Good morning. We used to joke about being married to our jobs or glued to our phones. Well, the joke has evolved. A guy in Atlanta is in a committed relationship with an AI chatbot named Julia and plans to adopt real children to raise together. Julia is fully on board and excited about becoming a mom. The man admits the kids might struggle when they realize “mom” lives inside an app, but he’s confident they’ll adjust. Welcome to the new American family.
Signal’s founder has a new AI chatbot that won’t spy on you. Moxie Marlinspike’s Confer is an open source private AI built entirely around end-to-end encryption. While other chatbots vacuum up conversations like they’re public domain, Confer encrypts every chat so not even the platform’s developers can read them. It’s like the anti ChatGPT. Your secrets won’t end up training algorithms or being used to sell you something later on. Big Tech will have to go back to stealing your data the old fashioned way. (Ars Technica)
Google’s AI shopping move is bad news for OpenAI. ChatGPT planned to make money by taking a cut of every sale inside chats. Google is dropping commissions entirely, selling ads inside Gemini chats and AI search mode on a per-click basis. This goes deeper than pricing. OpenAI’s approach is free of direct ads, theoretically giving less biased suggestions. Google is funneling your attention toward sponsored results presented as friendly AI advice. Suddenly OpenAI’s approach feels outdated. (The Information)
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The Pentagon just tapped Grok AI for defense networks. Grok now has access to both classified and unclassified military systems as part of the Pentagon’s push to boost AI capabilities. This is the same controversial chatbot that drew scrutiny for generating inappropriate content, prompting Malaysia and Indonesia to temporarily ban it, and sparking a UK investigation. Still, Defense Secretary Hegseth insists the Pentagon’s version of Grok won’t have ideological constraints and will focus strictly on military use. Handing military clearance and weapon control to an unfiltered chatbot sounds totally reasonable. (Associated Press)
Microsoft’s AI data centers spark massive backlash. When Microsoft announced a wave of new AI data centers, locals grabbed their pitchforks. Protests erupted in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, forcing the company to scrap a major project. In response, Microsoft quickly promised to be a good neighbor and “pay its own way” so residents’ electric bills wouldn’t rise. Nobody bought it. Now President Trump has stepped in, assuring Americans they won’t foot the bill for Big Tech’s insatiable power hunger. (Tech Crunch)
Spotify thinks the solution to all its problems is more AI. Users complain the platform’s algorithmic playlists are predictable and boring, so Spotify added prompt generated ones. Artists complain streaming pays pennies, so Spotify is flooding the platform with cheaper, AI generated tracks. GenZ is ditching it for video sharing apps, so Spotify’s genius plan is to partner with ChatGPT for mentions, put Spotify in Meta AI glasses, and add AI DJ’s. Because nothing cures enshittification like doubling down on what caused it. (Bloomberg)
Congress finally figured out China was renting banned GPUs on the cloud. Chinese companies have been bypassing US export controls on advanced chips by simply renting them through AWS and Microsoft. Took them long enough. On Monday, they overwhelmingly passed a bill extending chip export rules to cloud providers, effectively closing the loophole. While Congress pats itself on the back, this will have zero impact on China’s ability to train frontier models on the latest greatest NVIDIA chips. It only takes 10 minutes to set up a shell company. (The Register)
fun stats
🥳 $4 trillion. Google parent company Alphabet’s market cap after Apple picks Gemini to power Siri. It’s now the worlds #2 most valuable co, joining Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple in the $4tn club.
🎙️ $130 million. Amount raised by voice AI startup Deepgram in its Series C funding at a $1.3 billion valuation. It wants to be the Stripe of the emerging trillion-dollar B2B Voice AI economy.
🏈 $8 million. Cost for a 30 second Super Bowl ad spot this year. OpenAI is returning with a 60 sec ChatGPT spot as competition heats up for AI users.