Our team gleaned eighteen briefs from sixteen sources, from “Everyone’s worrying about chips, the circular economy and the AI boom” to “Spot a Sora fake, while you still can”. 9–11 minutes read.
News from Bloomberg
Solaris Ties Its Future to xAI’s Success in the AI Boom
Everyone’s worrying about chips, the circular economy and the AI boom. But there’s a subset of firms, mostly in energy markets, that are riding that artificial intelligence wave …. Among them is Houston-based Solaris Energy Infrastructure, a small and relatively unknown firm that has seen its stock surge by about 300% in a year. Its new key customer? Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start up xAI.
October 17, 2025
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News from TheVerge
Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it.
Microsoft… clearly wants to turn every Windows 11 PC into an AI PC that Copilot controls and users talk to. “We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft
October 16, 2025
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News from SmartBrief
Class — and AI — is in session
A new survey from the Center for Democracy and Technology shows 85% of teachers and 86% of students used AI in some form during the 2024-25 school year. Educators say the tools are streamlining everything, from lesson planning to grading. And, of course students have turned to AI for “help” (in its most generous meaning)
October 16, 2025
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News from CNBC
Sam Altman says OpenAI isn’t ‘moral police of the world’ after erotica ChatGPT post blows up* ….Altman said his company is “not the elected moral police of the world” after receiving backlash over his decision to allow content like erotica within ChatGPT.
October 15, 2025
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News from Neowin
“Stop ripping off manga and anime,” Japan’s government warns OpenAI.
Japan wants the company to stop ripping off its “irreplaceable treasures” like manga and anime. At a press conference last Friday, Minoru Kiuchi, the minister of state for IP and AI strategy, told reporters that the Cabinet Office made a formal online request for OpenAI to refrain from infringing on Japanese Ips.
October 15, 2025
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News from The Atlantic
Job Interviews Are Broken
People are sneaking answers from AI, and who can blame them?
“Interviews are NOT real anymore.” So reads the opening caption of a TikTok … punctuated by the skull-and-crossbones emoji…. a young woman interviews for a job on a video call. She has a smartphone propped up against her laptop screen, so she can read off the responses that an AI app has composed for her: “Um, yeah, so, one of my key strengths is my adaptability.”
October 15, 2025
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News from Reuters
Meet the AI chatbots replacing India’s call-center workers
At a startup office in this Indian city, developers are fine-tuning artificial-intelligence chatbots that talk and message like humans. The company, LimeChat, has an audacious goal: to make customer-service jobs almost obsolete. It says its generative AI agents enable clients to slash by 80% the number of workers needed to handle 10,000 monthly queries.
October 15, 2025
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News from TheNeuron
AI Just Designed Viruses That Kill Bacteria… And They Actually Work…*
Stanford scientists just crossed a wild milestone: they used AI to design viruses from scratch that can kill bacteria. This is not theoretical code, but actual working viruses that replicate and destroy bacterial cells. And before you ask, no, they did not “vibe code” the viruses.
October 15, 2025
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News from Axios
Walmart taps OpenAI for “AI-first” shopping through ChatGPT*
Walmart is teaming up with OpenAI to turn shopping into a conversation — letting customers plan meals, restock essentials and check out directly through ChatGPT. Why it matters: The world’s largest retailer’s new OpenAI partnership signals the arrival of “agentic commerce” — where AI doesn’t just answer questions but anticipates what shoppers need next.
October 14, 2025
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News from Rest of World
AI flood forecasting allows aid to reach farmers before disaster strikes*
Using Google’s Flood Hub, nonprofit trial program sends early warning and unconditional cash to workers….Farmers on Jamira, a tiny island on Bangladesh’s flood-prone Jamuna River, are used to warring with the river that’s eating their land. Next year, they’ll have one more weapon in their arsenal: cash payments from the international nonprofit GiveDirectly delivered days before a flood hits.
October 14, 2025
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News from Reuters
Meet the AI chatbots replacing India’s call-center workers
At a startup office in this Indian city, developers are fine-tuning artificial-intelligence chatbots that talk and message like humans. The company, LimeChat, has an audacious goal: to make customer-service jobs almost obsolete. It says its generative AI agents enable clients to slash by 80% the number of workers needed to handle 10,000 monthly queries.
October 15, 2025
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News from Gizmodo
Ohio Lawmaker Wants to Ban Marriage Between Humans and AI Chatbots
….a recently introduced bill in the Buckeye state would ban legal marriages between AI programs and their human users. In case you didn’t know this was a thing, it is—and, increasingly, it seems to be something that people are interested in doing.
October 14, 2025
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News from Semaphor
As electricity bills rise, candidates in both parties blame data centers*
GAINESVILLE, Va. — On Friday night, dueling candidates for a board of supervisors seat in this suburban county found a cause that united them: banning new data centers. “I think we should, personally, block all future data centers,” said Patrick Harders, the Republican running for an open seat on the Prince William County board. George Stewart, his Democratic opponent, agreed that “the crushing and overwhelming weight of data centers” was a crisis, with massive companies “having us, as residents, pay for their energy.”
October 13, 2025
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News from TheVerge
New California law requires AI to tell you it’s AI
…for instance, “if a reasonable person interacting with a companion chatbot would be misled to believe that the person is interacting with a human,” then the new law requires the chatbot maker to “issue a clear and conspicuous notification” that the product is strictly AI and not human.
October 13, 2025
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News from David Brin
AI ‘optimists’ who are down on us. And is the antichrist one of them?
….in a September 2025 series of ‘confidential lectures’ by Paypal/Palantir impresario Peter Thiel…. offering his unique perspectives concerning …“candidate antichrists,” a list that includes Bill Gates, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nick Bostrom, a panoply of Democrats… and Greta Thunberg.
October 13, 2025
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News from Wisdom of Crowds
Robots and Your Job
AI, automation and robotics could replace nearly 100 million jobs in America over the next decade, including 40% of registered nurses, 47% of truck drivers, 64% of accountants, 65% of teaching assistants and 89% of fast food workers, among many other occupations. So writes Senator Bernie Sanders, summarizing a Senate report released last week.
October 13, 2025
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News from Foreign Affairs
The Coming AI Backlash: How the Anger Economy Will Supercharge Populism
If there is significant disruption, officials will be confronted by workers furious about jobs lost to machines. Voters will make their frustrations known at the ballot box.
October 13, 2025
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News from Bloomberg (unlocked story)
The Pope Urges Vigilance About Who Controls AI
“Artificial intelligence is changing the way we receive information and communicate, but who directs it and for what purposes?” the pontiff said, according to Reuters. “We must be vigilant in order to ensure that technology does not replace human beings.”….Pope Leo has explicitly expressed wariness of trends ranging from AI slop to virtual avatar clones.
October 13, 2025
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News from Paul Krugman
Technology Bubbles: Causes and Consequences
What history can teach us about AI frenzy
….warnings that there may be a huge AI bubble are getting louder. Worries about the financial underpinnings of all that capital spending are growing. And many people have noted that the AI boom is driving most, possibly all, of the economy’s recent growth. So what will happen if the boom goes bust? … the consequences for the economy would be much worse than the bust at the end of the 1990s.
October 12, 2025
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News from Axios
Spot a Sora fake, while you still can
“Today is the last day I believe anything I see on the internet,” X, TikTok and YouTube commenters joked on September 30, the day OpenAI released its Sora video app….OpenAI promised guardrails, including adding the Sora logo to every video….But within a week of release, Sora watermark removal tutorials hit YouTube, Reddit and TikTok.
October 12, 2025
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