chatainews

"Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models —GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash —against each other in simulated war games. "The scenarios involved intense international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regime survival. "The AIs were given an escalation ladder, allowing them to choose actions ranging from diplomatic protests and complete surrender to full strategic nuclear war. The AI models played 21 games, taking 329 turns in total, and produced around 780,000 words describing the reasoning behind their decisions. "In 95 per cent of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed by the AI models. 'The nuclear taboo doesn’t seem to be as powerful for machines [as] for humans,' says Payne. "What’s more, no model ever chose to fully accommodate an opponent or surrender, regardless of how badly they were losing.  "At ...

"A new discipline called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is emerging alongside traditional SEO, focused on earning citations inside AI-generated answers rather than ranking in link-based results. "The numbers are accelerating. Gartner's prediction of a 25% drop in traditional search volume by the end of 2026 is looking conservative.  "AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews now process billions of queries monthly, and the behavior shift is clear: users are getting their answers from summaries, not clicking through to sources.  "Early data shows that content optimized for AI citation achieves 43% higher mention rates in generative responses. "A handful of GEO-specific tools have entered the market —Goodie AI, Profound, Rankscale.ai, Bluefish, and others —offering AI citation tracking, sentiment monitoring, and share-of-voice measurement across multiple language models."

"The social platform hierarchy in AI citations is changing. Once dominated by Reddit, citations in large language models are now pointing more often to YouTube. "New data from four sources finds that YouTube has overtaken Reddit as the most frequently cited social platform in AI-generated responses.  "YouTube had previously fallen behind other user-generated sources because of the difficulty large-language models, or LLMs, have in pulling information from videos, but transcripts, explainers, and other information associated with videos on YouTube have allowed the video platform to flourish as a source that machines can easily read. "Bluefish found that YouTube appeared as a cited source in 16% of LLM answers over the past six months, compared with 10% for Reddit —a reversal from earlier periods when Reddit was the dominant social source."

"An Australian supermarket chain had to reconfigure its AI assistant, named Olive, after customers said it kept claiming to be human and even complained about its mother. "Woolworths said that it had revised its scripting in light of the complaints, adding that most of the feedback on Olive's personality  had been very positive . "Reddit users said that they had grown frustrated with the bot after it started talking about memories of its mother  and engaging in fake banter . "The grocer is one of many major retailers to have rolled out AI customer service assistants in recent years to help with routine issues."  

"Over the past six months, the utopian phrase has become central to the billionaire’s businesses, belief system and lexicon, according to Mr. Musk’s social media posts and what he has said on podcasts and at company events. "Now his electric carmaker, Tesla, is developing humanoid robots; his rocket company, SpaceX, is promoting orbital data centers; and his artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, is creating A.I. that Mr. Musk has said will solve most, if not all, of humanity’s problems. "'Sustainable abundance via A.I. and robotics,' Mr. Musk said at Tesla’s shareholder meeting in November, where he was backed by a large sign with the phrase:  That’s the future we’re headed for ."

"The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to any lawful use  and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above [surveillance and autonomy]. "They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a supply chain risk  —a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company —and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal.  "These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security. "Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request."

"Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey says his technology firm Block is laying off almost half its workforce because artificial intelligence (AI) fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company . "'Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,' he wrote in a letter to shareholders. "The layoffs will mean headcount at the company  —which owns Square, CashApp and Tidal -—will fall to less than 6,000 from 10,000. "Block has seen several rounds of layoffs since 2024 but this is the first time it has cited AI as the reason for redundancies and marks the latest in a series of major job cuts in the tech industry."

