AI Reading for Friday December 5

Silicon spin doctors: Could ChatGPT Secretly Tell You How to Vote? - The Atlantic

A study by the UK government's AI security body (AISI) of nearly 80,000 British participants across 19 AI models found chatbots can change political opinions, with information-dense responses most persuasive but substantially inaccurate and post-training increasing persuasiveness. - the Guardian

AI tools, including GPT‑4, can shift voter attitudes up to 10 percentage points (25 when optimized), outperform non‑expert humans two‑thirds of the time, and could enable a sub-$1M campaign to message 174 million U.S. voters. - MIT Technology Review

ofc right wing nuts equate moderation and fighting manipulation with censorship, and need a space that explicitly forces their views down voters throats. bespoke brainworms and American flags for all!

DAGI: always eepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said AGI is "on the horizon" and called it "the most transformative moment in human history," saying this will intensify competition, investment and regulatory scrutiny of AI development. - Axios

Always Going Imminent

OpenAI's ChatGPT, launched three years ago and still the world's most popular chatbot, is experiencing slowing user growth while Google's Gemini gains ground, creating competitive pressure on OpenAI's market dominance. - The Washington Post

AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton said Google is "beginning to overtake" OpenAI, citing Gemini 3, the Nano Banana Pro model and Google's in-house chips, researchers, data and data centers as competitive advantages. - Business Insider

Google introduced Titans and MIRAS, an architecture and framework enabling online test-time memorization and scalable long-context modeling beyond two million tokens, which outperformed Transformer and RNN baselines and larger models on language, reasoning, and extreme long-context benchmarks. - Google Research

Google rolling out Gemini 3 Deep Think to AI Ultra - 9to5Google

AI will now ruminate, fixate and obsess just like humans

iQuit, Apple to OpenAI pipeline: a review of LinkedIn profiles shows dozens of Apple employees with expertise in audio, watch design, robotics and other areas have joined OpenAI in recent months. - The Wall Street Journal

OpenAI went on lockdown over threats from a 'Stop AI' activist - The Atlantic

really gonna need that underground bunker in the new HQ

GDP = Gross Datacenter Product: Mentions of 'AI bubble' surged 740% quarter‑over‑quarter to 42 earnings‑call appearances between October and December, prompting AMD's Lisa Su and Nvidia leaders to push back as analysts warn of trillions invested versus billions of revenue. - Business Insider

Top U.S. tech firms account for about 16% of global public equity, Nvidia's stock rose over 1,200%, and Jason Furman says H1 2025 U.S. GDP growth was driven by data-center investment amid warnings of an AI market correction. - Fast Company

MAGA Masa: Masayoshi Son and the White House plan to build 'Trump Industrial Parks' in the United States to manufacture AI infrastructure components, financed by funds from Japan's trade deal. - The Wall Street Journal

Google (Project Suncatcher), Amazon (Leo) and Elon Musk's xAI/SpaceX are developing solar-powered, vacuum-cooled low-Earth-orbit AI compute and satellite-broadband systems to run and train large machine-learning models, aiming to reduce latency and terrestrial power and thermal constraints. - TechRadar

AI that will still run after humanity self-immolates, can maybe reboot factories remotely and repopulate the world with robots

AI reasoning models used 100 times more power on average to respond to written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability. - Bloomberg

your funny cat video just stranded a polar bear on a melting ice floe

Caterpillar and Cummins are profiting from the AI data‑center buildout by selling large generators; Cummins sold $2.6B in data‑center power last year and expects 30–35% growth, while Caterpillar's power share rose from 8.4% in 2021 to >14% YTD. - Business Insider

Building materials company winning the AI boom - Fast Company

new boom in bunkers

AI Data Centers Are Making RAM Crushingly Expensive, Which Is Going to Skyrocket the Cost of Laptops, Tablets, and Gaming PCs - Futurism

New York Times Sues A.I. Start-Up Perplexity Over Use of Copyrighted Work - The New York Times

Goool! Cristiano Ronaldo invested in Perplexity AI and entered a partnership with the company. - Bloomberg

Judge Victoria Kolakowski dismissed evidence as an AI-generated deepfake in Mendones v. Cushman & Wakefield, prompting the National Center for State Courts' nine-question bench card and spurring federal and state proposals, including mid-2025 deepfake standards and Louisiana Act No. 250. - BGR

An AI image-generator startup left an internet-accessible database exposing more than 1 million images and videos, including photos of real people that had been nudified, creating privacy, legal and reputational risks. - WIRED

Mr DeepFakes, launched after Reddit banned deepfake porn in 2018, became the largest non-consensual deepfake hub with over 2 billion page views, monetized via ads and crypto memberships (forum posts cited $4,000–$7,000/month), and shut its domain on 4 May. - the Guardian

horny creeps are easy to monetize

A video shows what a Waymo vehicle failed to detect in the killing of Kit Kat. - The New York Times

Feds ask Waymo about robotaxis repeatedly passing school buses in Austin - TechCrunch

need to train robotaxis on some PSAs

Moderators and users report being overwhelmed by low-quality AI-generated posts in Reddit's most popular subreddits. - WIRED

from r/AmItheAsshole to r/AmItheBot

AI and the market for lemons, bad info drives out good, a used car jobs market, and new signaling mechanisms are needed - The Economist

Fei-Fei Li, Stanford professor and ImageNet co‑creator, said extreme 'doomsday' and 'utopian' AI rhetoric misinforms the public and urged balanced, factual communication to temper expectations and guide policy and industry focus. - Business Insider

Jesus will return as AI? Does Joe Rogan have the mark of the beast? - X (formerly Twitter)

Our AI, who art in the cloud, hallowed be thy tokens.

Google redesigned Fitbit Premium to run on Gemini models and integrate with Pixel Watch and Fitbit trackers, offering an AI health coach and adaptive workout plans for $10/month or $80/year (public preview). - ZDNET

Travel agents are using AI tools to improve efficiency and service quality, enhancing their roles rather than being displaced. - Bloomberg

AI can now tell you, never fly Spirit, just stay home

The man who invented the cloud - Implicator.ai

My Rebound Relationship With a Robot - The New York Times

don't ask AI about Chuck's cat - Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

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