Where's the concern about robots and AI?

[ChumpDumper]

China is kicking our ass in applying AI and robotics in manufaturing. It's not even close.

https://www.ien.com/redzone/blog/229...dark-factories

It seems we are busy ing around trying to find the one AI that will do everything for everybody (including CSAM for still unexplained reasons) instead of more targeted uses like you've cited -- though it's not like we'd even use a dark factory to make Trump phones here.

[velik_m]

White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says “the memes will continue”

The Trump White House yesterday posted a manipulated photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota civil rights attorney who was arrested after protesting in a church where a pastor is allegedly also an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted what seems to be the original photo of Armstrong being led away by an officer yesterday morning. A half hour later, the official White House X account posted an altered version in which Armstrong’s face was manipulated to make it appear that she was crying.

“The White House shared an AI-edited photo of Nekima, depicting her in tears and scared when, in actuality, she was poised, determined, and unafraid,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said yesterday.

Reader-added context on X said, “This photo has been digitally altered to make Nekima Levy Armstrong appear to be in distress. The Director of DHS herself posted the unedited photo in an earlier announcement.” White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr defended the post after criticism of the image manipulation.

“Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Dorr wrote. The White House post with the manipulated image called Levy Armstrong a “far-left agitator” who “orchestrated[ed] church riots in Minnesota.”

...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...c-was-sobbing/

[velik_m]

Like digging ‘your own professional grave’: The translators grappling with losing work to AI

As a rare Irish-language translator, Timothy McKeon enjoyed steady work for European Union ins utions for years. But the rise of artificial intelligence tools that can translate text and, increasingly, speech nearly instantly has upended his livelihood and that of many others in his field.

He says he lost about 70% of his income when the EU translation work dried up. Now, available work consists of polishing machine-generated translations, jobs he refuses “on principle” because they help train the software taking work away from human translators. When the edited text is fed back into the translation software, “it learns from your work.”

“The more it learns, the more obsolete you become,” he said. “You’re essentially expected to dig your own professional grave.”

While workers worldwide ponder how AI might affect their livelihoods – a topic on the agenda at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week – that question is no longer hypothetical in the translation industry. Apps like Google Translate already reduced the need for human translators, and increased adoption of generative AI has only accelerated that trend.
...

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/23/t...utomation-intl

[Winehole23]

using AI to draft laws is dumb

[CosmicCowboy]

AI is alredy starting to bite on white collar layoffs. Amazon has laid off 30,000 since last fall. UPS has cut 30,000. Pinterest cutting 800. Dow Chemical cut 1500. Walmart cut 2000. TCS cut 12,000. Home Depot cut 6000. Nestle cutting 16,000. Tyson laid off 5000. HP laid off 6000. And those are just the ones in the recent news.

Entry level business jobs are disappearing. Would suck to be graduating with a business degree and 6 figure student debt.

[SnakeBoy]

Sentiment in this thread vacillates from AI is nothing more than a glorified search engine and AI is so powerful it's going to take all the jobs

[velik_m]

The $100 Billion Megadeal Between OpenAI and Nvidia Is on Ice

Nvidia’s NVDA plan to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI to help it train and run its latest artificial-intelligence models has stalled after some inside the chip giant expressed doubts about the deal, people familiar with the matter said.

The companies unveiled the giant agreement last September at Nvidia’s Santa Clara headquarters. They announced a memorandum of understanding for Nvidia to build at least 10 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI, and the chip-maker also agreed to invest up to $100 billion to help OpenAI pay for it. As part of the deal, OpenAI agreed to lease the chips from Nvidia.

At the time, the ChatGPT-maker expected the deal negotiations to be completed in the coming weeks, people familiar with the plans said. But the talks haven’t progressed beyond the early stages, some of the people said.

Now, the two sides are rethinking the future of their partnership, some of the people said. The latest discussions, they said, include an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars as part of OpenAI’s current funding round.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has privately emphasized to industry associates in recent months that the original $100 billion agreement was nonbinding and not finalized, people familiar with the matter said. He has also privately criticized what he has described as a lack of discipline in OpenAI’s business approach and expressed concern about the compe ion it faces from the likes of Google and Anthropic, some of the people said.

