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Tech companies are running hot, with Wall Street investors sustaining multi-trillion dollar valuations despite subdued earnings. Companies heavily invested in AI are particularly challenged on that front, thanks to heavy data center spending that isn’t yet — and may ever — result in sizable profits.The gap between those companies’ valuations and their ability to actually make money continues to grow at a breakneck pace, terrifying analysts. The S&P is up a whopping nine percent so far this year, wrapping up its best quarter since 2020 at the end of last month, as Fortune reports.But what comes up must come down.…

Planning your next getaway? You’d be wise not to trust the advice of an AI chatbot — even if they’re explicitly designed to draw on the testimonies of real travelers.As The Guardian reports, an AI tool from Tripadvisor designed to summarize the reviews of hotels and other locations on its platforms routinely glosses over some of the horrifying complaints that guests have made about their stays.The AI described one hotel in Cape Verde as “spotless,” failing to mention that it was being sued for mass food poisoning, according to the findings of the consumer campaign organization Which?, reported in the…

If AI doesn’t drive you into a mental breakdown, then at least it’ll find a way to make you lose your marbles at work.As one beaten-down employee confessed in a recent Fortune piece about how the tech is reshaping workplace dynamics, she’s now resigned to asking an AI to interpret and respond to her boss’s nonsensical dispatches, because she suspects those were written with AI, too.“‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,’” the employee told Leena Rinne, an executive at the edtech firm Skillsoft, in the Fortune piece.…

If you’ve been following AI’s inroads into the movie biz, you’ll already know that Tilly Norwood is the AI “actor” that the tech-focused studio Particle 6 keeps trying to make into a thing, but has so far only succeeded in universally infuriating actual performers, not to mention moviegoers.Now, it’s taking its biggest gamble yet by having Tilly Norwood lead her own movie, Particle 6 announced Monday — which will surely be what finally catapults her to bona fide star status, after that sorry attempt at a music video.Called “Misaligned,” the movie will be a feature length “coming-of-age story infused with…

Our feeble simian brains simply aren’t built for the “polycrisis” of modern life, a new review of existing scholarship suggests.This hypothesis, outlined in a new study published in the journal Behavioral Sciences, could partly explain why we feel so much stress and loneliness by understanding these mental states as a consequence of an “evolutionary mismatch.”In a nutshell, we evolved to thrive in small, close-knit communities, and it’s backfiring now that we live in sprawling cities and have huge social networks. Long before we had smartphones to nuke our cerebrums, we relied on being finely attuned to the emotions and signals of…

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is struggling to keep his AI team together. As morale is hitting rock-bottom, his company is heavily relying on its competitors’ AI models to build out its own in-house tools. And despite the many billions of dollars the company has spent in its flailing efforts to keep up in the AI race, even Zuckerberg himself is now acknowledging that progress is nowhere near where he wanted it to be.As Reuters reports, Zuckerberg admitted during a town hall last week that AI agents in particular aren’t progressing as fast as he anticipated, a devastating revelation following enormous…

Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proudly touted his company’s $7.3 billion Fairwater data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, as the “world’s most powerful AI data center,” connecting “hundreds of thousands” of power-hungry chips “into a single seamless cluster.”However, local residents aren’t even remotely as enthusiastic about the facility cropping up in their neighborhood. Last week, three residents of the village of Sturtevant, which is adjacent to Mount Pleasant, filed a class-action lawsuit, as The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, alleging that Microsoft’s flashy data center is emitting “unreasonable and excessive noise onto Plaintiffs’ properties, thereby causing property damages through…

Revelers celebrating US independence day in San Francisco over the weekend were stopped in their tracks as an untold number of Waymo robotaxis stalled, exacerbating the city’s horrible holiday gridlock.According to NBC News, several Waymos had to be towed out of busy roadways after their batteries died on one of the city’s worst traffic days of the year so far. On top of intense fog and significant public transit slowdowns, travelers had to bob and weave past the bricked electric vehicles, which in some cases blocked traffic completely.One resident, Dave Guingona, told NBC he spent two hours sitting in traffic…

For over a year now, sober-minded observers have warned that the AI bubble can’t last for much longer. Unfortunately for everybody, it’s managed to outperform even the most cynical doomsday forecasts, to the degree that the US economy is now in even worse shape than it was right before an infamous downturn in the late 1920s.That’s according to the Telegraph‘s economics columnist Russ Mould, who notes that the overvaluation of US stocks has passed the level that brought the stock market to its knees to kick off the Great Depression.As Mould observes, US stocks trading on the S&P 500 are…

Throughout his second stint in the Oval Office, Donald Trump has raked in over a billion dollars on the backs of his most loyal acolytes. Some of his grifts harken back to the Trump cons of yesteryear, like the spectacularly cringeworthy Trump Mobile smartphone, a “made in America” device that was, predictably, produced entirely in China.Most of the president’s most successful pulls, however, are predicated on either the cryptocurrency market, where winner-take-all scams are the name of the game, or fly-by-night stock offerings that get a temporary boost from the business mogul’s endorsement. And as Trump pulls the billion-dollar ladder…