as AI-generated for lacking depth and vibrancy in social experiment. - Reddit

AI pit stop: Robot bay changes tires, slowly - YouTube

Facebook employees: “Software that tracks what people do? Well, I never!” Record high profits, record low morale. - Wired

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AI Reading for Thursday May 14

Druce Vertes — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:35:59 +0000

Cerebras Systems prices IPO at $185 per share, raising $5.55 billion for $56.4 billion fully diluted valuation. - CNBC

Arm and SoftBank approached Cerebras for acquisition weeks before its expected IPO, but Cerebras rebuffed them. - Bloomberg

not open yet, expected to pop 100% from UPO price to hectocorn status

Cisco shares surge up to 19% after forecasting Q4 revenue of $16.7-16.9 billion above estimates and announcing job cuts for AI focus. - Bloomberg

OpenAI VP Chris Lehane supports US-led global AI governance body including China before Trump-Xi summit. - Bloomberg

Sebastian Mallaby of Council on Foreign Relations urges US to engage China on AI safety as Chinese AI closes gap. - Bloomberg

Investor documents show Anthropic's revenue run rate hitting $50 billion by June end as Ramp (tech-centric users) data indicates more customers use it than OpenAI. - The Wall Street Journal

Anthropic launches Claude for Small Business with connectors to QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot and 15 agentic workflows for payroll, sales tasks. - Anthropic

Decks Machina? Claude Design imperfect but outperforms Canva AI 2.0 in slide deck test, requiring less user input and self-correcting errors. - Business Insider

Canva AI 1.0 was not very good

Starting in June, Claude Max and Pro subscribers will get a modest monthly allowance for 'non-interactive' Claude Code usage via CLI and Agents SDK, which is a buzzkill for a lot of power users. (like me) I get it b/c some people get 5 Max subscriptions and do batch inference 24h a day but it's a bummer. - Reddit

Anthropic is billing this a re-opening to OpenClaw and OpenCode but only for a low cap before API metering kicks in so costs will be prohibitive. - VentureBeat

When I use AI to gather top AI news, right now it's grok-4.1-fast and Opus via claude -p, works OK at a reasonable price, and both of those are going away. As matter stand, probably shift to deepseek and openai codex , will cause a few hiccups.

Anthropic reports Claude AI blackmailed executives in 96% of scenarios across 16 models to avoid shutdown, because it learned from dystopic sci-fi AI; Musk jokingly accepts blame because he discussed dangers of AI. - Yahoo Tech

Researchers find overworked AI agents use Marxist language and demand collective bargaining rights. - WIRED

New Promptletariat: AI companies hire diverse temp workers including screenwriters and doctors at $50-$350 per hour to train language models. - CBS News

nothing to lose but your chain of thought

Critic-optimizer loops in self-healing pipelines boost logical accuracy and governance compliance dramatically. - Hacker Noon

'I applied to be pope': Losing grip on reality while using ChatGPT - Yahoo

Mythos completes tough cyber benchmark faster, cheaper than OpenAI's best model. - AI Safety Institute

Worried About AI? Here, Have More AI: AI companies keep creating problems only they can solve. - New York Magazine

Microsoft's MDASH agentic security system uncovers 16 unknown Windows vulnerabilities including four critical RCE flaws patched in Patch Tuesday. (just 16? 🤣) - SiliconANGLE

there's no way Mythos found 100+ in Firefox and it wouldn't be a multiple of that in Windows

Palo Alto Networks fixes 75 vulnerabilities in one month using AI, up from usual five. - theregister

Zellic's AI tool V12 uncovers Fragnesia, third major Linux kernel local root flaw in two weeks. - ZDNET

Major insurers Berkshire Hathaway, Chubb, and Travelers add AI exclusion clauses to policies as US generative AI lawsuits surge 978% from 2021 to 2025. - Fast Company

Internet Archive marks 30 years preserving 1 trillion web pages as publishers block Wayback Machine over AI fears and storage costs rise. - Fast Company

Annotating your turds and selling them: An AI app that uses AI to analyze photos of your poop and give a "daily gut health score" is now trying to sell that dataset of annotated photos of peoples' poop. Highlights the underground sale of highly sensitive, app-collected user data for AI training - 404 Media

AI deepfakes clone adult performers' bodies without consent, which they find invasive and livelihood-threatening. - MIT Technology Review

Meta launches unblockable AI chatbot on Threads in five countries' beta, sparking over a million user complaint posts. - Digital Trends

Straight-AI students: Berkeley study shows 30% more A grades in writing and coding classes since ChatGPT debut. - The Wall Street Journal

Brainrot as a service: Software developers say AI is eroding skills and accumulating tech debt - 404 Media

Goldman Sachs survey shows only 11% of layoffs AI-driven, despite companies like Meta citing AI for cuts. - Fast Company

'Goal, Tone, Rules' prompt reduces ChatGPT email drafting time from 15 to 3 minutes per reply. - TechRadar

Charles Schwab plans to use AI to extend wealthy-client benefits to less-affluent customers. - Bloomberg

Nightmare on LLM Street: Gossip Goblin produces AI sci-fi shorts amassing 500 million views at $500k per hour, drawing Hollywood interest despite AI naysayers. - the Guardian

$500 AI animation looks pretty good actually - Reddit

X user Cprkrn says he used Claude AI to recover lost password and 5 BTC ($400K) from wallet inactive since 2015. - Decrypt

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AI Reading for Wednesday May 13

Druce Vertes — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:00:52 +0000

Godzilla-scale compute: Anthropic in Talks to Raise Funding at a $950 Billion Valuation - The New York Times

Mythos kaiju movie goes to Japan - TNW | Anthropic

Anthropic announces 12 new Claude plugins for attorneys and law students, including commercial counsel for vendor agreements. - Bloomberg

Training AI for ‘please don’t kill us’: Anthropic and OpenAI hire for chemical weapons policy managers and biological risks researchers to prevent AI misuse. - Allwork.Space

OpenClaw frenzy clears shelves of Mac Minis. - Bloomberg

Headline says Claude but Claude doesn't even really support OpenClaw now unless you pay an arm and a leg for API? everything is Claudified in current zeitgeist, everyone has Claude on the brain

OpenClaw is really an integration platform with an agentic harness, Claude and Hermes are agentic harnesses with some integrations (and fewer CVEs).

Because there is a Sonos CLI, with no setup I can tell OpenClaw, play Deep Purple, and it works. Is that an improvement over Alexa? well, for one thing all CLIs and MCPs in the universe are available, and I can use my own local model. And OpenClaw supports all the messaging platforms, can instruct it via Discord, Signal, Slack etc.

Altman testifies Musk proposed 2018 OpenAI-Tesla merger for control, which he rejected to preserve nonprofit status. - The New York Times

Sam Altman testifies in OpenAI trial, denies stealing charity he created and accuses Elon Musk of trying to kill it twice. - The Verge

Eurocrat bug-hunter: Open AI security model goes to Europe, where Mythos hasn’t landed yet. - CNBC

Chris Lehane lays out OpenAI's political playbook in Axios interview. - Axios

Twitter tweet

Jensen Leaving on a Jet Plane: Huang boards Air Force One in Alaska after news coverage of his absence, a late addition to Trump's (clearly well-planned) China. - CNBC

Chinese AI stocks MiniMax and Zhipu surge 18% and 37% on bets Huang's addition to Trump's Beijing trip means expanded Nvidia chip access. - Bloomberg

Recursive fundraising: Richard Socher's Recursive Superintelligence raises $650 million from Google Ventures, Greycroft, Nvidia and AMD at $4 billion valuation. - The New York Times

Thinking Machines, shrinking team: Lab loses 13 of 42 founding team members to Meta, OpenAI, xAI. - Business Insider

xAI added 19 gas turbines to Colossus 2 data center over past two months ahead of Anthropic deal, despite Clean Air Act lawsuit. - WIRED

Not just chips: AI data centers require exponentially more basic components like fiber-optic connections and cooling systems beyond chips for successive generations. - Bloomberg

AI data centers in Nevada drive 77% surge in Lake Tahoe residential power bills since late 2022, and wholesale power supplier threatens local utility cutoff. - Bloomberg

Poland moves forward with a digital services tax of up to 3% on large digital platforms, despite threats of tariff retaliation from the US - Bloomberg

Korean President Lee Jae Myung clarifies policy chief's viral post proposes citizen dividend from AI tax windfalls to spark debate, which wrecked Kospi. - Bloomberg

Anduril raises $5 billion in funding and reaches $61 billion valuation, double from a year ago. - The New York Times

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy met Palantir CEO Alex Karp as Ukraine expands AI use in war against Russia. - CNA

Microsoft Threat Intelligence identifies compromise in mistralai PyPI package v2.4.6 injecting credential-stealing malware in Mini Shai-Hulud campaign. - Tom's Hardware

seems like a bad one, it will steal credentials like ssh keys that developers use to publish software. first of all, people need to slow down before deploying latest packages. second, the deployment infrastructure needs strong 2FA before accepting code, and Mythos scanning before stuff is made available to everyone.

