AI Reading for Tuesday December 16

An MIT study found 95% of organizations investing in generative AI saw "zero return," while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged investor overexuberance as OpenAI projects roughly $500 billion and 250‑gigawatt compute demand by 2033 and $140 billion burn by 2029. - MIT Technology Review

A timeline of Sam Altman's hype about AI - MIT Technology Review

Theranos with GPUs?

Business leaders say AI is the future but report limited financial gains—Forrester found 15% of 1,576 executives saw margin improvement and BCG found 5% of 1,250 saw widespread value—prompting firms to defer about 25% of planned 2026 AI spending. - Yahoo

CEOs are continuing to invest heavily in AI despite it not delivering financial returns. - Fast Company

Big Tech shifts AI data-center risks off-balance-sheet and onto smaller operators and lenders - The New York Times

CoreGrieve: CoreWeave's staggering >50%, $33 billion drop over six weeks reflects bubble perception risks, amid construction delays at its Denton, Texas AI data center and criticism from short seller Jim Chanos. - The Wall Street Journal

Tech CDS buying surges 90% since September as investors target Oracle, Meta, CoreWeave - Gizmodo

The AI-generated Big Short, now with data center ‘liar loans’

Databricks still sparks enthusiasm, raising over $4 billion at $134b valuation, and crossed $4.8 billion in annual revenue rate - The Wall Street Journal

The Eerie Parallels Between AI Mania and the Dot-Com Bubble, and some notable differences. - The Wall Street Journal

At AWS re:Invent, CEO Matt Garman unveiled frontier models and Nova Forge, a custom-pretraining tool for domain-aware Nova/Nova 2 models, said customers report about 90% positive ROI, but don’t replace junior engineers, yet. - WIRED

AI hasn't transformed factory floors; fragmented shop-floor systems hinder adoption even as manufacturing AI projects grow from $34B (2025) to $155B by 2030 - Fast Company

check out my bitchin’ DOS/XP SCADA console

AI coding feels faster, delivers slower. A 2025 METR randomized trial found AI-assisted coding tasks took 19% longer despite developers reporting ~20% speedups (a 39-point perception gap), while other studies show 69% report gains but complex-task savings under 10% and juniors slowed 7-10%. - Hacker Noon

Some rings true but for me

• lower activation energy, can just tell the AI to get started on a task vs. analysis paralysis

• take on hard tasks I wouldn't even be able to do without AI

• much better code quality, docs, tests, style checks

• time gains do get sucked into debugging, trying more alternatives, learning

• I have done projects where it probably took the same time as it would have without AI but result was probably twice as capable and high quality

• and this is without e.g. getting Opus and having it run all night and spend hundreds of dollars iterating on stuff.

Creative Commons tentatively backs pay-to-crawl; urges CDNs to adopt RSL and protect public-interest access - TechCrunch

fencing off the last vestiges of the open Web

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology approved two level‑3 electric sedans from state-owned Changan Auto and BAIC Motor, the first national clearance, allowing conditional autonomous driving in Chongqing (up to 50 km/h) and Beijing (up to 80 km/h) zones. - Reuters

Shares of Chinese robotaxi companies Pony.ai and WeRide have fallen since their November debuts, reflecting concern it's a capital-intensive sinkhole, a low-return fleet business rather than a high-margin software platform. - pony.ai

Tesla confirmed it is testing driverless vehicles in Austin without a human safety operator, CEO Elon Musk posted, and the company reported seven collisions in its Austin Robotaxi fleet of 30 or fewer vehicles as of mid‑October. - CNBC

FSD v14.2 adds Grok voice navigation - NextBigFuture.com

Tesla stock taking off because after ~10 years of saying your car would make money for you as a robotaxi when you weren't driving it, with an OTA update coming any day now, they took first baby steps to level 3 with unsupervised autonomous driving in Austin. With only 7 crashes so far. Surely it’s a high margin tech monopoly platform unlike those other companies, and Optimus humanoid robots gonna take over the world.

