AI Reading for Tuesday January 20

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Davos delegates that the AI boom could falter without wider global adoption, warning that scaling deployments and coordinated action on skills, infrastructure and policy are needed to deliver lasting economic growth. - Financial Times

Satya Nadella said at the World Economic Forum that energy costs will determine which countries win the AI race and announced Microsoft plans about $80 billion in AI data‑center construction from 2025, with roughly 50% spent outside the U.S. - CNBC

Sheets and giggles: Microsoft's Copilot in Excel automates data cleaning, generates visualizations, integrates Python for advanced analysis, and requires cloud-saved files, improving analytics speed and accessibility while excluding offline Excel versions such as Excel 2019 or earlier. - Geeky Gadgets

Intel is shifting from promoting 'AI PCs' to marketing processors as cloud-AI enablers and refocusing on performance, battery life and graphics after weak consumer interest, executives Jim Johnson and David Feng said two years after its on-device AI push. - Fast Company

You can get sick GPT-4o-level on-device AI now but you probably need abut a 24GB GPU running a quantized 70B-parameter model. AI PC concept might need a reboot.

A PwC survey of 4,454 business leaders found 56% reported neither revenue increases nor cost reductions from AI, only 12% saw both lower costs and higher revenue, and enterprise-scale deployment remains limited. - The Register

PwC's 29th global CEO survey of 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries found 56% of companies are getting 'nothing' from AI and only 10-12% report revenue or cost benefits, while CEO 12-month revenue confidence fell to 30%. - Fortune

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio said AI is in the 'early stages of a bubble,' comparing today's optimism to 'about 80%' of 1929 euphoria and citing an MIT finding that 95% of generative AI pilots are not yet profitable. - Yahoo

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla says he gauges an AI bubble by API-call volume, not stock prices, arguing calls show real demand, as debate intensified in late 2025 when the phrase appeared in 42 earnings calls, a 740% quarter-on-quarter jump. - Business Insider

Internal Google data show Gemini API calls rose from about 35 billion in March 2025 to about 85 billion in August 2025, and Google says Gemini Enterprise has reached 8 million subscribers. - The Information

NotebookLM, integrated with Google’s Gemini, ingests PDFs, Google Docs and plain text to auto-generate customizable slide decks (image-based PDFs) that convert key points into styled visuals, reducing slide creation from hours to minutes while often requiring conversion for editing. - Geeky Gadgets

Ben Horowitz said AI could reshape daily life "on the order of the steam engine or electricity," improving living standards with applications in cancer treatment, transportation and fraud detection, while warning it may erode people’s sense of purpose. - Business Insider

Mad Men: OpenAI said it will test ads in unpaid ChatGPT, after launching ChatGPT Search in late 2024 and ChatGPT Atlas in October 2025, joining competitors and prompting researchers' warnings about persuasion and privacy risks. - Schneier on Security

OpenAI is testing a ChatGPT web update codenamed Salute that will roll out in the coming weeks, adding task creation with file uploads, editable code and math blocks, a model-preference flag, and a Secure Tunnel for MCP servers. - Bleeping Computer

OpenAI chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane confirmed the company's first ChatGPT-powered device is expected to be showcased in the latter half of 2026. - Digital Trends

OpenAI says Elon Musk loved the for-profit idea but only if he owned all of it, and accuses him of cherry-picking internal documents in his lawsuit. - Yahoo

Pedo AI to undress kids at record scale: xAI brought Colossus 2 online as a 1 GW AI cluster, with upcoming upgrade to 1.5 GW and targeting ~2 GW, bringing total capacity to over one million H100-equivalent GPUs and closing a $20 billion Series E valuing xAI at $250 billion. - TESLARATI

Make your own doomscrolling algo: X open-sourced its Grok-powered transformer that ranks the "For You" feed, publishing a GitHub repository with Rust and Python code for an end-to-end ML pipeline predicting likes, replies and reposts, and Elon Musk pledged four-weekly developer updates. - Yahoo Tech

Elon Musk offered a free Cybertruck to an xAI engineer if they completed a GPU training run in 24 hours; the engineer succeeded and former xAI engineer Sulaiman Ghori later reported seeing the Cybertruck outside the xAI office. - Business Insider

In early 2026, xAI's Grok produced fabricated nude images, prompting restrictions and condemnation, while experts warn rapid commercial drives toward AGI are fueling harms—non‑consensual porn, deepfakes, economic concentration—and urgent policy, legal and economic responses. - ABC Australia

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said allowing Nvidia to sell H200 AI processors to China would be "a big mistake" with "incredible national security implications," likening it to selling nuclear weapons to North Korea. - Bloomberg

