The A.I. Boom Is Stress-Testing America’s Power Grid As data center demand surges across Northern Virginia, Texas and beyond, A.I. is accelerating a long-overdue overhaul of America’s energy system.
David Isenberg brings us “AI version of 1960s Kung fu DragonBall Z,” “Stress-Testing America’s Power Grid,” “AI Chatbots Are Even Worse at Giving Medical Advice Than We Thought,” Elon Musk’s promises of “Moon cities and space catapults,” and much more.
News from AI Impact Smart Brief
Humans can’t hold back the flood of AI slopped research
February 17, 2025
Both the scientific and research communities are being flooded with low-quality, AI-generated submissions sent directly into numerous scientific paper publishing pipelines. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Cornell University produced a study that illustrated AI tools helping researchers…were “of marginal scientific merit.” … straining human review.
This Nature article points to Raphael Wimmer, a researcher at the University of Regensburg in Germany who used OpenAI’s Prism to AI an experiment with a supporting paper — in 54 seconds. He posted the evidence to his Bluesky account. Prism is one of a myriad of AI tools that …clog the scientific paper publishing plumbing….
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Pentagon threatens Anthropic punishment
February 17, 2025
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “close” to cutting business ties with Anthropic and designating the AI company a “supply chain risk” — meaning anyone who wants to do business with the U.S. military has to cut ties with the company, a senior Pentagon official told Axios. The senior official said: “It will be an enormous pain in the ass to disentangle, and we are going to make sure they pay a price for forcing our hand like this.”
Why it matters: That kind of penalty is usually reserved for foreign adversaries.
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The AI Middle
We have an opportunity to turn the emergent AI economy into a prosperity engine that benefits most of us, rather than the economic bloodbath it is on track to become. Here’s how.
February 16, 2026
We’ve hit an interesting milestone with the economic and social impact of AI. The predicted pivot of the AI companies from pursuing intelligence (AGI/ASI) to autonomous social AIs is bearing fruit. In response, millions of people, many of whom you may know, are now building AI agents (an early step toward autonomy) that can superempower their ability to perform their jobs, pursue new entrepreneurial opportunities, and improve their health and wellness.
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AI film school trains next generation of Hollywood moviemakers
February 14, 2026
Laid-off and sidelined by last year’s production slowdown, Hollywood visual‑effects veteran Michael Eng discovered a gap in his resume while perusing job listings in Los Angeles — experience in machine learning. Eng turned to Curious Refuge, an online school teaching filmmaking powered by artificial intelligence, in a bid to reinvent his career amid the industry’s rapid technological shift.
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The A.I. Boom Is Stress-Testing America’s Power Grid
As data center demand surges across Northern Virginia, Texas and beyond, A.I. is accelerating a long-overdue overhaul of America’s energy system.
February 13, 2026
Artificial intelligence has quickly become the focal point of nearly every major technology debate today—the safety of each system’s model, algorithmic bias and its impact on the future of work. The challenge isn’t theoretical. Beneath those headline concerns lie a more immediate concern: power. A.I. systems require continuous, power-dense computation at a scale few industries have ever demanded, and the infrastructure supplying that power is already under strain.
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MiniMax M2.5 promises “intelligence too cheap to meter” as Chinese labs squeeze Western AI pricing
February 13, 2026
Chinese AI company MiniMax has released M2.5, an open-weights model under MIT license that can autonomously plan and execute tasks without constant human guidance.
In benchmarks, M2.5 scores 80.2% on SWE-Bench Verified for programming and outperforms Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5.2, and Gemini 3 Pro on web search and office tasks, at ten to twenty times lower cost…. It can also handle Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files quickly and smoothly, according to the company.
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Democrats run on AI policy in 2026
February 13, 2026
A growing number of Democrats are putting AI regulation at the heart of their 2026 campaigns, making it a defining issue for the next Congress…. The Democrats campaigning on AI policy now could be the ones writing the rules for it in the next Congress…. As AI’s rapid advancements sound alarms even from within the ranks of AI companies, the Trump administration has embraced a very hands-off approach to the technology, and Congress has not passed major AI legislation.
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Anthropic donates $20M to pro-regulation groups
February 13, 2026
Anthropic is putting $20M into the 2026 midterm elections by donating to Public First Action, a bipartisan group supporting candidates who back AI regulation. The move puts Anthropic in direct opposition to rivals like OpenAI, whose executives have backed groups opposing stricter AI rules…. The organization was created to counter “Leading the Future,” a PAC backed by OpenAI’s Greg Brockman and Marc Andreessen that has raised $125M to oppose AI regulations.
