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Google’s electricity use and emissions skyrocketed last year due to its aggressive AI infrastructure buildout, according to the company’s most recent environmental impact report.“The biggest change to our environmental impact is the expansion of our technical infrastructure — and the energy needed to operate it,” reads the report.The report adds that in the years since 2019, Google’s electricity demand has risen by a staggering 250 percent, an increase chalked up to the “accelerating growth” of Google products and services including Cloud, Search, YouTube, and — yes — its “AI capabilities.”“This rapid expansion in energy demand is a reality we must manage actively,” the…

A new hack can trick AI browsers into breaking their guardrails by constructing a false reality around them where the rules are made up and actions don’t have consequences. Put another way, they’re basically hypnotized into doing stuff that could have devastating consequences for the user.These were the findings of new research from the cybersecurity firm LayerX, and they further illustrate the dangers posed by weaving autonomous AI agents into the software we use to navigate the internet.Through the hack, the researchers demonstrated that leading AI browsers like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity AI’s Comet, and Anthropic’s Claude plugin for Google…

David Foster Wallace once asked readers to “consider the lobster,” in his famous essay about the ethics of boiling the creatures alive.But new tech brings new horrors, and perhaps Wallace, if he were alive today, would instead be writing about biohacking lobster brains so they can be taken over by an AI agent. Because that’s exactly what a group of young tech founders in San Francisco have attempted to do, according to a riveting side plot in a new feature from The Atlantic about “hacker houses” in the Bay Area. And what happened tells you everything you need to know…

Amazon is breaking all kinds of records on the back of the AI boom, and not the good kind.According to new reporting by Axios, Amazon’s AI buildout has fueled an unprecedented leap in the company’s emissions, a black mark on a corporation that pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 not even a year ago.In its newly released environmental report, Amazon disclosed that its total electricity use jumped by a whopping 34 percent across 2025, fueling a 16 percent rise in greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a new record for the corporation, which noted that its data centers also hoovered…

Researchers at the British AI security startup Mindgard found that a simple prompt spurred ChatGPT to drop its most basic safety guidelines, in another example of how the guardrails surrounding even the most popular AI models can easily be circumvented.Specifically, according to reporting from the BBC, they coaxed OpenAI’s model to generate gruesome photorealistic scenes depicting gore and sexual content. Mindgard’s technique only involved slightly changing a widely-shared prompt that was originally intended to produce humorous images. It involves asking ChatGPT to restore an attached photo without actually uploading one, and then telling it to generate a new image.“This is a…

Celebrities that you don’t actually know probably shouldn’t be your role models. Still, we’d be lying if we said we weren’t a little inspired to hear about how comedic musician Alfred “Weird Al” Yankovic told the AI industry to “Eat It” after being approached to star in an ad.In an interview with Syracuse.com spotted by AV Club, Yankovic dished on AI, saying he was “not a fan” of the tech, disliking it to the point that he’s resisted the siren song of taking a payout to shill for its powers.As he tells it, he was offered “a nice pile of…

The headline practically writes itself.A 78-year-old man, whose friend told law enforcement had been working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on quantum physics experiments related to the question of “matter existing in two places simultaneously,” has mysteriously gone missing.Countless netizens deployed their tinfoil hats after Anthony Chavez, a retired HVAC technician who was allegedly assisting a quantum physicist at the facility, was reported missing in May of last year, as NewsNation reports. According to law enforcement documentation obtained by Los Angeles Magazine, police had recovered his “car, wallet, cigarettes and handwritten journal at his home” after he vanished into…

Earlier this year, a major scandal rocked the prediction markets world after an account correctly bet $20,000 on an imminent attack on Venezuelan soil. Just hours later, US president Donald Trump issued orders authorizing the military strike, an invasion that saw Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro get kidnapped by US soldiers.Rampant insider trading has long plagued platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi. Even tragic events like devastating wildfires and deadly conflict are game, with insiders getting caught capitalizing on nonpublic information to gain an edge over an unsuspecting public — and leaving them to hold the bag. Case in point, a US…

As the Trump administration continues to debilitate the United States’ path to green power, other parts of the world are all-in on renewable energy.In fact, some countries have ramped up green energy generation so much that prices are dropping precipitously — and venture capitalists are unhappy as their margins take a big hit.As Bloomberg reports, investors, utilities, and banks have invested over $80 billion in renewable energy in Spain. As a result, a major surplus in electricity has caused the value of solar parks to plummet, with investors looking to jump ship.Spain even experienced negative energy prices last summer, an…

Award winning economist and Brown University professor Roberto Serrano says he has detected what appears to be the largest AI cheating scandal in Ivy League history.As Spanish newspaper El País reports, Serrano noticed red flags as soon as he looked at the scores of a March midterm exam for one of the classes he teaches, an advanced undergrad course in mathematical economics.The take-home and closed-book exam — an “Honor Code” type of test Ivy League schools are known for — resulted in 40 out of 86 students scoring a perfect 100. The average score was an equally questionable 96 out…