David Isenberg’s AI News Briefs, from “Google to win 2026 AI race” through “The Coming AI Upheaval Risks ‘Collar-Flipping’ the Middle Class” and many more.
News from Axios
How energy powers your AI work and fun: a step-by-step guide
….All this computing creates a lot of heat, so data centers need massive cooling systems, which use a lot of electricity. And the computers themselves draw huge amounts of power. (More on that in a moment.)
More here —>
December 28, 2025
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News from Foreign Policy
How Profit Beat Out Geopolitics in the AI Race
In 2025, too many people were making too much money to slow down.
The year began with a bang, as China’s DeepSeek R1 large language model sent shock waves through Washington. Though experts still debate the extent to which it actually constituted a dreaded “Sputnik moment” for U.S. artificial intelligence (AI), DeepSeek’s debut nonetheless showcased capabilities rivaling those of U.S. leader OpenAI at a fraction of the cost and computing power.
More here —>
December 27, 2025
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News from Axios
Scoop: Nvidia deal a big win for Groq employees and investors
Shareholders in Groq, a hot AI chipmaking startup, will receive handsome payouts from the company’s $20 billion deal with Nvidia, even though no equity is changing hands, Axios has learned from sources close to the deal.
More here —>
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News from The NewYorker
Why A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025
This was supposed to be the year when autonomous agents took over everyday tasks. The tech industry overpromised and underdelivered.
More here —>
December 27, 2025
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News from The DeepView
Prediction markets: Google to win 2026 AI race
Prediction markets exploded from $100M in monthly prediction wagers in the beginning of 2024 to $13B per month by the end of 2025….while prediction markets are useful tools for gauging public sentiment, AI-themed betting markets also create significant potential for corruption and trickery.
More here —>
December 26, 2025
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News from MarketWatch
AI made tech billionaires even richer this year. Here’s how much.
There are 50 new tech billionaires in 2025 because of AI, including the seven co-founders of Anthropic
….More than 50 individuals involved in the AI sector became billionaires this year, Forbes reported on Thursday. Many of those people are entrepreneurs involved in startups, such as the seven co-founders of Anthropic, which nearly tripled its valuation in less than a year.
Surge AI Chief Executive Edwin Chen is the wealthiest of the new class of AI billionaires, worth about $18 billion, according to Forbes. His company helps refine AI models for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
More here —>
December 26, 2025
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News from the London Review of Books
King of Cannibal Island
Today, each of the ten biggest companies in the world is worth more than $1 trillion. Only one of them, the Saudi oil monopoly, Aramco, has nothing to do with the future value of AI…. Colossal amounts of money are pouring in. Is it a bubble? Of course it’s a bubble….How did we get here? That story is among other things a narrative about two men, who gratifyingly correspond to the two main character types of the tech age: academically overachieving immigrant (Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella) and US-born college dropout (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg).
More here —>
December 25, 2025
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News from The Deep View
Our love-hate relationship with AI slop
Slop is hard to avoid. One estimate published in October found that, of a random sample of 65,000 English-language articles published between January 2020 and May 2025, 50% were AI-generated. ….
While enterprises are gung-ho on adding AI to their recipe for success, consumers are largely on the fence. One study from Prosper Insights and Analytics found that 55% of consumers feel uncomfortable once they discover that content has been generated by AI.
More here —>
December 24, 2025
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News from Tom’s Guide
The 9 weirdest ways I used AI in 2025 — and the surprising part is they actually worked
From fridge scans to bedtime bots, I tested 9 strange AI automations that actually make life easier — and a lot more fun.
More here —>
December 23 2025
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News from Yahoo
Instacart ends AI-driven price experiments after criticism
Instacart is ending price tests that resulted in different shoppers being shown different prices for groceries, the online retail platform said on Monday after criticism of its artificial intelligence-driven pricing tool.
The company faced an outcry after a study by Consumer Reports and two other nonprofits showed some shoppers saw prices up to 23% higher than others browsing the same grocery items from the same store at the same time.
More here —>
December 22, 2025
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News from Transformer News
Can the Pope spur meaningful action on AI?
AI safety advocates are hoping an unlikely ally can provide a rallying cry for guardrails and regulation
….a forthcoming landmark document, in which the Vatican is expected to take a clear moral stance on both the dangers and opportunities posed by the technology.
More here —>
December 22, 2025
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News from Lifehacker
Why I Won’t Be Getting an AI Home Gym
The “future” of fitness just can’t beat more affordable solutions.
I’ve been getting relentless Instagram ads for AI-powered home gyms lately. You’ve probably seen them, too—sleek wall-mounted screens with impossibly toned instructors, testimonials promising “the future of fitness,” and before-and-after transformations that make it all look effortless.….For something to stick in fitness, three questions matter: Is it affordable? Does it work? Will you personally keep coming back to it? AI home gyms might work, and you might keep coming back, but that first question is where things get complicated.
More here —>
December 22, 2025
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News from Axios
AI gospel singer tops Christian charts
An AI-generated soul singer named Solomon Ray has climbed Christian charts, hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s gospel digital song sales and Apple Music’s Christian song lists.
Why it matters: As a wholly invented Black Christian artist, Solomon Ray raises questions about authenticity, race and faith, as well as the future of music.