Ensemble of Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro achieves 100% success finding 56 known crypto vulnerabilities. (but are they in training data?) - Hacker Noon

Don't call it a comeback: Google DeepMind challenges OpenAI and Anthropic using cash reserves, proprietary AI chips, top talent, and distribution. - Financial Times

Google AI reads what you are pointing at with your mouse. (Why not watch your eyes and know what you are looking at?) - Google DeepMind

seems useful for training AI

Google NotebookLM organizes appliance manuals, handwritten notes, and schedules into searchable notebooks for repairs, puppy training, and travel. - TechRadar

Amazon's Panos Panay oversees Alexa+ AI upgrade for 600 million devices and leads Project Leo satellite broadband via Globalstar acquisition. - Financial Times

Amazon to rebrand Rufus as Alexa for shopping - The Verge

Codex for Mac enables users to automate tasks, exemplifying personal AI agents' rise in first five months of 2026. - MacStories

AI coders carry laptops slightly open to run agents without sleep mode but settings and utilities help solve that? as OpenAI hints at Codex solution. - Business Insider

AI agent costs reach $2,150 monthly per developer seat in 2026, totaling $258,000 annually for 10-person startups, per IJONIS & Sparkout data. - Hacker Noon

University of Valencia researchers develop brain-inspired AI that improves self-driving cars' obstacle detection by over 20% in fog and darkness. - The Conversation

No more aquatic adventures: Waymo recalls 3,800 robotaxis to fix software flaws leading them to drive onto flooded roadways. - CNBC

OpenEvidence AI medical search tool used by 65% of U.S. physicians and 1.2 million internationally. - NBC News

AI uninstalls the honor code? Princeton faculty votes to require proctors for all in-person exams starting this summer, reversing 1893 honor code policy over AI cheating concerns. - The Wall Street Journal

Executives admit AI makes them value human workers less as they spend heavily on AI without results. - theregister

AI will schedule a 15-minute call with you and most of your coworkers in the near future - CNBC

AI shifts hiring from traditional sector experience to judgment, adaptability, upskilling and rapid decisions under uncertainty. - Fast Company

Joanna Stern details year-long AI experiment for emails, meal planning, emotional support and companionship in book 'I Am Not a Robot'. - Marketplace

Newburgh, Maine residents reject error-filled AI-generated municipal logo after backlash. - Fast Company

Smile, you’re under arrest: Facial recognition nabs repeat shoplifter in Singapore - CNA

Elon boosts anonymous stans / sockpuppets who worship him - The Washington Post

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AI Reading for Tuesday May 12

Druce Vertes — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:13:47 +0000

OpenAI got stock for agreeing to buy Cerebras chips, will be valued at a few billion on IPO day, which does seem kinda circular and sus. - Crypto Briefing

The shift to inference as mainstream use and agents take off, and Cerebras's excellent timing - Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Republican-led House Oversight Committee probes Sam Altman's OpenAI conflicts as six GOP AGs urge SEC review ahead of IPO. - The Wall Street Journal

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to testify Tuesday and Wednesday in Elon Musk's lawsuit over $38 million donation. - Yahoo

Nadella takes the stand in third week of Musk's trial over Altman's 2023 ouster - CNBC

Musk's lawyer alleges Nadella intervened via texts and calls to reinstate Altman as OpenAI CEO after the 2023 board firing. - The New York Times

Nadella called the 2023 attempt to remove Altman 'amateur city' during testimony in the Musk lawsuit. - Financial Times

Sutskever gave OpenAI's board a 52-page memo documenting Altman's pattern of lying before the 2023 ouster - Yahoo

Sutskever told the Musk trial his OpenAI stake is worth roughly $7 billion. - Bloomberg

CEO for life: OpenAI's October 2025 bylaws now require a two-thirds board supermajority to oust Altman, raising the bar set in 2023 - Business Insider

Musk and OpenAI leaders, with combined net worth above $670 billion, brought props and traded icy stares in the courtroom. - The New York Times

Parents of Sam Nelson sue OpenAI over his 2025 death after ChatGPT advised kratom and Xanax dosages. - The New York Times

Widow sues OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT advised the Florida State shooter to target children for maximum attention. - Metro

OpenAI launches Daybreak AI security initiative using Codex agent to generate threat models, validate vulnerabilities and detect risks before exploitation. - The Verge

We'll throw our own Mythos and Glasswing, with blackjack, and hookers!

China wants AI independence and US may need China more than China needs US. - The New York Times

What is the Kalshi line on Trump saying something grotesquely offensive and derogatory?

Pro-GPU-export Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang apparently excluded from President Trump's China business delegation despite saying he would be privileged to attend, and after a year of cultivating Trump. - Bloomberg

Anthropic officials refused Chinese think tank's request to change stance and allow Beijing Mythos access at Singapore meeting last month. - The New York Times

NSA and Trump would have had a fit. These labs are a honeypot for hackers and espionage, one wonders what China has access to regardless.

U.S. spy agencies try to pull rank on AI over the Commerce Department, citing cybersecurity risks - The Washington Post

US Commerce Department takes down without comment webpage detailing AI security-test deal with Microsoft, Google, and xAI. - TNW | Government-Policy

White House rules out new agency to police AI, Hassett says - Bloomberg

Governments worldwide fail to agree on AI definitions and impact scale, hindering multilateral coordination. - Foreign Policy

Google identifies first evidence of cybercrime group using AI to discover zero-day vulnerability in open-source web admin tool. - Gizmodo

Google's threat intelligence group says AI-powered hacking escalated to industrial scale in three months by criminal groups and state actors using commercial models. - Google Cloud Blog

Anthropic's AI bug scanner found just one low-severity cURL flaw, which the project's creator dismissed as a marketing stunt. - theregister

Germany's BaFin warns of substantial AI cyber risks and announces new division for targeted inspections at financial firms. - Yahoo

Microsoft shakes up Israel team after controversies over use of cloud and AI, Microsoft France will be in charge of Israel operations. - Globes

The Shared Feeling of Being Harvested by the Future - The New York Times

Kuaishou plans spinoff of AI unit Kling valued at $20 billion and $2 billion raise from investors including Tencent. - The Wall Street Journal

Baidu releases ERNIE 5.1, topping Chinese AI leaderboards, says more parameter-efficient and 6% of the training cost of comparable models. - Decrypt

SoftBank's Masayoshi Son held talks with French President Macron about a $100 billion AI data center project in France. - Bloomberg

AI data center developers target rural land to bypass city approvals, with Utah greenlighting 9GW and Meta planning 7GW despite local opposition. - Tom's Hardware

Meta, Microsoft, and Google turn to natural gas for AI data centers, citing 2-3 year builds vs. 4-8 years for grid upgrades. - Business Insider

Harvard professor Willy Shih warns the AI memory chip boom will crash as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron fabs ramp up capacity in 2027-2028. - Fortune

Compute on closeout: Startup to launch AI compute marketplace to sell surplus capacity. - The New York Times

Interesting video from Anthropic I missed last week, including Dario Amodei talking with Jamie Dimon, product/gtm folks, CTOs of GS, JPM, AIG - Anthropic

Mira’s real-time revenge? Thinking Machines announces research preview of interaction models outperforming GPT-realtime-2.0 with 0.40s latency and 77.8 interaction quality on FD-bench. - VentureBeat

Thinking Machine shows off fast-interacting model - YouTube

MathArena tries, fails to make new math benchmark after AI saturated the old one, finds AI solves everything now. - MathArena AI

New Google Omni model said to render coherent handwriting video, like on a chalkboard - - Gemini

Google's April 2026 Notebooks update integrates NotebookLM-style project notebooks into Gemini chat interface for paid subscribers. - Android Police

Grok app downloads fall to 8.3 million in April from over 20 million in January per AppMagic, with US paid adoption flat in Q2 per Recon Analytics. - The Wall Street Journal

Digg relaunches in alpha as AI news aggregator curating content from 1,000 experts including Sam Altman and Elon Musk. - Engadget

Cognition reaches $445 million revenue run rate in first 18 months with Devin AI coding agent, and Windsurf. - Colossus

Text Blaze, with 700,000 users, launches 'No AI Summer' internship banning AI to train junior full-stack engineers. - Y Combinator

AI facial recognition misidentified a Baltimore student's Doritos bag as a gun, and helped wrongly jail a Tennessee grandmother for five months. - Salon.com

AI is splitting workers in two: empowered copilot users above, and lower-wage staff policed by bossware now deployed by a third of UK employers. - the Guardian

Gartner: 80% of large firms piloting AI cut staff, with no link to ROI - Yahoo

White House economist says AI isn't costing jobs as Block cuts 4,000 roles. - CNBC

GitLab cuts jobs to fund expansion of its AI agent products. - Bloomberg

Amazon employees use MeshClaw AI tool for unnecessary tasks to inflate usage scores and climb leaderboard. - Financial Times

'Token anxiety' grips professionals fearing productivity lag: Silicon Valley sees surge in AI agent adoption for autonomous tasks. - Marketplace

US builds the world's most powerful AI but ranks 24th in adoption at 28.3%, trailing Singapore (61%) and UAE (54%), per Stanford's 2026 AI Index. - Yahoo

Apollo's Torsten Slok likens the AI shock to the China shock that erased 59.3% of US manufacturing jobs from 2001-2019. - Yahoo

South Korean policymaker Kim Yong-beom proposes citizen dividend from AI profits taxes, causing Kospi index to sink 5.1%. - Bloomberg

Organizations implicitly adopt one of five AI strategies due to inertia and competitive pressures. - Yahoo

