AI Reading for Thursday July 17

Elon Musk teases AI anime boyfriend based on Edward Cullen (did they license Twilight IP?) - The Verge

Grok AI is facing backlash for hallucinations, political extremism, and controversial NSFW waifu chatbot features - VICE

OpenAI and Anthropic researchers decry 'reckless' safety culture at Elon Musk's xAI - TechCrunch

xAI says Grok 4 is no longer searching for Musk's views before it answers - THE DECODER

Grok's new porn companion is rated for kids 12+ in the App Store - Platformer

I spent 24 hours flirting with Elon Musk’s AI girlfriend. No shower can ever make me feel clean again. - The Verge

Tesla's Autopilot system is in the spotlight at a Miami trial over a student killed while stargazing - Yahoo Finance

GenAI: Over Half of Teens Regularly Use AI Companions. Here's Why That's Not Ideal - CNET

A new class of imperiled white-collar workers could radically reshape democracy. - Financial Times

Hmmh I wonder what type of politics downwardly mobile college-educated people with status anxiety, under actual cultural or economic threat, might embrace in time of crisis? Who is your waifu AI sex symbol going to encourage you to vote for?

Max Tegmark's The Future of Life Institute gave Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind poor grades on AGI safety planning. - the Guardian

now do Grok

OpenAI seems a bit unorganized, chaotic, in ex-staffer blog - Calvin French-Owen

OpenAI to build a checkout page, take cut of ChatGPT shopping sales in hunt for revenues - Financial Times

Jason Wei, who worked on OpenAI’s o1 and deep research models, will be joining Meta’s superintelligence lab. His colleague Hyung Won Chung is also joining Meta. - WIRED

AI demand powers Taiwan’s TSMC to its highest-ever quarterly profit - Financial Times

TSMC accelerates fabs while others forced to scale back - Nikkei Asia

As Nvidia gets a lifeline in China, Jensen Huang goes on the charm offensive in Beijing with trademark leather jacket - CNBC

How Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Persuaded Trump to Sell A.I. Chips to China - The New York Times

Nvidia C.E.O. Treads Carefully in Beijing - The New York Times

AI data center growth is straining Virginia’s grid and raising bills across the region - Fast Company

Apollo economist warns: AI bubble now bigger than 1990s tech mania - Yahoo Finance

A trend of reporting layoffs as part of pivot to invest more in AI ... see also Microsoft and other tech companies - WCVB

Why Bender can't code: MIT Study maps the roadblocks to autonomous software engineering - MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Robinhood CEO says >50% of new code is written by AI, with 'close to 100%' adoption from engineers for writing gamified memestock and shittoken shopping cart - Business Insider

The New Intern on Wall Street Is an AI, and It's Already Taking Jobs - Gizmodo

Claude for financial services keynote is here, demo starts around 30m - YouTube

Detecting structural heart disease from echocardiograms using an AI model, claims to outperform cardiologists - Nature

Optimizing concrete mixes with AI. Concrete is surprisingly complex, and then you add rebar reinforcement. - Engineering at Meta

Drones, AI and Robot Pickers: Meet the Fully Autonomous Farm - The Wall Street Journal

Delta moves toward eliminating set prices in favor of AI that determines how much you personally will pay for a ticket - Fortune

and then European air traffic controllers strike and hopefully the pilot doesn’t decide to turn off the engines

Slack launches AI features for jargon decoding, summarization, and action item detection - The Verge

Advanced AI options coming to Google Search: AI can now make phone calls for you - The Verge

Anthropic Hires Back Two Coding AI Leaders From Cursor Developer Anysphere. - The Information

A superintelligence grows in Brooklyn - WIRED

Gartner predicts 40% of organizations will suffer major AI security incidents by 2027, urging 'zero-trust' AI architectures. - Hacker Noon

How I used a Gmail message to trigger code execution through Claude Desktop, and how Claude itself (!) helped me plan the attack. - Pynt

(with an enabled shell MCP tool, which is a big vulnerability in most contexts so don't do that, even to have Claude debug some hairy system admin sitch)

A Robot AI Red Team in the Agent Marketplace? - SiliconANGLE

Amazon: Introducing AI agents and tools in AWS Marketplace - Amazon Web Services, Inc.

Researchers introduced speculative decoding algorithms that speed up language model token generation by up to 2.8× without reducing quality. - The Register

Waze cofounder predicts the next generation 'will not drive' - Business Insider

Stephen Wolfram on AI, human-like minds & formal knowledge - YouTube

Robots in China are riding the subway to make 7-Eleven deliveries. - Popular Science

Won't survive Philly.

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