AI Reading for Saturday December 13

Artificial Analysis ranks GPT-5.2 a bit below Gemini 3 Pro and a bit more expensive - Artificial Analysis

OpenAI are quietly adopting ‘skills’, pioneered by Anthropic, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI - Simon Willison’s Weblog

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on the company's 10th anniversary that OpenAI, founded in January 2016, progressed from 2017 research milestones to ChatGPT and GPT‑4 and expects superintelligence within ten years while prioritizing safety and alignment. - OpenAI

Altmania: Karen Hao says OpenAI's AGI ambitions—including Sam Altman's 250‑gigawatt-by‑2033 goal, an estimated $10 trillion buildout and a $1.4 trillion spending claim—drive environmental and labor harms, and cites a survey where ~75% of veteran AI researchers doubt AGI. - Scientific American

The Alt-everything-app, because what if your bank scanned your eyeballs and let you send crypto and shitpost securely - TechCrunch

President Trump signed an executive order directing a single nationwide AI regulatory framework, ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an "AI Litigation Task Force" within 30 days to challenge state AI laws and meet with David Sacks. - Engadget

The US Office of Management and Budget issued guidance requiring federally procured LLMs to follow two "unbiased AI principles," "truth-seeking" and "ideological neutrality," warning government contractors could lose contracts if models violate the rules. - Axios

(translation: Trump-humping AI only, and don’t forget to tip your server)

The White House cited competitive pressure from Huawei's Ascend 910C (about 300 petaflops BF16) and Huawei production plans through 2026, authorizing exports of Nvidia H200 AI accelerators to China with a 25% per-shipment fee. - TechRadar

China Is ‘Rejecting’ H200s, Outfoxing US Strategy, Sacks Says - Bloomberg

The bar to outfox this administration is low, like a tripping hazard.

ASML's CEO said the company will expand production of its lithography machines, which are used to manufacture AI chips that power models like ChatGPT, to meet soaring AI demand. - Bloomberg

The US has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, but the portrayal of an existential showdown with China is partly delusion and partly a Silicon Valley lobbying tactic. - Financial Times

Tencent upgraded to 50 Cent: in recent months, Tencent aggressively hired AI researchers from ByteDance, including by offering to double their salaries, and reorganized its AI team - The Information

Broligarchs own the government, still can't stop whining they are being repressed - Financial Times

Behind Oracle’s big AI bet: Bloomberg Businessweek spoke to dozens of employees and leaders, in most cases anonymously to allow for candid conversation about a famously litigious company with little demonstrable interest in talking to the press. - Bloomberg

Oracle (who might be the customer for Fermi) denied Bloomberg's report that it pushed completion of some OpenAI-related data centers to 2028, saying spokesperson Michael Egbert told Reuters all contractual sites and milestones remain on track, after shares fell about 3.6% following the report. - Yahoo

Oracle will delay OpenAI data center projects by at least a year, moving planned completion from 2027 to 2028, a setback investor reports linked to labor and material shortages and tariffs, weakening confidence in Oracle's $455 billion remaining performance obligations. - Gizmodo

Rick Perry's Fermi, seeking to build a data center as large as Texas, falls after tenant pulls out. Huge plan, IPO, forgot the third thing, which was ‘profit’. - Bloomberg

Rapid construction of AI data centers, fueled by a lending frenzy, has prompted industry concerns about a potential oversupply. - Bloomberg

Goldman Sachs outlines four 2030 scenarios for the AI-driven datacenter boom, including a base case with occupancy peaking at about 93% next year, a monetization failure, cloud-spend contraction, and a demand surge, while Omdia forecasts $1.6 trillion capex to 2030. - The Register

The last time so much wealth was tied up in such obscure overlapping arrangements was just before the 2008 financial crisis. - The Atlantic

Subprime AGI: Bond markets are warning investors of a potential AI investment bubble. - The Wall Street Journal

Is A.I. Actually a Bubble? The narrative of boom and bust is familiar—but also out of step with the possibilities of a new technology. - The New Yorker

Where to Invest in AI in 2026: It’s not just LLMs. Ideas include robotaxis, copper, health care and more. (gift link) - Bloomberg

The Empire Strikes Backprop: OpenAI said Thursday it struck a licensing agreement with Disney allowing Disney characters in OpenAI's Sora app and ChatGPT-generated images, while Disney will invest $1 billion in OpenAI and buy ChatGPT Enterprise for employees. - Business Insider

Behind the Deal That Took Disney From AI Skeptic to OpenAI Investor: Disney’s deal with OpenAI will allow users to generate AI videos based on characters from Marvel, ‘Star Wars’ and other franchises - The Wall Street Journal

SAG-AFTRA and the WGA issued formal objections and said they will monitor Disney's deal with OpenAI to license over 200 Disney-owned characters to OpenAI’s Sora model. - Gizmodo

Disney sent Google a cease-and-desist letter alleging Google copied a large corpus of Disney copyrighted works without authorization to train generative AI and commercially exploit and distribute infringing images and videos, and demanding immediate cessation and technical safeguards. - Variety

RBC Capital's survey of 117 IT leaders found they are opening wallets: 90% plan higher AI spending and new generative AI/LLM budgets in 2026, 60% already have AI in production (up from 39% last year), and 32% expect production within six months. - Business Insider

Citi this year launched two internal programs, AI Champions and AI Accelerators, involving more than 4,000 colleagues to identify and deploy AI use cases across its operations, Payal Jain said, against a workforce of 229,000 reported in Q3. - FinAi News

British Airways CEO Sean Doyle warned that agentic AI could mediate customer bookings and render carriers invisible unless they adapt, and said BA is undergoing a digital overhaul, consolidating customer data and issuing Copilot licenses to about 5,000 employees. - The Register

OpenEvidence, the "ChatGPT for doctors" startup to find health information from medical journals and other trusted sources, doubles valuation to $12b - The Information

Thinking Machines launched Tinker into general availability, offering LoRA-based fine-tuning with multi‑GPU adaptation, sampling and checkpoints, supporting Kimi K2 and Qwen3‑VL models, after a $2 billion seed at a $10 billion valuation and investors including Nvidia, AMD and ServiceNow. - SiliconANGLE

30b-parameter open source model scores well on Putnam math exam, could run on a Mac - VentureBeat

AI tools like Google's Gemini are being used as 'drama-free' colleagues, reducing human-to-human workplace interaction and prompting employers to adopt AI for communication and tasks with potential effects on employee wellbeing and team dynamics. - Axios

Research finds AI can make decisions more accurately than humans, yet people often distrust AI systems. - The Wall Street Journal

AI Gadgets Are Bad Right Now but Their Promise Is Huge: Joanna Stern tested glasses, pendants, bracelets and other smart wearables this year so you don’t waste your money - The Wall Street Journal

The Washington Post launched a personalized AI podcast feature in its app that staff demanded be pulled within 48 hours over major errors, prompting an internal review and likely pause with stricter editorial oversight and slower consumer AI adoption. - The Daily Beast

Amazon Prime Video pulled its AI-powered Video Recaps, tested since November, from shows including Fallout, The Rig, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Upload and Bosch after viewers and GamesRadar flagged factual errors in Fallout's season-one recap. - The Verge

AI off the rails: ScotRail replaced its AI onboard announcer with a voice built from employee Vannessa Sloan's recordings after a complaint that the previous AI used voiceover artist Gayanne Potter's recordings without permission. Tha’s no on. - BBC

Good news everyone! Bender's bender - Reddit

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