After a French far-right politician used AI to strip a real Muslim woman of her hijab last month, The Guardian tested ChatGPT, Grok, and Gemini’s image editors and found that all the chatbots would comply with such requests. This issue has persisted for many months, adding to fears about how easily AI tools can be used to undress and violate women and children.
Following backlash, YouTube posted on X that when the trailer was “submitted as an ad, it was temporarily restricted by our system. Following review the ad has been cleared to run.” Meta spokesperson Alex Dziedzan said, “This was an error,” and will now run the ads.
Update September 26th: Added statement from Meta.
YouTube, TikTok, and Meta have all apparently rejected the trailer for Alex Gibney’s documentary, scheduled to hit theaters on October 9th. It’s not surprising that X has refused to take distributor Bleecker Street’s calls given its owner’s notoriously thin skin. But as The Hollywood Reporter notes:
The unwillingness of platforms to accept even paid advertising is sure to raise concerns about free speech and the dwindling number of companies that control many of the platforms in this country — and ironically provide a proof-text for the very point the film is coming to make. Gibney’s doc is a four-hour look at a title character who attempts to control the conversation in various ways, including with alleged suppressions on X, which he bought in 2022.
Update September 26th: Both YouTube and Meta will now reportedly run the ads.
[The Hollywood Reporter]
Trump officials filed a motion to support X’s appeal, arguing the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) enforcement overreached when levying the fine last December, and unfairly targets American tech platforms while threatening digital free speech and global market operations.
“The European Commission inappropriately attempted to expand its regulatory authority to reach American companies not present or operating within its jurisdiction.”
The AI agent can “manage your inbox, clean up your calendar, or talk through existing files/chat/tasks – all hands-free,” the company says. Some Tesla owners posted videos using Grok Bot to order Starbucks for them. The AI bot is only available to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers, who pay $300 a month for access. Bloomberg just reported that Grok Bot topped 400,000 weekly users roughly a month after launching.
It’s AI CEO against AI CEO, and things are changing by the day.
The industry is in a panic, but it’s been claiming to want legal guardrails for years — with few meaningful results.
Major AI companies want to ‘pace the frontier’ — but their proposed solutions need real teeth.
After high-profile incidents in which agents went rogue, hacked other sites, and overwhelmed a German wiki, some AI execs are calling for a slowdown. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy open letter yesterday saying it was time to “pace the frontier.” OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk both agreed. What do you think? Is it time to pump the brakes? Is it already too late? Or are you looking forward to serving your AI overlords?
The Department of Defense said it has added the AI tools for unclassified military use via its GenAI.mil platform. The generative AI portal launched last year with Google’s Gemini and has already onboarded more than 1.7 million of the department’s 3 million personnel, the Pentagon said.
Jensen Huang wants you to think ‘ah, compute as an asset class’ not ‘oh no more GPU-backed loans.’
Elon Musk’s AI-powered Grokipedia may have gone months without an update, but Verge commenters spotted that Wikipedia’s article about Grokipedia reflects that already — and even cites The Verge in doing so.
yelling-yellow-godzilla-goats:
Meanwhile Wikipedia’s article about Grokipedia already includes updates about the latter’s complete lack of updates lol lmao
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A lot of staffers subscribe just because we enjoy his work (and when he gets his vacation ruined). But today’s newsletter is about the SpaceX lockup expiring — how it should work vs what we will find out tomorrow about how it will work — and how the noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness may have tanked the bets of noted AI hedge fund Situational Awareness.
[Bloomberg]
A fascinating book review. “Muskism, in reading its subject as more a symptom than a person, doesn’t offer any kind of psychological interpretation of Musk’s worldview, but many of his pronouncements and preoccupations reveal an ontological confusion of the categories of human and machine.”
[The New York Review of Books]
In the process of getting through his thoughts, he does a pretty good riff about the people who say they “make” stuff with AI. As for Musk’s version of The Odyssey, Johnson says, “I’m excited for the Cyclops to have two eyes.”
XAI has filed a lawsuit in response to a law taking effect on Saturday that bans apps and websites from generating non-consensual sexualized imagery. The Musk-led company responsible for the Grok chatbot said the law will impact free speech and visual expression “in a clumsy attempt to prohibit ‘nudification.’”
“See you in court, creep,” responded Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Build Mode is out now for subscribers of SpaceXAI’s $300 per month SuperGrok Heavy tier, and it’s accessible on the Grok website and mobile apps. It’s powered by the company’s Grok Build coding agent.
The thirteenth, and first post-IPO, flight test of SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle was supposed to occur Thursday night, but when the countdown hit zero just before 7PM ET, “Some of the engines didn’t start, triggering an automatic launch abort,” writes Elon Musk.
Along with his usual morning tweets in support of right-wing politics, against certain immigrants to the US, and boosting data centers, the sometimes-trillionaire writes, “Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of 𝕏 open source, with no exceptions.” (He didn’t mention how Grok Build had apparently made exposing your code a little too easy.)
He also tweeted separately about its mysteriously busted algorithm, saying that it “…barraging you with similar content due to a few likes” is another problem.
The company formerly known as xAI has referred to itself as SpaceXAI before following the acquisition by SpaceX. There’s a new logo, too.
SpaceX bonds are creating losses for the fast-money types who piled in at the offering. “Bond types either aren’t sure that SpaceX will hang on to its investment-grade credit ratings, or will only get involved if they get paid a fat risk premium for doing so,” the Financial Times explains. SpaceX stock is, as of this writing, trading below its IPO price. Gee, if only someone had pointed out that this company is a stinker.
[Financial Times]
The open-source AI startup has a deal through 2029, similar to Anthropic and Google, to rent compute capacity from SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center for $150 million per month (up to $6.3 billion), reports the Wall Street Journal.
[Wall Street Journal]
The Justice Department argues that xAI’s Mississippi data center should be allowed to pollute the air because it’s “critical” for military operations, which honestly explains a lot.
Nicholi:
How are we going to keep losing the war against Iran without Grok?
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The Justice Department is trying to intervene and dismiss a case from the NAACP alleging xAI’s use of gas turbines in Mississippi are illegally polluting the air. Preventing xAI from using them would endanger national security, DOJ argues, because “Grok provides critical support for the Department of War’s military operations.”
A month after a jury dismissed Elon’s claims in the Musk v. Altman case, US District Judge Rita Lin dismissed an xAI lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing trade secrets and poaching employees. This time, it was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled, unlike when she dismissed the case in February.
The judge wrote in her ruling that continuing the case “would be futile.”
While SpaceX plans satellite-based AI servers, Bloomberg reports it ran into trouble trying to develop and run Grok AI in Memphis, citing unnamed sources. They claim that deals renting capacity to Anthropic ($15 billion annually) and Google ($920 million per month) happened following hardware variation and lag issues:
Elon Musk’s company had planned to train its most cutting-edge AI models on a massive amount of computing power by using a cluster of three data center campuses. However, the firm encountered latency issues when connecting Colossus 1 with two other sites located more than 10 miles away, the people said, compounded by aging network infrastructure.