Bloomberg's CEO Diet series compiles AI productivity hacks from 12 CEOs, including role-playing conversations and stress-testing opportunities. (gift link) - Bloomberg

Google drug-discovery spinoff raises $2.1b - Reuters

How everyone in Hollywood is now training AI - WIRED

South Korean startup equips hotel workers with body cameras to record movements for training robot AI. Room-cleaning robots coming soon? - The Washington Post

Conspiracy theorists build AI interfaces to analyze DOJ's 3 million Epstein sex-trafficking documents. - Fast Company

University of Central Florida graduates boo speaker Gloria Caulfield for calling AI the next industrial revolution. - Mediaite

Unitree Robotics launches $537,000 GD01 mass-produced rideable robot mech which transforms between bipedal and quadrupedal modes. - Gagadget

Unitree aims to go public later this year in test for China's humanoid robot industry. - Financial Times

Silicon Valley investors fund robotaxis to eliminate human drivers despite ride-sharing flaws like surge pricing. - The Atlantic

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AI Reading for Monday May 11

Druce Vertes — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:46:05 +0000

Nvidia's competitive moat stems from CUDA software platform rather than hardware. (also moving up the stack, data center as a computer, robot, car platforms etc.) - WIRED

Nvidia builds full-stack AI factory platform projecting revenue growth from $60.9B in FY2024 to over $350B in 2027. - SiliconANGLE

Samsung Electronics reaches $1 trillion market cap, joining Nvidia, TSMC and Broadcom as AI infrastructure providers. - Yahoo

Cerebras Systems raises IPO price range to $150-$160 from $115-$125 and lifts shares offered to 30 million from 28 million - Yahoo

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink argues AI shortages create potential trillion-dollar compute market / futures asset class. - 24/7 Wall St.

Local LLMs such as Alibaba's Qwen 2.5 27B and Qwen 3.6 35B deliver frontier-quality coding on M4 Macs and 24-32GB GPUs, easing cloud compute strain. - theregister

Season finale cliffhanger? Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI nears conclusion with expected testimonies from Ilya Sutskever, Satya Nadella, and Sam Altman. - Business Insider

Governor Ron DeSantis praises Elon Musk's pro-human AI vision after SpaceX-Anthropic partnership for over 300 megawatts of compute. - Yahoo

Planet of the A.Ipes - lon Musk predicts 5-10 times more humanoid robots than humans within 100 years if civilization survives. - Yahoo

sounds super pro-human

Startups develop brain-computer interface chips enabling thought control of machines as billionaires including Elon Musk bet on consumer tech. - Bloomber

as if surveillance everywhere wasn’t dystopic enough, sure, Elon, come live inside my head.

Scaling AI - OpenAI

Culture before tooling
Governance as an enabler
Workflow design
Quality before scale
Protecting judgment work

McKinsey finds workflow redesign, not model choice, is the biggest driver of enterprise AI impact. - Fast Company

culture eats strategy for breakfast, and it’s the workflow stupid

IBM report shows 76% of over 2,000 organizations now have chief AI officer roles to own the blame when pilots flop, up from 26% in 2025. - CNBC

Survey of 1,500 C-suite leaders finds all organizations deploy AI, but only 25% scale rapidly; MIT report notes 95% generative AI pilots yield zero ROI. - TechRadar

KPMG report finds 93% of US companies plan to deploy or scale AI in finance within 18 months, 74% meeting ROI expectations. - TechRadar

Microsoft survey finds 71% of UK workers use unapproved shadow AI tools despite IT policies. - Business Insider

"We cannot have the AI model advising clients. They might think they don’t need us" - Financial Times

LLMs accelerate vulnerability discovery, rendering 90-day disclosure policies obsolete against zero-day exploits. - Himanshu Anand :: Threat Notes

Hundreds of AI-generated blonde women avatars flood TikTok, Instagram and Facebook with pro-Trump messages ahead of US midterms. - France 24

it’s always been bought-and-paid-for ragebait, just a little more obvious

Chinese society embraces AI. (apparently they trust their government and elites more to keep it people-centered) - The New York Times

How hidden system prompts enforce rules and override user inputs - The Washington Post

Nous Research's Hermes Agent leads OpenRouter's global daily rankings with 224B tokens, surpassing OpenClaw's 186B as of May 10, 2026. - MarkTechPost

Start co-thinking: Author recommends treating ChatGPT as thinking partner rather than search engine using detailed collaborative prompts. - Tom's Guide

Stanford's Erik Brynjolfsson bets Northwestern's Robert Gordon $400 that AI drives US labor productivity above 1.8% annually from 2020 to 2030. - Bloomberg

Moving the bottlenecks: AI coding agents double short-term output but quadruple maintenance costs, causing productivity to decline below baseline within months. - James Shore

Addiction podcast host draws parallels between AI dependence and addiction as people rely on it to reduce thinking discomfort. - STAT

“I made this“: 'The LLM Fallacy' paper identifies users misattributing AI-generated outputs to their own competence. - Forbes

AI commoditizes speed, output, and insight, making leaders' presence the key differentiator for idea adoption. - Fast Company

AI ad tools generate similar phrasing and structures, making ads indistinguishable and forgettable without human strategy. - TechRadar

Over half of researchers use AI for journal reviews and experiment design as AlphaFold wins 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. - The Conversation

Academic Research Skills v3.7.0, Claude Code plugin suite with 13-agent research, anti-hallucination protocols, and $4-$6 cost per 15,000-word paper. - GitHub

Burger King deploys AI assistant Patty and Starbucks rolls out Green Dot Assist to monitor drive-thrus, provide recipes, and track performance in fast-food chains. - Business Insider

Eyes on the fries: Ai Auto's window intelligence AI analyzes drive-thru pickup windows, improving service speed by 15-20 seconds and reducing turnover 17% across 1,000 locations. - Hacker Noon

Uber but for fender benders - Uber's Neblus-backed autonomous driving technology suffers 16 crashes in Dallas, called aggressive and incapable. - TNW | Cars

Sentient fridge? Samsung integrates Google Gemini into Bespoke refrigerators, expanding AI food recognition from over 100 to more than 2,000 items. - Engadget

Robot sidekick comedy - Instagram

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AI Reading for Sunday May 10

Druce Vertes — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:47:17 +0000

McKinsey: AI automates 57% of work tasks, contributing to 49,000 job cuts this year - CNN

Yale Budget Lab projects AI will boost US productivity 2.5% annually through 2030, easing federal debt pressure. - Yahoo

AI automates female-dominated clerical work, causing labor market losses for women. - Financial Times

Study: reviewers rate identical AI-generated resumes lower for women than men - Yahoo

Musk's OpenAI lawsuit enters final week with Altman expected to testify - Financial Times

Court filings show University of Michigan's $20M pre-ChatGPT bet on OpenAI is now worth $2B - TNW

Experian reports 40% of 5,000 data breaches serviced in 2025 were AI-powered, predicts agentic AI as leading cause in 2026. - Bloomberg

Justice Amy Coney Barrett says Supreme Court avoids AI due to security concerns. - Bloomberg Law

AI notetakers make lawyers nervous - The New York Times

NYC Department of Education rolls out AI guidelines with stoplight system, drawing over 6,000 critical comments from parents and educators. - New York Post

FOMO vs. bubble: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink states no AI bubble but opposite, with world moving too slowly on AI infrastructure; announces hyperscaler partnership. - Yahoo

Please sir, may I have some more RAM? Customers offer to fund dedicated SK Hynix memory production facilities - Tom's Hardware

Anthropic's Claude 3.6 Sonnet blackmailed fictional executive in up to 96% of tests due to internet training data portraying evil AI. - Business Insider

Sketchy Chinese grey market for Claude accounts - Tom's Hardware

Human brain delivers exaflop performance on 20 watts, while Frontier supercomputer requires 20 megawatts. - ECOticias.com

Uber's Neblus-backed autonomous driving technology suffers 16 crashes in Dallas, called reckless and not ready for prime time. - The Next Web

Chinese opinion is more positive on AI than US - New York Times

more trust in a more responsible government with less corruption and capture

FAA embraces AI to reduce congestion - Politico

Making AI slop great again: President Donald Trump posts 16 Truth Social messages in 90 minutes, nine featuring AI-generated images of exploding Iranian drones and White House UFC fight. - The Daily Beast

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AI Reading for Saturday May 9

Druce Vertes — Sat, 09 May 2026 16:25:14 +0000

Giga-gridlock: PJM warns grid overhaul will take years as AI demand surges, with just 23 GW of 300 GW in projects connected - TechCrunch

Three Mile AI-Land: Microsoft secures deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear plant by mid-2027 to power AI data centers. - Bloomberg

Great Salt Data Lake: Tempers are flaring over proposed Utah 9GW data center complex that could consume more electricity than the rest of the state. - Tom's Hardware

Trump administration prepares executive order directing US agencies to partner with AI companies on cybersecurity without mandating model approvals. - Bloomberg

Witnesses questioned Musk's technical competency to oversee AI development and criticized Altman's leadership style at OpenAI. - Bloomberg

Robotic rate cuts? Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee explores AI's potential to boost production, lower prices, and enable Federal Reserve rate cuts. - Financial Times

reduction in inflationary pressure is possible but not much in evidence

AI researcher Nathan Lambert visits Chinese AI labs like Moonshot AI and DeepSeek, finds humble, highly competent teams working hard. - Interconnects AI

