Elon Musk bought Twitter saying civilization needed a "common digital town square." Four years later, it's more like a live group chat for Silicon Valley's AI obsessives . Why it matters: Two years ago, X was fighting off competition from a slew of new entrants. Today, it remains relevant by becoming more niche. - The people making AI news are often debating it, explaining it and occasionally breaking it on X before the rest of the information ecosystem catches up. State of play: New model releases, research papers, demos, hiring moves, high-profile executive exits and technical arguments ricochet through X in real time. - The latest viral example came Tuesday when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation on X, along…
AI researchers shook the world Tuesday when they publicly acknowledged that there's a non-zero chance of AI killing off humanity in the next decade. Why it matters: AI doomsday fears have existed for years, but as the technology has become more powerful and embedded in our lives, those warnings are breaking into the mainstream. State of play: Anthropic researchers are sounding the alarm that rogue versions of superintelligent AI could destroy humanity. - Anthropic's Jacob Coxon wrote on X: "No other human activity poses this level of danger." So how would AI kill us all, exactly? Experts generally worry about two broad paths to catastrophe: humans weaponizing extremely powerful AI, or humans losing control of it. - In these scenarios,…
Executive summary China-based artificial intelligence (AI) companies are conducting systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. AI companies’ models through industrial-scale knowledge distillation campaigns that form the core—not merely a supplement—of their AI development strategy. While “distillation” is recognized as a legitimate and useful technique in AI research, China-based AI companies are engaging in aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale that extract restricted proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. frontier AI models. The National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau…
OpenAI's ChatGPT , Anthropic's Claude, and xAI's Grok are all down Thursday morning, according to the outage company Downdetector. Why it matters: Outages are common, but it's unusual for all three to go down at once, especially as the world increasingly relies on AI models. - There have also been reported issues with Google's Gemini, but the company has not issued a confirmed outage notice. Editor's note: This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
The War Department increased its artificial intelligence offerings by launching versions of Grok and ChatGPT to GenAI.mil to go alongside Google's Gemini.
Originally posted by The University of Texas at Austin Civitas Institute
Some AI systems appear to have been trained to handle anti-Semitism in a way that is at once serious and shallow. Most name-brand public AI assistants understate or deny ideological guardrails that push biases, censor facts, and twist narratives. More than 99 percent of users accept these falsehoods without pushback, according to Perplexity, one of the more reliable public-facing AI chatbots. And so built-in narratives, churned through authoritative- and neutral-sounding AI platforms with an air of sophistication and certainty, become further embedded into the public psyche. These household-name AI companies rely so heavily on Wikipedia to train their artificial intelligence that they cannot, or will not, escape its gravitational pull. As…Open
Elon Musk’s controversial chatbot, Grok, is notorious for polluting the “cloud” with deepfakes and racist content. But in the Memphis metropolitan area, it’s under fire for literally polluting the air. MS NOW's Josh Einiger reports from the Tennessee-Mississippi border, where Grok’s “supercomputer” is located in massive data centers.
Elon Musk’s controversial chatbot, Grok, is notorious for polluting the “cloud” with sexual deepfakes and racist content. But in the Memphis metropolitan area, it’s under fire for literally polluting the air. Grok’s “supercomputer” is located in massive data centers on the Tennessee-Mississippi border, powered by dozens of gas-burning turbines emitting harmful particulate matter linked to asthma, lung cancer and heart attacks. In April, the NAACP sued xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech, claiming the fleet of turbines violates the Clean Air Act, by taking advantage of a loophole of sorts: Because their turbines are technically on wheels, Mississippi law considers them “portable” and not subject to permitting constraints,…
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have muscled their way back into AI's elite ranks, defying early obituaries to close the gap on a new generation of Silicon Valley startups. Why it matters: Recent gains by tech giants SpaceX and Meta — long stuck in AI's second tier — are putting new pressure on a hierarchy dominated by OpenAI and Anthropic. State of play: Both companies released models this week featuring a combination of performance and price that would have been hard to imagine from either lab a year ago. - SpaceX's Grok 4.6 scored essentially even with OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol Max on the closely watched Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index , and just behind Anthropic's Fable 5 Max. - Promising "something special," Musk said Grok…
AI:Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have aggressively re-entered the elite AI arms race by leveraging the massive scale of their respective empires to challenge the dominance of OpenAI and Anthropic. Musk has integrated xAI into SpaceX in a $60 billion move, utilizing proprietary data and immense computing power to push Grok 4.6 to performance levels rivaling GPT-5.6, with even more advanced iterations expected imminently. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is pivoting Meta toward "superintelligence for everyone" by focusing on high-performance, low-cost models like Muse Glimmer that can run locally, a strategy backed by a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI. As the battle shifts from raw intelligence to cost-effectiveness and resource deployment, these…Open
