Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
Welcome to Bear Lair!* (No, it’s nothing like that other show.) As we continue to explore the world of AI tools and vibe coding, we invited a few enterprising Vergecast fans to share their projects — and we invited The Verge’s Hayden Field to judge them with us. We’ll see what people are working on, and whether any of them will make us fabulously wealthy.
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Mitsui Fudosan is planning the data center, which will consist of more than 10 shipping containers with servers, in the Suma Belt Conveyor in Kobe, Japan, Nikkei Asia reports. The company is also apparently planning more underground data centers.
Users will soon be able to shop from other retailers without leaving TikTok, as well as use an AI chatbot to find and purchase products.
TikTok is often associated with short form video, but it has also reshaped the online shopping landscape. As I wrote last year, scrolling has become synonymous with shopping, and perhaps more than any other platform, TikTok has figured out how to bridge the gap.
The vulnerability could have allowed Meta’s buzzy AI assistant to escape its virtual machine and access the company’s databases and services, a source tells 404 Media:
The Meta source said they felt security teams were asked to push hot fixes to these bugs as quickly as possible and in a way that wouldn’t delay Muse’s launch, leading to what they described as “half-baked protections being rushed out to enable the launch.”
As reported by the Gulf Coast News network, Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot flagged a conversation with 30-year-old Carli Michelle Heller after she allegedly made violent threats toward the Lee County Sheriff’s Office. Human reviewers then viewed the messages and reported them to police, the report says.
According to the Financial Times, that’s nearly double the 135,000 takedown requests Sony Music had previously sent for AI tracks imitating its artists, like Harry Styles, Adele, and Britney Spears. Over the past year, Sony has also filed lawsuits against AI music platforms like Suno and Udio over copyright infringement.
[Financial Times]
Congress missed its chance on social media. Can it act on AI?
AI is junk food for the mind: easy, tempting and ultimately very bad for you.
The OSS VRP — which paid out for bugs found across Google’s open-source ecosystem — will be frozen until at least next year. It’s slop’s fault: the pause is down to a “significant rise” in AI submissions, “the vast majority of which are not valid.” Linux has been suffering from a similar problem.
[X (formerly Twitter)]
In an interview with Brendan Bordelon of Politico, Altman said this was a fundamental difference between OpenAI and Anthropic. He believes that “for the benefits of this technology” (rather than the benefit of humanity), we should just deal with “bad things happening.”
As the new AI czar, Clayton will lead a team that includes FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor. Clayton served as SEC chair during Trump’s first term and recently became director of national intelligence in August.
In a post on X, Elon Musk endorsed President Trump’s efforts to rebrand artificial intelligence (AI) and super intelligence (SI). When asked if he planned to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, he replied yes. But as we all know, Elon says a lot of things.
I’m not sure what prompted this post on X from the OpenAI CEO, but it’s hard not to see it as mildly concerning, especially since we’ve already seen AI is perfectly capable of building its own cult.
It’s been a dizzying few weeks of “is AI reasoning and / or alive” discourse, with the attendant pushback that these systems are just fancy autocomplete. But back in March, Margaret Mitchell, one of the authors of the famous Stochastic Parrots paper, took to Medium to clarify something: AI, as a whole, is not a stochastic parrot — LLMs are. Critics are missing a fundamental difference between the two technologies, even though they’re related. The post has been going back around, and it’s worth a read.
There is a vast array of technology called “AI” that is not reducible to LLMs, and many current AI systems that utilize LLMs also leverage a variety of other technologies, including hand-written-rules, deterministic (non-stochastic) programs, various algorithms, and non-language models. This means that “AI”, broadly, is not equivalent to a large language model; it is not “just a stochastic parrot”.
[Margaret Mitchell]
Musk has famously insisted that cameras are enough for his self-driving cars, when everyone else is pairing them with more advanced sensors. Now He’s explicitly said that his Robotaxis can’t run at night because it’s dark — a problem lidar and radar could easily solve.
As head of Splice, CEO Kakul Srivastava has tried to carefully thread the line on AI music tools.
Ok, let’s be honest, it’s not much of a competition. The AI songs suck, and it’s pretty easy to tell which is human and which is AI when compared side by side. But the diary-style detailing of the songwriting process for both illustrates just how low-effort AI music is.
The DOJ has charged Greg Lui with conspiracy, money laundering and smuggling over an alleged years-long scheme to sneak export-controlled Nvidia GPUs into China by re-exporting them from other countries, like Malaysia or Singapore. Four people were arrested last year for similar Nvidia smuggling allegations.
[U.S. Department of Justice]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Opt Out October tips go over settings to change in AI tools and browsers, decentralized social media platforms to try out, and suggestions for more private alternatives to popular apps. There’s also a guide on how you can switch to Linux, which could potentially save an old Windows 10 PC, like my ThinkPad, on top of improving your data privacy.
[Electronic Frontier Foundation]
Think of Dots as Codex, but for regular people.
Microsoft is expanding ‘biomimicry’ at its data centers as it faces more pushback from locals over construction, pollution, and noise.
You can now select images or listings for clothes that appear in the chatbot, tap “Try on,” and then upload images of yourself to see what you’d look like wearing the apparel. Sound familiar? That’s because Google introduced a near-identical AI try on feature over a year ago.