...

In a joint announcement unveiling the September deal with Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Huang called the deal “the largest computing project in history.” Nvidia’s stock rose by nearly 4% on the news, pushing its market value to almost $4.5 trillion. As part of the deal, Nvidia discussed guaranteeing some of the loans OpenAI planned to take out to build its own data centers, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

OpenAI went on to sign a string of other agreements with chip and cloud companies that helped fuel a global stock market rally. But investors have since grown jittery about the startup’s ability to pay for these deals, leading to a sell-off in some tech stocks tied to OpenAI. Altman has said that the deals put the startup on the hook for $1.4 trillion in computing commitments—more than 100 times the revenue it was on pace to generate last year.

...

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-100-...n-ice-aa3025e3

[velik_m]

[velik_m]

Oracle May Cut 30k Jobs and Sell Cerner to Fund $156B OpenAI Deal

The Report: Investment bank TD Cowen claims Oracle is evaluating “multiple paths” to finance its massive AI datacenter build-out, including cutting 20,000 to 30,000 jobs and potentially selling its health tech unit, Cerner, the Register reports.
The Cause: The financial pressure stems from Oracle’s $300B contract with OpenAI, which requires an estimated $156B in capital spending for GPUs and infrastructure—a burden that has spooked U.S. debt investors.
The Indicators: Risk metrics are flashing red. Oracle’s credit default swap (CDS) spreads have tripled, and the company is reportedly now requiring 40% upfront deposits from some customers to secure cash flow.

...

https://hitconsultant.net/2026/01/30...ancing-crisis/

[CosmicCowboy]

US industrial might was the main driving force in the WWII victory over Germany. We had the steel mills , the factories, the trained workforce to quickly retool and turn out s hips by the hundred, new planes , tanks, guns etc. by the thousands...We could arm ourselves and our allies including the Russians to overwhelm and grind down the Axis powers.

We have basically surrendered that ability to the Chinese in the event of future conflicts for the convenience of cheap manufactured goods.

[Winehole23]

short term, looks like consumer goods that need "compute" are going to get more expensive

longer term, RAM will be cheaper for everyone

With Western Digital and Seagate, two of the three remaining hard drive manufacturers worldwide have confirmed that they have already sold their production quotas for 2026 completely or almost completely. The situation is likely to be similar for Toshiba.



The statements come from the company CEOs in the analyst conferences on the latest business reports. They thus confirm speculation from September 2025. And there are already initial agreements for the year 2026. They largely come from hyperscalers who want hard drives for their AI data centers, for example to store training data on them. These include Amazon (AWS), Google, Microsoft (Azure), Meta, and OpenAI.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/WD-and-...-11178917.html

In German retail, HDD prices have risen by about 20 to 50 percent compared to mid-2025. A shortage of HDDs for data centers also affects SSDs: hyperscalers are buying high-capacity SSDs as an alternative. Manufacturers are therefore shifting their production, which leads to price increases in retail.

Toshiba has not been listed on the stock exchange since 2023. As a result, only rudimentary financial information is publicly available. The company no longer provides outlooks like its compe ors.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/WD-and-...-11178917.html

[Winehole23]

[Winehole23]

[velik_m]

AI Added ‘Basically Zero’ to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says

...
“We don’t actually view AI investment as strongly growth positive,” said Hatzius. “I think there’s a lot of misreporting, actually, of the impact AI investment had on U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and it’s much smaller than is often perceived.”

Hatzius said one major reason is that much of the equipment powering AI is imported. While U.S. companies are spending billions, importing chips and hardware offsets those investments in GDP calculations.

“A lot of the AI investment that we’re seeing in the U.S. adds to Taiwanese GDP, and it adds to Korean GDP but not really that much to U.S. GDP,” he said.

On top of that, there is currently no reliable way to accurately measure how AI use among businesses and consumers contributes to economic growth.

