Read full article about: Meta pours $65 million into state elections to back AI-friendly politicians
Meta is investing $65 million to influence state-level elections across the US, backing politicians friendly to AI. It's the company's largest political spending push to date, the New York Times reports.
To do this, Meta has set up four Super PACs: two new groups - "Forge the Future Project" targeting Republicans and "Making Our Tomorrow" targeting Democrats - alongside two that already existed. Spending kicks off this week in Texas and Illinois. In Texas, where Meta is building three AI data centers, the money will go toward boosting Republican candidates. In Illinois, it's flowing into at least four races for seats in the state legislature.
The push appears driven by Meta's concern over a patchwork of state-level AI regulations. State races are relatively cheap to influence, which means $65 million can go a long way.
Read full article about: Nvidia teams up with venture capital firms to find and fund India's next wave of AI startups
Nvidia is rapidly expanding its partnerships in India. According to CNBC, the chipmaker is working with major venture capital firms to find and fund Indian AI startups. More than 4,000 AI startups in India are already part of Nvidia's global startup program.
At the same time, Indian cloud provider Yotta has invested roughly two billion dollars in Nvidia chips, the Economic Times reports. Nvidia is also partnering with Indian cloud providers to build out data center infrastructure.
The Indian government expects up to 200 billion dollars in data center investments over the coming years. Adani alone is planning to spend 100 billion dollars on AI-capable data centers. These efforts are all part of India's "IndiaAI Mission," a government initiative aimed at turning the country into a global technology powerhouse.
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Source: CNBC | Economic Times
Read full article about: Warner Bros. says Bytedance deliberately trained Seedance on its characters, adding to growing Hollywood backlash
Warner Bros. accuses ByteDance of copyright infringement with its new AI video service Seedance 2.0. The studio sent a letter on Tuesday to ByteDance's chief legal officer John Rogovin, who previously worked at Warner Bros. himself.
Users had been using Seedance to create AI videos featuring Superman, Batman, "Game of Thrones," "Harry Potter," "Lord of the Rings," and other Warner characters. Warner Bros. stresses that the users aren't the problem - Seedance came preloaded with the studio's copyrighted characters, which the company says was a deliberate choice by ByteDance.
Disney and Paramount had already sent cease-and-desist letters before Warner's move. ByteDance responded by announcing additional safeguards. Warner Bros. argues, however, that these easily implementable protections should have been in place from the start. This has become a familiar pattern - OpenAI keeps discovering copyright issues only after shipping its models, too.
At New Delhi summit, India pushes for a "Global AI Commons"
India is the second-largest market for both ChatGPT and Claude. Now the country wants to shape AI policy at the summit in New Delhi.
Developer targeted by AI hit piece warns society cannot handle AI agents that decouple actions from consequences
An AI agent wrote a hit piece on a developer who rejected its code. Days later, the agent is still running, a quarter of commenters believe it, and no one knows who’s behind it. The case shows how autonomous agents turn character assassination into something that scales.
Read full article about: Journalist rents out his body to AI agents and earns nothing after two days of gig work
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.
