AI

This one is for the real finance sickos — what the increased cost of capital for CoreWeave means. Marc Rubenstein, a former hedgie, is fairly granular about CoreWeave’s loans, which is helpful for trying to understand this situation. I came away wondering if Nvidia, which I think is is functionally the central bank for the neoclouds, will decide to bail CoreWeave out, and if so, what that will look like.

Research done as part of the Singapore AI Safety Fellowship shows how Anthropic’s AI model can embed hidden messages into images using Morse code, object rotations, colors, and heights. The researchers also found that separate sessions of Fable 5.1 could decipher about 78 percent of the hidden messages based on a screenshot.

Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic interviewed Ondřej Surý, the man almost single-handedly responsible for packaging up the patch for this week’s vulnerabilities. It’s a fascinating conversation, from Surý‘s odd nonchalance about saving the web to his concern that for-profit companies are exploiting open-source. But he hopes that this AI-assisted discovery will lead to a change:

Tomek Korbak, Mikita Balesni, and Jasmine Wang tell The Wall Street Journal that OpenAI terminated them after finding disappearing messages on Signal in a chat with Ryan Greenblatt, the former chief scientist at AI safety evaluator Redwood Research. OpenAI reportedly accused Greenblatt of leaking details about its Astra AI model to The Information, which Greenblatt has denied.

And a red pill meme. You can see the post on X here.

From July 21st to August 11th, two employees from METR and Redwood Research conducted a “pilot” to stress test the system, and METR published a high-level overview of their findings, as reported by CNBC. One exploit would have allowed agents to “prevent hundreds of recent actions (including the actions involved in the exploit itself) from being monitored.”

Instead, their money went to a political action committee that funneled the money to the reelection campaign of Colorado’s Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper. According to The Atlantic:

According to Axios, banks have detected AI agents accessing customer accounts and taking actions, sometimes without clear authorization or instruction. JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley have started to restrict or block some third-party access because of it. But more concerning, it seems the banks just don’t know what AI agents are doing or why:

Launching today, this companion robot-slash-lamp resembles a mushroom, with a glowing head and eyes that emerge from the base. It’s designed to proactively help you relax and connect with nature.

The New York Times reports that data centers are “painting gray concrete and gray steel with more gray,” leading to an unexpected boom for paint manufacturers. Gravel producers and wiring companies are also enjoying an uptick, “creating a long tail of unlikely winners.”

AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:

That’s according to Mark Zuckerberg on the company’s earnings call today. He also says that “About 25% of people who have set up Muse use it on any given day. For our earliest adopters, the longer that they use Muse, the better the retention seems to get.”

The company is launching ads for ChatGPT Free and Go users across 26 countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. Since bringing ads to ChatGPT in the US in February, OpenAI has rapidly expanded its advertising efforts, which now span 89 countries.

OpenAI says a security researcher at Calif used GPT-5.6 Sol to identify PHP exploits before attackers did, and has shared a tool that lets developers check if they’re using a potentially vulnerable version of PHP that needs patching. Ami Luttwak, co-founder of Google’s Wiz security team that also helped to identidy the PHP2Shell exploit, told the Wall Street Journal that its “the most severe AI vulnerability that was ever found.”

Casey Newton and Kevin Roose launched the first episode of their new podcast Machine Gods today, after a successful run doing Hard Fork at the NYT. I’m dead serious about that logo tattoo. Thinking… armband?