AI Reading for Monday November 10

Debt-a Centers?

While the tech giants have plenty of money to build data centers, smaller outfits are taking on debt and taking big chances to work with them. - The New York Times

Dealbook: big borrowing for AI infrastructure - The New York Times

Rising data-center demand is straining U.S. electricity supply as China added 429 GW of generation in 2024 while U.S. additions were a fraction, and U.S. coal plants' capacity factor fell to 42% from 61% in 2014. - MIT Technology Review

OpenAI’s Strategy: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

OpenAI wants to leverage the 2.5 billion ChatGPT prompts it handles per day to expand into search, social, hardware, robotics, healthcare and payments - Business Insider

OpenAI is reported to be looking for a location for a corporate campus of at least 500,000 square feet and plans to move operations from downtown San Francisco to suburban Silicon Valley. - Fast Company

OpenAI introduced GPT-5-Codex-Mini, a smaller, 75% cheaper GPT-5-Codex variant for code-generation and reasoning, alongside other improvements. - X (formerly Twitter)

Calls persist for greater transparency in Microsoft's dealings with OpenAI. - The Wall Street Journal

Office Worker NPCs as a Service

Microsoft is developing 'Agentic Users', AI agents on the Microsoft 365 roadmap that can hold Entra/Azure AD identities, attend meetings, edit documents and send email, may require separate Agent 365 licenses, and target launch at Microsoft Ignite, Nov 18–21, 2025. - TechRadar

Microsoft released a roadmap that teased Agent 365 (A365), AI "agentic users" assigned A365 licenses that get Entra ID/Azure AD identities, and a M365 Agent Store with targeted November/Ignite release. - The Register

Multi-sensor AI now replicates sight, sound, taste, smell and action, Microsoft plans to make every Windows 11 PC an AI PC with Copilot that can see screens, listen and execute actions, and experts warn of cognitive offloading risks. - Psychology Today

Microsoft has developed internal toolkits that convert NVIDIA CUDA models into ROCm-compatible code to run on AMD AI GPUs (examples: 300X) and is working with AMD on 400X and 450X to reduce inference costs and cut NVIDIA CUDA lock-in. - Wccftech

Financial stress from AI infrastructure spending, overhiring, and recession fears, rather than AI adoption, are likely responsible for economy-wide layoffs - Fast Company

Corporate technology and human resources teams are collaborating to address how artificial intelligence is disrupting jobs and workplace roles. - The Wall Street Journal

A Reddit user talked about being interviewed by an apparently AI-powered video interviewer, sparking a viral debate about undisclosed AI use in hiring and calls for transparency and oversight. - The Indian Express

AI-powered voice phishing can impersonate human voices in real time, requiring the public to treat unsolicited human-sounding calls with the same skepticism applied to email phishing. - Financial Times

McKinsey State of AI 2025 - Almost all survey respondents say their organizations are using AI, and many have begun to use AI agents. But most are still in the early stages of scaling AI and capturing enterprise-level value. - McKinsey & Company

Research shows implementing AI can increase revenue in the real economy. - Financial Times

Companies need an AI-first approach to integrate artificial intelligence into strategy, operations and products to maintain competitiveness. - Fast Company

A survey of British employers finds one in four large UK businesses expects to cut staffing within a year, with junior roles most likely to be axed and increased investment expected in AI automation and reskilling. - Financial Times

An Indian wealth firm is replacing costly advisers with AI-trained graduates. - Bloomberg

RoboDoc

OpenAI is exploring consumer health products, including a personal health assistant and records aggregator, and is working with pharma partners Eli Lilly and Sanofi. - Business Insider

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports Apple is developing an AI chatbot within a redesigned Health app to be offered through a new Health+ subscription, potentially launching as soon as next year to help users manage their health. - TechRadar

Two-thirds of U.S. physicians (a 78% year-over-year jump) and 86% of health systems used AI in 2024, and high-performing models (OpenEvidence scored 100% on the USMLE) have prompted concerns about clinical deskilling, embedded bias, and insurer-driven care denial. - the Guardian

A dietitian tests the Zoe app which uses AI photo-logging and barcode scans. Dr. Federica Amati says matches manual logging above 95% accuracy, identifies ingredients and nutrition, offers a processed-food risk scale, and has a free tier with Zoe Plus at $100/year despite limitations. - CNET

Apple's earnings show early AI-driven App Store benefits, and Apple will white-label Gemini into Siri, producing short-term services revenue gains while creating long-term strategic risk from third-party model dependence. - Digital Trends

Solid State of Disruption

SanDisk raised NAND flash contract prices by 50% for November, prompting module makers Transcend, Innodisk and Apacer to pause shipments or re-evaluate quotes, and industry sources say AI-driven wafer demand could keep flash and DRAM prices elevated into 2026. - Tom's Hardware

Amazon, Reddit accuse Perplexity of being a little too scrappy for its own good (gift link) - Bloomberg

Stanford academic and author Erik Brynjolfsson questions whether generative AI's aim of mimicking human behavior is the appropriate goal for technology. - Financial Times

A.I. is already intelligent. Will humans start to view it as conscious? - The New York Times

DeepSeek founder made a rare public appearance, said we are in an AI 'honeymoon phase', success will mean it replaces many jobs, he was pessimistic about impact on humanity, called for disclosure and oversight. - South China Morning Post

Karp-e Diem: what Palantir does, Mamdani hates AI etc. - WIRED

Anthropic is on a list. Maker of the Claude chatbot, has ties to the Effective Altruism movement and Dem donors including Sam Bankman‑Fried (who bought a $500M stake), Dustin Moskovitz and Reid Hoffman. - New York Post

TeachGPT v. CheatGPT

In a randomized controlled trial with 194 undergraduate physics students, a carefully designed AI tutor outperformed in-class active learning. - The Potential Surface

Teach students to lead, not cheat. Maurice J. Elias urged schools to adopt clear academic-integrity values and teach social-emotional skills so students can use AI ethically and avoid it short-circuiting learning by doing students' work. - nj

Nothing is real, dead Internet theory: I-generated retirement home TikTok account Basin Creek Retirement, which has over 63,000 followers and Halloween videos exceeding two million views, was created with generative tools including OpenAI's Sora 2, monetizes via merch. - Dexerto

ChatGPT in real life - Reddit

Tesla brags about FSD but blames you if it crashes. - Electrek

Musk having a normal one - TechCrunch

Nano Banana 2 expected this week - TestingCatalog

AI has only two possible outcomes and neither is good. - Futurism

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction.” - Woody Allen, 50 years ago

apparently unremarkable now:

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