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Who, exactly, is Sam Altman?⁠
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Here's a hint: Maybe not the guy Sam Altman wants you to believe he is.⁠
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See our full coverage at the link in bio. by @futurism

In the early days of the AI boom, experts warned that employees may be spending more time hunting down the many errors being made by unreliable and hallucinating AI tools than if they weren’t using the tech at all.⁠
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Those predictions are coming perfectly true. And for companies that went all-in on generative AI, that's becoming an extremely large problem.⁠
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See our full coverage at the link in bio. by @futurism

Surprise, surprise: all that climate stuff scientists have been warning us about is coming back to bite us. ⁠
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And by us, of course, we mean all of humanity.⁠
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See our full coverage at the link in our bio. by @futurism

For years now, some of the biggest players in the AI space have been investing in smaller startups — which in turn use the same exact money to purchase services from the same large companies.

Investors have watched this circular financing with quiet but growing trepidation. After all, as the @wsj points out, if the AI bubble were to pop, the consequences could be dire. Now, with fears over a sudden collapse are as palpable as ever, such a “tangled web of AI bets,” as the newspaper puts it, could spell disaster.

The signs aren’t exactly hard to identify. Just last week, Google’s parent company Alphabet experienced the biggest drop in its market value in its history, wiping out well over half a trillion dollars in value.

Beyond the tech industry’s very bad week, data center operators aren’t looking much better. Nvidia customer CoreWave, which analysts have dubbed the “AI trade’s canary in the coal mine,” has also seen its shares decline over months, raising plenty of flags.

Despite the widespread unease, enormous data center expansion efforts are in full swing, major bipartisan backlash notwithstanding. It’s an unprecedented all-in that could jeopardize the entire economy if it were to collapse.

#ai #economy #datacenters by @futurism

Scientists have long suspected that comets helped kickstart life on Earth by seeding it with organic molecules. But new research may bring the idea to a screeching halt.

A team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge found that a comet’s entry into the Earth’s atmosphere is too violent for the molecular building blocks of life to survive, as detailed in a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports. Any stragglers would be vaporized upon impact with the ground.

“Historically, scientists thought that comets were important for the origin of life on Earth, because they carried carbon- and nitrogen-bearing molecules, so these giant space snowballs were almost like a ‘get out of jail free card’ that brought all the molecules a planet would need to seed life,” said lead author and Cambridge astronomer Richard Anslow in a statement about the work.

“It’s kind of a romantic idea,” he added, “but our results suggest it’s highly unlikely.”

In simulations of comet entries, the researchers focused on hydrogen cyanide (HCN), a prebiotic molecule that’s commonly found on solar system comets. What they discovered was that there’s just too many conditions that would need to be perfect for hydrogen cyanide to survive the trip in one piece. “We can’t rule out for certain that it happened that way,” Anslow added. “But it seems to be a really rare occurrence — at best, a one-off fluke.”

#science #biology #astronomy by @futurism

University of Kentucky administrator David Durman was granted a religious exemption from using AI at work, claiming that use of the tech violates his religious beliefs as a humanist.

As @religionnewssvc reports, Durman maintains that outsourcing cognitive tasks to chatbots could interfere with his development as a “moral actor.” Assisted by the American Humanist Association (AHA), he applied for a religious exemption under Title VII, the federal civil rights law that forbids workplace discrimination and allows employees to apply for “religious accommodation,” and his request was accepted in September.

“The process and work involved in thinking through situations, through my work, through my ethics, through the way I handle other people, is a key component in being able to develop myself as a moral person,” Durman told RNS. “And offloading that labor, regardless of whether it’s taxing or not, is undercutting my ability to be a moral actor.”

Durman isn’t the first American to obtain this kind of AI exemption. This summer, a software engineer and Unitarian Universalist in North Carolina named Erin Maus was also granted a religious exemption from using AI at work, with Maus saying that ethical and environmental concerns raised by AI violated her religious beliefs.

In a letter, Durman wrote that “substituting automated machine processing for human presence, authentic listening, and personal responsibility in my work directly conflicts with my obligation to uphold human dignity and flourishing as primary.”

#ai #antiai #chatbots by @futurism

A fiscal court meeting in Carroll County, Kentucky grew contentious when local residents started playing the sound of a data center to county officials. Spoiler: they didn’t seem to like it.

As local news station @whas11 reported last week, Carroll County is the planned location for two separate data center projects, each of which will likely be around 800 megawatts and will overtake hundreds of acres of Kentucky land. Some officials, like magistrate Scott Nab, are strong supporters of the projects.

But many residents are vociferously not. One of their strategies? Subject county officials to the horrible, 24/7 screech that large data centers emit. “We’re going to be making them listen to it, so they can get a dose of what they’re asking us to endure,” Laura Beth Austin, a local resident who traveled to a nearby data center to record the sound, told the station.

When Austin and an associate interrupted a meeting with their recordings, things quickly turned tense. Nab told them that “You guys have made your point, okay,” and later said with a smirk: “Oh, ya have to live with it?”

#datacenters #ai #kentucky by @futurism

As economists in the rest of the world look at the billions being poured into the AI industry with their hands over their eyes, the fate of China’s AI industry may be a sign of things to come.

