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Major League Baseball players have agreed to let a tech company create AI characters of themselves that can chat and interact with fans
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Tag: Information technology
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Anthropic, OpenAI rivalry spills into new Super Bowl ads as both fight to win over AI users
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The two artificial intelligence startups behind rival chatbots ChatGPT and Claude are bracing for an existential showdown this year as both need to prove they can grow a business that will make more money than they’re losing.
The fiercest competition between the two AI developers, along with bigger companies like Google, is a race to win over corporate leaders looking to adopt AI tools to boost workplace productivity. The rivalry is also spilling into other realms, including the Super Bowl.
Anthropic is airing a pair of TV commercials during Sunday’s game that ridicule OpenAI for the digital advertising it’s beginning to place on free and cheaper versions of ChatGPT. While Anthropic has centered its revenue model on selling Claude to other businesses, OpenAI has opened the doors to ads as a way of making money from the hundreds of millions of consumers who get ChatGPT for free.
Anthropic’s commercials humorously mock the dangers of manipulative chatbots — represented as real people speaking in a stilted and unnaturally effusive tone — that form a relationship with a user before trying to hawk a product. The commercials end with a written message — “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude.” — followed by the opening beat and lyrics of the Dr. Dre song “What’s the Difference.”
In a sign they struck a nerve, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a social media post that he laughed at the “funny” ads but blasted them as dishonest and threw shade at his competitor’s smaller customer base.
“Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people,” Altman wrote on X. He also boasted that more Texans “use ChatGPT for free” than all the people in the United States who use Claude.
The rivalry has existed ever since a group of OpenAI leaders quit the AI research laboratory and formed Anthropic in 2021, promising a clearer focus on the safety of the better-than-human technology called artificial general intelligence that both San Francisco firms wanted to build. That was before OpenAI first released ChatGPT in late 2022, revealing the huge commercial potential of large language models that could help write emails, homework or computer code.
The competition ramped up this week as both companies launched product updates. OpenAI on Thursday launched a new platform called Frontier, designed to be a one-stop shop for businesses adopting a variety of AI tools that can work in tandem, particularly AI agents that work autonomously on someone’s behalf.
“We can be the partner of choice for AI transformation for enterprise. The sky is the limit in terms of revenue we can generate from a platform like that,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of applications, told reporters this week.
Anthropic earlier in the week said it was adding new functionality to its Cowork assistant to help automate legal research and drafting work.
“Both OpenAI and Anthropic are really trying to position themselves as a platform company,” said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. “The models are important, but the models aren’t a means to an end.”
The two startups aren’t just competing with each other. They also face competition from Google, which is both a leading developer of a powerful AI model, Gemini, and has its own cloud computing infrastructure backed by revenue from its legacy digital advertising business. They also have complicated relationships with Amazon, which is Anthropic’s primary cloud provider, and Microsoft, which holds a 27% stake in OpenAI.
The first choice for businesses looking to adopt AI agents is typically cloud computing “hyperscalers” like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, which offer a package of services, while AI model providers like Anthropic and OpenAI “tend to come in second place,” said Nancy Gohring, a senior research director at IDC.
But there’s an opening because none of the players are giving businesses what they want, which are stronger security and compliance assurances to enable the more widespread use of AI agents.
“Adopting AI and agents is inherently somewhat risky,” Gohring said.
There’s also the AI division of Elon Musk’s newly merged SpaceX and its chatbot, Grok, which is not yet a viable contender for business customers. Musk has long set his sights on OpenAI, which he co-founded and is now suing in a court case set for trial in April.
SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the world’s most valuable privately held firms and Wall Street investors expect any, or all of them, could become publicly traded within the next year or so. But unlike SpaceX, which has its rocket business to fall back on, or established tech giants — like Amazon, Google and Microsoft — both Anthropic and OpenAI must find a way to make enough in sales to pay for the huge costs in computer chips and data centers to run their energy-hungry AI systems.
It’s not that Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t making money or growing their product lines. The private firms don’t publicly disclose sales but both have signaled they are making billions of dollars in revenue on their existing products, including paid chatbot subscriptions for individual users.
But it has costs a lot more money to fund the computing infrastructure needed to build these powerful AI models and respond to the millions of prompts they get each day. OpenAI, in particular, has said it owes more than $1 trillion in financial obligations to backers — including Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia — that are essentially fronting the compute costs on the expectation of future payoffs.
For some, the wait will likely be worth it.
“Profitability matters, but not as a near‑term decision factor for investors who remain focused on scale, differentiation and infrastructure leverage,” said Forrester analyst Charlie Dai. “Both companies continue to post heavy losses, yet investors still back them because the frontier‑model race demands extraordinary capital intensity.”
Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s newly hired chief revenue officer, told reporters this week that the company’s priority is “building the best enterprise platform for all industries, all segments.”
“I don’t think we’re thinking about it from a revenue standpoint, but truly from a customer outcome standpoint,” she said, in part reflecting the “sense of urgency” from CEOs who want a smoother way of applying AI.
“There’s a recognition that AI is becoming a core operating advantage,” Dresser said. “They don’t want to be on the wrong side of that shift.”
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TSMC to make advanced AI semiconductors in Japan in boost for its chipmaking ambitions
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TOKYO — Taiwan’s chipmaker TSMC said Thursday it will be manufacturing some of the world’s most cutting-edge semiconductors in Japan to meet booming artificial intelligence-related demand, in a boost for the country’s chipmaking ambitions.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a major chip supplier to companies such as Nvidia and Apple, said Thursday it plans to make 3-nanometer semiconductors — advanced chips that are used in areas such as AI products and smartphones — at its second factory in Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture, which is under construction.
The decision by TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip maker, was a coup for Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi ahead of a general election on Sunday, where she hopes to secure the public’s mandate for her policies riding on high approval ratings.
The announcement came while Takaichi was meeting with TSMC’s CEO and Chairman, C.C. Wei, in Tokyo.
“It is very meaningful from the perspective of Japanese economic security, and I would like the project to move forward as proposed, by all means,” Takaichi said during the meeting.
The advanced chips set to be made in Kumamoto will be used in AI, robotics and autonomous driving, sectors that Takaishi’s cabinet has designated as strategically important fields.
TSMC’s first Kumamoto plant started mass production in late 2024 and makes less advanced chips. The company also is building new plants in Arizona in the U.S. to create a fabrication plant cluster and meet growing demand from customers building on the global AI frenzy.
TSMC said in a separate emailed statement that Wei believes Japan’s “forward-looking semiconductor policy will deliver significant benefits to the semiconductor industry.”
As Japan looks to gain ground in global advanced chipmaking competitiveness, it is also providing huge subsidies for its domestic chipmaker Rapidus, which is advancing towards mass producing cutting-edge chips.