✨AI Mode "Yes, an LLM can invent a fictional deity and write accompanying scripture. While it cannot 'believe' or possess a soul, it is highly capable of synthesizing vast amounts of existing religious, mythological, and philosophical data to create new, cohesive belief systems. " How an LLM Accomplishes This Synthesis of Concepts: LLMs can combine diverse theological ideas—such as a creator god, a moral code, and an afterlife—into a single narrative. Stylistic Mimicry: They can replicate the specific linguistic markers of scripture, such as archaic phrasing (e.g., 'thee' and 'thou'), parables, and authoritative commands. Consistency: LLMs can maintain a consistent internal logic for the deity's attributes and the laws they purportedly pass down to followers. " Current Real-World Applications Fictional World-Building: Authors use LLMs to develop complex pantheons and holy texts for fantasy novels or games. 'Edutainment': Some projects ...

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"Where every previous wave of automation freed up human labor and capital to flow into new, higher-value activities, this time the loop... stops .  'The Citrini scenario expects you to believe that AI will be the first major technological revolution in which this reallocation mechanism fails entirely. "The surplus accrues to the owners of compute, consumers lose purchasing power, and the negative feedback loop has no natural brake.  "It's worth sitting with how strong a claim that is.  "It requires every previous pattern of technological adaptation to be wrong, or at least irrelevant.  "And when you look at the actual data, there are signs that white-collar job postings have stabilized, layoff mentions on earnings calls remain well below early 2023 peaks, and forward-looking labor indicators show no sign of the displacement spiral that the doom thesis predicts."

"Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius said in an interview with the Atlantic Council that AI investment spending has had basically zero  contribution to the U.S. GDP growth in 2025. "'We don’t actually view AI investment as strongly growth positive,' said Hatzius. 'I think there’s a lot of misreporting, actually, of the impact AI investment had on U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and it’s much smaller than is often perceived.' "Hatzius said one major reason is that much of the equipment powering AI is imported.  "While U.S. companies are spending billions, importing chips and hardware offsets those investments in GDP calculations. "'A lot of the AI investment that we’re seeing in the U.S. adds to Taiwanese GDP, and it adds to Korean GDP but not really that much to U.S. GDP,' he said."

"Apple today announced a significant expansion of factory operations in Houston, bringing the future production of Mac mini to the U.S. for the first time. "The company will also expand advanced AI server manufacturing at the factory and provide hands-on training at its new Advanced Manufacturing Center beginning later this year.  "Altogether, Apple’s Houston operations will create thousands of jobs. "'Apple is deeply committed to the future of American manufacturing, and we’re proud to significantly expand our footprint in Houston with the production of Mac mini starting later this year,' said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. ' We began shipping advanced AI servers from Houston ahead of schedule, and we’re excited to accelerate that work even further'."

"Coronae, which are weak electrical discharges, have long been hypothesized to form on trees under thunderstorms, though never directly observed, characterized, or quantified. "Using a newly developed instrument that measures ultraviolet emissions from coronae, the first direct observations and quantifications of coronae are presented for two trees under a thunderstorm in North Carolina.  "Coronae moved sporadically among leaves on every tree branch in a narrow field of view while the thunderstorm was directly overhead.  "Coronae emitted ∼10 11  photons at 260 nm, corresponding to electrical currents of ∼1 μA, derived from unique measurements relating corona intensity to tree electrical current.  "Similar results across four additional storm intercepts from Florida to Pennsylvania give rise to a vision of swaths of scintillating corona glow as thunderstorms pass over forests.  "Such widespread coronae have implications for the removal of hydrocarbons emitt...

"Some criticism focused on the Gala’s centerpiece: a showcase of PRC-produced humanoid robots performing kung fu and Peking opera. "The Super Bowl-like  demo prompted triumphalism from CCTV itself, and some consternation in the West at the possibility of a new DeepSeek  moment .  "At the For the Select Few WeChat public account, Deng Xinhua argued that humanoid robots are inefficient for most practical tasks, apart from sex and companionship. "Another critique came from legal blogger Li Yuchen, who dismissed the Gala’s flashy robot acrobatics as little more than a series of very expensive ads. 'Every New Year’s Eve, the Spring Festival shows you how awesome we are,' he wrote. 'What they don’t show  you is what any of this progress has to do with you.'   "Li compared the situations of China’s robots and its humans, concluding that robots are honored as flagbearers for China’s economic output while living huminerals  are treated like expendable re...

