David Isenberg’s This is the week that was in AI News, from “What if OpenAI is worth more dead than alive?” to “Google’s Agentic AI wipes user’s entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure.”
News from Reader Supported News
AI Fuels a New Wave of Political Lies
Across races from Georgia to New York, deepfakes are steering political narratives and voter perception
In a new political ad in Georgia’s Senate race, GOP Rep. Mike Collins’ campaign released a video featuring incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff saying he knows his vote to shut down the government will hurt farmers: “But I wouldn’t know. I’ve only seen a farm on Instagram.” Ossoff never said any of this. When challenged on spreading disinformation using Ossoff’s likeness and voice, Collins’ campaign campaign doubled down, saying they were pleased the ad sparked conversation — proving they were either oblivious to the dangerous precedent or had simply decided to embrace it as strategy.
December 6, 2025
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News from The Decoder
Yann LeCun, Meta’s outgoing AI scientist, is launching a new startup built around “world models” – systems designed to understand physical reality rather than just generate text.
LeCun argues that Silicon Valley is currently “hypnotized” by generative AI, and he intends to build his project with a heavy reliance on European talent. According to Sifted, the company will operate globally and maintain a hub in Paris.
December 6, 2025
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News from Racket News
Time to Pump the Brakes on Artificial Intelligence Finance?
Big Tech needs trillions to fund their AI dream, much of it from insurance companies and pension funds. What could possibly go wrong?
….Deals among the major players have reached around $1 trillion. Nearly every week, tech giants like Oracle, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia announce multi-billion dollar circular investment deals with AI, large language models, or “chatbot” creators such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, along with data center providers like Coreweave and several smaller firms. These are circular investments where the tech giants pour billions into AI chatbot companies, which rely on massive data centers and purchase or lease millions of graphic processing units (GPUs), the chips used for AI computing.
Amazingly, the deals closed in 2025 may be just the tip of the iceberg.
December 5, 2025
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News from Tom’s Hardware
AMD CEO Lisa Su ’emphatically’ rejects talk of an AI bubble — says claims are ‘somewhat overstated’
News
AMD CEO Lisa Su used her appearance at WIRED’s Big Interview conference in San Francisco to push back against growing speculation that the AI sector is overheating. Asked whether the industry is in a bubble, Su replied “emphatically” no, arguing that concerns are “somewhat overstated” and that AI is still in its infancy. According to Su, AMD needs to be ready to provide chips for the future — “there’s not a reason not to keep pushing that technology.”
December 5, 2025
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News from The Guardian
AI deepfakes of real doctors spreading health misinformation on social media
Hundreds of videos on TikTok and elsewhere impersonate experts to sell supplements with unproven effects
The factchecking organisation Full Fact has uncovered hundreds of such videos featuring impersonated versions of doctors and influencers directing viewers to Wellness Nest, a US-based supplements firm.
All the deepfakes involve real footage of a health expert taken from the internet. However, the pictures and audio have been reworked so that the speakers are encouraging women going through menopause to buy products such as probiotics and Himalayan shilajit from the company’s website.
December 5, 2025
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News from Brad Delong
The AI-Bubble’s Most Likely Endgame Looks to Be Not Apocalypse, But an Awful Lot of Useful Compost
All the digging will not uncover a Golden ASI Pony. But the digging will spread an awful lot fo very useful fertilizer around, in which very useful and valuable things will grow…
No Deep Thought, but better weather forecasting, antibiotics, copilots…
December 5, 2025
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News from FT Alphaville
What if OpenAI is worth more dead than alive?
One of the more optimistic theories we’ve heard about artificial intelligence involves most of the companies involved in its development going bust….
Here’s the theory. Proprietary large-language models like ChatGPT turn out to be not that great for GDP. Core technologies still have value, but their developers’ individual business models marry persistently high operating costs with shallow commercial moats and their innovations quickly become commoditised.
This is fine. Commoditisation is for the common good. The result is better machine learning for all. Companies will die, but the spoils of more than $1tn in capital expenditures can trickle down equitably to a nation’s underfunded labs, studios, factories and faculties.
December 5, 2025
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News from TechCrunch
AWS needs you to believe in AI agents
AWS announced a wave of new AI agent tools at re:Invent 2025, but can Amazon actually catch up to the AI leaders? While the cloud giant is betting big on enterprise AI with its third-gen chip and database discounts that got developers cheering, it’s still fighting to prove it can compete beyond infrastructure.