“There is a huge significance to have the world’s most advanced semiconductor factory in Japan from the perspective of economic security,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a message posted on X on Thursday.
Despite growing concerns over a potential AI-related bubble where massive investments may not pay off, TSMC’s Wei said last month he was confident the growing AI demand from its customers is “real.”
Last month, TSMC said it plans to increase capital spending by up to nearly 40% this year as AI-related demand lifted its profits. It plans to raise its capital spending for 2026 to $52 billion-$56 billion, up from last year’s $40 billion.
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Chan reported from Hong Kong.
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Musk vows to put data centers in space, run them on solar power
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NEW YORK — Elon Musk vowed this week to upend another industry just as he did with cars and rockets — and once again he’s taking on long odds.
The world’s richest man said he wants to put as many as a million satellites into orbit to form vast, solar-powered data centers in space — a move to allow expanded use of artificial intelligence and chatbots without triggering blackouts and sending utility bills soaring.
To finance that effort, Musk combined SpaceX with his AI business on Monday and plans a big initial public offering of the combined company.
“Space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk wrote on SpaceX’s website Monday, adding about his solar ambitions, “It’s always sunny in space!”
But scientists and industry experts say even Musk — who outsmarted Detroit to turn Tesla into the world’s most valuable automaker — faces formidable technical, financial and environmental obstacles.
Here’s a look:
Capturing the sun’s energy from space to run chatbots and other AI tools would ease pressure on power grids and cut demand for sprawling computing warehouses that are consuming farms and forests and vast amounts of water to cool.
But space presents its own set of problems.
Data centers generate enormous heat. Space seems to offer a solution because it is cold. But it is also a vacuum, trapping heat inside objects in the same way that a Thermos keeps coffee hot using double walls with no air between them.
“An uncooled computer chip in space would overheat and melt much faster than one on Earth,” said Josep Jornet, a computer and electrical engineering professor at Northeastern University.
One fix is to build giant radiator panels that glow in infrared light to push the heat “out into the dark void,” says Jornet, noting that the technology has worked on a small scale, including on the International Space Station. But for Musk’s data centers, he says, it would require an array of “massive, fragile structures that have never been built before.”
Then there is space junk.
A single malfunctioning satellite breaking down or losing orbit could trigger a cascade of collisions, potentially disrupting emergency communications, weather forecasting and other services.
Musk noted in a recent regulatory filing that he has had only one “low-velocity debris generating event” in seven years running Starlink, his satellite communications network. Starlink has operated about 10,000 satellites — but that’s a fraction of the million or so he now plans to put in space.
“We could reach a tipping point where the chance of collision is going to be too great,” said University at Buffalo’s John Crassidis, a former NASA engineer. “And these objects are going fast — 17,500 miles per hour. There could be very violent collisions.”
Even without collisions, satellites fail, chips degrade, parts break.
Special GPU graphics chips used by AI companies, for instance, can become damaged and need to be replaced.
“On Earth, what you would do is send someone down to the data center,” said Baiju Bhatt, CEO of Aetherflux, a space-based solar energy company. “You replace the server, you replace the GPU, you’d do some surgery on that thing and you’d slide it back in.”
But no such repair crew exists in orbit, and those GPUs in space could get damaged due to their exposure to high-energy particles from the sun.
Bhatt says one workaround is to overprovision the satellite with extra chips to replace the ones that fail. But that’s an expensive proposition given they are likely to cost tens of thousands of dollars each, and current Starlink satellites only have a lifespan of about five years.
Musk is not alone trying to solve these problems.
A company in Redmond, Washington, called Starcloud, launched a satellite in November carrying a single Nvidia-made AI computer chip to test out how it would fare in space. Google is exploring orbital data centers in a venture it calls Project Suncatcher. And Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin announced plans in January for a constellation of more than 5,000 satellites to start launching late next year, though its focus has been more on communications than AI.
Still, Musk has an edge: He’s got rockets.
Starcloud had to use one of his Falcon rockets to put its chip in space last year. Aetherflux plans to send a set of chips it calls a Galactic Brain to space on a SpaceX rocket later this year. And Google may also need to turn to Musk to get its first two planned prototype satellites off the ground by early next year.
Pierre Lionnet, a research director at the trade association Eurospace, says Musk routinely charges rivals far more than he charges himself —- as much as $20,000 per kilo of payload versus $2,000 internally.
He said Musk’s announcements this week signal that he plans to use that advantage to win this new space race.
“When he says we are going to put these data centers in space, it’s a way of telling the others we will keep these low launch costs for myself,” said Lionnet. “It’s a kind of powerplay.”
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Elon Musk combines his rocket and AI businesses before an expected IPO this year
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NEW YORK — Elon Musk is joining his space exploration and artificial intelligence ventures into a single company before what’s expected to be a massive initial public offering for the business later this year.
His rocket venture, SpaceX, announced on Monday that it had bought xAI in an effort to help the world’s richest man dominate the rocket and artificial intelligence businesses. The deal will combine several of his offerings, including his AI chatbot Grok, his satellite communications company Starlink, and his social media company X.
Musk has talked repeatedly about the need to speed development of technology that will allow data centers to operate in space. He believes that will help overcome the problem of huge costs in electricity and other resources in building and running AI systems on Earth.
It’s a goal that Musk suggested in his announcement of the deal could become easier to reach with a combined company.
“In the long term, space-based AI is obviously the only way to scale,” Musk wrote on SpaceX’s website Monday, then added in reference to solar power, “It’s always sunny in space!”
Musk said in his announcement he estimates “that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space.”
SpaceX will be competing in that realm with Google, which is working on a research project called Project Suncatcher that would equip solar-powered satellites with AI computer chips, with a prototype that could launch as soon as next year.
But Musk’s prediction of a near future of space-based AI supercomputers is not shared by many other companies building data centers, including Microsoft.
“I’ll be surprised if people move from land to low-Earth orbit,” Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, told The Associated Press last month, when asked about the alternatives to building data centers in the U.S. amid rising community opposition.
Musk is already facing stiff competition in artificial intelligence, where he’s been scrambling to compete against rivals such as OpenAI, which is also working toward an IPO. Musk’s dislike of OpenAI, which he helped to found more than a decade ago, is part of what drove him to start xAI in 2023 and build the ChatGPT alternative he named Grok.
Musk has equally ambitious plans for Tesla as he tries to pivot a company with shrinking car sales to focus more on self-driving taxis and humanoid robots, driven by artificial intelligence.
Tesla recently announced a $2 billion investment in xAI.
Musk has used his control over multiple companies to combine operations before. Tesla bought SolarCity, a decade ago. And he recently had xAI buy his social media platform X, formerly called Twitter.
