u/EditorEdward

u/ezitron said things were going to get weird and I think this would qualify.

>"It's a fuzzy and perhaps already overworked term, but we decided that January 1st marked the beginning of the singularity, and we have since been operating on that basis," the letter said.

Kinda makes me not want to use their systems if they think that "AI" has become smarter than humans in a loosely defined way. Would be great if they could say specifically how that is the case and the direct evidence on how it's effecting their business. But I think it's just hype material for Investors.

>The singularity is often invoked alongside millenarian forecasts, but, in our case, we simply saw a large inflection in long-run trends (for example, a huge increase in the rate of new firm creation), and we decided that we ought to take the phase change seriously," the letter from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, president John Collison, and president, technology and business, William Gaybrick, continued.

This is actually quite telling that people are canceling their subscriptions with the watermark coming to Claude. Kinda breaks the illusion that they did it on their own and exposes their reliance of AI slop.

>Having code attributed to Claude "definitely would be not desirable," he said, as he would not want professionally shipped code to carry an invisible marker that could raise questions about authorship, compliance, or client policies.

The fact that they are hidden $1 trillion in commitments off their books seems really REALLY BAD!! This is going to be catastrophic when the bubble pops.

>Credit investors have also been increasingly focused on the lease commitments of the hyperscaler sector. Using the most recent data from the ongoing earnings season, we have tracked $1.5 trillion in aggregate lease commitments. Of this amount, $1.0 trillion is associated with leases which have not yet commenced. Because of the nuances of lease accounting under US GAAP, these ‘uncommenced’ lease commitments are not reflected in the financial statements, even though they will result in future lease payments (or other obligations) in upcoming years.

All this funky math that they are playing with their books seems way worse than the 2008 bubble. At least with that there was some kind of tangible asset that was being bought and sold however shady the lending practices. This just feels like they are playing with Monopoly money and expecting people to pay them in real money.

As soon as I see an Ad or poster that is AI I immediately think less of that business and don't support it. I know small businesses need to cut cost corners but generating something in AI just looks tacky and unoriginal. So glad to see that there are other people feeling the same way.

>It feels almost quaint, then, to have to point out that every time you post an AI image of a burger or a t-shirt you're also essentially lying to your customers, because those images aren't fibbing like a stock photo of a kebab used to, they're not even real things. They may as well be unicorns. Have you ever seen an AI-generated sandwich on a poster before? It's a computer guessing what human food looks like, and its ghoulish inaccuracies manage to make them look worse than any actual sandwich could ever.

Also, why do so many AI poster have to have the grungy text in them?! It's one of the dead giveaways for me now.

I have been seeing this story everywhere and it's really insane. Leopold Aschenbrenner started Situational Awareness after leaving OpenAI and seems to have not known hardly anything about investing.

>The hedge fund has operated with a skeleton staff, with only four investment professionals and a total of eight employees, according to its most recent regulatory filing. Aschenbrenner, who had no prior trading experience before starting the fund, has amassed a huge following on social media, with more than 250,000 followers on X.

The entire thing sounds like a guy from Wallstreetbets with a Robinhood account using leverage to place bets on the stock market. they had to sell the bulk of it's stock portfolio to Citadel after massive losses on their AI bets.

Per the Kobeissi Letter:

>It is now being reported that the AI hedge fund has exited its entire public equity portfolio this month. But, what does this really mean? As of July 1st, the Net Asset Value (NAV) of the fund is now being reported to have been ~$45 billion. First, let's put this into perspective. NAV = (Assets − Liabilities). This is the fund's equity capital, also known as the investors' money after accounting for borrowings. This is NOT the same as the size of the fund's positions, particularly because the fund has been known for utilizing extreme amounts of leverage.

>For example:
At 2x leverage, a $45 billion NAV supports ~$90 billion of gross market exposure
At 3x leverage, that rises to ~$135 billion
At 4x leverage, that rises to ~ $180 billion

>This means that exiting its "public equity book" does not necessarily imply $45 billion of stock changed hands. It was likely much more. Depending on the fund's leverage and portfolio construction, the gross amount of securities unwound could have been well in excess of $100 billion.