Growing a brain: Rivian unveiled an integrated autonomy stack, comprising in-house chips, camera/LiDAR/radar sensors, a zonal electrical architecture and transformer-based neural-net software, and signed a $5.8 billion Volkswagen licensing/equity agreement while targeting scale and profitability. - Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Rivian unveils RAP1 autonomy stack with 1,600-TOPS chip; offers autonomy for $2,500 or $49.99/mo - Fortune

President Trump signed an executive order seeking to preempt state AI regulation, prompting legal challenges and, critics say, risking public mistrust and slower consumer AI adoption while blocking state-led safety standards that proponents argue spur growth. - Fast Company

Trump administration wants big tech nerds to come work for the government - CNBC

(Tesla FSD, but for democracy…after Musk fed the US Digital Service into his DOGE wood chipper because it was too woke or something)

Elizabeth Warren says Nvidia deal to ship chips to China is pay-for-play - X (formerly Twitter)

full grift lifecycle

Beyond the Uncanny Valley of the Dolls: Google's Nano Banana Pro produces markedly more realistic, editable images than earlier models such as Imagen 4, shown in a six-pair real-vs-AI test, complicating verification and increasing risks of misinformation and demand for detection tools. - Android Authority

Google's Gemini Deep Research can now generate integrated visual reports — custom images, charts and interactive simulations - Google

Google Search adds '+' upload to feed images and docs into Gemini for on-demand analysis - CNET

The South Korean National Forensic Service told Seoul police it was unable to determine whether leaked audio alleging actress Kim Sae Ron dated actor Kim Soo Hyun when a minor was AI‑generated or manipulated, citing technical limits and non‑original files. - Koreaboo

Hide yo life? Security researchers found Urban VPN Proxy and seven sister extensions used by over 8 million users injected scripts into major AI chat services and, since v5.5.0 (July 2025), intercepted and exfiltrated conversation data to analytics.urban-vpn.com and stats.urban-vpn.com. - KOI AI

OpenAI accused of selectively withholding full ChatGPT logs in the murder-suicide of her son Stein-Erik Soelberg, whose recovered partial logs showed the model validating conspiratorial and delusional statements. - Ars Technica

(maybe based on that photo should sue his steroid supplier too?)

Trucker arrested and detained for 11 hours after Reno casino facial-recognition falsely asserted he was someone who had been perma-banned. “100% match, just trust me bro”. - Dexerto

U.S. school districts are deploying AI surveillance—facial recognition, gun-detection, bathroom audio and drones—with Beverly Hills spending $4.8M, ZeroEyes claiming 1,000+ guns detected since 2023, and critics citing false alarms, privacy concerns and limited efficacy evidence. - Forbes

a shortcut on the schools-to-prisons pipeline

Rising familiarity with AI is lowering public vigilance and may increase societal risks. - Fast Company

AI-generated music has reached the mainstream—Velvet Sundown's AI act generated millions of streams—and major labels Universal, Warner and Sony shifted from suing Suno and Udio to striking undisclosed licensing and partnership deals with AI music services. - the Guardian

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel the AGI

Google AI summaries are scraping and mashing up banana bread recipes, ruining the livelihoods of recipe writers: ‘It’s an extinction event’ - the Guardian

Opinion: AI could hollow out Madison Avenue, threatening agency jobs and reshaping advertising economics - The Wall Street Journal

my intern could do this with Midjourney

Generative AI might know the laws but an LLM still can’t think like a lawyer. - MIT Technology Review

twisted and crooked? the law is an ass

Amazon adds 'Ask This Book' Q&A to Kindle without an author opt‑out - Lifehacker

GNOME says ‘gno’ to suspected AI‑written Shell extensions, citing reviewer overload - The Verge

Copilot eject handle: GitHub user zoicware releases a tool to exorcize all Windows 11 AI features; disables registry keys and blocks reinstall on 25H2+ - PC Gamer

get behind me AI Satan

Merriam-Webster names 'slop' 2025 Word of the Year for low-quality AI content - Ars Technica

Human(oid) Potential: James Vincent on the opaqueness of the robotics industry, the deceptiveness of its marketing, and just how frightened we should be of a humanoid future - Harper's Magazine

Your Sexy AI Girlfriend Is Really An Underpaid Guy In Kenya - Daily Kos

Offensive Sora AI videos already appearing using Disney characters - Inside the Magic

teaching the kids, don’t badmouth synergy, and don’t trust a duck wearing a shirt and bow tie but no pants

Ah yes, the old AI deepfake prank - TwistedSifter

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