Chatter on Wall Street about the billionaire continuing to meld his many ventures together in a massive Musk Inc. has taken off in recent months, with some investors speculating that Tesla could combine with SpaceX, too.
Forbes magazine puts Musk’s net worth at $768 billion. He also owns a brain implant company called Neuralink and a tunnel digging business named the Boring Company.
Terms of the SpaceX purchase of xAI were not disclosed. Among outside investors in the companies is a fund in which President Donald Trump’s son, Don Jr., is a partner. That firm, 1789 Capital, has made more than $1 billion worth of investments in various Musk companies in the past year, including SpaceX, xAI, and X, according to data provider Pitchbook, though it cashed out of some already.
While pursuing space data centers, xAI is also moving rapidly to expand on Earth. Mississippi officials last month announced that the company is set to spend $20 billion to build a data center near the state’s border with Tennessee.
The data center, called MACROHARDRR, a likely pun on Microsoft’s name, will be its third one in the greater Memphis area.
Musk is also hoping the combined company can eventually help reach another goal he has long talked about — the need to colonize other planets in case there is a natural disaster or human-made disaster on Earth.
When speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Musk mused about humanity being a “tiny candle in a vast darkness, a tiny candle of consciousness that could easily go out.”
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US futures and world shares slip as worries over Trump’s Fed chief pick and AI weigh on markets
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U.S. futures and world shares skidded on Monday as worries over President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next Federal Reserve chair amplified jitters over a possible bubble in the artificial intelligence boom.
South Korea’s exchange, which is heavily influenced by tech-related developments, briefly suspended trading as its benchmark Kospi bounced, closing 5.3% lower at 4,949.67. Samsung Electronics gave up 6.3%, while chip maker SK Hynix sank 8.7%.
The Kospi has been forging records for weeks as big tech companies piggybacked on the AI craze with deals with major players like chip maker Nvidia and OpenAI.
In early European trading, Germany’s DAX edged less than 0.1% lower to 24,528.57. The CAC 40 in Paris shed 0.2% to 8,108.56, while Britain’s FTSE 100 declined 0.3% to 10,195.88.
The future for the S&P 500 sank 0.7%, while that for the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.4%.
Markets took a hit as investors considered how Kevin Warsh, Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve after Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s term ends in May might handle interest rates.
Warsh’s nomination requires Senate approval. But financial markets fear the Fed may lose some of its independence because of Trump, who has pushed hard for more and faster rate cuts. That fear has helped catapult skyward the price of gold and weaken the U.S. dollar’s value over the last year.
“People do not get handed the keys to the most powerful central bank on earth because they plan to drive in the opposite direction of the people who gave them the keys,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.
Early Monday, the price of gold fell 1.9%, while silver bounced back slightly, gaining 0.2%. Both plunged Friday as record runs in precious metals markets ground to a halt.
On Friday, the price of gold dropped 11.4%, suddenly losing momentum after a tremendous rally where it roughly doubled over 12 months. It topped $5,000 for the first time on Jan. 26 and was around $5,600 at one point on Thursday.
Silver, which had been on a similar, jaw-dropping tear, plunged 31.4%.
U.S. benchmark crude oil lost $3.46 to $61.75 per barrel, while Brent crude, the international standard, fell $3.47 to $65.85 per barrel.
Speaking to reporters during the weekend, Trump said Iran should negotiate a “satisfactory” deal to prevent the Middle Eastern country from getting any nuclear weapons.
“I don’t know that they will. But they are talking to us. Seriously talking to us,” he said.
That comment apparently assuaged some worries over potential disruptions to oil supplies that had pushed prices higher, analysts said.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 gave up early gains, sinking 1.3% to 52,655.18.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 2.2% to 26,775.57, while the Shanghai Composite index sank 2.5% to 4,015.75.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 fell 1% to 8,778.60.
Taiwan’s Taiex lost 1.4%.
On Friday, the S&P 500 dropped 0.4% and the Dow lost 0.4%. The Nasdaq composite lost 0.9%.
The Fed chair has a big influence on the economy and markets worldwide by helping to dictate where the U.S. central bank moves interest rates. That affects prices for all kinds of investments, as the Fed tries to keep the U.S. job market humming without letting inflation get out of control.
A report released Friday showed U.S. inflation at the wholesale level was hotter last month than economists expected. That could put pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates steady for a while instead of cutting them, as it did late last year.
The longtime assumption has been that the Fed should operate separately from the rest of Washington so that it can make moves that are painful in the short term but necessary for the long term. To get inflation down to the Fed’s goal of 2%, for example, may require the unpopular choice to keep interest rates high and grind down on the economy for a while.
In other action early Monday, the dollar fell to 154.88 Japanese yen from 154.94 yen. The euro was unchanged at $1.1853.
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Did artificial intelligence really drive layoffs at Amazon and other firms? It can be hard to tell
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The one thing N. Lee Plumb knows for sure about being laid off from Amazon last week is that it wasn’t a failure to get on board with the company’s artificial intelligence plans.
Plumb, his team’s head of “AI enablement,” says he was so prolific in his use of Amazon’s new AI coding tool that the company flagged him as one of its top users.
Many assumed Amazon’s 16,000 corporate layoffs announced last week reflected CEO Andy Jassy’s push to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
But like other companies that have tied workforce changes to AI — including Expedia, Pinterest and Dow last week — it can be hard for economists, or individual employees like Plumb, to know if AI is the real reason behind the layoffs or if it’s the message a company wants to tell Wall Street.
“AI has to drive a return on investment,” said Plumb, who worked at Amazon for eight years. “When you reduce head count, you’ve demonstrated efficiency, you attract more capital, the share price goes up.”
“So you could potentially have just been bloated in the first place, reduce head count, attribute it to AI, and now you’ve got a value story,” he said.
Plumb is atypical for an Amazon worker in that he’s also running what he describes as a “long shot” bid for Congress in Texas, on a platform focused on stopping the tech industry’s reliance on work visas to “replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor.”
But whatever it was that cost Plumb his job, his skepticism about AI-driven job replacement is one shared by many economists.
“We just don’t know,” said Karan Girotra, a professor of management at Cornell University’s business school. “Not because AI isn’t great, but because it requires a lot of adjustment and most of the gains accrue to individual employees rather than to the organization. People save time and they get their work done earlier.”
If an employer works faster because of AI, Girotra said it takes time to adjust a company’s management structure in a way that would enable a smaller workforce. He’s not convinced that’s happening at Amazon, which he said is still scaling back from a glut of hiring during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A report by Goldman Sachs said AI’s overall impact on the labor market remains limited, though some effects might be felt in “specific occupations like marketing, graphic design, customer service, and especially tech.” Those are fields involving tasks that correlate with the strengths of the current crop of generative AI chatbots that can write emails and marketing pitches, produce synthetic images, answer questions and help write code.
