AI Reading for Wednesday July 9

xAI disabled Grok briefly, deleted a slew of its antisemitic and neo-Nazi posts, posted a statement, and are evidently rolling back the prompt that made it identify as "MechaHitler," but this new low for Elon Musk's chatbot will live in internet infamy: - Rolling Stone

Grok-4 release livestream at 5pm ET - Decrypt

Is Russia really ‘grooming’ Western AI? - Al Jazeera

Someone is, not just Russia.

The AI industry is radicalizing, tech industry and its critics occupy parallel universes. - The Atlantic

'Cheat at everything' and 'stop hiring humans' are antisocial, tech-over-humans messages.

Your browser agent can't recognize malicious sites - Ubergizmo

Agentic AI Is An Attack Surface CISOs Can’t Afford to Ignore - SecurityWeek

Likewise, AI is an attack surface pro-democracy folks can’t afford to ignore.

Trump Officials Keep Getting Targeted by video impersonation - how to protect yourself. - TIME

surely Trump’s cell phone won’t get attacked because he is way too smart for that. AI gonna start ww3 one way or another.

Mike Lindell loses $2.3m verdict in voting machine defamation case, and his lawyers were fined for AI hallucinations - Ars Technica

some people will fall for anything. the eye sees what it brings the power (and desire) to see.

AI-driven approaches are reaching retail traders and testing Wall Street's hegemony on investment technology. - Forbes

Robinhood CEO says it doesn't matter what OpenAI thinks about tokenized equity. - CNBC

Matt Levine wrote about this a while back - Bloomberg

See also, the crazy story of DXYZ, which is a closed-end fund that owns private stock in startups. Hey it worked for Chris Sacca. - Bloomberg

dumb money is still dumb money even if it uses AI

OpenAI hires from Tesla, xAI and Meta - WIRED

Sam Altman rolls up to Sun Valley, gets buttonholed, says he is looking forward to running into Mark Zuckerberg. - Bloomberg

Mountainhead part deux, make it interesting and vote someone off the island every year

An interview with Karen Hao about her book on OpenAI - MIT Technology Review

People who don't know how stuff works are very worried about OpenAI's finances. - Futurism

OpenAI could blow up, over governance/key man risk. They have been riding the tiger so far but the edge is slim and a lot of smart people are gunning for them. Altman has a lot of grandiosity, smarminess, idiosyncrasies, might be the right guy for 0 to 1 but not for 1 to infinity.

Anthropic, the AI company that wants government rules on transparency and stuffs - Politico

Researcher says tech could replace nearly all human labour within 20 years and societies urgently need to prepare - the Guardian

Hertz AI Scanner Charges $350 for Tiny 'Dings' on Rental (that were maybe there before) and This Is Going Off the Rails - The Drive

Robo-doctors don't take you seriously if you don't speak good, just like real doctors - Futurism

What made the Texas flash flood so deadly and how AI could improve forecasting. - Northeastern Global News

Shouldn’t really happen in a time of pervasive telecoms. Should invest in

• no mobile dead zones even in remote areas

• proper notification system that isn't abused for dumb alerts and politics

• if you need a phone to get basic government services, a super cheap one + minimal service should be mandated

Big Tech makes so much money, a little responsibility would go a long way. instead we get memes and people who don’t believe in climate change talking about the deep state controlling the weather, it’s so pervasive even MTG is even introducing a bill. how can people be so truth-challenged when information is free?

AI is driving down the price of knowledge – universities have to rethink what they offer - The Conversation

Just bots talking to bots: AI is running rampant on college campuses as students and professors alike lean on the tech. - Fortune

AI can predict mutations from slides, that would otherwise require genetic testing. - Medical Xpress

Turning your iPhone into a microscope with AI - Hacker Noon

Can AI help detect doping in sports? - euronews

There is a phenomenon of tech retconning, you could test old slides. If you hoover up all the encrypted comms, you can probably decrypt them 20 years from now with more quantum compute. If you plagiarize your book or thesis, AI will catch up to you.

1,000-pound wheels and robots now farming Dyson strawberries - New Atlas

LangChain is raising a new round at about $1 billion valuation led by IVP, as LangSmith and LangGraph gain traction. - TechCrunch

Amazing for POCs, overall they lack focus and execution is spotty. Architecture astronauts try to be all things to all people. But stuff doesn't always work as expected and documentation and support is sketchy.

Google’s Veo 3 Floods AI With Slop, Spawns a Slop-Coach Cottage Industry - Gizmodo

Slop whisperer, the AI job of the future

Zoom’s new Meta Quest app lets you take video calls in VR, as an avatar - The Verge

I lost my software engineer job in May and have taken up welding. I'm happy to leave the tech industry — AI has changed it. - Business Insider

"learn to weld" is the new "learn to code"

Beyond the Prototype: 15 Hard-Earned Lessons to Ship Production-Ready AI Agents - Hacker Noon

An AI-generated gaming YouTuber has 2.5m subs - Futurism

what happens when you give 2 AIs different personalities and have them talk to each other? the less sycophantic wins presumably - Hacker Noon

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