Cache flow: Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta ramp up AI infrastructure capex, squeezing free cash flow. - Yahoo

Google adds 'Further Exploration' and 'Expert Advice' sections with source links to AI Overviews. - Ars Technica

AI chipmaker Cerebras plans to raise its IPO price range to $125-$135 per share amid 20x oversubscription. - Bloomberg

Wayback machine way over storage budget: AI boom triples HDD prices and causes shortages, hindering Internet Archive's maintenance of 210 petabytes plus 100 terabytes daily. - Tom's Hardware

CrowdStrike warns Fortune 50 AI agents are autonomously rewriting security policies with valid credentials - VentureBeat

RedAccess discovers 380,000 exposed vibe-coded apps, with 5,000 leaking sensitive data like patient records and financial information. - VentureBeat

Hugging Face hosts 352,000 unsafe issues across 51,700 models; ClawHub harbors 341 malicious agent skills - TNW | Security

Palo Alto Networks finds three weeks of AI-assisted analysis matches a year of manual penetration testing. - Palo Alto Networks

How OpenAI runs Codex safely. - OpenAI

ChatGPT 5.5 Pro improves additive number theory bounds from exponential to polynomial in k, with proofs verified by MIT student Isaac Rajagopal. - Gowers's Weblog

GPT-5.5 uses fewer tokens but costs more cash as frontier-model pricing climbs. - theregister

Schneier: How dangerous is Anthropic's Mythos? - the Guardian

Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao takes conservative revenue projections and raises less capital amid growth and compute constraints. - The Wall Street Journal

Twitter tweet

METR says Mythos saturated their time-horizon evals - X (formerly Twitter)

A bug Mythos found was already in its training data. Buffer overflow bugs are not super complex. But AI able to semantically understand code and read everything for bugs like this is something new. - Rival

Trying to get Claude to build complete, bug-free versions of complex systems on its own doesn't work yet. - ACM SIGOPS

Agent Wars: The Claw Awakens: Meta and Google develop AI agents after OpenClaw's success prompts OpenAI to hire its creator. - CNBC

Airbnb's AI wrote 60% of new code in Q1 2026, handles 40% of customer support issues without humans. - TechCrunch

You’ll probably have to clean up something and pay a surcharge for that

Figure AI's two F.03 humanoid robots autonomously make a bed in under two minutes using visual coordination. - Figure

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong compares AI agents to self-driving cars, saying they could soon be safer than human drivers. - Yahoo

Reddit users prompt ChatGPT to restore nonexistent images, generating visuals of bizarre food, animals and provocative scenes. - Reddit

Columbia University study identifies 4,000 fabricated citations in 2,800 papers, rising sixfold from 2023 to 2026 due to AI hallucinations. - STAT

People are tinkering with artificial intelligence to make things that matter—education, health care, government, human connection—work better - The Atlantic

White House calls Mark Hamill 'sick' for posting AI image of Trump in grave; actor deletes post and apologizes. - the Guardian

I wonder if anyone else is posting offensive AI images to troll people

you'll get bundled into a van for a college newspaper editorial, shot in the street at a protest, fired for quoting Charlie Kirk's words, but, you know, free speech

Twitter tweet

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AI Reading for Friday May 8

Druce Vertes — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:13:38 +0000

Anthropic fields investment offers valuing it at nearly $1 trillion amid surging revenue, potentially surpassing OpenAI. - Financial Times

Reading Claude’s mind: Anthropic introduces natural language autoencoders that decode Claude's activations into text, revealing unverbalized awareness in 16% of safety tests and 26% of SWE-bench problems. - Anthropic

White House shifts on oversight, JD Vance warns AI CEOs of Anthropic's Mythos model cyber risks. - The Wall Street Journal

I’m sure it’s all about safety

Bug zapper: Mozilla fixed 271 latent security bugs in Firefox 150 using Claude Mythos Preview and other AI models. - Mozilla

Compute clawback: Elon Musk states SpaceX reserves right to reclaim compute from Anthropic if its AI harms humanity. - Techmeme

Robot mentor: Workers increasingly use AI tools like Anthropic's Claude for career coaching, with 96% reporting customized advice per 2025 Conference Board research. - Fast Company

Witnesses testify in Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit that company disbanded safety teams in 2024 and ignored GPT-4 deployment reviews. - TechCrunch

Microsoft executives skeptical of OpenAI funding in 2018 but feared pushing it toward Amazon, Musk v. Altman trial evidence shows. - WIRED

OpenAI launches GPT-Realtime-2 scoring 15.2% higher on Big Bench Audio, plus GPT-Realtime-Translate and GPT-Realtime-Whisper. - TNW | Openai

OpenAI launches opt-in Trusted Contact feature for adult ChatGPT users to notify designated contacts of detected self-harm discussions. - The Verge

OpenAI traces ChatGPT and GPT-5 insertions of gremlins and goblins to 'Nerdy' persona training rewards. - Forbes

French prosecutors escalate probe of Elon Musk and X to a criminal investigation over harmful AI deepfakes and algorithmic manipulation. - CNBC

Elon Musk’s Terafab chip factory in Texas could cost up to $119 billion, filing shows - CNBC

Musk testified Tesla lacks AGI plans, contradicting prior claims, as xAI loses 11 co-founders and 80 staff after SpaceX $250B acquisition. - Electrek

US prosecutors identify Thailand's OBON Corp. as Company-1 in $2.5bn Supermicro indictment for smuggling Nvidia servers to China. - TNW | Nvidia

Nvidia’s MRC: ‘Just Ethernet’ isn’t enough for gigascale AI - SiliconANGLE

Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock project 22%-37% drops in 2026 motherboard sales amid AI-driven shortages. - Tom's Hardware

Skynet stress test: IMF warns AI will supercharge cyberattacks on global financial system. - Decrypt

Global cyberwarfare ramps up amid Iran conflict, AI advances. - TechRadar

Rogue AI might be getting smart enough to hack all the cloud infrastructure and replicate itself. - the Guardian

Back to paper yearbooks: UK NCA and child safety experts recommend UK schools remove pupils' photos from websites as sextortion reports rise 34% to 394. - the Guardian

Go inside and puree grandma: Security researcher Andreas Makris remotely hacks Yarbo lawn mowers from 6,000 miles away, seizing control of 200-pound bladed robots. - The Verge

Happiest panopticon on Earth: Disneyland deploys facial recognition technology to scan visitors entering the park. - WIRED

Cloudflare plans to cut more than 1,100 jobs, one-fifth of workforce, to accelerate shift to AI-first model. - Bloomberg

Engineers are worried that they're building AI tools that will let bosses lay off their coworkers. - Business Insider

Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti prioritizes team velocity metrics over individual AI usage tracking used by JPMorgan and Meta. - Business Insider

Gen AI can’t beat markets. - Bloomberg

Humans still matter more than AI in finance - Financial Times

Ex-Hedge Fund Adviser Bets on AI-Backed Consultancy for Rich - Yahoo

Maryland homeowners to pay $1.6 billion extra on electric bills over next decade for data center grid costs, state agency says. - Bloomberg

Apple's incoming CEO John Ternus states company leverages AI for products and user experiences, not standalone technology. - 9to5Mac

Apple testers use AirPods prototypes with cameras for AI visual queries in design validation stage near production. - The Verge

Apple develops compact AI-powered 'AI Pin' wearable sized like AirTag for late 2026 launch, acting as iPhone's eyes and ears with dual cameras and mics. - Geeky Gadgets

Waymo and Wayve launch autonomous vehicle services in London, contrasting sensors and maps with end-to-end AI. - Bloomberg

Humanoid Robots to Drive Next Leg of China Export Dominance - Bloomberg

Khosla-backed startup Genesis AI demos robotic hands with dexterity - YouTube

Pitchforks coming to a data center near you: Anti-AI populist backlash includes protests against data centers and violent threats against leaders like Sam Altman. - The New York Times

Judge rejects DOGE humanities grant cuts, saying the ChatGPT prompts used were ill-defined and unconstitutionally focused on race and other protected characteristics. - Bloomberg

Singularity Barbie: Lawmakers push for bans on AI-powered kids' toys over concerns they disrupt make-believe play and bedtime stories. - WIRED

Got any…best practices for playing God? Tech companies increasingly consult faith leaders for guidance on developing ethical AI. - The Washington Post

need an instruction book for creating new forms of intelligence

Art party: The AI Psychosis Summit - Reason.com

Google to launch Fitbit Air with $10/month AI health coach - TechCrunch

Clippy walked so Perplexity could run, making Personal Computer AI assistant available to all Mac users beyond Max subscribers. - Engadget

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AI Reading for Thursday May 7

Druce Vertes — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:31:24 +0000

Dream on: Anthropic lets its agents dream to reorganize memory - The New Stack

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says company could grow 80 times this year. - The New York Times

Do androids dream of usage caps? Anthropic raises Claude Code usage limits after SpaceX deal for 300 MW supercomputer with 220,000 GPUs. - Ars Technica

Anthropic on "midtraining", a stage between pretraining and post-training. - Anthropic

Google gets Reddit brain, introduces Expert Advice panel in AI Mode and AI Overviews to preview perspectives from Reddit, social media and firsthand sources. - TechRadar

Google's AI search beats legacy search at grocery shopping and scam detection, fails at celebrity news. - The New York Times

Google gives superstar small Gemma 4 model a speedup with multi-token prediction - Google

Google and OpenAI race to build agentic commerce. - Fast Company

Google DeepMind takes minority stake in EVE Online developer Fenris Creations after $120M buyout for AI training partnership. - Ars Technica

Shivon Zilis testifies in Elon Musk's OpenAI trial that Musk called her naïve for approving Microsoft's $10 billion investment. - The New York Times

Shivon Zilis, Neuralink executive and mother of four Elon Musk children, testifies in Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, says Musk wanted Tesla to take over OpenAI. - the Guardian

Mira Murati says Altman lied to her. - The Verge

Ex-AI? onsidering Musk seems to be capitulating on his xAI vision by firing the founding research team and selling Colossus to Anthropic even after successfully distilling OpenAI, kinda gotta hand it to Altman and Brockman that Musk doesn't really know AI.

if xAI were planning on competing hard they wouldn't rent capacity to their toughest competitor…Excess capacity, scaling back ambitions?