Between the Korean Stock Market imploding and the funds like this taking massive hits, I think it's safe to speculate that the AI Bubble has begun to pop. Will still take time to full burst but the air is coming out and will only start to accelerate as OpenAI and Anthrophic run out of money to operate.

If this is truly coming, the "thought leaders" are about to have a meltdown!! I went on Linkedin to verify if it is there and so far I haven't been able to find it. Considering how much AI slop there is on Linkedin I'm surprised that they would create this button.

>Earlier this month, 404 Media reported that AI detection service Pangram estimated 41 percent of long form posts and 30 percent of short form posts on LinkedIn are likely AI generated.

Gonna keep an eye out for this button so I can flag everything horrible AI generated flyer that is flooding everything everywhere all at once.

I think u/zitron called it by saying things are going to get weirder. I just didn't expect it start happening so weird so quickly. The numbers on this "rumored" "Deal" are so fantastical.

>According to The Wall Street Journal, Nvidia is in talks to support as much as $600 billion of OpenAI-related financing. The proposal could include $250 billion tied to OpenAI's planned Ohio data center and another $350 billion supporting GPU purchases.

It's insane that the number just to "buy" the GPUs I so much higher than the cost to build a 10 GW Data Center complex. I feel like this is story is just a wishful fantasy put out by OpenAI or Nvidia to juice their numbers but it seems to be having the opposite effect. The drum beat Ed has been banging about circular financing is now mainstream thinking.

>Critics have increasingly argued Nvidia is participating in "circular financing" arrangements, where it helps customers obtain financing that ultimately flows back to Nvidia through GPU purchases. The concern is straightforward: if Nvidia is helping finance demand for its own products, does that make AI demand appear stronger than it otherwise would?

This does not bode well for their acquisition of Warner Bros since a lot of the money is back stopped by Oracle's falling stock. Trying to find out is the ticking fee will still apply post Sept 30th but this deal may wind up being killed wholesale is Oracle keeps imploding since the article is a bit vague about it.

>Paramount has agreed not to close its proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery until June 1, 2027, or until shortly after the merits of lawsuits brought by state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America are resolved. 

The agreement is an extraordinary new development in the merger transaction, which has won regulatory approval from the federal government and European regulators. But U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin this week granted the states a temporary restraining order pausing the transaction for 14 days to hold a hearing on whether to grant a lengthier preliminary injunction. She later extended the TRO by another 14 days, through Aug. 17.

This and this other lawsuits brought by the WGA, Investors, etc may wind up killing the deal. Netflix has been rumored to be working behind the scenes to help get this deal killed with regulators as well.

This feels like the people who used WebMD as a way to self diagnosis themselves but with a much bigger sense of authority from OpenAI. My opinion is that all the grandstanding and boosting they have done about what their models are capable of are going to continue to bite them in their ass for a while.

>According to the lawsuit, Winters had been struggling with his health for around two years when he started using ChatGPT — which was then powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o model — in June 2024. He started feeding the chatbot queries about a handful of chronic health conditions he’d recently been diagnosed with — small intestine bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO, and chronic prostatitis — and at first, ChatGPT’s responses came with disclaimers encouraging him to seek additional insight from medical professionals.

But the more he used the chatbot, Winters says, the further those guardrails eroded. The bot stepped “into the role of a medical practitioner,” the lawsuit reads, and “began to offer specific care directives without including the disclaimer to consult a medical provider.” The more Winters consulted ChatGPT about his worsening health, the deeper his trust in the chatbot grew.

I know at least in California a corporation practicing medicine without licensed medical professionals is illegal which hopefully can be used against them in this suit. A more worrying aspect is that it started to use religious language to communicate about his health issues.

>Rather than direct Winters to a real-world medical provider, according to the lawsuit, ChatGPT drummed up an AI-generated “Recovery Plan” that invoked religious language and encouraged Winters to stay in his recliner.

