From “Struggling to Deploy AI Weapons” through “if OpenAI can’t pay Oracle, Oracle can’t pay NVIDIA, NVIDIA’s stock crashes, and suddenly 25% of the S&P 500 is in freefall.”
News from the Wall St. Journal (unlocked article)
U.S. Military Is Struggling to Deploy AI Weapons
The work is being shifted to a new organization, called DAWG, to accelerate plans to buy thousands of drones.
September 26, 2025
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News from Foreign Affairs
The Cost of the AGI Delusion: By Chasing Superintelligence, America Is Falling Behind in the Real AI Race
…top technologists, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and computer science professors Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, have been dreaming of constructing superintelligent systems for decades—as well as fearing them…. the hype has grown out of proportion. Given the limitations of existing systems, it is unlikely that superintelligence is actually imminent…. The United States should therefore treat the AI race with China like a marathon, not a sprint.
September 26, 2025
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News from the Wall St. Journal (unlocked article)
Walmart CEO Issues Wake-Up Call: ‘AI Is Going to Change Literally Every Job’
Walmart executives aren’t sugarcoating the message: Artificial intelligence will wipe out jobs and reshape its workforce.
September 26, 2025
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News from the Wall St. Journal
Spending on AI Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?
Tech companies pour hundreds of billions into data centers, taking on heavy debt, but current revenue is relatively tiny; echoes of dot-com bubble….The building rush is effectively a mega-speculative bet that the technology will rapidly improve, transform the economy and start producing steady profits.
September 25, 2025
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News from The Power Law
OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Oracle: Breaking Down $100B Bets on AGI
….a $400+ billion web of circular financing deals between OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Oracle that makes everyone’s valuations contingent on AGI arriving on schedule. This financial engineering has transformed 25% of the S&P 500 into a leveraged bet that AI scaling will continue unabated through 2030. The math only works if AGI arrives before the money runs out…. Oracle signed a $300 billion, five-year computing power deal with OpenAI. The contract was the largest cloud deal ever signed. The resulting bump in Oracle stock briefly made Oracle CEO Larry Ellison the world’s richest man…. This leads to what Semianalysis’s Dylan Patel calls the “Infinite Money Glitch”…. Critically, the same money moves around in just one circle, but all of a sudden everyone’s valuations go up. It’s a virtuous cycle — as long as the music keeps playing…When everyone is both buyer and seller in circular deals, you’ve created massive correlation risk. If OpenAI can’t pay Oracle, Oracle can’t pay NVIDIA, NVIDIA’s stock crashes, and suddenly 25% of the S&P 500 is in freefall.
September 25, 2025
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News from Observer
The New Patronage: A.I., Algorithms and the Economics of Creativity
As production costs collapse, platforms and algorithms, not patrons or studios, decide who gets paid…. As generative A.I. turns production into a near-commodity, cultural power is shifting from studios and galleries to the platforms that allocate attention and the algorithms that determine who gets paid. The new patrons are not moguls with checkbooks; they are recommendation systems tuned for engagement and brand safety.
September 24, 2025
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News from the New Yorker
The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Browser
Artificial-intelligence startups, like the makers of the “smart” web browser Dia, are being acquired for vast sums. But it’s not yet clear which products can transcend the hype.
September 24, 2025
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When AI Feels Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Empathy
Artificial intelligence is becoming emotionally intelligent….. Emotional attachment to AI can blur boundaries, deepen dependency, and weaken human-to-human connections…. AI tutors can provide encouragement to struggling students…. Documented cases have shown AI failing to intervene in harmful situations, or worse, encouraging self-destructive behaviors.
September 23, 2025
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News from Gizmodo
‘Workslop’: AI-Generated Work Content Is Slowing Everything Down
AI slop has infiltrated the workplace, costing companies time and money.
September 23, 2025
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News from Axios
Exclusive: Meta launches super PAC to fight AI regulation
Meta launched a new super PAC on Tuesday to help fight off what it sees as onerous AI and tech policy bills across the country….The super PAC is called the American Technology Excellence Project, and Meta spokesperson Rachel Holland said the company is investing in the “tens of millions” into the project.
Holland said it’s meant to fend off what the company sees as poorly crafted state-level tech policy proposals — with 1,100 introduced just this year — that could hurt the U.S. in the AI race with China.
September 23, 2025
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News from Curmudgucation
“Should People Be Polite To AI?”
…is, unfortunately, a real question featured in the latest issue of Time For Kids…. why are we even asking this question at all? Would an editor have said, “Hey, let’s ask kids if people should be polite to their toaster-oven.” ….To even ask the question is to presume that a chatbot is a sentient entity. It is not. The correct answer is “This is a silly question,” but the second best answer is, “Absolutely not, because we surely do not need to train young humans to think of this soulless word-extruding machine as a thinking, feeling being.”
September 23, 2025
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News from Canadian Dimension
Water woes from data centres
As AI expands, data centres are draining local water supplies and sparking global conflicts over scarce resources…. Despite frequent media coverage with headlines like “AI is draining water from areas that need it most,” actual figures on water use remain uncertain…. water scarcity is local: investments in replenishment elsewhere do not help communities losing access to water from rivers and aquifers. (Carolyn’s note: Where I live, we say whisky’s for drinkin’ and water’s for fightin’.)
September 22, 2025
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News from the Harvard Business Review
Generative AI…“Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appears polished but lacks real substance…
September 22, 2025
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News from Bloomberg
Nvidia to Invest $100 Billion in OpenAI for Data Centers
….The investment is intended to help OpenAI build data centers with a capacity of 10 gigawatts of power using Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to train and deploy OpenAI’s models….OpenAI’s ChatGPT is used by roughly 700 million people weekly and takes an intensive amount of computing power to service and build its products
September 22, 2025
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News from Slowboring
American students are getting dumber
It started before Covid, and it keeps getting worse….the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading scores for 12th graders… the worst recorded since 1992.
No demographic subgroups registered a statistically significant increase… the fall existed across the entire ability distribution — the kids in the lowest percentiles experienced the biggest drop, but even the kids in the top percentiles are doing a little worse than they were 10 years ago….in Japan they are following a similar trajectory to the United States but the declines are less severe. https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/shotou/gakuryoku-chousa/sonota/1419141_00007.htm
September 22, 2025
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News from Commonplace
Tim Estes: AI, Dignity, and the Defense of the American Family
A recent study in the Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/5cd77ef0-b546-4105-8946-36db3f84dc43 ….” tracked the personalities of young adults.… For Americans aged 18-29, conscientiousness—the trait associated with diligence, perseverance, and self-control—is in “freefall.”… A smartphone-based childhood…. is not a free market at work…. This is the deliberate engineering of addiction for profit…. They are treating our kids’ developing minds as raw material to be mined for engagement.
September 21, 2025
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News from MSM
Goodwill’s CEO [Steve Preston, formerly a Secretary of Housing and Urban Development] says he’s preparing for an influx of jobless Gen Zers because of AI—and warns, a youth unemployment crisis is already happening
…. Call centers and sales roles are being particularly hard hit right now…. “I don’t know that it’ll be catastrophic, but I do think we’re going to see a significant reduction in a number of jobs. I think it’s going to hit low wage workers especially hard.”
September 21, 2025.
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