Generative AI Archive

Jan 14, 2026

Music platform Bandcamp now prohibits music created entirely or substantially by generative AI. The company says the new policy protects human creativity and the direct connection between artists and fans. The updated rules also strictly ban using AI tools to imitate specific artists or styles.

Unlike most streaming services, Bandcamp focuses on direct purchases of music and merchandise, letting fans support creators financially without intermediaries.

Users can now report content that sounds heavily AI-generated. Bandcamp reserves the right to remove music from the platform based on suspected AI origins alone.

Comment Source: Bandcamp

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 13, 2026

Short News

Microsoft is rolling out a new initiative for AI data centers after facing mounting opposition from communities across the US. The company says it will fully cover the power costs of its data centers, ensuring residents won't see higher electricity bills as a result. The announcement comes as data center regions like Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio have seen electricity prices climb 12-16 percent faster than the national average.

Beyond power costs, Microsoft is making several other commitments: the company will stop requesting local tax breaks, cut water consumption by 40 percent by 2030, and replenish more water than it uses. Microsoft President Brad Smith told GeekWire that the industry used to operate differently and now needs to change its approach. Trump previewed the announcement on Truth Social before Microsoft made it official.

As part of the initiative, Microsoft also plans to train local workers and invest in AI education programs in affected communities.

Comment Source: Microsoft

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 13, 2026

AI and society

UAE leads with 64% AI adoption rate, leaving the US and Europe far behind, Microsoft says

Maximilian Schreiner

Jan 13, 2026

AI research

Expecting internal coherence from language models means asking the wrong question, according to an Anthropic researcher.

"Why does page five of a book say that the best food is pizza and page 17 says the best food is pasta? What does the book really think? And you're like: 'It's a book!'", explains Josh Batson, research scientist at Anthropic, in MIT Technology Review.

The analogy comes from experiments on how AI models process facts internally. Anthropic discovered that Claude uses different mechanisms to know that bananas are yellow versus confirming that the statement "Bananas are yellow" is true. These mechanisms aren't connected to each other. When a model gives contradictory answers, it's drawing on different parts of itself - without any central authority coordinating them. "It might be like, you're talking to Claude and then it wanders off," says Batson. "And now you're not talking to Claude but something else."

The takeaway: Assuming language models have mental coherence like humans might be a fundamental category error.

Comment Source: MIT

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 15, 2025

AI research

The case against predicting tokens to build AGI

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 15, 2025

AI and society

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.

Comment Source: Reuters

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 11, 2025

AI research

FACTS benchmark shows that even top AI models struggle with the truth

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 10, 2025

AI in practice

US aviation startup Boom Supersonic, typically focused on developing a supersonic passenger jet, is making a surprise entry into the energy business to capitalize on the AI boom.

Founder Blake Scholl unveiled "Superpower," a 42-megawatt gas turbine designed specifically to handle the massive energy loads of AI data centers. With the US power grid struggling to meet demand, companies are increasingly turning to independent power sources like these turbines to keep their facilities running.

The system uses the core of the "Symphony" engine, which was originally built for the company's planned Overture jet. Scholl notes that unlike older models, the turbine can maintain full power in high heat without requiring water cooling.

Crusoe has signed on as the launch customer, and Boom has secured $300 million to begin production. The company plans to use the revenue from the turbine business to help fund the development of its aircraft.

Comment Source: Boom Supersonic

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 8, 2025

AI and society

Report: Aging power grid puts OpenAI and Microsoft's growth at risk

Maximilian Schreiner

Dec 8, 2025

AI research

Essential AI's new open-source model, Rnj-1, outperforms significantly larger competitors on the "SWE-bench Verified" test. This benchmark is considered particularly challenging because it evaluates an AI's ability to independently solve real-world programming problems. Despite being a compact model with just eight billion parameters, Rnj-1 scores 20.8 points.

By comparison, similarly sized models like Qwen 3 (without reasoning, 8B) only reach 4.5 points in Essential AI's testing. The system was introduced by Ashish Vaswani, co-founder of Essential AI and co-author of the famous "Attention Is All You Need" paper that launched the Transformer architecture. Rnj-1 is also Transformer-based, specifically utilizing the Gemma 3 architecture. According to the company, development focused primarily on better pre-training rather than post-training methods like reinforcement learning. These improvements also result in lower pre-training computational costs, thanks to the use of the Muon optimizer.

Comment Source: EssentialAI