December 5, 2025
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News from Lifehacker
Google Is Testing AI-Generated Headlines, and It’s Not Going Well
That shocking Google Discover headline might not be accurate.
Take a look at the top of this article. See that headline? If it looks different than what you clicked on to get to this page, congratulations: Google might have chosen you to participate in its latest AI experiment: rewriting news headlines for some users in Google Discover.
December 4, 2025
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News from Axios
Exclusive: Some AI dangers are already real, DeepMind’s Hassabis says
Some of the biggest dangers of AI, like attacks on infrastructure, are already real and need to be guarded against, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at Axios’ AI+ Summit in San Francisco Thursday.
December 4, 2025
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News from Tom’s Hardware
Google’s Agentic AI wipes user’s entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure
— cache wipe turns into mass deletion event as agent apologizes: “I am absolutely devastated to hear this. I cannot express how sorry I am”
The user even made a screen recording to document his troubles.
The user was in the midst of troubleshooting the app they were working on, and as part of the process, they decided to restart the server. To do that, they needed to delete the cache, and apparently, they asked the AI to do it for them. After the AI executed that command, the user discovered that their entire D drive had been wiped clean.
December 3, 2025
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News from Techradar
Nvidia admits the $100bn ‘biggest AI infrastructure project in history’
OpenAI deal still isn’t finalized
The $100 billion collaboration between Nvidia and OpenAI has received its fair share of publicity, but the deal is yet to be finalized and it remains little more than a letter of intent, to this day.
December 3, 2025
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News from Engadget
Amazon halts AI anime dub ‘beta’ after widespread ridicule
The AI-generated English dub for Banana Fish was the source of much of the ire.
Amazon appears to have quietly removed its terrible AI-generated English dubs for several anime shows currently streaming on Prime Video, following widespread ridicule from viewers and industry professionals. AI dubs were recently added to Banana Fish, No Game, No Life and Vinland Saga, where they were labeled “AI beta” in the Languages section of the app.
December 3, 2025
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News from CNBC
Anthropic reportedly preparing for one of the largest IPOs ever in race with OpenAI: FT
Anthropic, the AI startup behind the popular Claude chatbot, is in early talks to launch one of the largest initial public offerings as early as next year….
The start-up, led by chief executive Dario Amodei, was also pursuing a private funding round that could value it above $300 billion, including a $15 billion combined commitment from Microsoft
and Nvidia, per the report.
December 2, 2025
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News from Rest of World
Will DeepSeek’s new model spark another global AI shake-up in 2026?
DeepSeek’s R2 launch was likely delayed by limited access to compute, but a new model is on its way, intensifying the AI rivalry between the U.S. and China.
The world of artificial intelligence — across the U.S., China, and the regions outside these major model-developer centers, infrastructure hubs, deployment ecosystems, and differing governance approaches — has undergone seismic change since DeepSeek surfaced forcefully on January 20, 2025.
We may be in for another major change when DeepSeek releases its new reasoning model.
December 2, 2025
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News from Fortune
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers
Google’s “moonshot” aspirations to expand its AI footprint are taking on a more literal meaning.
CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Fox News interview on Sunday that Google will soon begin construction of AI data centers in space. The tech giant announced Project Suncatcher earlier this month, with the goal of finding more efficient ways to power energy-guzzling centers, in this case with solar power.
December 1, 2025
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News from Digiday
How AI’s hit to publisher traffic is quietly rewiring media M&A
Publishers’ traffic has dipped since AI tools arrived — and the fallout isn’t limited to audience or ad revenue. It’s now weighing on the media mergers and acquisitions (M&A) market, making deals harder to price during a time of disruption, according to investors and analysts.
December 1, 2025
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News from Reuters
Trump’s push for more AI data centers faces backlash from his own voters
The residents came in camouflage hats and red shirts signaling unity, more than 300 of them packing into a rural Pennsylvania planning commission meeting to protest a proposed data center they feared would carve up their farmland and upend the quiet rhythms of their valley.
Most were loyal supporters of President Donald Trump, who carried their home of Montour County by 20 percentage points in the 2024 election. But they bristled at Washington’s push to fast-track artificial intelligence infrastructure, which has driven data-center growth in rural areas around the U.S. where land is cheap.