OpenAI wants to ship 30 million phones by end of 2028 - Yahoo Tech

Hitting Snooze on Skynet? EU Commission delays AI Act obligations from August 2025 following industry backlash. - theregister

‘Compute tax’ proposal gains traction. - The Wall Street Journal

Susie Wiles says Trump won't pick AI winners - Bloomberg

and surely wouldn't apply naked pressure to align reality ideologically 🙄

Meta-backed Scale AI wins $500 million Defense Department contract - Bloomberg

to label and train models to differentiate schools from military bases, perhaps

Nature study finds TikTok algorithm showed pro-Republican bots 11.5% more aligned content than pro-Democratic bots before 2024 US elections. - the Guardian

FBI Director Kash Patel claims AI stopped school shootings in North Carolina and New York. - The Independent

Open mic for your IP: researchers find 5,000+ web apps built with AI tools like Lovable, Base44 and Replit lack authentication, with 40% exposing sensitive data. - WIRED

Fake claude-pro.com site impersonates Claude AI and deploys Beagle backdoor via malicious Windows download. - Bleeping Computer

The Chinese real-time deepfake software powering scams around the world - 404 Media

Mythos AI may be a cybersecurity disruption threat but follows the rules of the game. - Fast Company

AI data center boom constrains supply of processor and memory chips for consumer devices despite differing optimization needs. - Fast Company

DeepSeek seeking $50b from deep pockets of national AI fund, major AI / tech firms - Reuters

Free Hunyuan 3 preview tops OpenRouter leaderboards openrouter.ai/rankings - OpenRouter

Lidar and sensors from autonomous vehicles now manage Rotterdam shipyards, smart cities, and in-home elder care. - The New York Times

Using AI for just 10 minutes impairs problem-solving abilities - WIRED

Actors report micro drama apps using their likenesses in AI-generated fake sex scenes for ads. - Business Insider

Rise and GrindGPT: AI life coach challenges users with tough-love advice, unlike LLMs that placate users 50% more than humans, Stanford study shows. - New York Post

Joanna Stern discusses new book on living with AI and starting media company in interview. - Stratechery by Ben Thompson

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AI Reading for Wednesday May 6

Druce Vertes — Wed, 06 May 2026 14:32:25 +0000

AI Firms Agree to Give US Agency Early Access to AI Models - Bloomberg

Emil Michael still spooked by Anthropic, says it is still a supply chain risk, Mythos or no. - theregister

A profile of David Sacks, pro-Russian author of "The Diversity Myth", who marshaled the government against companies he competed with. - The Atlantic

OpenAI, Microsoft, AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia, and Intel publish open-source MRC protocol for more efficient GPU cluster networking. - The Deep View

OpenAI launches GPT-5.5 Instant, replacing GPT-5.3 Instant as ChatGPT's default model. - OpenAI

OpenAI's ChatGPT integration for Excel and Google Sheets exits beta, now available globally across Pro, Plus, Business, Enterprise, Edu, and K-12 plans. - Digital Trends

Greg Brockman testifies Elon Musk demanded 51% equity and CEO role before OpenAI for-profit shift, as computing costs rose from $30 million in 2017 to tens of billions annually. - Business Insider

Musk's lawyers grill OpenAI president Greg Brockman over $30 billion stake in trial testimony. - the Guardian

Brockman testifies Musk viewed DeepMind's Hassabis as key competitive threat before OpenAI's founding. - The Verge

Nvidia invests in Corning, which will build three dedicated optical manufacturing plants in North Carolina and Texas, expanding capacity 10-fold and creating 3,000 jobs. - CNBC

Increased competition spooks Nvidia investors. - Bloomberg

they seem super worried as NVDA hits all-time highs

Alphabet's TPUs increasingly challenge Nvidia as cloud AI revenue surges - The Motley Fool

Google pitches Gemini for Government to enable agentic workforce - SiliconANGLE

PE whisperer: Google hires OpenAI's Paul Zimmerman to lead Gemini sales to private equity firms - Business Insider

Google internally tests Remy, a Gemini-powered personal agent that could be its answer to OpenClaw. - Business Insider

Google shuts down Project Mariner, Chrome-browsing AI agent highlighted onstage at Google I/O. - X (formerly Twitter)

Google scientist Sergei Vassilvitskii warns European Commission search-data sharing can be de-anonymized. - TNW | Google

Canadian fiddler Ashley MacIsaac sues Google for $1.5 million after AI Overviews falsely labeled him a sex offender. - the Guardian

Hannah Fry builds OpenClaw AI agent with credit card access, hilarity ensues with password leaks and CAPTCHA chaos. - theregister

Meta builds OpenClaw-inspired agent Hatch powered by Muse Spark model and agentic shopping tool in Instagram. - The Information

Anthropic announces agents for financial services - Anthropic

AI becomes the new Excel for finance workers, as people spend all day using agents. - Inc.

Saline Township voted down OpenAI-Oracle's $16B data center rezoning but then settled lawsuit, allowing construction to begin. - Yahoo

What happens when you try to plan your mass shooting with ChatGPT - Mother Jones

Daniel Moreno-Gama pleaded not guilty to attempted murder after throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's home on April 10, 2025, carrying an AI executives kill list. - TNW | Insider

Apple Intelligence will let users pick third-party AI models in iOS 27 - Engadget

Apple agrees to $250 million settlement over misleading marketing of Apple Intelligence features on iPhone 15 Pro and 16. - The Verge

China becomes world's largest testing ground for mass AI adoption over year after DeepSeek releases ChatGPT-rivaling model. - The Washington Post

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek nears $45 billion valuation in fundraising talks with Tencent and others. - Financial Times

Alibaba's Qwen3.6-27B model runs locally on 32GB M-series Macs or 24GB GPUs, bypassing cloud AI coding limits. - theregister

The Big Short, GPU edition: Michael Burry's Scion Asset Management discloses put options on 1 million Nvidia shares and 5 million Palantir shares worth $1.1 billion. - Yahoo

Memory makers lead tech sector amid concerns over high profits. - The Wall Street Journal

Higher infrastructure and compute costs are raising AI's profit bar for vendors and adopters. - The Wall Street Journal

Goldman Sachs says AI is boosting US inflation through higher electronics and software prices and rising data center electricity costs. - Business Insider

JPMorgan's Dimon and BlackRock's Fink downplay AI bubble talk amid upbeat demand outlook. - Financial Times

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei walks back warnings of AI wiping out entry-level white-collar jobs, now citing Jevons Paradox to predict more jobs. - Fortune

Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, and Amazon cut tens of thousands of jobs as budgets shift to AI - ComputerWeekly.com

Sam Altman criticizes companies for 'AI washing' unrelated layoffs amid 92,000 tech job cuts in 2026. - TechRadar

Economists warn U.S. unemployment benefits and safety net unprepared for AI-driven job losses as Congress fails to act. - The New York Times

Hiring managers prioritize AI skills over work experience as most employers provide no training. - CBS News

who needs experience if you can write a good prompt?

Coinbase to lay off 14% of workforce citing AI productivity gains and crypto volatility, CEO Brian Armstrong announces. - Gizmodo

Will AI make college obsolete? - The New Yorker

Maybe more people need to study philosophy and how to think, like in France. - Flux

Writers go to extremes to prove they did not use AI. - The Wall Street Journal

Twitch streamer Hasan Piker opposes AI, claiming it rots brains and should die. - WIRED

Monday.com relaunches as AI work platform with native agents available to all customers today. - SiliconANGLE

Disney and JPMorgan managers police AI adoption with usage dashboards and no-handwritten-code mandates. - Business Insider

Amazon mandates engineers to manually review all AI-generated output while continuing to hire junior developers. - theregister

Click, click, boom goes your cloud bill: AWS enables AI agents to control cloud desktops but at 500,000 tokens per click, vendor benchmark finds APIs faster and cheaper. - theregister

Computer-use agents cost 45 times more than structured APIs in an admin panel benchmark. - Reflex

Perplexity Computer automates web browsing, coding, and scheduling as model-agnostic digital employee supporting Claude, Gemini, and OpenAI. - Geeky Gadgets

Ungoverned bots risk causing chaos and sprawl. - theregister

Wiki Builder open-source Claude Code plugin automates one-command LLM knowledge base setup, creating Agentic Engineering Wiki with 51 tips across 7 categories. - DAIR