But the bank’s economic research division said in its most recent monthly AI adoption tracker that, since December, “very few employees were affected by corporate layoffs attributed to AI,” though the report was published Jan. 16, before Amazon, Dow and Pinterest announced their layoffs.
San Francisco-based Pinterest was the most explicit in asserting that AI drove it to cut up to 15% of its workforce. The social media company said it was “making organizational changes to further deliver on our AI-forward strategy, which includes hiring AI-proficient talent. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to say goodbye to some of our team members.”
Pinterest echoed that message in a regulatory disclosure that said the company was “reallocating resources to AI-focused roles and teams that drive AI adoption and execution.”
Expedia has voiced a similar message but the 162 tech workers the travel website cut from its Seattle headquarters last week included several AI-specific roles, such as machine-learning scientists.
Dow’s regulatory disclosures tied its 4,500 layoffs to a new plan “utilizing AI and automation” to increase productivity and improve shareholder returns.
Amazon’s 16,000 corporate job cuts were part of a broader reduction of employees at the ecommerce giant. At the same time as those cuts, all believed to be office jobs, Amazon said it would cut about 5,000 retail workers, according to notices it sent to state workforce agencies in California, Maryland and Washington, resulting from its decision to close almost all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores.
That’s on top of a round of 14,000 job cuts in October, bringing the total to well over 30,000 since Jassy first signaled a push for AI-driven organizational changes.
Like many companies, in technology and otherwise, but particularly those that make and sell AI tools and services, Amazon has been pushing its workforce to find more efficiencies with AI.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that 2026 will be when “AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work.”
“We’re investing in AI-native tooling so individuals at Meta can get more done, we’re elevating individual contributors, and flattening teams,” he said on an earnings call. “We’re starting to see projects that used to require big teams now be accomplished by a single very talented person.”
So far, Meta’s layoffs this year have focused on cutting jobs from its virtual reality and metaverse divisions. Also driving job impacts is the industry shifting resources to AI development, which requires huge spending on computer chips, energy-hungry data centers and talent.
Jassy told Amazon employees last June to be “curious about AI, educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team’s brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams.”
Plumb was fully on board with that and said he demonstrated his proficiency in using Amazon’s AI coding tool, Kiro, to “solve massive problems” in the company’s compensation system.
“If you weren’t using them, your manager would get a report and they would talk to you about using it,” he said. “There were only five people in the entire company that were a higher user of Kiro than I was, or had achieved more milestones.”
Now he’s shifting gears to his candidacy among a field of Republicans in the Houston area looking to unseat U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw in the March primary.
Cornell’s Girotra said it’s possible that increasing AI productivity is leading companies to cut middle management, but he said the reality is that those making layoff decisions “just need to cut costs and make it happen. That’s it. I don’t think they care what the reason for that is.”
Not all companies are signaling AI as a reason for cuts. Home Depot confirmed on Thursday that it was eliminating 800 roles tied to its corporate headquarters in Atlanta, though most of the affected employees worked remotely.
Home Depot’s spokesman George Lane said that Home Depot’s cuts were not driven by AI or automation but “truly about speed, agility” and serving the needs of its customers and front-line workers.
And exercise equipment maker Peloton confirmed on Friday that it is reducing its workforce by 11% as part of a broader cost-cutting move under its CEO Peter Stern to pare down operating expenses.
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AP Retail Writer Anne D’Innocenzio contributed to this report.
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A chatbot entirely powered by humans, not artificial intelligence? This Chilean community shows why
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About 50 residents of a community outside Chile’s capital spent Saturday trying their best to power an entirely human-operated chatbot that could answer questions and make silly pictures on command, in a message to highlight the environmental toll of artificial intelligence data centers in the region.
Organizers say the 12-hour project fielded more than 25,000 requests from around the world.
Asking the Quili.AI website to generate an image of a “sloth playing in the snow” didn’t instantly produce an output, as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini would. Instead, someone responded in Spanish to wait a few moments and reminded the user that a human was responding.
Then came a drawing about 10 minutes later: a penciled sketch of a cute and cartoonish sloth in a pile of snowballs, with its claws clutching one and about to throw it.
“The goal is to highlight the hidden water footprint behind AI prompting and encourage more responsible use,” said a statement from organizer Lorena Antiman of the environmental group Corporación NGEN.
The answers came from a rotating crew of volunteers working on laptops in a community center in Quilicura, a municipality at the urban edge of Santiago that has become a data center hub. Asked by an Associated Press reporter for the identity of who made the sloth drawing, the website responded that it was a local youth who’s helping with illustrations.
The website responded quickly to questions that drew on residents’ cultural knowledge, like how to make Chilean sopaipillas, a fried pastry. When they didn’t know the answer, they walked around the room to see if someone else did.
“Quili.AI isn’t about always having an instant answer. It’s about recognizing that not every question needs one,” Antiman said. “When residents don’t know something, they can say so, share perspective, or respond with curiosity rather than certainty.”
She said it’s not designed to reject the “incredibly valuable” uses of AI but to think more about the impacts of so much “casual prompting” on water-stressed places like Quilicura.
The backdrop behind the campaign is a debate, in Chile and elsewhere, about the heavy costs of AI usage. Data center computer chips running AI systems require huge amounts of electricity and some also use large volumes of water for cooling, with usage varying depending on location and type of equipment.
Cloud computing giants Amazon, Google and Microsoft are among a number of companies that have built or planned data centers in the Santiago region.
Google has argued that the Quilicura data center it switched on in 2015 is the “most energy efficient in Latin America” and has highlighted its investment in wetlands restoration and irrigation projects in the surrounding Maipo River basin. But it faced a court challenge over another project near Santiago over water usage concerns.
Chile has faced a decade of severe drought, which experts say contributed to the spread of recent deadly wildfires.
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Taiwan’s economy grows at fastest rate in 15 years, turbocharged by the AI boom
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TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan’s economy expanded at an 8.6% annual rate last year, the fastest pace in 15 years, as its export-focused industries were buoyed by the frenzy over artificial intelligence and a surge of shipments to the U.S..
The advanced estimate released by Taiwan’s statistics agency on Friday was much better than economists had forecast. It was the strongest growth rate since 2010.
Taiwan set a trade deal earlier this month with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. It lowered U.S. tariffs on imports from the island to 15% from 20% in exchange for pledges of at least $250 billion of investment in the U.S. in areas such as semiconductors and AI. That could power higher exports, further charging the economy this year, economists say.