A report from @reuters suggests that the AI bubble in China “has already burst.” Or it might be more apt to say that it shriveled like a rapidly deflating balloon: over the past four months, Reuters notes, the country’s STAR50 index of AI and semiconductor companies collapsed by 40 percent, wiping out $480 billion in market value. That is not a typo.

“The stock market later evolved into a speculative crazy bull,” Beijing-based fund manager Dong Baozhen told Reuters. “And now we see the bubble bursting.”

The scale of money being poured into AI and AI-related industries — with AI stocks taking up some 42 percent of China’s market capitalization, according to Goldman Sachs — isn’t too dissimilar to what’s happening in Western economies, where the obvious lack of a return of investment becomes harder to ignore.

Anthropic’s recent disclosure in its IPO filing of a staggering $80 billion loss — and plans to spend another $1 trillion on data centers over the next decade — will only further fuel fears that even the industry’s top players are still far from being profitable.

#aibubble #ai #china by @futurism

As tech billionaires make bank off an AI trade that now threatens retirement accounts and university endowments, a criminal element is rising to take advantage of the crumbs that fall off the table.

According to new reporting by @nbcnews, truckfuls of equipment bound for data center construction sites are disappearing at a breakneck pace, representing tens of millions of dollars in losses for developers.

In one case, a trailer hauling server equipment bound for a hyperscale data center campus in Fayetteville, Georgia disappeared, after the unmarked police car escorting it was rammed by another driver. The trailer was found in a lot a few days later, with pallets containing $13 million worth of equipment nowhere to be found.

“The accident was not an accident,” private cargo theft investigator Gerardo Pachuca told NBC. “The bad guys wanted that load, so they intentionally took out the escorts.”

Thefts of AI data center equipment in transit has resulted in over $100 million in losses since June of 2026 alone. Since last year, NBC identified some two dozen cargo thefts of components across the US, a number that’s expected to grow as the data center boom continues.

#datacenters #theft #ai by @futurism

Despite the enormous amounts of money that are pouring into the AI industry, an actual return on investments remains a distant dream. One major reality check, as Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok argued in a note over the weekend: outside of the tech industry, AI has yet to deliver on any meaningful economic advantages for businesses — amounting to what he called “zero financial payoff.”

It’s a familiar line of thinking as fears of the AI bubble bursting continue to haunt investors, a potentially doomsday-level economic event that could send ripples across the entire global economy.

“Revenue per worker is rising for the Mag 7 but is flat for the S&P 493,” he wrote, differentiating the Magnificent Seven tech companies from the rest of big American business. “Profit margins are rising for the Mag 7 but are flat for the S&P 493,” adding that “there are still no signs of AI boosting productivity growth.”

It’s the latest vote of no confidence as fears of a colossal money pit caving in on itself continue to grow. Much of corporate America has struggled to see much in the way of the promised benefits that are directly reflected on their balance sheets.

Case in point: Despite having just announced a half a billion dollar AI push, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told investors last week that “there’s very little that we do where we need frontier models,” according to reporting by @fortunemag.

#ai #goldman #tech by @futurism

Go ahead and use AI to make your video game — if you want the result to be derivative trash, that is.

Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of the iconic Super Smash Bros and Kirby franchises, recently unloaded on how developers are using AI to “churn out” video games, saying the tech is speeding up development time at the expense of quality and originality.

“The vast majority of these [AI-generated games] will likely be ‘unprofitable’ titles,” Sakurai told Japanese video game outlet Denfaminico Gamer. “There will simply be too many to keep track of, let alone comprehend.” (Some translations have Sakurai saying that AI games will be “unplayable” instead of “unprofitable.”)

AI, Sakurai later suggested, is exacerbating rigid and unoriginal thinking, saying that most of what it creates “will likely consist of systems lifted directly from existing games.” As an example, he noted how the success of the indie game Librarian: Tidy Up The Arcane Library, immediately spawned loads of imitators.

“This kind of imitation is something AI is exceptionally well-suited for,” he said.

#ai #videogames #smash #sakurai by @futurism

Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, a torrent of money has flowed into building out data centers to power the AI boom. The efforts reached a fever pitch the day after Donald Trump’s second inauguration in 2025, when a bevy of AI luminaries crowded into the Oval Office to announce a $500 billion private investment in data centers.

But as the public has grown jittery about the impacts of AI on society and the job market — and story after story has landed about the downsides of hosting data centers in local communities — the buildout has emerged as a major political flashpoint and a key issue in the looming midterms.

The data industry’s headwinds aren’t just political, either. As the @financialtimes reports, serious cracks are forming at the financial and logistical level, especially as serious AI revenue remains elusive. Drawing on data from regulatory intelligence outfit RegLayer, the FT reports that 47 large data center projects have already fallen through this year. Analysts at the equity research firm Bernstein only believe that about 35 percent of planned facilities are feasible.

All those canceled projects are due to a lot of factors, including local communities mobilizing against them, but it’s also macroeconomic. The buildout is taking place during a period of high interest rates and shaky bond markets, and people involved with the effort told the paper that the situation is “threatening their ambitions.”

“People aren’t just dropping their shorts for data centers anymore,” one unnamed executive said. “It’s much harder today to finance a data center.”

#datacenters #ai #economy by @futurism