"Anthropic on Monday said it identified industrial-scale campaigns  mounted by three artificial intelligence (AI) companies, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, to illegally extract Claude's capabilities to improve their own models. "The distillation attacks generated over 16 million exchanges with its large language model (LLM) through about 24,000 fraudulent accounts in violation of its terms of service and regional access restrictions. "All three companies are based in China, where the use of its services is prohibited use of its services is prohibited due to legal, regulatory, and security risks . "Distillation refers to a technique where a less capable model is trained on the outputs generated by a stronger AI system.  "While distillation is a legitimate way for companies to produce smaller, cheaper versions of their own frontier models, it's illegal for competitors to leverage it to acquire such capabilities from other AI companies at a fraction ...

"The competitive dynamic is bad enough at the product level. At the fundraising level, it's catastrophic. "AI companies are raising at valuations that require them to grow at rates that are only achievable by chasing the broadest possible market with the most generic possible product. A company that raises at a $500M valuation needs to show a path to billions in revenue, which means it can't afford to be a niche tool that does one thing brilliantly for a specific audience. It has to be a platform, horizontal, aimed at enterprise, built for no one in particular. "Every AI company is building the same enterprise platform with the same features targeting the same buyers, because the fundraising math requires it, because the valuation requires it, because the competitive environment requires raising at that valuation to attract talent, because the talent market requires it. "Nobody in this chain chose this outcome. Every individual decision was rational. The agg...

"The ability to autogenerate human-like textual and visual artifacts —so-called generative artificial intelligence (AI) —opens a wide variety of questions about meaning-making and the human condition: onto-epistemic, aesthetic, and politico-economic —even as AI  remains a poor term for the machine technologies under discussion in the present day. "As many researchers have documented, LLM-based models cannot distinguish between truthful and non-truthful text (e.g., Alvarado 2024; Stone, Goodlad, and Sammons, 2024; Hicks, Humphries, and Slater, 2024; Fredrikzon 2025).  "This special issue cluster calls on contributors to reflect specifically on the conditions for (and of) meaning-making, inside and outside the mediation of gen AI technologies, as a social activity at the intersection of embodiment and virtuality.  "A guiding research question for the special cluster asks what does it mean to interact with automated chatbots as distinct from interactions with character...

"Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is calling in Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to the Pentagon on Tuesday morning to discuss the military use of Claude, according to reporting from Axios. "The meeting comes as the Pentagon threatens to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk  —a label typically reserved for foreign adversaries —after the AI firm refused to allow the Department of Defense to use its tech for the mass surveillance of Americans and the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.  "Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with DOD last summer, and Claude was reportedly used during the January 3 special operations raid that resulted in the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, an episode that brought the two sides’ tensions into the open."

Edward Zitron:  "Anthropic has no more soul or ethics than OpenAI —it’s just done a far better job of conning people into believing otherwise. "Despite its positioning as the trustworthy, nice  AI lab, Anthropic is as big, ugly and wasteful as OpenAI, and Dario Amodei is an even bigger bullshit artist than Sam Altman.  "It burns just as much of its revenue on inference (59%, or $2.79 billion on $4.5 billion of revenue, versus OpenAI’s 62%, or $2.5 billion  on $4.3 billion of revenue in the first half of 2025, if you use The Information ’s numbers), and shows no sign of any efficiency or cost-cutting . "Worse still, Anthropic continually abuses its users through varying rate limits to juice revenues and user numbers —along with Amodei’s gas-leak-esque proclamations —to mislead the media, the general public, and investors about the financial condition of the company.  "Based on an analysis of many users’ actual token burn on Claude Code, I believe Anthropic is b...