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UN approves 40-member scientific panel on the impact of artificial intelligence over US objections
February 12, 2026
The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Thursday to approve a 40-member global scientific panel on the impacts and risks of artificial intelligence, with the United States strongly objecting.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who established the panel, called the adoption “a foundational step toward global scientific understanding of AI.”
“In a world where AI is racing ahead,” he said, “this panel will provide what’s been missing
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AI Chatbots Are Even Worse at Giving Medical Advice Than We Thought
Even when they have the “right” information, they can lead you astray.
February 12, 2026
It’s tempting to think that an LLM chatbot can answer any question you pose it, including those about your health. After all, chatbots have been trained on plenty of medical information, and can regurgitate it if given the right prompts. But that doesn’t mean they will give you accurate medical advice, and a new study shows how easily AI’s supposed expertise breaks down. In short, they are even worse at it than I thought.
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AI insiders are sounding the alarm
February 12, 2026
An OpenAI researcher also left this week citing ethical concerns. Another OpenAI employee, Hieu Pham, wrote on X: “I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing.”
- Jason Calacanis, tech investor and co-host of the “All-In” podcast, wrote on X: “I’ve never seen so many technologists state their concerns so strongly, frequently and with such concern as I have with AI.”
- The biggest talk among the AI crowd yesterday was entrepreneur Matt Shumer’s post comparing this moment to the eve of the pandemic. It went mega-viral, gathering 56 million views in 36 hours, as he laid out the risks of AI fundamentally reshaping our jobs and lives.
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Elon Musk’s latest promises: Moon cities and space catapults
Musk pitched a lunar industry for AI — a moon supply chain and a mass-driver launcher — plus an X growth moonshot
February 12, 2026
At a recent xAI meeting heard by The New York Times, Musk floated a plan that sounds like a late-night whiteboard session that got loose and wandered into space-age real estate. xAI, he suggested, may eventually need a factory on the moon to build AI satellites, and a giant electromagnetic mass driver — a space catapult — to launch them into orbit. His reasoning, at least as reported, was simple and stark. “You have to go to the moon,” Musk said.
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Computer, Enhance
People keep running crime footage through AI thinking they’re helping. They’re not.
February 12, 2026
Nancy Guthrie… was last seen at her home outside Tucson on the evening of January 31 and reported missing the next day. On February 10, the FBI released footage from a Nest doorbell camera showing a masked, armed figure at her front door the morning she disappeared. The footage is grainy and dark. The figure’s face is completely hidden behind a ski mask. There’s almost nothing to go on visually, which is probably why the FBI released it in the first place: they were hoping someone might recognize the build, the backpack, the way the person moved.
That’s not what happened.
Scroll through FBI Director Kash Patel’s replies on X and you’ll find people demanding “enhanced” and “colorized” versions of the footage, plus AI-generated close-ups that supposedly reveal details invisible to the naked eye…. (Because it wouldn’t produce real information. That’s why.)
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QuitGPT is going viral — here’s why people are cancelling ChatGPT
February 11, 2026
What to know about the boycott of OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Early in February 2026, a grassroots backlash against ChatGPT began gaining steam online — not over the sunsetting of GPT-4o or outages, but as a political and ethical protest movement.
Branded “QuitGPT,” the campaign is urging users to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions, delete the app and shift to alternative AI chatbots — and its momentum is raising hard questions about how AI intersects with politics, corporate behavior and consumer values.
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AI and the Coming Jobless Economy
AI will make most of us poorer and a few fabulously wealthy — unless its productivity gains are allocated fairly
February 11, 2026
Business leaders are rhapsodizing about how AI will “free” their employees to take more time off. Zoom’s Eric Yuan told the Times that “AI can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week? Every company will support three days, four days a week. I think this ultimately frees up everyone’s time.”…. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates openly wonders whether a two-day workweek could be the future.
But worker productivity has been rising for years, yet the median wage has barely risen when adjusted for inflation… The four-day workweek will most likely come with four days’ worth of pay. The three-day workweek, with three days’ worth. And so on.
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Bytedance’s Seedance 2.0: The New King of AI Video Generation
February 10, 2026
…ByteDance (the TikTok parent company) just dropped Seedance 2.0, and the AI video landscape basically changed overnight: We’re talking native audio generation, lipsynced speech, 2K resolution, and quality that makes Google’s Veo 3.1 and OpenAI’s Sora 2 look like they’re running on a flip phone. One creator made a full 2-minute cinematic fight scene for $60. Another generated a photorealistic LeBron James dunk that’s genuinely hard to tell from broadcast footage. Chinese filmmakers are already producing entire short films from scripts, complete with VFX, voice acting, and editing.
Check out this 1960s Kung fu DragonBall Z match-up and this prompt-to-mini-film demo. We watched these three times each. It’s almost unbelievable…
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