This is the week that was in AI: AI stocks plunging, the Age of Anti-Social Media Is Here, the New York College Trying to ‘AI-Proof’ Its Students, and much more.
9–12 minutes read
News from NBC
AI stocks lost more than $820 billion this week
The Nasdaq had its worst week since the April global market plunge tied to Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.
….Markets have been led lower primarily by companies connected to the artificial intelligence boom. Collectively, the drop this week in shares of Microsoft, Nvidia, AMD, Palantir, Oracle and Instagram owner Meta Platforms has erased more than $820 billion of market value.
November 7, 2025
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News from The American Prospect
OpenAI Is Maneuvering for a Government Bailout
If you need trillions of dollars for data centers forever, there’s only one entity to turn to: Uncle Sam.
…to my knowledge, no tech company has ever burned more cash more quickly than OpenAI.
In 2024, it lost about $5 billion; in the first half of 2025, it lost a reported $13.5 billion; and in the last quarter alone, it lost another $12 billion….where do you get a trillion dollars quick?—OpenAI is getting ready to run hat in hand to the taxpayer for subsidies
November 7, 2025
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News from Truthout
With Big Tech Talking Government Backing, Has OpenAI Become “Too Big to Fail”?
Leaders at the AI company are scrambling to pacify concerns that the bubble around their company could soon burst….the latest warning sign that OpenAI is becoming “too big to fail” as the industry aggressively lobbies at all levels of government to shift enormous financial burden onto taxpayers.
November 7, 2025
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News from Bloomberg, no paywall
Microsoft to Pursue Superintelligence After OpenAI Deal
Microsoft Corp. is pursuing a more powerful form of AI called “superintelligence” it hopes will be capable of making advances in areas like medicine and materials science….“If AGI is often seen as the point at which an AI can match human performance at all tasks, then superintelligence is when it can go far beyond that performance,”
November 6, 2025
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News from TechCrunch
Sam Altman says he doesn’t want the government to bail out OpenAI if it fails
OpenAI execs have been fielding plenty of questions about how they expect to pay for the $1.4 trillion worth of data center build-outs and usage commitments…. in response to comments made by OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar — which she quickly walked back. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal event on Wednesday, Friar said she wanted the U.S. government to “backstop” her company’s infrastructure loans. This…. would make the company’s loans cheaper and help ensure it could always be using the latest, greatest chip.
November 6, 2025
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News from Semaphor
Microsoft superintelligence team promises to keep humans in charge
“We cannot just accelerate at all costs. That would just be a crazy suicide mission,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, who will head the company’s new superintelligence team, told Semafor this week. “We have to find ways of simultaneously having humanist superintelligence, which delivers the benefits that we’re all chasing for humans, and also accelerating technology at the same time.”
November 6, 2025
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News from the Observer
The Cost of Automating Authenticity: A.I.’s Limits in Social Media
As brands rush to automate, the most effective social media strategies still depend on human creativity, taste and connection….A recent survey revealed that 39 percent of CMOs and brand marketing executives plan to reduce labor costs as they adopt A.I. and other automation tools. With 94 percent of organizations using A.I. in marketing preparation or execution, 51 percent of content marketers now piloting or scaling A.I. and 85 percent of marketers employing it for writing and content creation, that influence is only growing.
November 6, 2025
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News from The Atlantic
The Age of Anti-Social Media Is Here
The social-media era is over. What’s coming will be much worse.
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, X, Reddit—all have aggressively put AI chatbots in front of users…. Zuckerberg said that AI probably won’t “replace in-person connections or real-life connections”—at least not right away. Yet he also spoke of the potential for AI therapists and girlfriends to be embodied in virtual space….many people already use AI for companionship, sexual gratification, mental-health care.
November 5, 2025
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News from CDO Online
Google researchers detect first operational use of LLMs in active malware campaigns
Google’s Threat Intelligence Group reports that new malware strains use LLMs mid-execution to generate, rewrite, and obfuscate malicious code in real time.
November 5, 2025
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News from Bloomberg
Wall Street Rattled by Job Woes as AI Winners Sink: Markets Wrap
US Posts Most October Layoffs in More Than 20 Years
The job cuts are attributed to AI adoption, softening consumer and corporate spending, and rising costs, which are driving belt-tightening and hiring freezes, said Andy Challenger.
November 5, 2025
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News from the Observer
Rivian Spins Off a Robotics Startup to Foray Into Physical A.I.
The EV maker’s latest venture takes its A.I. expertise beyond cars and into robotics….Mind Robotics was unveiled during Rivian’s third-quarter earnings yesterday (Nov. 4).
November 5, 2025
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News from The Soufan Center
As Data Centers Proliferate, Anti-AI Resistance Has the Potential to Turn Violent
According to Gallup data, 61 percent of Americans believe that AI technology will destroy more jobs than it creates. At the same time, Pew Research indicates that 57 percent of Americans rate the societal risks of AI as high. Across the United States, community groups in areas where large data centers are being built to house servers for training, deploying, and delivering AI services have organized campaigns to stop construction, citing noise, environmental degradation, and concerns about electricity rates.
November 5, 2025
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News from CNBC
AI-washing and the massive layoffs hitting the economy
….in the absence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report, which has gone dark amid the government shutdown, the layoff announcements have raised questions about the strength of the labor market and if it’s the start of an AI-driven, white-collar recession.
November 4, 2025
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News from Curmudgeon
The Coming AI Teaching Assistant Boom (And Cheating)
Matt Barnum just made three predictions about AI in education, and one of them makes my head hurt…. AI will become a ubiquitous teaching assistant….Lord, but I want this not to be true…. I want teachers who use AI to extrude lesson plans to be embarrassed about it…. if a teacher is using their AI “teaching assistant” to grade essays, I want to encourage that teacher to leave the profession immediately.
November 4, 2025
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News from The Atlantic
The Company Quietly Funneling Paywalled Articles to AI Developers
“You shouldn’t have put your content on the internet if you didn’t want it to be on the internet,” Common Crawl’s executive director says…. For more than a decade, the nonprofit has been scraping billions of webpages to build a massive archive of the internet. This database—large enough to be measured in petabytes—is made freely available for research. In recent years, however, this archive has been put to a controversial purpose: AI companies including OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon have used it to train large language models.
November 4, 2025
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News from Gizmodo
‘The Big Short’ Investor Michael Burry Bets Against AI Hype
The investor successfully predicted the 2008 housing market crash.
Burry’s hedge fund Scion Asset Management disclosed put options on Nvidia, and an even larger one on Palantir, according to regulatory filings from Sept. 30 that were released on Monday. …Burry posted and still has pinned a rather cryptic X post showing a photo of Christian Bale portraying him in “The Big Short” movie, along with text that says “Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.”
November 4, 2025
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News from the New York Times (Unlocked paywall)
Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars
Once pitched as dispassionate tools to answer your questions, A.I. chatbots are now programmed to reflect the biases of their creators.
November 4, 2025
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News from 404 Media
arXiv Changes Rules After Getting Spammed With AI-Generated
arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science review articles and position papers. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are “little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues,” according to a press release about the change.
November 3, 2025
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News from NewsWeek
The New York College Trying to ‘AI-Proof’ Its Students
Some 70 percent of Generation Z say artificial intelligence has made them doubt their future job security, according to a survey by Glassdoor, and 65 percent of respondents in a separate poll said even a college degree can no longer protect them in the event of an AI-driven mass replacement….But another approach is being adopted at a small yet growing college in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, committed to “AI-proofing” its students with a curriculum focused on “hands-on” professions even advanced LLMs will struggle to supplant.
November 2, 2025
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