News from the bleeding edge of science and technology. Today, More GenAI Risks and Opportunities.
~3 minutes read
News from Bloomberg
YouTube’s Covert AI Editing Experiment Won’t Be Its Last
September 2, 2025
Throughout its history, YouTube, the company, has done practically anything it wants to videos: delete them, promote them, monetize, demonetize, recommend, restrict and even pay for them. It hadn’t, to my knowledge, edited videos after they were finished.
Apparently, now YouTube’s done that too. Viewers first noticed that some recent YouTube Shorts looked odd, “like plastic” with “extra punchy shadows,” the telltale signs of AI-generated content
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News from Axios
1 big thing: Stop pretending AI is human
September 02, 2025
…. AI is in its “anything goes” era, and government regulations are unlikely to rein in the technology anytime soon. But as teen suicides and instances of “AI psychosis” gain attention, AI firms have a growing incentive to solve their mental health crisis themselves.
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News from Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn
A second paper in a week also finds Generative AI is reducing the number of junior people hired (while not impacting senior roles)
September 1, 2025
This one compares firms across industries who have hired for at least one AI project versus those that have not. Firms using AI were hiring fewer juniors. Paper —>
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News from Peter Wildeford’s blog
Compute is a strategic resource
September 1, 2025
Computational power (“compute”) is a strategic resource in the way that oil and steel production capacity were in the past. Like oil, and like steel production capacity, compute is scarce, controllable, concentrated, and highly economically and militarily useful…. NVIDIA has an estimated 80-95% of the AI chip market. 
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News from The Atlantic
Our AI Fears Run Long and Deep
September 1, 2025
Fictional portrayals of computer sentience reveal not only what we want from this technology, but also what we know about the fallibility of humans.. in the 1983 film WarGames,… a scientist creates an AI for a defense computer—the eggheads in these stories never learn—and names it after his son. The computer is trained to fight a nuclear war, but not to understand one…. (Carolyn’s note: In a meeting at the Santa Fe Institute where we wrestled with the threat of malicious botnets, a speaker mentioned War Games and all of us said in unison, “Shall we play a game?”
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