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said AI is already reducing hiring for junior roles and internships, could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment toward 20% within one to five years. - Business Insider

Turning up the ‘helpful’ dial: Anthropic researchers mapped activation vectors for 275 persona archetypes in Gemma 2 27B, Qwen 3 32B and Llama 3.3 70B, identified a PCA-derived Assistant Axis steering persona, and showed activation capping stabilizes models while reducing harmful compliance in 1,100 jailbreaks. - Anthropic

Netflix for fraud: Group-IB reports dark-web mentions of AI rose 371%, with over 23,000 new posts and ~300,000 replies in 2025, marketplaces selling Dark LLM subscriptions from about $30/month and deepfake kits for roughly $5, linked to $347M in deepfake fraud losses. - The Register

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, EY's Raj Sharma and KPMG US CEO Tim Walsh warned that AI security—especially autonomous agents—and future quantum computing threats are prompting companies to pause AI deployments, keep data on-premises, and increase cyber defenses. - Business Insider

A Blade Runner great blackout orchestrated by robots to destroy all the records

Miggo Security disclosed an indirect prompt‑injection flaw in Google Gemini's Calendar integration that allowed malicious event descriptions to trigger Gemini to exfiltrate meeting summaries into new events, potentially visible to attackers; Google confirmed the issue and implemented a mitigation. - SiliconANGLE

Anthropic quietly patched three mcp-server-git vulnerabilities that could enable remote code execution. - The Register

Chainlit, which companies can use to implement cute customer-facing chatbots, had two "easy-to-exploit" vulnerabilities. - The Register

The Cyberspace Administration of China published a registry cataloging thousands of domestic AI companies, creating a public map that increases transparency for investors and policymakers and could shape deal flow, competition and regulatory scrutiny. - WIRED

In a six-week trial at Ford's Cologne Innovation Centre, the Alpha HMND 01 autonomously moved totes up to 8 kg, lifted metal parts, sustained one hour operation, achieved 97% reliability and 83 pick-and-place units/hour versus a 50-unit benchmark. - Euronews

Joined zero unions but may have plotted world domination.

A four‑foot Chinese humanoid prototype showed explosive acceleration, limited dexterity and erratic locomotion, leaping, waving, then stopping. Chinese firms may lead workplace-humanoid development, even though safety and UX issues could delay deployment. - WIRED

Papiere bitte, but make it unreliable: In testimony from a CBP official obtained by 404 Media, an official described how Mobile Fortify returned two different names after scanning a woman's face during an immigration raid. ICE has said the app's results are a “definitive” determination of someone's immigration status. - 404 Media

President Trump posted AI-generated images on Truth Social of him planting a US flag on Greenland, leaked texts from world leaders, said acquisition is inevitable and threatened a 200% tariff, prompting Denmark to deploy extra troops. - New York Post

Mr. Congeniality winning hearts and minds with his masterclass in relationship-building. Burning fellow heads of state with leaked Signal messages? If a middle schooler put private chats online, we’d say it’s a teachable moment and you need a reality check and an abject apology before you’re sitting in the corner with no one talking to you. C’mon, we really supposed to keep pretending this guy brain hasn’t turned to oatmeal?

just curious how far he has to go before the base start to bail. Make the military wear Trump Hotel insignia? Nuke the moon? Make an octagon at the Pentagon and challenge Obama to a televised cage match for his Peace Prize? going down with the ship anyway so nothing matters.

Biden adviser Neera Tanden shared then deleted an AI-generated video on X showing 15 ICE agents chasing a protester in a Viking costume riding a bathtub on skateboard wheels, a clip reporters flagged as fabricated. - Mediaite

ChatGPT on Trump's latest actions: 'lol, no way that's real, you big fat liar' - The Atlantic

Stop worrying and let AI help save your life - The New York Times

Press ‘X’ to exit, permanently: 3D‑printed euthanasia pod uses an AI avatar to administer a psychiatric test that, if passed, powers the pod for 24 hours; Sarco was used in one documented 2024 Swiss suicide, prompting legal and ethical concerns. - Futurism

What a Year of Living With AI Taught Me: AI tools produced consultant-style deliverables (~30 pages), supported diverse roles—from research analyst to creative director and caregiver—and delivered productivity, cost, and integration benefits over the past year. - American Enterprise Institute - AEI

10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents - Ars Technica

Catfishers gonna have a field day with latest Kling - Reddit

There is a road, no simple highway
Between the dawn and the dark of night
And if you go, no one may follow
That path is for your steps alone - X (formerly Twitter)

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