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For years, AI companies have been selling investors on the idea that scaling up operations is the key to success — the bigger the AI model, the more powerful it becomes.But in practice, that premise is leading to enormous business problems. As The Atlantic points out, LLMs are suffering from severely diminishing returns: the cost of inference, or the act of using a trained AI model to process new data, is rising exponentially, making the tech far less lucrative than it was even half a year ago.Put simply, it’s effectively the opposite of what investors would conventionally want to see, as…

In June 2025, 29-year-old Christian Faith Madison died after after walking into oncoming traffic in the early hours of the morning. Now her family is suing OpenAI, arguing that ChatGPT stoked Madison’s grandiose religious delusions — and, in the process, encouraged her suicide.The wrongful death lawsuit, which was filed in California in June and but first reported this week by the local outlet Al.com, is the latest of more than two dozen lawsuits alleging that extensive interactions with ChatGPT caused users — and in some cases, those around them — to experience psychological harm, reputational and financial damage, and death.The lawsuit specifically targets…

Good news, everyone: “open-weight” AI models that are available to anyone to download and run are comically easy to poison.Katie Paxton-Fear, a cybersecurity researcher at Semgrep, demonstrated this in an attack that took less than an hour and cost less than $100 to carry out, The Register reports, successfully manipulating the AI’s behavior by feeding it malicious data.By training the model on just ten examples of poisoned material, the model started churning out new code that’s exposed to remote code execution, a vulnerability that allows hackers to run code on a person’s machine. “I did a proper backdoor,” she triumphantly shared…

As the public backlash to AI data centers continues to escalate, activists are resorting to extreme measures to send home an important message.The growing concern over environmentally damaging, yet rapidly growing, data centers has become an international phenomenon. In Amsterdam, climate activists affiliated with the group Extinction Rebellion claimed responsibility for some unique vandalism against a Microsoft data center construction project. According to the Register, the protestors filled water balloons with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, acetic acid, salt, and acrylic paint before hucking them at the facility.“This acidic mixture attacks concrete, and the hydrogen peroxide causes steel to rust…

These days, it’s hard to say which technological “innovation” US citizens hate more: AI data centers or Flock surveillance poles.The American revulsion with the former is well known. The latter, however, has seen an even more shocking rise in resistance, as the number of people hacking down, blinding, or otherwise sabotaging Flock cameras has reached a level best described as “countless.”Those who cut down Flock surveillance devices are regarded as folk heroes, garnering huge defense campaigns aided by the rapid growth of the online anti-Flock community. Amidst immense pressure from the public, the company is starting to back down on…

Zoox, the Amazon-owned robotaxi company, issued a recall after one of its self-driving cars blundered into a cloud of heavy smoke near a fire scene that emergency workers were responding to, and became confused.The recall, in the form of a software update, will affect its entire fleet of 105 autonomous robotaxis. The patch “enhances the existing capability of detecting active [emergency] scenes by adding the ability to detect and respond to heavy smoke in certain situations,” Zoox told TechCrunch in a statement.While you wouldn’t be remiss for thinking this was related to the wildfire smoke covering much of the eastern US…

Spotify, like pretty much every other digital platform, has been grappling with a torrent of low-quality AI-generated content flooding its streaming service. The deluge has resulted in cheap-and-fast AI-generated music infiltrating algorithmic playlists and even charting. The slop has led to artists — including dead musicians — being impersonated by AI-powered squatters.“The low-effort content you see where it’s mass-produced, it’s mass uploaded, it’s AI slop… we’ve removed over 75 million spammy tracks in the last year,” Spotify executive Sam Duboff recently told the Australian Financial Review, adding that AI has “taken existing spam tactics and taken them to a new level.”Yet, as…

If there’s extraterrestrial life anywhere in the galaxy, chances are, it could be on LHS 1140b.Astronomers have found that the exoplanet 48 light years away is spewing helium into space, a strong sign that it harbors a robust atmosphere, they reported in a new study published in the journal Science.And that’s not all: it’s also a rocky world like our own, and orbits within its star’s habitable zone, the region around a star where a planet can maintain liquid — and possibly life-harboring — water on its surface.If their findings are borne out, then it’s the first ever Earth-like exoplanet…

China wants more children — and it’s willing to kill off virtual AI companions to get there.Earlier this week, the Chinese government implemented sweeping new regulations aimed at curbing human “emotional dependence” on AI chatbots. These regulations are especially targeted at emotive AI companions, or bots expressly designed to embody human-like personas.One of Beijing’s core motivations for this crackdown, as reported by The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, are worries over the nation’s declining birthrates — and the fear that falling in love with agreeable, always-on robots will prevent people from finding human partners and having children.“They don’t like the…

“The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,” will de-age actors using AI, the actor and director Andy Serkis confirmed to Variety.“There’s a little bit of de-aging for some of the characters and machine learning is part of the process,” Serkis, who is both directing the new film and reprising his famous role as Gollum, told Variety.AI is an incredibly contentious topic in Hollywood. Some studios, like A24, have leaned into generative AI. Others in the industry, from actors to directors and writers, have lambasted the tech, with many fearing that AI will be used to replace industry jobs…