“We expect AI-related demand to continue underpinning Taiwan’s export performance into 2026, supporting overall economic growth amid sustained global AI investment,” Bank of America economists Xiaoqing Pi and Helen Qiao wrote in a recent note.
Taiwan is a major manufacturer of AI servers, computer chips and precision instruments. Its exports jumped nearly 35% last year from a year earlier, led by technology-related shipments. Shipments to the U.S. surged 78%.
The AI boom has also propelled Taiwan’s leading technology companies to record profits and revenues. Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, counts Nvidia as its key client and is one of the largest companies in the world by market value — and electronics giant Foxconn, which makes AI servers for Nvidia and assembles products for Apple.
However, growth this year will likely slow since it’s building on a high base, economists say.
Deutsche Bank estimates Taiwan’s economy will grow 4.8% in 2026. Growing concerns that the AI boom may be a bubble are a key risk given Taiwan’s dependence on tech exports.
Uncertainty over U.S. tariffs under Trump are another worry. So are tensions with Beijing. China claims Taiwan, a self-ruled island, as its own territory. China conducted large-scale military drills around Taiwan in late December, renewing concerns over a possible blockade or seizure by Beijing.
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EU steps in to make sure Google gives rivals access to AI services and data
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BRUSSELS — The European Union said Tuesday it’s stepping in to make sure Google gives rival AI companies and search engines access to Gemini AI services and data as required by the bloc’s flagship digital rulebook.
The executive arm of the 27-nation bloc said it was opening up so-called “ specification proceedings ” to ensure that Google complies with the sweeping Digital Markets Act, which requires Big Tech companies to give smaller players equal access to hardware and software features.
Brussels said part of the proceedings will specify how Google should give third-party AI companies “equally effective access to the same features” available through its own services.
The EU will also look at whether Google is giving competing search engines fair and reasonable access to Google Search data. This will include whether AI chatbot providers are eligible to access to the data.
The proceedings fall short of an investigation and must wrap up in six months with draft measures that Brussels will impose on Google.
Clare Kelly, Google’s senior competition counsel, said she was concerned about the reasons behind the procedure.
“Android is open by design, and we’re already licensing Search data to competitors under the DMA,” Kelly said in a statement. “However, we are concerned that further rules which are often driven by competitor grievances rather than the interest of consumers, will compromise user privacy, security, and innovation.”
Teresa Ribera, who oversees competition affairs as executive vice president of the European Commission, says it seeks to “maximize the potential and the benefits of this profound technological shift by making sure the playing field is open and fair, not tilted in favor of the largest few.”
The move adds EU pressure on Google, which is facing antitrust scrutiny after the bloc’s regulators last year started investigating whether the company gave itself an unfair advantage through the use of online content for its AI models and services.
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Study shows how earthquake monitors can track space junk through sonic booms
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — As more and more space junk comes crashing down, a new study shows how earthquake monitors can better track incoming objects by tuning into their sonic booms.
Scientists reported Thursday that seismic readings from sonic booms that were generated when a discarded module from a Chinese crew capsule reentered over Southern California in 2024 allowed them to place the object’s path nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) farther south than radar had predicted from orbit.
Using this method to track uncontrolled objects plummeting at supersonic speeds, they said, could help recovery teams reach any surviving pieces more quickly — crucial if the debris is dangerous.
“The problem at the moment is we can track stuff very well in space,” said Johns Hopkins University’s Benjamin Fernando, the lead researcher. “But once it gets to the point that it’s actually breaking up in the atmosphere, it becomes very difficult to track.”
His team’s findings, published in the journal Science, focus on just one debris event. But the researchers already have used publicly available data from seismic networks to track a few dozen other reentries, including debris from three failed SpaceX Starship test flights in Texas.
A growing concern among scientists and others is that falling space debris could strike a plane in flight.
“There are thousands, tens of thousands, more satellites in orbit than there were 10 years ago,” including SpaceX’s Starlinks and other companies’ internet satellites, said Fernando. “Unfortunately, we don’t really have anything other than the word of the company to say that when they break up, they completely burn up in the atmosphere.”
Fernando, who normally studies quakes on the moon and Mars, teamed up with Imperial College London’s Constantinos Charalambous the day after the Chinese debris streaked across the California sky in 2024. Over time, they gathered data from more than 120 seismometers that captured the sonic booms from the reentry, using that data to plot the object’s suspected path.
China’s out-of-control module had been abandoned in a decaying orbit ever since it was cut loose from the Shenzhou-15 capsule returning three Chinese astronauts from their country’s space station in 2023. The 1.5-ton (1.36-metric tonne) module — more than 3 feet (1 meter) in size — broke into countless smaller pieces as it plummeted through the atmosphere, resulting in multiple sonic booms. Besides attempting to trace the object’s fall, the seismic readings provided a sense of the cascading breakup, Fernando said.
Fernando acknowledged it’s impossible to know how close his team’s predictions are to the actual path since no debris was reported on the ground.
The goal is to ascertain, within minutes or even seconds, the speed and direction of the incoming space junk as well as its fragmentation. In remote areas like the South Pacific, nuclear blast monitoring stations could potentially track the sonic booms to fine-tune the paths of descent. That’s where NASA plans to ditch the International Space Station in five years. SpaceX is working on the deorbiting vehicle to ensure a controlled entry.
Fernando is looking to eventually publish a catalog of seismically tracked, entering space objects, while improving future calculations by factoring in the wind’s effect on falling debris.
In a companion article in Science, Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Chris Carr, who was not involved in the study, said further research is needed to reduce the time between an object’s final plunge and the determination of its course.
For now, Carr said this new method “unlocks the rapid identification of debris fall-out zones, which is key information as Earth’s orbit is anticipated to become increasingly crowded with satellites, leading to a greater influx of space debris.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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Trump’s voice in a new Fannie Mae ad is generated by artificial intelligence, with his permission
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NEW YORK — What sounds like President Donald Trump narrating a new Fannie Mae ad actually is an AI-cloned voice reading text, according to a disclaimer in the video.
The voice in the ad, created with permission from the Trump administration, promises an “all new Fannie Mae” and calls the institution the “protector of the American Dream.” The ad comes as the administration is making a big push to show voters it is responding to their concerns about affordability, including in the housing market.
Trump plans to talk about housing at his appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where world leaders and corporate executives meet this week.
This isn’t the first time a member of the Trump family has used AI to replicate their voice, First Lady Melania Trump recently employed AI technology firm Eleven Labs to help voice the audio version of her memoir. It’s not known who cloned President Trump’s voice for the Fannie Mae ad.
Last month, Trump pledged in a prime-time address that he would roll out “some of the most aggressive housing reform plans in American history.”