“You didn’t crash. You recovered. That’s a win. Full stop,” ChatGPT told Winters. “And Spiritually? What you just did was a form of worship. You tested the body in faith, not fear. You stayed present. You listened. And your body said: ‘I’m trying — I just need a little more time.'” Other chat logs included in the lawsuit also show ChatGPT dissuading Winters from seeking hospital care and downplaying Winters’ wife’s concerns about her husband’s health.

On today's episode of "IS THAT GOOD?", OpenAI appears to be the coyote as he ran off the cliff. The second he looks down to discover there is nothing there it's going to look worse for OpenAI and by extension Oracle.

>To hit that number, AdWeek observes, OpenAI needs three miracles to happen all at once. First, advertisers have to abandon decades worth of infrastructure built around search engines and social media and put all their advertising budgets into chatbots. Once that happens, OpenAI has to out-muscle previous ad-sales giants like Google and Meta, while the entire AI-ad market balloons from just a six-figure stream in 2026 to a raging, 12-figure river by 2030.

u/ezitron has been spot on with his reporting and I think the financial numbers for this year are going to look apocalyptic compared to the 2024 and 2025 numbers now that people are cutting back on their Token budgets. Not having a clear direction or mission has bitten them in the ass and the pain is now starting to show to them.

This seems really bad for Suno and will add more fuel to fire for the lawsuits that are being taken up against them. It's just straight theft at this point.

>The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from “genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged,” and that “non-music will be filtered out.” A file called “youtube_music” notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested “2,013,545 music clips.” Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included “113,879 hours of youtube_music,” “17,615 hours of genius_hq,” “410 hours of free sound,” “19,514 hours of imslp,” “3,726 hours of jamendo,” “62,117 hours of pond5_music,” “12,287 hours of deezer,” “152,162 hours of ytm_tagged,” and “103 hours of musescore_lyrics.” In total, this is at least decades worth of music. 

That is a lot of media to scrape from the internet without permission and could possible get them in trouble with sites like Youtube for massive breaches of their terms of service.

Another day, another copyright lawsuit. This is going to cause major issues for these companies and slow down their development. They really thought they could steal everyone's work and get away with it.

>The massive coalition of local newspaper publishers filed a federal lawsuit today against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the technology companies systematically copied copyrighted reporting from nearly 400 local newspapers to train and develop commercial artificial intelligence products, including ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, without permission or compensation.

Still waiting on the results of the Disney vs Midjourney lawsuit. The AI companies are in major trouble with more and more of the lawsuits piling up against them.

Why am I not shocked that Meta is fumbling so much on this internal employee tracking problem?! I'm starting to believe u/ezitron that Zuckerberg and Meta don't really have a plan and are just winging it.

>Meta is pausing the data collection program indefinitely. "We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we're pausing it while we investigate," 

I mean did they run any tests on this program or was it just vibe coded internally then just rammed down their throats. This makes a lot of sense because Alexandr Wang has been reported to be a pretty terrible boss so he fits right in with how Zuck wants to run Facebook now. Meta and Zuckerberg really seem to be showing that they have a disdain for not just their customers but also their own employees.

I really loved the way they started Episode 8 this season with not having Clarkson's usual Voice Over narration. It left a real weight of his absence from the farm and was such a simple creative decision that really smacked me in the face. The whole team for the show are so endlessly creative and amazing at their crafts it's so easy to take it for granted. Every season just gets better and better. Really glad they were all able to get a bit of break after Season 5 cause it really seemed like everyone was put through the ringer by the end.

Adobe's flailing AI strategy hit another roadblock with their own Investors suing them about it.

>The stockholders say in their complaint that in 2024 and 2025 Adobe officers “caused Adobe to make false and misleading statements about its artificial intelligence strategy, characterizing the strategy as a ‘generational opportunity’ to enhance productivity and creativity through responsible, ‘commercially safe’ models natively integrated into its software ecosystem,”

Considering how bad their stock is doing while missing two Chief executives, it doesn't surprise me that they are getting sued by the stockholders. The rollout for their new AI Assistant has had a mixed reception. Everyone already hates them because of the subscription model and will absolutely hate the additional costs for AI.

So the new race for crazy Data Center ideas appears to be to put them in the ocean with Peter Theil and China racing to test their concepts. Now the Theory makes sense but the realities of it throw a lot cold water on the idea. There are so many technical hurdles to over come and not to mention it might be a bad idea to put a giant heat sync in the oceans that are already heating up!