...

https://gizmodo.com/ai-added-basical...ays-2000725380

[Winehole23]

Talk getting y between Hegseth and Anthropic

Per source familiar with meeting: Hegseth threatened to terminate Anthropic’s $200M contract by Friday if it does not comply to Trump admin's terms. Amodei reiterated Anthropic’s red lines around AI- powered weapons and domestic surveillance.

A senior Pentagon official told NPR if Anthropic does not change its stance, it will invoke the Defense Production Act to compel Anthropic to be used as the Trump administration wishes "regardless of if they want to or not"

https://bsky.app/profile/bobbyallyn..../3mfmuliqpzk2x

[Winehole23]

lol Hegseth telling Anthropic to leave its conscience at the door after signing the contract with them

[Winehole23]

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/24/ant...-hegseth-dario

[Winehole23]

Anthropic: we can help you decide who to kill, to aim the weapon, even, but a human has to press the button

Hegseth: *crunching the can of his 19th beer of the day in his fist* how dare you

https://bsky.app/profile/ens0.me/post/3mfn6lpgqgc2j

[Winehole23]

man, it is so crazy that a washed-out unit commander who Trump watched on Fox News is SECDEF now

[Winehole23]

Trump 2.0 is full of boobs, cranks and incompetents, tbh

[Winehole23]

Anthropic defend their red lines

They won't agree to let their tech be used to kill people autonomously nor to surveil Americans

I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.


Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community. We were the first frontier AI company to deploy our models in the US government’s classified networks, the first to deploy them at the National Laboratories, and the first to provide custom models for national security customers. Claude is extensively deployed across the Department of War and other national security agencies for mission-critical applications, such as intelligence analysis, modeling and simulation, operational planning, cyber operations, and more.


Anthropic has also acted to defend America’s lead in AI, even when it is against the company’s short-term interest. We chose to forgo several hundred million dollars in revenue to cut off the use of Claude by firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party (some of whom have been designated by the Department of War as Chinese Military Companies), shut down CCP-sponsored cyberattacks that attempted to abuse Claude, and have advocated for strong export controls on chips to ensure a democratic advantage.


Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.


However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now:

• Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.
• Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.

To our knowledge, these two exceptions have not been a barrier to accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date.


The Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to “any lawful use” and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards; they have also threatened to designate us a “supply chain risk”—a label reserved for US adversaries, never before applied to an American company—and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards’ removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory: one labels us a security risk; the other labels Claude as essential to national security.


Regardless, these threats do not change our position: we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.


It is the Department’s prerogative to select contractors most aligned with their vision. But given the substantial value that Anthropic’s technology provides to our armed forces, we hope they reconsider. Our strong preference is to continue to serve the Department and our warfighters—with our two requested safeguards in place. Should the Department choose to offboard Anthropic, we will work to enable a smooth transition to another provider, avoiding any disruption to ongoing military planning, operations, or other critical missions. Our models will be available on the expansive terms we have proposed for as long as required.


We remain ready to continue our work to support the national security of the United States.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/state...artment-of-war

[Winehole23]

Trump blows up at Anthropic

He and Hegseth are essentially breaking a contract with Anthropic because they decided they didn't like terms they already agreed to

the US government not being agreement-capable is bad for business and US credibility

"I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic's technology," Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social. "We don't need it, we don't want it, and will not do business with them again!"


The president said he will give certain agencies, like the Department of Defense, that use Anthropic's technology six months to phase out their use of its products and threatened to take additional action against the company if it does not assist during that period.


"Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow," he wrote.


Mr. Trump attacked the company as a "Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about."


About an hour and a half after Mr. Trump's Truth Social post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth followed through on his promise to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk.


"I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic," Hegseth wrote. "Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War its services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service. America's warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-a...eral-agencies/

[Winehole23]

Anthropic says Hegseth is way out over his skis

Wouldn't be at all surprised if these nerds beat Hegseth in court

[Winehole23]

To strike 1,000 targets in 24 hours in Iran, the U.S. military leveraged the most advanced AI it’s ever used in warfare.

Anthropic’s Claude partnered with the military’s Maven Smart System, suggesting targets and issuing precise location coordinates

wapo.st/46BFe1T

[Winehole23]

the strike on the girls school was reportedly a double tap strike