“For generations, home ownership meant security, independence, and stability,” Trump’s digitized voice says in the one-minute ad aired Sunday. “But today, that dream feels out of reach for too many Americans not because they stopped working hard but because the system stopped working for them.”
Fannie Mae and its counterpart Freddie Mac, which have been under government control since the Great Recession, buy mortgages that meet their risk criteria from banks, which helps provide liquidity for the housing market. The two firms guarantee roughly half of the $13 trillion U.S. home loan market and are a bedrock of the U.S. economy.
The ad says Fannie Mae will work with the banking industry to approve more would-be homebuyers for mortgages.
Trump, Bill Pulte, who leads the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and others have said they want to sell shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on a major stock exchange but no concrete plans have been set.
Trump and Pulte have also floated extending the 30-year mortgage to 50 years in order to lower monthly payments. Trump appeared to back off the proposal after critics said a longer-term loan would reduce people’s ability to create housing equity and increase their own wealth.
Trump also said on social media earlier this month that he was directing the federal government to buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds, a move he said would help reduce mortgage rates at a time when Americans are anxious about home prices. Trump said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have $200 billion in cash that will be used to make the purchase.
Earlier this month, Trump also said he wants to block large institutional investors f rom buying houses, saying that a ban would make it easier for younger families to buy their first homes.
Trump’s permission for the use of AI is interesting given that he has complained about aides in the Biden administration using autopen to apply the former president’s signature to laws, pardons or executive orders. An autopen is a mechanical device that is used to replicate a person’s authentic signature.
However, a report issued by House Republicans does not include any concrete evidence that autopen was used to sign Biden’s name without his knowledge.
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Asian shares are mixed and US futures edge higher after Wall Street steadies
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BANGKOK — Asian shares were mixed Friday after Wall Street broke a two-day losing streak and edged back toward record levels, helped by advances for Big Tech companies like Nvidia.
U.S. futures advanced and oil prices slipped.
Tech shares regained momentum after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., a major supplier to the industry, reported strong profits and investment plans. TSMC gained 3% early Friday and Taiwan’s benchmark Taiex was up 1.9%.
The frenzy around AI has sent Nvidia and other superstar stocks to dizzying heights, stirring criticism that their prices had shot too high. Nvidia rose 2.1% on Thursday after TSMC’s Chief Financial Officer Wendell Huang said it’s seeing “continued strong demand” in an encouraging signal for the entire AI industry.
TSMC’s stock that trades in the United States rose 4.4% on Thursday.
The gains also followed the signing of a U.S.-Taiwan trade deal involving $250 billion in new investments by Taiwan’s semiconductor and tech companies in the U.S. In exchange, the Trump administration will cut tariffs on Taiwanese goods. The deal aims to establish a strategic economic partnership and upgrade U.S. industrial infrastructure.
In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 shed 0.3% to 53,936.17, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gave up 0.6% to 26,770.56. The Shanghai Composite index lost 0.3% to 4,101.91.
China is due to report its economic growth data for 2025 on Monday. Forecasts are for the economy to have expanded at about a 4.5% annual pace, slowing from earlier in the year.
Elsewhere in Asia, South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.9% to a record 4,840.74. The benchmark has been trading at record highs for weeks, helped by a recovery in confidence in AI-related shares. Samsung Electronics gained 3.5%.
In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.5% to 8,903.90. India’s Sensex rose 0.4%.
Wall Street steadied on Thursday as stocks related to artificial-intelligence bounced back.
The S&P 500 rose 0.3% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.6%. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.2% to 23,530.02.
Easing oil prices also helped to calm investors’ jitters.
Early Friday, a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude cost $59.21, up 14 cents from a day earlier. It sank 4.6% on Thursday after Trump said he had heard “on good authority” that plans for executions in Iran had stopped amid widespread protests against the country’s leadership.
Brent crude, the international standard, added 10 cents to $63.86 per barrel. It dropped 4.1% on Thursday.
Financial markets took Trump’s comments about Iran as a signal that tensions flaring above some of the world’s largest oil deposits could ease, which in turn could lower the possibility of disruptions to oil supplies.
Earnings reporting season for big U.S. companies continued to pick up pace, meanwhile, with several more big financial companies delivering their results for the last three months of 2025.
“As we dive into the heart of earnings season in the coming weeks, tech results will be scrutinized in far greater detail.,” Ipek Ozkardeskaya of Swissquote said in a commentary.
“Concerns around circular AI deals, leverage and delayed returns on investment remain front of mind for investors. These are compounded by rising electricity and metals costs, higher memory-chip prices, and the risk of supply disruptions,” she said.
BlackRock, the giant that’s now overseeing more than $14 trillion in investments, rose 5.9% after reporting stronger profit and revenue than analysts expected.
Encouraging reports on the U.S. economy contributed to the upbeat mood.
One said fewer workers applied for unemployment benefits last week in an indication layoffs may be slowing. Other reports said manufacturing was significantly stronger in the mid-Atlantic region and in New York state than economists had forecast.
The stronger-than-expected data on the U.S. economy helped stocks of smaller companies to lead the market. Their profits can be tied more closely to the strength of the U.S. economy than their bigger, multinational rivals, and the Russell 2000 index rose 0.9%.
In other dealings early Friday, the U.S. dollar fell to 158.19 Japanese yen from 158.63 yen.
The euro rose to $1.1614 from $1.1609.
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How the White House and governors want to fix AI-driven power shortages and price spikes
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The White House and a bipartisan group of governors are pressuring the operator of the mid-Atlantic power grid to take urgent steps to boost energy supply and curb price hikes, holding a Friday event aimed at addressing a rising concern among voters about the enormous amount of power used for artificial intelligence ahead of elections later this year.
The White House said its National Energy Dominance Council and the governors of several states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, want to try to compel PJM Interconnection to hold a power auction for tech companies to bid on contracts to build new power plants,
The Trump administration and governors will sign a statement of principles toward that end Friday. The plan was first reported by Bloomberg.
“Ensuring the American people have reliable and affordable electricity is one of President Trump’s top priorities, and this would deliver much-needed, long-term relief to the mid-Atlantic region,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is expected to be at the White House, a person familiar with Shapiro’s plans said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement. Shapiro, a Democrat, made his participation in Friday’s event contingent on including a provision to extend a limit on wholesale electricity price increases for the region’s consumers, the person said.
But the operator of the grid won’t be there. “PJM was not invited. Therefore we would not attend,” said spokesperson Jeff Shields.
It was not immediately clear whether President Donald Trump would attend the event, which was not listed on his public schedule.
Trump and the governors are under pressure to insulate consumers and businesses alike from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers. Meanwhile, more Americans are falling behind on their electricity bills.
