Jay Peters

Senior Reporter

AI leaders sign a statement asking the government to do something about automated AI

Hayden Field and Jay PetersJul 28

Jay PetersJul 28

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 PetersJul 28

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.

Jay PetersJul 28

Meta and BlackRock are building a data center campus together.

The campus will be located in El Paso, Texas and is already under construction. It will have “1 gigawatt of compute capacity” and “will play an essential role in bringing Meta’s AI technologies to life.” BlackRock will own an 80 percent interest, while Meta will own a 20 percent interest.

The data center is expected to come online in 2028.

Meta Announces New Strategic Venture With BlackRock to Develop Data Center in El Paso

[Meta Newsroom]

Jay PetersJul 28

Xbox’s CTO explains Monday’s big outage.

The outage, which lasted for nearly a day, blocked people from playing some digital and disc games. You can read Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet’s full explanation on X, but here’s a key part of it:

What happened. Late last night, a licensing service that sits outside of XBOX, but which XBOX depends upon, began failing. This caused some sign-in scenarios to fail, and it caused many scenarios that require an entitlement check to also fail, such as listing out your Full Library and launching games that you own. It also affected several of our publishing and store partners who depend on those same systems which is why some of you saw issues in specific games and not others.

Jay PetersJul 28

T-Mobile’s huge outage is officially over.

The outage, which started on Monday, seemed to affect people all over the US and even some customers on MVNOs. In a 12:10PM ET post on Tuesday, the company finally said that it had “fully restored service for all customers.”

A screenshot of a T-Mobile tweet. It says: “We have fully restored service for all customers and sincerely apologize for the difficulties. We know that customers rely on us to stay connected to what matters most, and we appreciate their understanding as we prioritized resolution.“

Image: T-Mobile

HBO Max is putting on vertical shorts

Jay PetersJul 28

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.

Jay PetersJul 27

T-Mobile is ‘actively working’ to resolve a major outage.

The outage seems to be affecting many places across the country, as users from areas like New York City, New Jersey, North Dakota, and Berkeley, CA all recently reported problems with their T-Mobile service in a Reddit thread that has more than 6,000 comments and 2,000 upvotes.

The outage also appears to impact customers on MVNOs, too. One NYC-based Verge staffer on Google Fi, which runs on T-Mobile’s network, has no service.