December 1, 2025
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News from MIT Technology Review
An AI model trained on prison phone calls now looks for planned crimes in those calls
The model is built to detect when crimes are being “contemplated.”
A US telecom company trained an AI model on years of inmates’ phone and video calls and is now piloting that model to scan their calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes.
December 1, 2025
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News from The Guardian
James Cameron says AI actors are ‘horrifying to me’
Avatar director, known for his advocacy of new technology, told interviewer generative AI performance puts ‘all human experience into a blender’
Cameron was speaking to CBS on Sunday Morning in the run-up to the release of the third Avatar film, subtitled Fire and Ash, and was asked about the pioneering technology he used in his film-making. After praising motion-capture performance as “a celebration of the actor-director moment”, Cameron expressed his disdain for artificial intelligence. “Go to the other end of the spectrum [from motion capture] and you’ve got generative AI, where they can make up a character. …. It’s like, no. That’s horrifying to me. That’s the opposite. That’s exactly what we’re not doing.”
December 1, 2025
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News from Semaphor
Exclusive / Fight over state-level AI rules heats up in Congress
Washington will focus intensely this month on the Senate’s vote to extend expiring enhanced health insurance tax credits, but don’t lose sight of the must-pass defense policy bill.
That’s where the White House and its allies are pushing language to block states from establishing their own artificial intelligence regulations — a fight that played out over the Thanksgiving recess, according to a person familiar with the matter.
December 1, 2025
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News from Observer
Masayoshi Son ‘Crying’ Over Nvidia Sale as SoftBank Doubles Down on A.I.
The SoftBank CEO remains unfazed by bubble fears, insisting A.I. growth will dwarf today’s soaring valuations.
Last month, SoftBank sold $5.8 billion worth of Nvidia shares, and CEO Masayoshi Son now says he’s “crying” over the decision. “I don’t want to sell a single share,” he said at the FII Priority Asia forum in Tokyo today (Dec. 1). Son explained that the sale was meant to fund SoftBank’s investment in OpenAI and other A.I. bets—not because he believes Nvidia’s stock has entered bubble territory.
December 1, 2025
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News from Noahpinion
I love AI. Why doesn’t everyone?
Anti-AI sentiment might or might not be rational, but it certainly relies on a lot of bad arguments.
New technologies almost always create lots of problems and challenges for our society. The invention of farming caused local overpopulation. Industrial technology caused pollution. Nuclear technology enabled superweapons capable of destroying civilization. New media technologies arguably cause social unrest and turmoil whenever they’re introduced.
And yet how many of these technologies can you honestly say you wish were never invented?
But when we think about the technologies now being invented, we often forget this lesson — or at least, many of us do.
December 1, 2025
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News from The Atlantic
The World Still Hasn’t Made Sense of ChatGPT
OpenAI’s chaos machine turns three.
n this day three years ago, OpenAI released what it referred to internally as a “low-key research preview.” …. They called it ChatGPT.
And people sure did use it—more than 1 million of them in the first five days. ChatGPT grew faster than any other consumer app in history. Today, it has 800 million weekly users. Numbers matter, but what is undeniable is that ChatGPT’s success has quickly rewired parts of our society and economy. Now we are living in a world that ChatGPT helped build.
November 30, 2025
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News from The Guardian
ChatGPT-5 offers dangerous advice to mentally ill people, psychologists warn
Research finds OpenAI’s free chatbot fails to identify risky behaviour or challenge delusional beliefs
ChatGPT-5 is offering dangerous and unhelpful advice to people experiencing mental health crises, some of the UK’s leading psychologists have warned.
Research conducted by King’s College London (KCL) and the Association of Clinical Psychologists UK (ACP) in partnership with the Guardian suggested that the AI chatbotfailed to identify risky behaviour when communicating with mentally ill people.
November 30, 2025
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News from The Neuron
MIT: 11.7% of US jobs could vanish today
MIT Just Built a Digital Twin of Every American Worker—And the Results Are Sobering
Remember when everyone said AI would only replace tech jobs? Turns out, they were looking at the tip of the iceberg.
MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory just released Project Iceberg, a massive simulation that tracked 151M US workers across 32K skills and 923 occupations to figure out which jobs AI can already automate today.
The findings = AI can technically replace 11.7% of the American workforce right now… affecting $1.2 trillion in wages. That’s not a prediction for 2030. That’s what’s possible with current technology.
November 30, 2025
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