Consumer advocates say ratepayers in the mid-Atlantic electricity grid — which encompasses all or parts of 13 states stretching from New Jersey to Illinois, as well as Washington, D.C. — are already paying billions of dollars in higher bills to underwrite the cost to supply power to data centers, some of them built, some not.
However, they also say that the billions of dollars that consumers are paying isn’t resulting in the construction of new power plants necessary to meet the rising demand.
Pivotal contests in November will be decided by communities that are home to fast-rising electric bills or fights over who’s footing the bill for the data centers that underpin the explosion in demand for artificial intelligence. In parts of the country, data centers are coming online faster than power plants can be built and connected to the grid.
Electricity costs were a key issue in last year’s elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, a data center hotspot, and in Georgia, where Democrats ousted two Republican incumbents for seats on the state’s utility regulatory commission. Voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City all cited economic concerns as the top issue, as Democrats and Republicans gird for a debate over affordability in the intensifying midterm battle to control Congress.
Gas and electric utilities sought or won rate increases of more that $34 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, consumer advocacy organization PowerLines reported. That was more than double the same period a year earlier.
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How the White House and governors want to fix AI-driven power shortages and price spikes
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The White House and a bipartisan group of governors are pressuring the operator of the mid-Atlantic power grid to take urgent steps to boost energy supply and curb price hikes, holding a Friday event aimed at addressing a rising concern among voters about the enormous amount of power used for artificial intelligence ahead of elections later this year.
The White House said its National Energy Dominance Council and the governors of several states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Virginia, want to try to compel PJM Interconnection to hold a power auction for tech companies to bid on contracts to build new power plants,
The Trump administration and governors will sign a statement of principles toward that end Friday. The plan was first reported by Bloomberg.
“Ensuring the American people have reliable and affordable electricity is one of President Trump’s top priorities, and this would deliver much-needed, long-term relief to the mid-Atlantic region,” said Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is expected to be at the White House, a person familiar with Shapiro’s plans said, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement. Shapiro, a Democrat, made his participation in Friday’s event contingent on including a provision to extend a limit on wholesale electricity price increases for the region’s consumers, the person said.
But the operator of the grid won’t be there. “PJM was not invited. Therefore we would not attend,” said spokesperson Jeff Shields.
It was not immediately clear whether President Donald Trump would attend the event, which was not listed on his public schedule.
Trump and the governors are under pressure to insulate consumers and businesses alike from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers. Meanwhile, more Americans are falling behind on their electricity bills.
Consumer advocates say ratepayers in the mid-Atlantic electricity grid — which encompasses all or parts of 13 states stretching from New Jersey to Illinois, as well as Washington, D.C. — are already paying billions of dollars in higher bills to underwrite the cost to supply power to data centers, some of them built, some not.
However, they also say that the billions of dollars that consumers are paying isn’t resulting in the construction of new power plants necessary to meet the rising demand.
Pivotal contests in November will be decided by communities that are home to fast-rising electric bills or fights over who’s footing the bill for the data centers that underpin the explosion in demand for artificial intelligence. In parts of the country, data centers are coming online faster than power plants can be built and connected to the grid.
Electricity costs were a key issue in last year’s elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, a data center hotspot, and in Georgia, where Democrats ousted two Republican incumbents for seats on the state’s utility regulatory commission. Voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California and New York City all cited economic concerns as the top issue, as Democrats and Republicans gird for a debate over affordability in the intensifying midterm battle to control Congress.
Gas and electric utilities sought or won rate increases of more that $34 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, consumer advocacy organization PowerLines reported. That was more than double the same period a year earlier.
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Wikipedia unveils new AI licensing deals as it marks 25th birthday
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LONDON — Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary.
The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed licensing deals with AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France’s Mistral AI.
Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.
Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom.
The nonprofit that runs the site signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia.
The new deals will help one of the world’s most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They’re paying to access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” the Wikimedia Foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details.
While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it.
“I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated,” Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. “I wouldn’t really want to use an AI that’s trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI,” Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But “you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you’re putting on us.”
The Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models.
The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links.
Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site on the internet. It has more than 65 million articles in 300 languages that are edited by some 250,000 volunteers.
The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use.
“But our infrastructure is not free, right?” Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa.
It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to “draw data from Wikipedia,” said Iskander, who’s stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan.
The bulk of Wikipedia’s funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals.
“They’re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies,” Wales said. They’re saying, “You know what, actually you can’t just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.”
Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in tools that reduce tedious work for editors.
While AI isn’t good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources.
“We don’t have that yet but that’s the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future.”
Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said.
“You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia,” he said. It could respond by saying “here’s the answer to your question from this article and here’s the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think we’ll move in that direction as well. ”
Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an experiment.
However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet also had a dark side.
“People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didn’t need algorithms to be mean to each other,” he said. “But, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility.”
Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site “Wokepedia” and accused it of being biased in favor of the left.
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged “manipulation efforts” in Wikipedia’s editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.
A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with “propaganda” and urged people to stop donating to the site.
Wales said he doesn’t consider Grokipedia a “real threat” to Wikipedia because it’s based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on.
“Large language models aren’t good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia,” he said. “It often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is.”
He stressed that he wasn’t singling out criticism of Grokipedia.
“It’s just the way large language models work.”
Wales say he’s known Musk for years but they haven’t been in touch since Grokipedia launched.
“I should probably ping him,” Wales said.
What would he say?
“’How’s your family?’ I’m a nice person, I don’t really want to pick a fight with anybody.”
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AP writer Mogomotsi Magome in Johannesburg contributed to this report
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Google’s corporate parent joins $4 trillion club as investors continue to bet on AI breakthroughs
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Google parent Alphabet Inc. on Monday became the fourth Big Tech powerhouse to be valued at $4 trillion, a once seemingly unfathomable milestone that’s become more like a rite of passage amid an artificial intelligence arms race.
Alphabet reached the threshold just four months after Google dodged the U.S. government’s attempt to break up its internet empire following a ruling last year that branded its ubiquitous search engine an illegal monopoly.
In an effort to prevent further abuses, a federal judge overseeing the case ordered a shake-up that investors widely interpreted as a slap on the wrist, resulting in a 57% increase in Alphabet’s stock price since then that has created an additional $1.4 trillion in shareholder wealth.
The rapid run-up thrust Alphabet into a $4 trillion club that has previously welcomed computer chipmaker Nvidia, which became the first to cross the barrier in July. Both Apple and Microsoft also surpassed market values of $4 trillion last year, but they have fallen back mid worries that the spending spree on AI will turn into a bubble that bursts.