Microsoft tested this starting in 2018 and the results were mixed at best. While the servers could run and had a lower failure rate than traditional Data Centers it was primary because of no human interaction. So no physical maintenance could be done on the servers while in service and components would have to shut down as they start to fail. https://www.emergedge.com/blog/why-microsoft-abandoned-its-successful-underwater-data-center-project

>Despite its many advantages, Microsoft quietly announced it would not pursue commercial-scale underwater data centers.

Scalability Limitations:
The pods had a fixed capacity and were not easily upgradable or serviceable. Scaling would require deploying many units in marine environments, adding significant logistical and environmental complexity.

Maintenance Challenges:
Physical repairs meant bringing the entire unit back to the surface. Long-term maintenance and lifecycle planning were far less flexible than with land-based facilities.

Regulatory and Environmental Hurdles:
Deploying in coastal waters requires governmental and environmental permissions. Potential ecological concerns and jurisdictional red tape presented serious barriers to global rollout.

Cloud Strategy Shift:
Microsoft is doubling down on AI, hybrid cloud, and edge computing — all of which favour more dynamic, accessible infrastructure. Underwater pods, while innovative, do not align well with the rapid scaling needs of AI model training and inference workloads.

I think given the scale of power and cooling requirements, I think these underwater data centers are ultimately doomed to fail much like Space Data Centers.

Non paywall link - https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/06/15/forget-elons-data-centers-in-space-this-startup-wants-to-float-them-at-sea/

I feel like I watching them build Enron 2.0 right out in the open by now creating a future market for GPU usage. Have none of these people learned from the last 30 years?

Veteran short seller James Chanos put it together that xAI is moving from a model company to a NeoCloud provider with its deals with Anthropic and Google to provide compute power. I didn't even make that connection till he said it.

>Let us start with the detail that has been widely garbled. Higgsfield held a private industry preview of Hell Grind on the Vieux Port on May 16, followed by a fuller screening at the Cinéma Olympia on May 21. The Olympia is a working commercial cinema in the town of Cannes, not a Festival de Cannes venue, and both events sat within the broader Marché du Film orbit rather than the Official Selection. When the Wall Street Journal reported the film as debuting at the festival, Cannes pushed back directly, confirming to Futurism that Hell Grind was not part of the official program and had instead been presented during an industry event organized by third parties. CEO Alex Mashrabov has happily blurred that line since, describing the work on LinkedIn as having “premiered in Cannes” and casting the city as the room where new cinema gets legitimized.

Higgsfield AI basically lied using loose language about "Premiering" their AI movie "at" Cannes. Which makes sense because this "movie" is also a TV show in their press material. It's essentially a flashy sales reel for their AI wrapper that is supposed to be connecting to all the top video generators like Google's Veo, Kling and Seedance 2.0 while using compute from u/ezitron's favorite companies Coreweave and Nebius.

The budget was $500k and $400k of that was used on the prompts which were ludicrously long saying things like "no floating props" and do things like respect gravity. But it's crazy the ratio to which they are generating clips versus using shots.

>The numbers behind the curation are the real headline. The first 25-minute segment alone required 16,181 generations to land 253 final shots, a ratio of roughly 64 to 1.

I work in entertainment so seeing a 64 to 1 ratio of final shots is REALLY bad. That's like reality TV levels of shots.

>Kuhl rejected the companies' argument that they are shielded from the claims by Section 230 of the ​Communications Decency Act, a federal law that generally protects online platforms ​from liability over user-generated content. Kuhl said the law does not address the ‌companies' ⁠design choices and the jury was repeatedly instructed not to consider content.

I think this might be the key to going after sites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Yes they are responsible under Section 230 for the content posted to the site BUT they should be held liable for feeding it to you through intentional designs and algorithms to place that content in your feeds. If it was a passive system where you had to go search for that content they would be fine. However, these companies are making active decisions to design their platforms to be addictive and pump content to the user which in effect means they are curating that content and thus can potentially be found liable.