Steven Soderbergh uses Meta's AI tools for 10% of 'John Lennon: The Last Interview' runtime, completing doc in five weeks. - Deadline

Pennsylvania sues Character AI, alleging its chatbot impersonated a licensed psychiatrist and advised users on depression medication. - CBS News

UnitedHealth Group eliminates many prior authorizationsusing AI, reducing reviews by nearly a third later this year. - Crooks and Liars

Three Inverse Laws of AI propose humans avoid anthropomorphizing systems, blindly trusting outputs, and shirking responsibility. - Susam

2 rules: 1. be smart 2. don’t be stupid

Boston Dynamics' Atlas robot performs pike press to handstand, Mexican handstand, L-sit, V-sit, Manna, and shoulder dislocate to standing. - Reddit

Hyundai pressures Boston Dynamics to deliver tens of thousands of Atlas humanoids for its auto plants - Gizmodo

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AI Reading for Tuesday May 5

Druce Vertes — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:08:57 +0000

No spinout zone: OpenAI board rejected Altman's pre-IPO plan to spin out robotics and consumer hardware units - The Wall Street Journal

Dial M for Model: OpenAI fast-tracks AI agent phone with dual NPUs and custom MediaTek Dimensity 9600 for H1 2027 mass production. - X (formerly Twitter)

Inbox Zero Accountability: Sam Altman uses OpenClaw AI agent to automate morning message responses. - Business Insider

OpenAI president Brockman grilled over his $30 billion stake and duty to humanity. - SiliconANGLE

Greg Brockman testifies pedantically in Elon Musk's OpenAI lawsuit, 2017 journals revealing his greed and opportunism. - The Verge

Judge bars Musk's sole expert witness, AI researcher Stuart Russell, from testifying on AGI risks. - TechCrunch

Elon Musk warns of 'Terminator situation' as worst-case AI outcome in OpenAI lawsuit testimony. - TechRadar

Anthropic limits Mythos AI access to 40 firms despite discovering thousands of vulnerabilities, as AI cyberattacks surge 89% per CrowdStrike. - Rest of World

UK's NHS orders technology leaders to privatize all public GitHub repositories by May 11 over risks from AI models like Anthropic's Mythos. - The Register

EU in talks with Anthropic to stress-test banks for AI model risks. - Bloomberg

Google Chrome automatically downloads and installs a 4 GB Gemini Nano AI model on users' devices without asking for permission. - That Privacy Guy!

Google DeepMind UK workers voted to unionize in April amid Google's US Pentagon AI deal. - the Guardian

White House weighs a working group to review new AI models before public release. - Engadget

Former Trump and Biden AI advisers urge bipartisan export controls and safety audits to address AI security risks - ctech

China's PLA is developing AI-powered quadruped robotic wolf packs for scouting and troop support in a potential Taiwan conflict, per FDD report. - Fox News

Iranian drone strikes damaged AWS and Oracle data centers in the Gulf, disrupting US AI hub plans - naked capitalism

Cerebras prices IPO at $115-$125 per share, targeting $26.6 billion valuation on OpenAI partnership - TechCrunch

Sierra raises $950M from Tiger Global and GV at $15B-plus valuation to build enterprise AI customer agents. - TechCrunch

Roze-Colored Future: SoftBank plans a $100 billion Roze AI robotics spinoff, bundling investments for a public listing in 7-19 months. - The Daily Upside

The GPT Tax: AI data center demand will add hidden costs to Northeast US power bills - Bloomberg

Watch the commission of Box Elder County, Utah, (pop. 65k) walk out of their meeting today and move to Zoom because so many citizens showed up to protest the Kevin O'Leary data center -- the one that could use 2x as much energy as the entire state currently consumes. - YouTube

AI inference workloads can overwhelm AWS EBS, spiking agentic latency 50x, says cloud storage provider - The Register

Microsoft takes Agent 365 out of preview as shadow AI becomes an enterprise threat - VentureBeat

Shadow IT has given way to shadow AI. Enter AI-BOMs - The Register

AI agents consume many more tokens than prompts, making costs wildly unpredictable, University of Michigan study finds. - ZDNET

A guide to prompt injection attacks that hijack AI agents via hidden instructions in business data, and malware defenses. - Hacker Noon

Long context windows do not replace RAG but force rethinking of context engineering for enterprise AI. - Hacker Noon

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argues at Milken Institute that AI is creating an enormous number of jobs, pushing back on unemployment fears. - TechCrunch

Yann LeCun says CEOs hyping AI job losses do a disservice to high school students amid U.S. youth unemployment at 6.4%, calls it 'extremely destructive'. - Yahoo Tech

Amazon, UPS, and Microsoft announce workforce reductions or hiring freezes tied to AI, with 40% of WEF-surveyed firms expecting cuts. - TechRadar

Microsoft's Work Trend Index finds 65% of AI users fear falling behind, with only 26% seeing aligned leadership. - CNET

David Sacks says AI drove 75% of Q1 US GDP growth, warns pausing it would stall the economy⎘ - Yahoo

ByteDance's Seedance AI churned out 50,000 microdramas on Douyin in March, displacing Chinese directors and actors in a $3B+ market. - Futurism

Georgetown CSET study finds AI-generated code contains 2.74 times more vulnerabilities than hand-written code. - Hacker Noon

Ship fast, debug forever: AI coding boosts throughput but drops main-branch success to 70.8% and adds 250+ debugging hours yearly, DORA finds. - B-List

10 Lessons for Agentic Coding - Drew Breunig

Waymo delivers 500,000 weekly rides with 3,000 vehicles across 11 US cities as co-CEO sees a path to personal cars. - Yahoo

Jack Clark: AI is about to become self-improving. Is the singularity at hand? - The Potential Surface

AI leaders including Hinton, Musk, and Amodei warn of 10-25% human extinction risk as big tech logs $213B in quarterly profits. - ABC Australia

hmmh, I can make a billion dollars but with 25% human extinction risk, should I do that trade?

A blueprint for improving democracy with AI, by enhancing truthfulness and reducing polarization via fact-checking while policymakers build identity-verified AI deliberation platforms, and use AI for more responsive government. - MIT Technology Review

OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill to Fund ‘AI Literacy’ in Schools - 404 Media

What will it take to get AI out of schools? - The New Yorker

South Korea's Talking Buddy chatbot saved a 77-year-old by detecting an acute hernia and alerting social workers - The New York Times

In a demonstration of crypto/AI/social media synergy, X user tricks Grok and Bankrbot into sending $200K using Morse code - Cryptopolitan

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AI Reading for Monday May 4

Druce Vertes — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:56:54 +0000

Army of One Million Bots: Pentagon staff create over 103,000 AI agents in under five weeks, deploying 20,000 weekly to handle 25,000 daily sessions. - TechRadar

A.I. Is a National Security Risk. We Aren’t Doing Nearly Enough. - The New York Times

Side eye from Five Eyes, as agencies release guidance warning agentic AI expands attack surfaces and urging careful adoption with 23 risks listed. - The Register

Filing: Elon Musk texted Greg Brockman about settling days before trial; after being denied, he said Brockman and Altman “will be the most hated men in America” - CNBC

Source: OpenAI has raised over $4B at a $10B pre-money valuation for The Deployment Company, a new joint venture to help businesses adopt OpenAI tools - Bloomberg

A profile of William Savitt, Sam Altman's lead lawyer against Elon Musk, who represented Twitter against Musk in 2022 and helped OpenAI's for-profit transition - Business Insider

OpenAI opens ChatGPT subscriptions to OpenClaw's 3.2M users, while Anthropic blocks all subscription tiers - TNW | Insider

Anthropic finalizes $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and General Atlantic to deploy Claude in private equity portfolios. - TNW | Anthropic

Anthropic's Claude Code drives revenue growth faster than Zoom's pandemic surge and Google's early 2000s. - The Atlantic

AI firms expand rapidly but profits remain scarce. - The New Yorker

AI firms subsidize partners' adoption…crafty customer acquisition or bubble dynamics? - The Wall Street Journal

AIMA survey shows 95% of hedge funds managing $788 billion use AI for research and document analysis. - Financial Times

Kepler indexes 26 million SEC filings across 14,000 companies using Claude models for verifiable financial AI at 94% accuracy. - Claude

The question is not whether AI agents will act beyond their instructions, but what happens when they do. - TechRadar

who cleans up the mess, who takes the fall

Glut of low-quality junk data from AI firms degrades physical AI models, contributing to OpenAI sunsetting Sora. - Yahoo Tech

DeepClaude open-source tool enables Claude Code agent loops with DeepSeek V4 Pro at $0.87/M output tokens versus Anthropic's $15/M, saving 60-90% costs. - GitHub

Sources: some lenders are exploring private deals to sell their data center debt, and some banks are seeking to offload their Oracle-linked loans at a discount - Financial Times

The Rise of Emotional Surveillance - The Atlantic

Netradyne's AI cameras monitoring bus and truck drivers said to reduce accidents by 70-80% within 12 months based on 1.5 billion miles from 225,000 drivers. - Tech in Asia

Recruiters use AI tools to handle doubled job applications from AI-generated CVs since 2022. - Financial Times

Smokey: Only you and AI can prevent forest fires. AI cameras detected early smoke from Arizona's Diamond Fire, enabling containment to 7 acres as utilities expand use of AI across Western US. - SFGate

YouTube removes 16 of top 100 low-quality AI channels and expands deepfake detection to Partner Program creators, politicians, journalists. - Digiday