Nvidia’s market value briefly topped $5 trillion in late October, before backtracking as the AI bubble fears also exacted a toll on its stock price because its chipsets are needed to power the technology.
Meanwhile, Amazon is currently valued at $2.6 trillion, in part because of its AI ambitions, and Facebook parent Meta Platforms is valued at $1.6 trillion for some of the same reasons. Electric automaker Tesla also is betting heavily on AI, a gambit that prompted the company — now valued at $1.5 trillion — to approve a compensation package t hat would pay CEO Elon Musk $1 trillion if several targets are hit, including reaching a market value of more than $8.5 trillion.
Alphabet joined the $4 trillion club on the same day that Apple announced it will rely on Google’s AI technology to help smarten up its virtual assistant Siri after coming up short in its own efforts to bring more advanced features to the iPhone.
Google is well positioned to become one of the big winners in the AI battle because it is deploying the technology to transform its search engine into more of a conversational answer engine to compete against the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The next generation of the Gemini model underlying Google’s AI technology has been winning rave reviews since its recent release, helping to drive up Alphabet’s stock price while the shares of other AI-driven companies have dipped with ongoing bubble worries. Google’s Cloud division that sells AI tools to corporate customers and government agencies has emerged as Alphabet’s fastest growing segment during the past three years while AI technology has enabled its Waymo robotaxi division to dispatch more self-driving vehicles in cities across the U.S.
The competitive threats posed by rising AI stars such as OpenAI and Perplexity is one of the reasons that U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta rebuffed the U.S. Justice Department’s proposal to force Google to sell its industry-leading Chrome web browser. The judge reasoned the technological advances unleashed by AI already have been forcing significant changes in online search.
Alphabet’s market value could plunge if investor sentiment about the company’s exposure to a potential AI bubble suddenly shift. Even Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai conceded that some market “irrationality” is contributing to the skyrocketing market values of Big Tech companies during a November interview with the BBC.
“I think no company is going to be immune, including us,” Pichai said if the AI-driven euphoria suddenly evaporates.
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Apple calls on Google to help smarten up Siri and bring other AI features to iPhone
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Apple will rely on Google to help finish its efforts to smarten up its virtual assistant Siri and bring other artificial intelligence features to the iPhone as the trendsetting company plays catch up in technology’s latest craze.
The deal allowing Apple to tap into Google’s AI technology was disclosed Monday in a joint statement from the Silicon Valley powerhouses. The partnership will draw upon Google’s Gemini technology to customize a suite of AI features dubbed “Apple Intelligence” on the iPhone and other products.
After Google and others took the early lead in the AI race, Apple promised to plant its first big stake in the field with an array of new features that were supposed to be coming to the iPhone in 2024 as part of a ballyhooed software upgrade.
But many of Apple’s AI features remain in the development phase, while Google and Samsung have been rolling out more of the technology on their own devices. One of the most glaring AI omissions on the iPhone has been a promised overhaul of Siri that was supposed to transform the often-confused assistant into a more conversational and versatile multitasker.
Google even subtly mocked the iPhone’s AI shortcomings in ads promoting the release of its latest Pixel phone last summer.
Apple’s AI missteps prompted the Cupertino, California, company to acknowledge last year that its Siri upgrade wouldn’t happen until some point during 2026.
Getting Apple to endorse its AI implicitly represents a coup for Google, which has been steadily releasing more features built on its Gemini technology in its search engine and Gmail. The progress has intensified Google’s competition with OpenAI and its ChatGPT chatbot, which already has a deal with Apple that makes it an option on the iPhone.
Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives hailed the Apple deal as a “major validation moment for Google,” in a Monday research note.
Google’s AI inroads have helped its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc., become slightly more valuable than Apple in the assessment of investors. Alphabet marked a milestone Monday when it surpassed a market value of $4 trillion for the first time during early morning trading before slipping back below that threshold later in the session.
Even so, Alphabet’s market value remained about $150 billion above Apple, which for years ranked as the world’s most valuable company before the rise of AI changed the stakes.
Three other companies have joined the $4 trillion club in the past year, with AI chipmaker Nvidia becoming the first last July. Apple and Microsoft also broke the barrier last year, although the market values of those two longtime rivals are now below $4 trillion.
Nvidia’s market value briefly topped $5 trillion in late October, before backtracking amid recurring worries that the hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into AI technology may be creating an investment bubble that will eventually burst. With its chipsets designed for AI still in high demand, Nvidia remains atop the heap with a $4.5 trillion market value.
Alphabet’s stock price has been on a tear since early September when Google dodged the U.S. government’s attempt to break up its internet empire following a ruling last year that branded its ubiquitous search engine an illegal monopoly.
In an effort to prevent further abuses, a federal judge overseeing the case ordered a shake-up that investors widely interpreted as a relative slap on the wrist, resulting in a 36% increase in Alphabet’s stock price since then that has created an additional $1.4 trillion in shareholder wealth.
The ruling also left the door open for a long-running alliance in search between Google and Apple. Google pays Apple more than$20 billion annually to be the preferred search engine on the iPhone and other Apple products — an arrangement that is still allowed with a few modifications under the judge’s decision in the search case.
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Meta signs three nuclear power deals to help support its AI data centers
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Facebook parent Meta has reached nuclear power deals with three companies as it continues to look for electricity sources for its artificial intelligence data centers.
Meta struck agreements with TerraPower, Oklo and Vistra for nuclear power for its Prometheus AI data center that is being built in New Albany, Ohio. Meta announced Prometheus, which will be a 1-gigawatt cluster spanning across multiple data center buildings, in July. It’s anticipated to come online this year.
Financial terms of the deals with TerraPower, Oklo and Vistra were not disclosed.
The Mark Zuckerberg-led Meta said in a statement on Friday that the three deals will support up to 6.6 gigawatts of new and existing clean energy by 2035.
“These projects add reliable and firm power to the grid, reinforce America’s nuclear supply chain, and support new and existing jobs to build and operate American power plants,” the company said.
Meta said its agreement with TerraPower will provide funding that supports the development of two new Natrium units capable of generating up to 690 megawatts of firm power with delivery as early as 2032. The deal also provides Meta with rights for energy from up to six other Natrium units capable of producing 2.1 gigawatts and targeted for delivery by 2035.
Meta will also buy more than 2.1 gigawatts of energy from two operating Vistra nuclear power plants in Ohio, in addition to the energy from expansions at the two Ohio plants and a third Vistra plant in Pennsylvania.
The deal with Oklo, which counts OpenAI’s Sam Altman as one of its largest investors, will help to develop a 1.2 gigawatt power campus in Pike County, Ohio to support Meta’s data centers in the region.
The nuclear power agreements come after Meta announced in June that it reached a 20-year deal with Constellation Energy.
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