AI
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‘Humanity has chosen to become idiots’: This Brown professor switched to take-home exams after a mass shooting and discovered mass cheating
When Brown University Professor Roberto Serrano changed the format of his midterm exam last spring, he was thinking about his students’ mental health, not academic fraud. Two of them had been shot, including Ella Cook, a young woman who had sat in his office just days before the December 13 massacre at Brown University and…
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This summer’s heat is a live stress test for data centers — here’s what it’s revealing in real time
This summer has already produced three answers to questions the data center industry would have preferred to leave theoretical. In May, the PJM Interconnection — the grid operator serving data center-dense northern Virginia — received emergency authorization from the Energy Department to curtail power to data centers due to “atypically hot mid-May weather conditions.” In…
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The most reassuring argument about AI and jobs quietly explains why Gen Z can’t get one
Smart people disagree on the AI job apocalypse, and even the prophets of white-collar doom—Dario Amodei and Sam Altman—have walked back their predictions. But the best explanation for why AI won’t kill off jobs across the economy comes, perhaps unexpectedly, from a Dutch software company that sells its products to law firms. It also explains…
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Ford realized AI wasn’t capable of taking human jobs years ago—and hired 350 ‘gray beard’ engineers to steer its program
WIth all the discussion about the AI bubble, AI hype and mass automation displacement, Ford Motor Company has a message for the U.S. economy: human experience matters. Over the last three years, the company has hired 350 veteran engineers—dubbed “gray beards” internally and made up of both former Ford employees and workers from suppliers—to help…
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Hyperscalers could end up resembling airlines—plagued by small margins, intense competition, and high expenses, AI skeptic warns
The relentless arms race among AI hyperscalers to amass more and more computing power will eventually hit a wall, according to Gary Marcus. That’s because the enormous amounts of capital expenditures have failed to clean up errors their large language models produce while also removing any technical moats that might give them a competitive edge.…
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AI spending boom accelerates as Big Tech pours trillions into infrastructure
Good morning. AI-driven capital spending is scaling rapidly, and the economics remain attractive and increasingly profitable—for now, according to JPMorgan Global Research’s midyear outlook. Analysts see a broadening AI capex cycle underpinning growth expectations, led by “AI upstream” investments in data centers, chips, and supporting infrastructure. Much of this activity remains concentrated in the U.S.,…
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Samsung, SK reportedly to invest $1.3 trillion over 10 years
South Korea’s Samsung Group and SK Group are poised to announce as much as 2,000 trillion won ($1.3 trillion) of investments over the next decade as part of President Lee Jae Myung’s flagship industrial strategy, Korea Economic Daily reported Monday. The two groups are expected to unveil the package when their leaders present the plans…
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One in three Gen Zers is letting AI do their homebuying homework, but they still trust realtors with the closing process
Gen Zers have gotten so accustomed to AI that they’re now using it for one of the biggest financial decisions they’ll ever make: buying a home. A study by the Bank of America Institute found that about a third of Gen Z had used AI tools in the past 12 months for homebuying research, a…
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Anthropic’s Alibaba fight raises a trillion-dollar question for IPO: How defensible is a frontier AI moat against China with Washington’s toolbox?
Anthropic has alleged Alibaba found a cheaper way to close the already narrowing AI gap: Not by stealing servers or smuggling chips, but by using fake accounts and innocuous interactions with Claude to extract its capabilities and train competing systems at a fraction of the cost. Leading IPO expert Jay Ritter told Fortune that Alibaba’s…
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‘It’s not going away’: The Stanford economist who called the AI entry-level jobs crisis early has the receipts
Last August, a team led by Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson published a deep look at the impact of AI on jobs, boosted by a “large-scale, high-frequency administrative dataset from ADP,” the largest payroll software provider in the United States. The findings were stark: a significant relative decline in employment for workers ages 22 to 25…