From “we admit to being confused” to “Make America Deepfaked Again”
Our team gleaned twenty-seven briefs from sixteen sources. 12–15 minutes read.
News from The Wolf-Krugman Exchange
Talking AI With Martin Wolf, in which we admit to being confused.
I’m Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. I’m Paul Krugman, professor at the City University of New York [and an economics Nobel Prize winner]….So far, we’re certainly not seeing a productivity surge….it’s still very early stages….it actually did take around 40 years for businesses to figure out what to do with electricity….But this abrupt surge in unemployment among recent college graduates… makes you wonder: is that really the technology or is it something else?
October 11, 2025
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News from Neiman Lab
Publishers say generative AI is cutting into their traffic. New research shows just why they’re right.
More worrying than the “10 to 15% decline that we see coming from search referrals globally,” Matthew Monahan, president of The Washington Post’s Arc XP CMS for media companies, said… there’s a “drop in direct traffic from young audiences.”
October 10, 2025
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News from NBC
ChatGPT safety systems can be bypassed to get weapons instructions
NBC News found that OpenAI’s models repeatedly provided answers on making chemical and biological weapons. ….NBC News was able to generate hundreds of responses with instructions on how to create homemade explosives, maximize human suffering with chemical agents, create napalm, disguise a biological weapon and build a nuclear bomb. (Carolyn‘s note: in many cases, these instructions were incomplete, for example how to make a nuclear bomb.)
October 10, 2025
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News from Wonkette
Tax The Robots!
It’s the only way we’re going to survive the AI-pocalypse. If the plan is for these robots to take over all of the jobs in between C-level executives and hard manual labor, then what is everyone else supposed to do?…. a Robot Tax. Not a tax for robots to pay once they become our sentient mechanical overlords, but a tax for companies who use them to pay.
October 9, 2025
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News from Venture Beat
Samsung AI researcher’s new, open reasoning model TRM outperforms models 10,000X larger — on specific problems
Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, Senior AI Researcher at Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Montreal, Canada, has introduced the Tiny Recursion Model (TRM) — a neural network so small it contains just 7 million parameters (internal model settings), yet it competes with or surpasses cutting-edge language models 10,000 times larger… including OpenAI’s o3-mini and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, on some of the toughest reasoning benchmarks in AI research.
October 8, 2025
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News from Observer
The 22-Year-Old Founder of Viral A.I. Startup “Friend” Embraces the Backlash
Friend’s provocative marketing push has divided New Yorkers and boosted business for the young A.I. company. If you’ve taken a New York City subway recently, you’ve likely seen an advertisement for Friend… selling A.I. companionship in the form of a $129 wearable pendant…. Many of the minimalistic posters, which liken the A.I. device to a friend or roommate, have been quickly defaced with messages like “A.I. is not your friend,” “Stop profiting off of loneliness.”
October 8, 2025
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News from Axios
OpenAI’s Sora deepfakes of Robin Williams, George Carlin spark outrage
Family members of the late actor Robin Williams and comedian George Carlin urged OpenAI to restrict deepfakes of their loved ones on video-generation platform Sora….: While public figures can opt out of AI-generated videos, the likenesses of the dead are fair game, a loophole their families say desecrates their legacies.
October 8, 2025
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News from WinBuzzer
OpenAI Bans State-Backed Chinese and North Korean Accounts for Malicious AI Use
OpenAI has banned state-backed accounts from China and North Korea for using its AI for surveillance, phishing, and cyber espionage….these groups used its AI models to draft proposals for surveillance tools, develop phishing campaigns, and assist in malware creation.
October 8, 2025
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News from Bloomberg
AMD’s Su Joins the Party With OpenAI for Better or Worse
AMD products, and a huge chunk of its future growth, are now linked to [OpenAI’s] unprecedented and highly publicized expansion plans. The deal put [Chief Executive Officer Lisa ] Su in an unusual situation. Instead of talking about her company’s steady progress, she found herself defending an explosion in spending on technology that’s increasingly causing concern.
October 8, 2025
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News from Bloomberg
OpenAI, Nvidia Fuel $1 Trillion AI Market With Web of Circular Deals
A wave of deals and partnerships are escalating concerns that the trillion-dollar AI boom is being propped up by interconnected business transactions….Never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains largely unproven as an avenue for profit-making.
October 7, 2025
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News from Curmudgucation
Saving Time With AI
AI will help save teachers time. Here are a few things to keep in mind the next time you hear this pitch. https://educationrecoded.org/7-ways-ai-helps-teachers-save-time-on-lesson-planning/
….AI, which will save you all this time doing things like creating lesson plans, once you get better at creating prompts. Except that you will need to double check every single thing it extrudes, because all it will do is make stuff up.
October 7, 2025
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News from Axios
AI power demand to grow tenfold by 2030, new report says
…according to a new report from global risk firm DNV….The report argues that even with this growth, AI’s share of global electricity is unlikely to exceed 3% by 2040, staying below demand from sectors such as electric vehicle charging and building cooling.
October 7, 2025
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News from Axios
AI video apps are a scammer’s goldmine
This problem is ubiquitous,” Matthew Moynahan, CEO of GetReal Security, which helps customers identify deepfakes and forgeries, told Axios. “It’s like air, it’s going to live everywhere.”