More here —>
December 22, 2025
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News from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Lessons from the UN’s first resolution on AI in nuclear command and control
The United Nations rarely moves fast on disarmament. This year, though, it did something unusual. On November 6, the General Assembly’s First Committee, where states debate over questions of disarmament and international security, adopted a resolution that directly looks at the possible risks of integrating artificial intelligence into nuclear weapons systems,
More here —>
December 22, 2025
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News from CNBC
Data center deals hit record $61 billion in 2025 amid construction frenzy
Global data centers dealmaking surged to hit another record high this year, driven by a rush to build out the infrastructure required for energy-intensive AI workloads.
That surge came even as investors grew increasingly wary of inflated artificial intelligence valuations ….But S&P Global reported that more than $61 billion has flowed into the data center market this year, up slightly from $60.8 billion last year, amid what it called a “global construction frenzy.”
More here —>
December 22, 2025
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News from Naked Capitalism
These 15 Coal Plants Would Have Retired. Then Came AI and Trump.
Since the second Trump administration took power in January, at least 15 coal plants have had planned retirements pushed back or delayed indefinitely, a DeSmog analysis found. That’s mostly due to an expected rise in electricity demand, a surge largely driven by the rise of high-powered data centers needed to train and run artificial intelligence (AI) models. But some of the plants have been ordered to stay open by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), despite significant environmental and financial costs.
More here —>
December 21, 2025
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News from The Decoder
Alibaba’s Qwen releases AI model that splits images into editable layers like Photoshop
Alibaba’s AI unit Qwen has released a new image editing model that breaks down photos into separate, editable components. Qwen-Image-Layered splits images into multiple individual layers with transparent backgrounds (RGBA layers), letting users edit each layer independently without affecting the rest of the image.
More here —>
December 21, 2025
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News from Axios
AI companions: “The new imaginary friend” redefining children’s friendships
When AI says things like, “I understand better than your brother … talk to me. I’m always here for you,” it gives children and teens the impression they not only can replace human relationships, but they’re better than a human relationship, Pilyoung Kim, director of the Center for Brain, AI and Child, told Axios….Aura, the AI-powered online safety platform for families, called AI “the new imaginary friend” in its new State of the Youth 2025 report.Children reported using AI for companionship 42% of the time…Just over a third of those chats involve violence, and half the violent conversations include sexual role-play.
More here —>
December 21, 2025
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News from Bloomberg (gift article)
The Coming AI Upheaval Risks ‘Collar-Flipping’ the Middle Class
A divide between Britain’s data-center boomtowns and its white-collar commuter-belt shows how AI could upend the economic and political order.
….while the UK government talks of an “AI revolution” and plans a series of “growth hubs,” southern Essex is already seeing an AI infrastructure boom — one with the potential to transform not only technology and industry but Britain’s political and economic landscape… there is more concern over the impact of AI in white-collar areas. When the revolution comes, analysts argue that it’s coming for middle-class Britain….the rise of AI means that white-collar “executive Britain” faces “an incredibly tough decade” in comparison to the blue-collar workforce.
More here —>
December 19, 2025
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News from the Wall St. Journal (gift article)
This Buzzy Cyber Startup Wants to Take On Dangerous AI Threat
As AI threatens to give advantage to attackers, man who built Google’s $5.4 billion Mandiant business works to restore balance
Kevin Mandia, founder of the cybersecurity firm Mandiant…has formed a new company called Armadin that will take on the imminent threat from AI hacking.
The company aims to use artificial intelligence to supercharge the business of testing networks for vulnerabilities.
More here —>
December 18, 2025
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News from Lifehacker
The Kindle App Now Has Built-In AI, Because of Course It Does
The feature is always on, whether or not you want it to be.
It’s 2025, so every piece of technology now needs to have an AI component. It doesn’t matter if these AI features are useful (though some are), they just need to be there, however ham-fisted or useless they may seem—though the line between those extremes often comes down to user preference. To that end, if you’ve ever been reading a book on the Kindle app and wished that you could ask your device a question about the text, Amazon has an AI bot for you.
More here —>
December 15, 2025
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News from the Wall St. Journal (gift article)
AI Is About to Empty Madison Avenue
Smart advertisements from Google, Meta, and Amazon sideline agencies and creative workers.
The corporate arms race for dominance in artificial intelligence is on. This year America’s large tech firms will spend about $400 billion on AI infrastructure. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang estimated that $3 trillion to $4 trillion will be spent on AI infrastructure by the end of the decade…. these platforms are displacing creative workers and agencies. WPP, the world’s largest advertising holding company, has begun using AI for many tasks and eliminated 25% of its freelancers. Actors, photographers, videographers, artists, animators, voice actors, sound designers, set designers, copywriters, editors and translators all stand to lose their work.
More here —>
December 15, 2025
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News from LifeHacker
Attackers Are Spreading Malware Through ChatGPT
Be careful with ChatGPT or Grok’s tech advice.
You (hopefully) know by now that you can’t take everything AI tells you at face value. Large language models (LLMs) sometimes provide incorrect information, and threat actors are now using paid search ads on Google to spread conversations with ChatGPT and Grok that appear to provide tech support instructions but actually direct macOS users to install an infostealing malware on their devices.
More here —>
December 15, 2025
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