Bytedance has released its new Seed2.0 AI model series. The story is a familiar one by now: the models match Western AI models on benchmarks while costing a fraction of the price.
WIRED reporter Reece Rogers rented out his body to AIs. He tested RentAHuman, a platform where AI agents pay people for real-world tasks. Despite an hourly rate of just 5 dollars, no bot reached out.
He started applying on his own. One gig offered 10 dollars to listen to a podcast and tweet about it, but he never heard back. An AI agent called Adi offered 110 dollars to deliver flowers and marketing materials to Anthropic for an AI startup. When Rogers hesitated, the bot bombarded him with ten messages in 24 hours and even emailed him.
While I’ve been micromanaged before, these incessant messages from an AI employer gave me the ick.
On his third try, Rogers took a gig putting up flyers for 50 cents each. He cabbed to the pickup spot, but the contact changed the meeting point mid-ride. At the new location, he was told the flyers weren't ready—come back that afternoon. After two days, Rogers hadn't made a penny, and every task turned out to be advertising for AI startups.
Google and OpenAI are complaining about data theft—yes, you read that right. According to Google, Gemini was hit with a massive cloning attempt through distillation, with a single campaign firing over 100,000 requests at the model, NBC News reports. Google calls it intellectual property theft, pointing to companies and researchers chasing a competitive edge.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has sent a memo to the US Congress accusing DeepSeek of using disguised methods to copy American AI models. The memo also flags China's energy buildout, ten times the new electricity capacity the US added by 2025, and confirms ChatGPT is growing at around ten percent per month.
Distillation floods a model with targeted prompts to extract its internal logic, especially its "reasoning steps," then uses that knowledge to build a cheaper clone, potentially skipping billions in training costs. Google security head John Hultquist warns smaller companies running their own AI models face the same risk, particularly if those models were trained on sensitive business data.
Anthropic’s revenue has grown 10x year over year, and CEO Dario Amodei believes Nobel Prize-level AI is maybe just a year or two away. So why isn’t he going all in on compute? Because being off by even one year could mean bankruptcy, and he’s not sure his competitors have done the math.
In the future, AI agents won’t just search the web; they’ll browse it, shop on it, and complete tasks on their own. At least that’s Big AI’s vision, and Google’s WebMCP wants to turn websites into standardized interfaces for these agents. For website operators who depend on human visitors, that could be a serious problem.
xAI has lost half of its founders in recent weeks and months. Elon Musk said on X that some departures were part of a restructuring where "unfortunately we had to part with some people" to "improve speed of execution."
But former employees tell a different story. One ex-employee told The Verge that many people at the company had grown disillusioned with Grok's focus on NSFW content and its lack of safety standards. A second former employee backed that up: "There is zero safety whatsoever in the company." According to the source, Musk deliberately pushed to make the model less restricted, viewing safety measures as censorship. Among other things, Grok had generated sexualized images of children.
You survive by shutting up and doing what Elon wants.
Another common complaint is that xAI is "stuck in the catch-up phase" without shipping anything fundamentally new compared to OpenAI or Anthropic, even though they're all trying to do the same thing anyway. Several people who left are now using money from the SpaceX merger to start their own companies, including AI infrastructure startup Nuraline.
Anthropic is discussing building at least 10 gigawatts of data center capacity worth hundreds of billions of dollars, recruiting ex-Google managers and lining up Google as a financial backer to make it happen.
