Hub AI and society

Artificial Intelligence is a key technology that can help us solve major societal challenges such as climate change, energy supply, healthcare, education or logistics. AI can solve specific problems more effectively by supporting us in decision-making, automating solutions and thus scaling them, or discovering completely new solutions. But the use of AI also poses new risks, for example when it comes to surveillance or questions of social justice.

What is our society doing with AI – and what is AI doing to our society? We shed light on this question in our AI and Society Content Hub.

AI and society

OpenAI restructures under new foundation, Microsoft takes 27 percent stake

AI and society

The long-predicted deepfake dystopia has arrived with Sora 2

AI and society

Google downplays AI's environmental impact in new study

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AI and society
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OpenAI is in early talks with investors about a massive funding round that could push the company's valuation to around $750 billion, according to The Information. The company could raise tens of billions of dollars, potentially as much as $100 billion.

The discussions are still in their early stages, and nothing is set in stone. At this valuation, the deal would mark a 50 percent jump from OpenAI's last share sale in October.

Amazon is also in talks to invest $10 billion or more. It's the kind of circular AI deal that's become common: Amazon hands OpenAI cash, and OpenAI turns around and spends it on Amazon's chips and cloud services.

According to The Information, OpenAI has reached an annualized revenue run rate of $19 billion, keeping the company on pace to hit its $20 billion target by year's end. The company is projecting $30 billion in revenue for 2026, rising to around $200 billion by 2030. But these ambitious growth targets come with an enormous cash burn of roughly $26 billion for this year and next.

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Renowned mathematician Terence Tao has proposed a new way to think about AI capabilities. On Mastodon, Tao questions whether true "artificial general intelligence" (AGI) is actually achievable with current AI tools. His alternative: "artificial general cleverness" (AGC).

According to Tao, "general cleverness" means the ability to solve complex problems using partly improvised methods. These solutions might be random, rely on raw computing power, or draw from training data. That makes them something other than true "intelligence," but they can still succeed at many tasks, especially when strict testing procedures filter out incorrect results, he says.

"This results in the somewhat unintuitive combination of a technology that can be very useful and impressive, while simultaneously being fundamentally unsatisfying and disappointing."

Terence Tao

In humans, cleverness and intelligence are linked, but in AI they're decoupled, Tao argues. The mathematician has recently spoken positively about how AI has sped up his own work.

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Trump attempts to block state AI laws by withholding broadband billions, but faces shaky legal ground.

"I think the administration has a 30 to 35% chance of this working legally," says Dean Ball, a former White House official who contributed to the administration's AI Action Plan.

The executive order directs the Commerce Department to block states with onerous AI regulations from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program (BEAD), reports Reuters in an analysis of the new order. However, experts doubt whether Congress intended to give the administration authority over state AI regulation when it authorized broadband funding. Furthermore, the move risks political blowback from within the party: Republican governors like Ron DeSantis have previously spoken against federal interference, and withholding funds would impact rural voters—a key demographic that supported Trump by wide margins.

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The Center for Humane Technology (CHT), a nonprofit organization advocating for ethical technology, has criticized a new executive order from the Trump administration that aims to undermine state AI laws.

According to the CHT, the regulation puts public safety at risk by preventing states from meaningfully regulating AI. At the same time, it offers no national replacement framework, creating what the organization calls a vacuum in accountability.

Americans understand the potential benefits and dangers of this technology. They believe government should help regulate AI, not provide a regulatory shield to an industry that prioritizes growth at any cost. (CHT)

The CHT points to documented AI harms, including deepfakes, fraud, and chatbot-related suicides among young people. Social media already showed what happens when technology goes unregulated, the organization argues. The government should protect the public instead of caving to the tech industry.

Trump argues that varying state regulations are slowing down the industry. AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google support national regulation.

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Deepmind co-founder Shane Legg puts the odds of achieving "minimal AGI" at 50 percent by 2028. In an interview with Hannah Fry, Legg lays out his framework for thinking about artificial general intelligence. He describes a scale running from minimal AGI through full AGI to artificial superintelligence (ASI). Minimal AGI means an artificial agent that can handle the cognitive tasks most humans typically perform. Full AGI covers the entire range of human cognition, including exceptional achievements like developing new scientific theories or composing symphonies.

Legg believes minimal AGI could arrive in roughly two years. Full AGI would follow three to six years later. To measure progress, he proposes a comprehensive test suite: if an AI system passes all typical human cognitive tasks, and human teams can't find any weak points even after months of searching with full access to every detail of the system, the goal has been reached.

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AI is reshaping the media landscape. Some companies are striking partnerships, others are fighting back against alleged copyright infringement, and some are doing both. To keep track of this shifting terrain, Columbia University's Tow Center has launched an "AI Deals and Disputes Tracker." The tool, part of the center's "Platforms and Publishers" project, monitors the evolving relationship between news publishers and AI companies by documenting lawsuits, business deals, and financial grants based on publicly available information.

The tracker lists major agreements and disputes between publishers and AI companies. | Image: Tow Center

The Tow Center says the overview gets updated at the start of each month, with the most recent data from December 12, 2025. The goal is to give readers a clear picture of the legal and economic shifts happening across the industry. Klaudia Jaźwińska compiles the data and welcomes tips on missing developments to keep the tracker up to date.

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On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from states whose AI regulations impede American innovation. Speaking to reporters, Trump argued that a patchwork of state-level rules slows down the industry.

The order directs the Secretary of Commerce to review state laws and, in cases of conflict, block access to the $42 billion broadband fund. Previous attempts to enforce such bans had failed.

The directive specifically targets anti-discrimination rules in states like Colorado, which the administration claims lead to "ideological bias." While tech giants like Google and OpenAI welcomed the move toward national standards, Representative Don Beyer warned that the order could create a "lawless Wild West" and potentially violates the Constitution by undermining state-level safety reforms.

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