AI

The Book of Life director Jorge Gutierrez cancelled an AI animation collaboration with Amazon last week following massive backlash. A new project by two Pixar alums, premiering at Tribeca Film Festival this weekend, shows that not every use of the tech is about fast, cheap slop.

Following a report from a bitcoin policy think tank and claims from Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, three Republican lawmakers asked the Trump administration to brief them about investigations into alleged foreign influence campaigns. The lawmakers are concerned that adversaries are pushing anti-AI sentiment to slow US infrastructure development.

The company just raised $250 million in November against a $2.45 billion valuation — already a staggering jump from its roughly $500 million valuation in 2024. Now it’s more than doubled its valuation to $5.4 billion in just over six months, suggesting that investors haven’t been scared off by looming lawsuits.

Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Lori Trahan (D-MA) are releasing a highly anticipated 269-page draft bill as a launching pad for discussion about federal AI regulation, Politico reported. In a Bloomberg Law op-ed, the lawmakers said a national standard is necessary to extend protections across state lines.

I enjoyed this piece from Ted Chiang in The Atlantic because it’s a well-deserved smack in the face to the clowns who suggest LLMs might be conscious. Nope, we’re just falling for one of the most obvious confidence tricks of all time: giving in to “someone” who appears to like us.

Young people do hate AI. “Creatively, I get no enjoyment from using those tools. It defeats the purpose entirely for me,” 20-year-old director of A24’s horror hit Backrooms told The Australian. “To me, generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot.” Read more about Backrooms on The Verge:

You all know how much we here at The Verge love market consolidation. SwitchBot’s acquisition of Nanoleaf offers all that, plus a sprinkling of something extra.

Grimes County, Texas, awarded the company a property tax exemption for its planned $55 billion Terafab semiconductor plant. Local residents seem to feel the same way about the project as many do about data centers, and this tax break won’t help. As local landowner Rhonda Nesloney put it in court:

The company is lagging behind Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Microsoft when it comes to AI coding tools, but 404 Media reports it’s found a novel way to expand its training base of code: offering to pay Android developers for access to the innards of their apps.

CNBC reports details from a new filing ahead of SpaceX’s IPO on June 12th and notes a mention that xAI, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year, bought $269 million worth of Tesla megapack batteries in April.

According to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, ChatGPT reached the milestone last month, roughly three years after launching, Reuters reports. It apparently passed 1 billion MAUs faster than the other apps that have hit the benchmark, including Google Maps, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

According to the Steam page for Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis:

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:

Microsoft has a vision for its future AI hardware concepts, including an AI ID badge. It doesn’t feel entirely new, but it does feel very Microsoft.

Utah Senate president J. Stuart Adams is calling for a 75 percent reduction, bringing the project from 40,000 acres to approximately 10,000, alongside demands for greater transparency and stronger conservation commitments. O’Leary says the reduced proposal is like “selling you a house, and you get to live in the upstairs toilet.”

The “Model Capability Initiative” that records staff’s computing activity for AI training is being updated following backlash. Now, Meta employees can pause MCI for up to 30 minutes, and staff who handle sensitive content, work remotely, or have concerns regarding bandwidth or device battery can be exempt from using it.

It uses data from your pictures to mix and match outfits in a virtual try-on you can save and share. It’s rolling out in the US, India, and Brazil as part of the June Android drop, starting with AI Pro/Ultra subscribers and “other select users” on Android, but you’ll need at least 1,000 photos of yourself to be eligible to try it out without a subscription.

Nvidia is betting that AI is going to change the way you use your computer — and with a new chip, the RTX Spark, it’s hoping to ensure it powers that new-fangled AI machine. The Verge’s Sean Hollister explains what’s inside the Spark, why Nvidia is taking on Apple, Intel, AMD, and the rest of the chip industry, and whether the world’s most valuable company has a shot at reinventing the personal computer. Without charging a fortune.

At its Build developer conference, Microsoft is launching Microsoft Execution Containers, a policy-driven layer to make it more secure to run things like OpenClaw on Windows. It’s going a step further too, by allowing a companion app for OpenClaw to run contained on Windows PCs. It should stop AI agents like OpenClaw from deleting all your files. “You can totally run OpenClaw inside your company now,” says OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger.

With this expansion of Anthropic’s Project Glasswing initiative, organizations in “several industries that weren’t well represented” in the initial cohort, like power, water, and healthcare, will get access to the model so they can use it to find security vulnerabilities.

As Microsoft shows off its AI tools at Build, close frienemy OpenAI is once again promoting Codex as something for all kinds of information and knowledge-based work that goes beyond ChatGPT’s features. It’s launching new plugins, and says that business and enterprise customers have access to a new preview capable of building “interactive, hosted websites and apps” that it can keep updated with new data.

Fresh off interviewing the chatbot-powered stunt that is Tilly Norwood, the NYT tells us of Martin Scorsese’s advisor and partner arrangement with Black Forest Labs (whose Flux tech has powered xAI’s image generation) in what it calls “a clear sign of Hollywood’s softening stance on artificial intelligence.”