October 7, 2025
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News from Bloomberg
AMD Inks Chip Deal With OpenAI That Triggers Explosive Rally
… OpenAI will deploy 6 gigawatts’ worth of AMD graphics processing units over multiple years, according to the pact….There are also risks: It further ties AMD’s prosperity to an AI market that some worry is in a bubble.
October 7, 2025
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News from The Associated Press
Deloitte to partially refund Australian government for report with apparent AI-generated errors
Deloitte Australia will partially refund the 440,000 Australian dollars ($290,000) paid by the Australian government for a report that was littered with apparent AI-generated errors, including a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment and references to nonexistent academic research papers.
October 7, 2025
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News from Observer
Machine Intuition: Can A.I. Out-Innovate Human Strategy?
The future of strategic thinking lies at the crossroads of human insight and machine imagination….he question for leadership is no longer whether A.I. can imitate the past. It is whether machines can meaningfully extend the frontier of invention—and how executives should organize decision-making when they do.
October 7, 2025
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News from Big Think
AI adoption rates look weak — but the data hides a bigger story
Behind the plateau in corporate AI lies a surge in personal and agentic use. Recent reports found that U.S. companies are reducing their use of AI, and that 95% of firms are seeing “zero return.” But individual use of AI, both in and outside of work, seems to be rising.
October 6, 2025
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News from Observer
OpenAI Overhauls Copyright Policy After Sora 2’s Pokémon Mania Backfires
After Sora 2 flooded social media with A.I.-generated Pokémon videos, OpenAI faced backlash and overhauled its copyright policy.
October 6, 2025
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News from SiliconAngle
Google DeepMind unveils CodeMender, an AI agent that autonomously patches software vulnerabilities
Alphabet Inc.’s Google DeepMind lab today shared results for CodeMender, an artificial intelligence-powered agent that automatically detects, patches and rewrites vulnerable code to prevent future exploits. CodeMember builds on DeepMind’s … Big Sleep and OSS-Fuzz, by combining the reasoning power of Gemini Deep Think models with advanced program analysis techniques.
October 6, 2025
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News from Axios
OpenAI reboots its ChatGPT app effort
OpenAI on Monday announced a new approach to apps within ChatGPT. The company says it will make it easier for developers to reach users and earn revenue…. The new ChatGPT apps are based on the open source Model Context Protocol….initial apps include Spotify, Canva, Zillow and Coursera. The first wave of these apps will be available today….OpenAI released guidelines and tools today and plans to let more developers list apps later this year.
October 6, 2025`
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News from TechCrunch
MrBeast says AI could threaten creators’ livelihoods, calling it ‘scary times’ for the industry
Top YouTube creator MrBeast is worried about AI’s impact on creators’ livelihoods, despite having dabbled with using the technology himself. On Monday, the creator posted his concerns on social media, where he openly wondered how AI-generated videos could affect the “millions of creators currently making content for a living….“Scary times,” he added.
October 6, 2025
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News from Winbuzzer
Musk’s High-Stakes Gamble: xAI’s Billion-Dollar Bid to Build the World’s Biggest AI Supercomputer in Memphis
Elon Musk’s xAI is building… a multi-billion dollar project facing financial pressure and a federal environmental lawsuit….the gamble is fraught with peril. xAI faces internal turmoil with executive departures, immense financial pressure, and a federal lawsuit from the NAACP over alleged illegal air pollution.
October 6, 2025
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News from the Buletin ofthe Atomic ScientistsHow AI can—and cannot—improve verification of the Biological Weapons Convention
In his address to the UN General Assembly, US president Donald Trump announced his intention to “lead an international effort to enforce the Biological Weapons Convention … by pioneering an AI verification system that everyone can trust.” High-level attention from the United States and other countries to this 50-year-old treaty, particularly on a measure to address the current verification deficit, should be welcomed.
October 6, 2025
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News from Bloomberg
Why Fears of a Trillion-Dollar AI Bubble Are Growing
Investors have parted with unprecedented sums of money to help AI fulfill its lofty promise. But no one really knows how it will all pay off….warnings of a speculative bubble that could rival the dot-com craze of the late 1990s that ended in a spectacular crash and a wave of bankruptcies.
October 6, 2025
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News from Axios
OpenAI to pour billions into chipmaker AMD
… ChatGPT-maker potentially taking up to a 10% share of the U.S. semiconductor firm…. OpenAI said it expects to have the first 1 gigawatt (out of a projected 6 total) of AMD’s Instinct processors up and running in the second half of 2026.
October 6, 2025
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News from Bloomberg (not paywalled)
AI Health Startup Heidi Gets Point72 Funds at $465 Million Value
Heidi, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to automate administrative work for doctors, has raised $65 million in a new funding round led by billionaire Steve Cohen’s Point72 Private Investments.
October 5, 2025
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News from Meidasplus
Make America Deepfaked Again
AI isn’t just reshaping politics; it’s erasing reality itself. With Trump weaponizing synthetic media to inflate his image, America risks losing the very ability to know truth from fiction….America’s president is leading a government shutdown while spending his midnight hours reposting deepfakes. And millions of people can’t tell what’s real anymore.
October 5, 2025
