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Category: Technology

How Silicon Valley’s AI accelerationists swept aside safety concerns

How Silicon Valley’s AI accelerationists swept aside safety concerns

Chang Che writes: In January 2025, a new regime of Silicon Valley’s AI maximalists took charge of AI policy whose ethos can be summed up by a Bay Area party slogan: “Accelerate or die.” Established federal guardrails were cast off, and a global consensus was scrapped. The February 2025 AI safety summit in Paris was renamed the “AI Action Summit.” In a speech there, Vice-President J.D. Vance warned against “excessive regulation” of the AI industry and criticized those who partnered…

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GOP warns AI CEOs that data centers are as popular as spent nuclear waste

GOP warns AI CEOs that data centers are as popular as spent nuclear waste

Axios reports: The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party’s chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio. In the memo, obtained by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee says Democrats have made data centers a “centerpiece” of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) — and that it’s working. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will…

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Under Trump, the U.S. has ‘completely ceded the AI-governance agenda to China’

Under Trump, the U.S. has ‘completely ceded the AI-governance agenda to China’

Chang Che writes: So many people had signed up for China’s premier artificial-intelligence expo in mid-July — over 200,000 by some estimates — that the ticketing system had crashed. A mob of frustrated AI enthusiasts had formed outside as a result. “How could they do this to us?” one woman cried. “Report the venue! Dial 12345!” a man hollered, evoking the Chinese equivalent of 311. A decade ago, people around the world traveled to Silicon Valley to glimpse the future….

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Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. WIRED got its code

Flock has a powerful new AI tool for police. WIRED got its code

Wired reports: Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned. Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often…

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In a major shift, Gov. Josh Shapiro restricts data center development in Pennsylvania

In a major shift, Gov. Josh Shapiro restricts data center development in Pennsylvania

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports: Gov. Josh Shapiro signed a sweeping executive order on Tuesday dramatically restricting data center development in Pennsylvania, marking a major shift from his initial embrace of the increasingly unpopular projects. Shapiro, a first-term Democrat running for reelection and a rumored 2028 presidential contender, had been an early champion of data center development in the state, including a $20 billion commitment from Amazon to build at least two data centers in Bucks and Luzerne Counties. Now he…

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How Israel is trying to shape what AI tells users about Gaza

How Israel is trying to shape what AI tells users about Gaza

Politico Influence reports: Israel has launched a new campaign to influence how large-language models like ChatGPT are answering questions about Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces amid declining public support for the country across the U.S. political spectrum. — French PR firm Havas Media, which runs the lion’s share of Israel’s Foreign Agents Registration Act-registered foreign influence work in the U.S., appears to have stood up an “institute” aimed at feeding LLMs positive information about Israel via one of its subcontractors, boutique ad agency Piro, Inc. — In a…

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Amazon is destroying rare books to train AI

Amazon is destroying rare books to train AI

Ars Technica reports: For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon. On Monday, 404 Media revealed…

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China wants to shape what the world’s AI knows

China wants to shape what the world’s AI knows

The New York Times reports: When ChatGPT was still a new technology, researchers in Beijing tested how well it handled Chinese-language questions. Their response to its results was telling. The chatbot described the former N.B.A. star Yao Ming as the first Chinese woman to play professional basketball in the United States. It confused two classic works of Chinese literature, “Journey to the West” and “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which were written two centuries apart. The researchers at the Beijing…

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‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

‘Godfather of AI,’ Geoffrey Hinton, predicts mass unemployment is on its way

Fortune reports: The long-term impact of AI is one of the most hotly debated topics in Silicon Valley. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicts every job will be transformed—and likely lead to a four-day workweek. Other tech titans go even further: Bill Gates says humans may soon not be needed “for most things,” and Elon Musk believes most humans won’t have to work at all in “less than 20 years.” While those predictions might sound extreme, they’re not just plausible, they’re…

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Inside Ukraine’s kill zone

Inside Ukraine’s kill zone

Reuters reports: A terrifying game of hide-and-seek is playing out in this deadly corridor that snakes along the 1,200 km-long (750-mile) front line in Ukraine. The war, well into its fifth year, has become the first major conflict to be dominated by unmanned aerial vehicles, with thousands of the cheap but deadly machines filling the skies. Ukraine and invader Russia are constantly advancing the new technology, which is transforming modern warfare. Both sides have had to abandon age-old tactics of…

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Fake news spreads like an epidemic. Here’s how to stop it

Fake news spreads like an epidemic. Here’s how to stop it

The Straits Times reports: More than five years after the outbreak of Covid-19, most of us still remember the shape of the pandemic. It started small and distant. Then it passed from one person to another quickly, and we often did not even know we were spreading it. Today’s misinformation epidemic has the same shape: Fake news spreads quickly, and those “infected” by a rumour are often unaware it is untrue before passing it on to others. The “pink salt…

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The real reason why data center gas power plants are so dirty

The real reason why data center gas power plants are so dirty

Wired reports: Amazon has acquired a massive off-grid power plant being built in Texas for one of its data centers that could be one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. But size isn’t the only reason its climate toll will be so high. The plant will rely on a much less efficient set of gas turbines than regular power plants use; these kinds of turbines are also increasingly being put to use at other data…

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The data center industry’s PR blitz is backfiring

The data center industry’s PR blitz is backfiring

By Lisa Sorg August 14, 2026 This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here. HENDERSON, N.C.—On a recent summer evening Mitzi Parrott, who lives in Vance County, saw a television commercial on the evening news that gave her pause. Kathie Hamm and Bobbie Lequire, also of Vance County, saw it, too, streaming on Sling and posted on Nextdoor. The ad extolled the…

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‘Big Short’ investor Steve Eisman sees an Achilles’ heel in the AI boom

‘Big Short’ investor Steve Eisman sees an Achilles’ heel in the AI boom

CNBC reports: Steve Eisman is warning that the artificial intelligence boom has become increasingly dependent on the fortunes of just two companies: OpenAI and Anthropic. The investor, best known for his bet against the housing market ahead of the global financial crisis, said the two AI startups account for roughly 70% of AI-related revenue at Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet’s Google and Oracle — and as much as 25% to 35% of their cloud revenue. “The futures of these massive companies, in…

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Time to panic about AI

Time to panic about AI

Matteo Wong writes: The crisis began quietly, on September 12, 2024. That was the day OpenAI announced a new sort of bot, known as a “reasoning model,” that was trained to complete challenging tasks that took long periods of time—the very sorts of science, math, and coding problems the AI industry had long prized. Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and the like raced to launch their own reasoning models. This new class of models was very capable, and has been almost entirely…

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Joseph Cox: Flock employees are quitting in disgust

Joseph Cox: Flock employees are quitting in disgust

  “People don’t want Tech coming into their neighbourhood without permission, or arrogantly.” 404 Media’s Joseph Cox joins The Tech Report’s Isaac Pound to talk about the controversies surrounding automatic license plate recognition cameras as the backlash against Flock grows.