4 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Ai Artificial Intelligence Archive

Archives for July 2026

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Willie Nelson is pushing back against data centers in his hometown.

“The last thing we need is a loud, water thieving, light polluting, data center anywhere near our town (or any others for that matter),” Nelson says.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed about AI for the WSJ.

Zuckerberg argues that bringing “superintelligence” to more people is better than centralizing who controls AI:

As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Grok now lets you use an AI prompt to build apps.

Build Mode is out now for subscribers of SpaceXAI’s $300 per month SuperGrok Heavy tier, and it’s accessible on the Grok website and mobile apps. It’s powered by the company’s Grok Build coding agent.

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
Meta pledges to solve AI labeling problems it’s actively exacerbating.

The company has signed a voluntary code to comply with obligations under the EU’s AI Act to mark and label AI-generated content that takes effect on August 2nd. Meta unironically said it wants to help prevent “a growing array of different labels and disclosures” from confusing people and regulators, after launching its own bespoke system this month.

Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Yelp’s AI can now handle takeout orders over the phone.

You can read more about it in a Yelp blog post, and the company put together a video demo you can watch below. Could be useful, but let’s hope it works better than some AI drive-thru chatbots.

Jess Weatherbed
Jess Weatherbed
ChatGPT now refuses to mimic famous authors.

The OpenAI chatbot has started to push back on requests to copy the writing style of authors like Stephen King and Agatha Christie, saying it can spit out something with similar characteristics, but can’t closely imitate distinctive styles. Those disclaimers could be legally important as OpenAI faces down copyright lawsuits filed by authors.

Thomas Ricker
Thomas Ricker
AI is coming for call center jobs.

Last week, Uber said it would be cutting 10 percent of its customer service workforce to “embrace” AI. But things are much more dire than that according to Forrester analyst Kate Leggett, who estimates that “almost half of customer service roles will be impacted by 2030.”

Hayden Field
Hayden Field
Dario Amodei weighed in on Anthropic’s open-weight model controversy.

The company had been igniting widespread criticism as seemingly the only leading AI lab not supporting open-weight models. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently published a public letter in support of them, signed by Microsoft, Nvidia, Meta, Palantir, Hugging Face, and others — and in the days since, it’s added OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, SpaceX, Cohere, Mistral, CoreWeave, GitHub, OpenClaw, and Perplexity as signatories. Now Anthropic’s CEO has published his own thoughts on the matter, clarifying, “Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models.”

Elizabeth Lopatto
Elizabeth Lopatto
Nvidia is making investors nervous.

After reports of Nvidia in talks for deals worth more than $750 billion — with OpenAI, among others — insurance on Nvidia’s debt got more expensive. “There’s a fear of financial alchemy driven by opaqueness, off-balance-sheet transactions and intercompany relationships, which could result in credit rating downgrades,” Sal Naro, chief investment officer of Coherence Credit Strategies, told Bloomberg. Nvidia is at the center of many transactions that tie the AI ecosystem together.

David Pierce
David Pierce
Today’s Vergecast: Here’s what an AI-first phone might look like.

Some of the biggest players in AI — in particular OpenAI, SpaceX, and Amazon — are heavily invested in creating a world after smartphones. They’re also all rumored to be building devices that sound a lot like smartphones. Verge contributor David Imel helps us figure out what these companies might actually be building, what an AI smartphone looks like, and whether anyone can unseat Apple and Google.