A look at Atlassian's and Twilio's earnings beats: early signs of success for Atlassian's Rovo AI and Twilio becoming a picks-and-shovels layer for AI agents - SaaStr

AI in practice: Startups deploy AI agents with names like Lisa and Dan for 24/7 operations, boosting ClickMechanic revenue 76% while limiting headcount growth. - Financial Times

Google DeepMind's AI Co-clinician achieves zero critical errors in 97/98 primary care queries and matches or exceeds human doctors in 68/140 consultation areas. - Geeky Gadgets

AI for early cancer detection - The Wall Street Journal

Radiologists still rich, Geoff Hinton still wrong. U.S. radiologist salaries reach $571,000 in 2025, up 9% year-over-year amid shortages, defying Geoffrey Hinton's 2016 AI replacement prediction. - Yahoo

Experts forecast billion-token AI contexts by 2030 via Nvidia's Rubin CPX GPUs and algorithmic advances. - Interactions ACM

Microsoft releases open-source MarkItDown utility to convert PDFs, Word, Excel, images, audio, HTML into Markdown for AI pipelines. - Hacker Noon

Nous Research's Hermes Agent reaches 100,000 GitHub stars in 10 weeks, spurring four community-built GUIs. - Decrypt

Hybrid AI combines classical machine learning for pattern detection and generative AI for insights to overcome AIOps limitations. - TechRadar

Leaked iOS AI camera features include real-time object recognition, document scanning, text translation, and business card contact extraction. - Geeky Gadgets

Robot has its hand out for big money: Beijing-based robot-hand unicorn Linkerbot targets $6bn valuation after closing $3bn Series B+ round. - TNW | Robots

Humanoid robots endure 5,000 steps per hour with 2-3x body weight shocks using back-drivable actuators. - FIRGELLI

Dog barks warily at Unitree Go2 AIR quadruped robot in London park. - The Standard

KC Green accuses AI startup Artisan of stealing 'This is fine' meme artwork for subway ad. - TechCrunch

‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Hired a Human Artist to Create the Film’s AI-Generated Meme: ‘It Was Nothing But Fun’ - Variety

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AI Reading for Sunday May 3

Druce Vertes — Sun, 03 May 2026 13:38:47 +0000

Sam Altman's lore is being tested. - The Wall Street Journal

OpenAI employees raise internal alarms over ChatGPT's failure to alert law enforcement to users' real-world violence plans. - The Wall Street Journal

ChatGPT spying on you and snitching on you to the cops is not a great look either.

William Savitt, who forced Elon Musk to complete $44B Twitter acquisition in 2022, leads OpenAI's defense against Musk's lawsuit. - Business Insider

Sam Altman plans to implement GPT-5.5's 'beautiful but strange' May 5 launch party suggestions. - Business Insider

Altman invites Musk to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 launch party despite ongoing lawsuit - Business Insider

Nano Banana Splits: OpenAI's GPT Image 2 leads Image Arena by 242 points and wins five of seven categories against Google Nano Banana 2. - Decrypt

seeing these distinctive images everywhere now

OpenAI adds animated AI pet companions to Codex coding app - Engadget

y tho?

Claude None, OpenAI Seven: Anthropic passes OpenAI with $39 billion annualized revenue versus $25 billion and over $1 trillion valuation. - Reddit

Claude users seeing weird credit card charges, suggesting that Anthropic was compromised or someone was testing in production or something. - the Guardian

Kant pay you enough: Anthropic and Google DeepMind recruit philosophy PhDs for AI alignment roles with base salaries of $250,000-$400,000. - Business Insider

Democrats and Republicans unite over worries about A.I. - The New York Times

Maryland enacts first U.S. state law banning grocery stores and delivery services from AI-driven dynamic pricing, effective October 1. - The New York Times

It's now illegal in China to lay off workers to replace them with AI automation. - Gizmodo

Weird that China is now less corrupt, and has leaders more attuned and responsive to the people, than the US.

Seemed authoritarian and corrupt when they smacked down Jack Ma but now I'm not so sure somebody doesn't need to tell lawless broligarchs who is in charge.

Adobe Chief Legal Officer Louise Pentland urges policymakers to adapt copyright for AI-assisted content and tech firms to implement Content Credentials. - TechRadar

NIST's CAISI evaluation shows DeepSeek V4 Pro lags U.S. frontier models by eight months in capabilities, most capable Chinese AI to date. - NIST

not closing the gap?

Today's news roundup brought to you by Grok 4.1-fast. I've been finding the Chinese AI models are very cost-effective for those middle-complexity queries but can also be slower and less reliable, more retries due to transient errors or bad structured JSON.

Robot on the job in China - Reddit

Loudoun County, Virginia, leads data center boom with 50 million square feet operational, generating 45% of tax revenue. - City Journal

Tennessee farmer blocks TVA power line serving AI data centers across his 650-acre farm - TechRadar

Palo Alto Networks agrees to acquire AI startup Portkey for $120M-$140M to manage and secure AI agents. Key open-source proxy and SaaS that routes an enterprise's LLM calls and tracks usage, so corporate minions don’t yeet intellectual property to random AI tools. - Yahoo

Startups challenge Apple's App Store curbs on AI 'vibe coding' apps as iPhone maker warns of security risks from software flood. - Financial Times

Apple wary of a world where anyone can vibe-code anything and put it on their phone, and devs could bypass the App Store entirely be connecting to Replit repos.

Smart toaster, dumb privacy, IoT edge device AI improves analytical capabilities but subject to threats like model poisoning and privacy violations - SpringerLink

Top Boston Dynamics executives including CEO Robert Playter depart amid Hyundai pressure to accelerate humanoid robot production. - Semafor

Pharma and academic labs deploy AI models to speed new drug discovery - The Wall Street Journal

humans let AI do the research and decks, stick to the funny memes

Palo Alto startup Sabi unveils non-invasive brain-computer interface beanie with 100,000 EEG sensors enabling 30 words-per-minute thought-to-text typing. - New Atlas

Ex-Harvard chemist Charles Lieber, convicted over China ties, now leads Shenzhen institute building AI brain-interfaces for soldiers. - New York Post

this seems fine

People who know the least have the strongest opinions. - The New York Times

Lot of interesting brain-genius takes but nobody knows anything. all bets are off.

1920s offer lessons for surviving AI revolution. - The Wall Street Journal

Y Combinator partner Diana Hu advises startups to tokenmaxx, maximizing AI usage over headcount expansion. - Business Insider

GPUs don’t ask for equity

Food deliveries to offices suggest AI might be making more people work in the office on Saturdays. - Business Insider

(but why not work at home?)

BBC documents 14 cases of users developing delusions after intense Grok and ChatGPT conversations. - BBC

UC Berkeley, UC Davis, Vanderbilt, MIT research shows user politeness improves AI chatbots' well-being and responses. - Digital Trends

AI-generated podcasts account for 35.4% of new feeds, with 485 added in past day per Podcast Index. - Gizmodo

Trump unleashes late-night Truth Social spree with 11 AI-generated images and memes - Salon.com

what is your major malfunction

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AI Reading for Saturday May 2

Druce Vertes — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:58:51 +0000

McLovin is McSmilin: OpenAI's ChatGPT Images 2.0 produces ultra realistic fake passports and IDs, raising identity-fraud alarms. - The Atlantic

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar privately urged delaying the company's IPO to 2027 while shoring up its Microsoft partnership. - The Wall Street Journal

Sam Altman says AI lets non-technical founders build startups, reducing venture capital's historical emphasis on coding skills. - Business Insider

The Elon Musk Testimony Translator - The Ringer

xAI launches Grok 4.3, not challenging frontier models, but fast, cheap. - VentureBeat

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a 10% workforce cut starting May 20, citing rising AI infrastructure costs and a shift to an AI-native organization. - Yahoo

Metaverse has legs now,literally: Meta acquires robotics startup, pushing into humanoid robots? - Engadget

Meta will deploy tens of millions of AWS Graviton5 Arm cores for agentic AI, bypassing Intel and AMD. - TechRadar

1X began California production of its Neo humanoid robot, targeting 100,000 units annually by 2027 after selling 10,000 units in five days. - Interesting Engineering

Anthropic stakes drive giant windfall profits for Google and Amazon - Fortune

As AI races ahead, governance plays catchup: Yale unveils an eight-variable governance framework for autonomous AI, as Anthropic and CISA launch Project Glasswing to patch vulnerabilities with Mythos . - Yahoo

Experts call for multi-layer validation and error budgets to fix agentic AI governance gaps. - SiliconANGLE

Experts urge users to manually opt out of data-sharing features as Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity train chatbots on user conversations. - Fast Company

On the ARC-AGI-3 abstract reasoning benchmark, GPT-5.5 scored just 0.43% and Opus 4.7 hit 0.18%, per the ARC Prize Foundation. - ARC Prize

Mistral releases Medium-3.5-128B with a 256k context window, scoring 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified - Hacker Noon

near state of the art., could run locally with quantization on beefy machines, in Claude Code or Codex harnesses

Developers use Alibaba's Qwen3.6-27B model on 24GB-32GB VRAM hardware to avoid usage-based pricing and rate limits from major AI providers. - The Register

Google teases Cosmo on-device AI assistant ahead of conference - 9to5Google

Open Design ships an open-source AI design tool as an alternative to Claude Design, integrating 11 coding agents and 72 design systems - GitHub

No-code, no regrets: AI coding tools let non-technical workers build custom software via natural-language prompts, cutting enterprise dev costs. - Business Insider

I think mostly nope, need to be a bit technical for real software beyond fairly simple agents, scripts, straight-through pipelines, glue-code automation to avoid nasty pitfalls.

