AI Reading for Sunday October 26

SoftBank's board approved releasing the remaining $22.5 billion of a planned $30 billion investment in OpenAI, contingent on OpenAI completing a corporate restructuring. - The Information

SambaNova looking for a buyer, after being valued at $5b in 2021, their AI architecture which can address big DRAM seems to have gotten out of step with current approaches that use fast expensive HBM memory, Softbank funded them but apparently switched horses to Arm and Graphcore. - The Information

Three Charts That Help Explain What’s Behind the AI Bubble Fears - The Wall Street Journal

HotOrNot guy makes some good points - X (formerly Twitter)

big difference vs 90s is a lot of the investment is underwritten by Big Tech. Google won't go bust if AI takes a long time to really pay off. But someone will be left holding the bag if $1T in OpenAI plans, or the 4th-20th big LLM startups, or coding ventures don't pay off.

OpenAI released Sora 2, which quickly generated user-created videos inserting recognizable characters and prompted policy rollbacks and industry backlash, but the technology remains nascent with ongoing litigation and no widespread job losses or major filmmaking cost reductions to date. - The Atlantic

OpenAI is said to be building a Suno competitor - THE DECODER

California State, partnering with companies including Amazon and OpenAI, launched an AWS-powered A.I. Camp training students on Amazon Bedrock and AWS Jam as part of efforts to become the nation's largest A.I.-empowered university. - The New York Times

Researchers from Anthropic, Thinking Machines and Constellation stress tested model specs using value tradeoff scenarios, quantified cross model disagreement as a signal of gaps or contradictions in the spec, linking high disagreement to specification violations. - MarkTechPost

Do you own your face, voiceness, and likeness? After the 2023 faux-Drake deepfake "Heart on My Sleeve", the U.S., lacking a federal likeness law and relying on divergent state statutes, faces legal uncertainty, litigation and state legislation over AI-generated voice and face uses. - The Verge

When you go all-in on Claude Code, who owns the product, you or Claude Code? - The Potential Surface

AI-generated listing media, including fake video walk-throughs with visual glitches such as expanding lofts and stair hallucinations, are appearing in real-estate ads, increasing fraud and liability risks and prompting calls for provenance, watermarking, detection tools, and clearer policies. - WIRED

Do not trust your eyes’: AI generates surge in expense fraud - Financial Times

AI engineers at some companies get "golden handcuffs" as surging share prices have multiplied RSU values (e.g., $420,000 to nearly $2 million) and firms report sharply lower turnover. - Business Insider

Britton Winterrose, Microsoft for Startups' business development lead, tweeted that AI doomsters are deluded, criticizes Jensen Huang for supporting ‘random bitcoin miners’ over more deserving AI startups. - Tom's Hardware

Google president Ruth Porat told the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh that AI is a revolution beyond chatbots, citing DeepMind's AlphaFold—used by millions in over 190 countries—as accelerating drug discovery and arguing AI could enable curing cancer within our lifetime. - Fortune

Researchers face huge challenges in creating robotic hands equal to the real thing, but they’re getting closer. One big question: How many fingers? - The Wall Street Journal

Teen labor force participation falls sharply. Culture shifted, more stuff went online, malls died, back of house automation and Dashers took their jobs. - The Verge

AI-enabled headphones are becoming sensor-rich wearables with ANC, environmental alerts and conversational AI; headphone market might exceed $100 billion by the early 2030s versus $18.4 billion for smart glasses. - CNET

Does smart home AI reduce decision fatigue? - Yahoo

WWE tagged in an AI writing assistant trained on past WWE content, but Wrestling Observer says AI kayfabe is tapping out. - Cageside Seats

AI that cries for help … a civilizational cry for help? - WIRED

As civilization disintegrates, we will have a historic opportunity to reinvent the ways we find food, water, shelter, and protection.

He’s designing the ballroom with AI isn’t he - Nilay Patel

Follow the latest AI headlines via SkynetAndChill.com on Bluesky