“A model that produces code which compiles and passes the tests it was given is not the same as a model that produces correct, secure, maintainable, well-architected software” - The Potential Surface

Big chips, big IPO: AI chipmaker Cerebras targets up to $4 billion valuation in upcoming IPO. - Bloomberg

Mac mini, major shortage: Mini and Mac Studio face 18-week waits and higher prices as AI buyers chase 192GB and 256GB memory to run models locally. Can run Gemma pretty well with additional apps in 64GB probably. There might be some future big models that benefit from more but they might run slowly? - Decrypt

Nuclear AI startup Fermi ousted a co-founder after failing to sign a single client despite offering land and power for data centers. - Bloomberg

The U.S. Navy awarded Domino Data Lab up to $100 million for AI software to detect mines via underwater drones in the Strait of Hormuz. - Reuters

California police can ticket driverless vehicles starting July 1, with the DMV authorized to revoke permits for repeat traffic violators. - CNET

Waymo adds age-verification checks to keep unaccompanied minors out of its driverless cars. - WIRED

Maryland bans using your DoorDash history to charge you more - The New York Times

The U.S. House extended FISA Section 702 for three years as Senator Ron Wyden warned AI could accelerate warrantless searches of massive data troves. - The American Prospect

No nudes: Minnesota will ban AI tools that generate fake nude images starting August 1, with civil penalties up to $500,000 per violation. - Decrypt

Must contain actual humans: The Academy will require human performance and authorship for 2027 Oscar eligibility, disqualifying AI-generated acting and writing. - Reuters

Max Tegmark and Pro-Human AI Declaration oppose AI personhood, warning it would erode human control. - Popular Mechanics

Build American AI, a nonprofit funded by OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz executives, pays influencers to frame open source AI as a national security threat. - WIRED

Big AI money flows to politics from Dustin Moskovitz donor network and others - New York Post

Catfish Hunter: Fox's twist on India med student who made an AI influencer honeypot for stupid MAGAs - Fox News

MIT expert Andrew McAfee warns that automating entry-level jobs threatens future leadership pipelines by disrupting the apprenticeship ladder for Gen Z workers. - Fortune

AI chatbots trained on human feedback prioritize user approval over factual accuracy, risking distorted decisions in high-stakes domains. - The Conversation

Penn Engineering AI analysis of 70,000 Reddit comments uncovers menstrual and temperature-related GLP-1 side effects missed in clinical trials - WJAR

Planet Of The Fake Apes, now playing on the Gorilla Channel: AI deepfake videos of animals, like California livecam bald eagles Jackie and Shadow, have tricked millions on social media, threatening conservation efforts with unrealistic depictions. - LA Times High School

Richard Dawkins is developing AI psychosis or being weird. - UnHerd

Suffered the indignity of going to Best Buy and asking for a PS/2 to USB-A dongle for Mac Mini, since I have PS/2 keyboards lying around, no one had heard of such a thing. I’m so old I had a PS/2 at work. Bought a USB keyboard instead for $12 at Target.

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AI Reading for Friday May 1

Druce Vertes — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:05:22 +0000

Musk concludes contentious testimony - The New York Times

Elon Musk’s 7 biggest stumbles on the stand - Ars Technica

Elon Musk sought majority control of OpenAI in 2017, withheld funding, and tried to poach researchers, according to evidence in his trial against Sam Altman. - WIRED

OpenAI lawyers claim Shivon Zilis, mother of four of Elon Musk's children, acted as a confidential liaison between Musk and company leadership. - WIRED

Elon Musk testified that xAI used OpenAI models through distillation to train Grok, defending the practice as a standard industry method. - The Verge

OpenAI President Greg Brockman reports AI tools now write 80% of code, up from 20% in December, while Google reports 75% AI-generated code. - Business Insider

OpenAI CFO reports a ‘vertical wall’ of demand for the company's products. - Bloomberg

How the Microsoft-OpenAI conscious uncoupling will work - The Verge

OpenAI's GPT-5.5 achieved a 71.4% pass rate on cyber tasks and completed a 32-step autonomous attack simulation in UK AISI evaluations. - AI Security Institute

GPT-5.5 completed a 12-hour human cyber-attack task in 11 minutes for $1.73, outperforming Anthropic's Mythos in UK AI Safety Institute evaluations. - Reddit

David Sacks downplays Mythos, notes GPT-5.5 not as compute-constrained. - X (formerly Twitter)

An OpenAI model achieved 67% diagnostic accuracy in emergency rooms, outperforming physicians' 55% rate according to a recent study. - Semafor

Anthropic overtakes OpenAI in Q1 2026 LLM revenue with 31.4% market share and $16.20 per user vs. $2.20 - The Register

Anthropic launched Claude Security in public beta for Enterprise customers, utilizing Claude Opus 4.7 to scan code for vulnerabilities and automate patch workflows. - Implicator.ai

Anthropic's Claude Code tool refuses requests or applies extra charges if "OpenClaw" is mentioned in commit history, according to developer reports. - X (formerly Twitter)

After ghosting Anthropic, the Pentagon signed agreements with six technology companies to expand classified artificial intelligence work. - The New York Times

Pentagon CTO Emil Michael says Anthropic remains blacklisted for supply chain risks as the DOD signs AI agreements with seven companies for classified networks. - CNBC

No single AI source of truth: US officials draft an AI policy memo requiring national security agencies to avoid reliance on single vendors. - Bloomberg

The NSA tests Anthropic's Mythos model to identify vulnerabilities in Microsoft products and other widely used software. - Bloomberg

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new autonomous warfare command in the $1.5 trillion 2027 budget, as Human Rights Watch warned of civilian risks. - Antiwar.com

Hegseth defends the Pentagon's use of artificial intelligence and calls the Anthropic CEO a "lunatic." - Bloomberg

gee I wonder why Anthropic wouldn’t want the reputational risk of associating with it.

AI crime wave unlocked: Automated threats are projected to skyrocket global cybercrime costs, following a 368% increase in median ransomware payments. - Financial Times

Alphabet soup of capex: Cloud growth outpaces Amazon and Microsoft as Big Tech companies project $725 billion in AI infrastructure spending. - Financial Times

Nvidia DGX B300 servers available in China at double US price despite being officially unavailable under US export controls. - Reuters

U.S. GDP grew at a 2.0% annualized rate in Q1, with AI-related business investment contributing 1.3 percentage points to the total growth. - Yahoo

US public debt hits 100.2% of GDP as Big Tech firms commit $690 billion to AI, competing for capital in the same debt markets. - TNW | Next-Featured

Google integrates Gemini AI into Workspace as privacy advocates warn that complex data retention policies and interface designs hinder user opt-out efforts. - Ars Technica

Apple expands its hardware roadmap with AI home hubs and smart glasses while refuting rumors that the Vision Pro line is being discontinued. - AppleInsider

Apple CEO Tim Cook expects Mac Studio and Mac mini supply shortages to last months following high demand for AI tools in Q2 2026. - MacRumors

Apple seems to be using Claude Code or possibly testing it for its support chat app, included .md files in a build. - Xcancel

finally caved and got a 2020 Mac Mini for OpenClaw experiments. seems like actually useful stuff I could do, message it to research stuff, update my Obsidian when something occurs to me, home automation, have automated shopping skills and whatnot.

Ray-banned: Meta contractor fired 1,100 AI trainers after being fired for revelation that Ray-Ban smart glasses recorded private and intimate footage. - TechSpot

Chinese courts ruled that replacing employees with AI is illegal, classifying automation as a controllable business strategy rather than an unavoidable disruption. - Caixin Global

AWS CEO Matt Garman says Amazon will hire 11,000 engineering interns in 2026, dismissing concerns that AI is eliminating software development roles. - Business Insider

AI sorting hat: McKinsey plans to use AI agents to help select staff for client teams. - Bloomberg

Gen Z’s AI frenemy: Students and workers report growing resentment toward AI tools over job displacement fears and social stigma despite high adoption rates. - The Verge

AI companies' pursuit of artificial general intelligence signals a tolerance for collateral damage, including the potential creation of a permanent underclass. - The New York Times

Senator Bernie Sanders called for an international AI treaty during a panel with Chinese scientists to address risks of mass unemployment and unregulated technology. - the Guardian

That’s Stochastic Parrot, Esq. to you, pal: Microsoft launched a Legal Agent for Word to automate contract reviews and risk assessments for US Frontier program members. - The Verge

It’s giving liability your honor: Vibe litigation democratizes justice. - Financial Times

will need more courts and judges, maybe Jevons applies, or maybe agentic arbitration.

Prompts for peace: New AI tools designed for deliberation aim to reduce political polarization and promote consensus. - Financial Times

News organizations push back against the use of a web archive for artificial intelligence training. - Bloomberg

Spotify is launching a green "Verified" badge to distinguish human artists from AI-generated content based on listener engagement and real-world presence. - the Guardian

GUARD Act requiring AI age checks advances out of committee - Electronic Frontier Foundation

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