AI Watch
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Meta announced Monday that its Louisiana data center investment has grown from $10 billion to $50 billion and that it expects to generate substantial local tax revenues as it pursues artificial superintelligence.
The Richland Parish Data Center, nicknamed “Hyperion,” will be a nearly 10 million-square-foot, five-gigawatt facility, equivalent to a power plant capable of supplying enough electricity to power roughly 4 million average U.S. homes simultaneously. Altogether, that is about as much energy as New York City uses on a winter day.
“We’re delivering real economic impact alongside the AI infrastructure that will power the future,” Meta Vice President of Data Centers Rachel Peterson said in a statement.
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Writing in May for Above the Law, Ken Crutchfield observed that “over the past year, we’ve seen a steady stream of headlines about AI hallucinations where fake cases, fabricated quotes, and misstated facts made it through a review process and into court filings.” The predicament isn’t just that GenAI tools invent non-existent cases that some short-cut-taking attorneys cite without verifying; it’s that the tools also produce difficult-to-discover false claims and quotations that masquerade as truth in pleadings and motions. Indeed, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit explained in February that the “problem now often manifests as false quotes or statements of law attributed to real cases, rather than the more easily recognizable fake cases.”
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WASHINGTON, July 13 (Reuters)—The White House plans to bring together utility companies and data center developers to make a voluntary pledge designed to ensure that rapid growth in electricity demand from artificial intelligence does not drive-up power bills for households and businesses, according to three people familiar with the plans.
An event to announce the initiative is expected in the coming weeks, with several companies taking part and vowing to protect current ratepayers from shouldering all the costs of AI expansion. The guest list is still being finalized, the sources said.
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The last few weeks should end any illusion that the United States can improvise its way through frontier AI policy. What we have witnessed was not serious governance. It was vibe policymaking: ad hoc, deal-by-deal reactions with no clear standard, public explanation, or predictable process. The result was not just confusion. It exposed a deeper weakness: the United States has no reliable way to measure frontier AI risk, no agreed process for acting on it, and no institution built to do either.
In early June, Anthropic released Mythos 5 and its restricted consumer version, Fable 5, models that write complex code and find software vulnerabilities with minimal prompting. Days later, the Administration ordered Anthropic to cut off access to all foreign nationals, effective immediately. Unable to verify nationality in real time, Anthropic pulled the models entirely. OpenAI, meanwhile, held back its own GPT-5.6 series at the government’s request.
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With the exploding popularity of generative artificial intelligence, many open-source models are now available online for anyone to adapt for their task, such as generating product renderings in a certain artistic style.
But these models also find their way into the hands of nefarious actors who may optimize them to produce illegal content, like hate speech or child sexual abuse material (CSAM). This is a growing problem — the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 1.5 million reports of AI-generated CSAM in 2025, an increase from 67,000 in 2024.
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AI is turning scientists into publishing machines—and quietly funneling them into the same crowded corners of research.
That’s the conclusion of an analysis of more than 40 million academic papers, which found that scientists who use AI tools in their research publish more papers, accumulate more citations, and reach leadership roles sooner than peers who don’t.
But there’s a catch. As individual scholars soar through the academic ranks, science as a whole shrinks its curiosity. AI-heavy research covers less topical ground, clusters around the same data-rich problems, and sparks less follow-on engagement between studies.
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The researchers behind the breakthrough say these humanoid robots could offer several advantages over the complex surgical systems currently in use.
Humanoid-style robot performs surgery for the first time, marking a potential turning point in the relationship between robotics and healthcare. Working alongside surgeons from the University of California San Diego, a robot named Surgie successfully removed a gallbladder. In another operation, “Surgie” was joined by another robot also dubbed “Surgie” to work alongside one another to perform a laparoscopic gallbladder removal. Both procedures were performed on non-primate mammals, The Independent reports.
“This study shows that humanoid robots have a viable future in the field of surgery,” said Michael Yip, a faculty member in the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.,” said to The Independent. “Remotely operated and autonomous humanoid robots have real potential for amplifying access to critical surgeries to which patients would otherwise not have access. This can help address the healthcare crisis not only in the United States, but also worldwide.”
President Trump has lifted his export ban on Anthropic’s AI product. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced “… The controls … are withdrawn. A license is no longer required for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer, including deemed export or deemed reexport, of the Mythos or Fable models.”
The software giant Microsoft announced it was laying off 4,000 people, primarily its X-box division. The move is designed to optimize X-box and other divisions using AI. The layoffs amount to 2.1% of its workforce. 1,600 of those layoffs are already happening, and they’re all in the X-box division.
AI ‘actor’ Tilly Norwood to appear in feature film set in the ‘Tillyverse’ – National– globalnews.ca
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The AI “actor” known as Tilly Norwood will be used in a new feature film entitled Misaligned, its first lead role as a digitally generated persona.
Particle6, the AI production studio that built Norwood, is developing and producing the film, the company told Global News in an email statement. The company is led by comedian and writer Eline Van der Velden.
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arXiv:2607.05382v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Visual generators excel at rendering, but they confidently fabricate what they do not know. User requests are unbounded, evolving, and deeply long-tailed: new characters, trending entities, post-cutoff events, and more. This world-knowledge bottleneck is structural: generators are trained on fixed corpora, but the visual world is open-ended. We construct SearchGen-20K and SearchGen-Bench, with 20,839 prompts spanning twelve failure categories and twenty-two domains, paired with a pre-executed multimodal SearchGen-Corpus-1M to support offline, reproducible research. On SearchGen-Bench, frontier open generators score only 21 to 28 out of 100, a 40-point collapse invisible to existing benchmarks.
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Sometimes the great verities are pretty straightforward. For example, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,” an observation made famous by economist Herb Stein. Let’s stick with that one, given its sensible application to the Trump administration’s current quasi-licensing regime for frontier AI models. The effort has proven to be a vibey, ad hoc process that The Economist correctly describes as “opaque, unpredictable—and unsustainable.” Good news that a more structured process apparently is coming soon.
The Financial Times reports that, as early as this week, the White House will roll out “voluntary standards for the release of new models” that would “set benchmarks for models with cutting-edge cyber capabilities and establish release timelines in an effort to streamline future launches.” What’s more, the guidelines would clarify “who is able to access advanced models, both domestically and abroad, in a move that could set the stage for a global framework including US allies.” Definitely seems less haphazard, I’ll give it that.
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Water is the most abundant liquid on Earth’s surface, and it is highly anomalous compared with other liquids because it expands upon freezing. The anomalies in water have been linked to how its microscopic structure changes with temperature and pressure. However, there is no systematic scheme for characterizing these structural changes.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has told staff that the company’s effort to replace human workers with AI agents is moving slower than expected, even after the tech giant cut thousands of jobs and reorganized aggressively around artificial intelligence.
The admission came during an internal town hall after months of restructuring at Meta.
Earlier this year, the company cut roughly 10% of its workforce and reassigned about 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles.
Those moves were framed internally as urgent, as Meta raced to compete with OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and other major players in the artificial intelligence arms race.
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EXCERPT:
Water is the most abundant liquid on Earth’s surface, and it is highly anomalous compared with other liquids because it expands upon freezing. The anomalies in water have been linked to how its microscopic structure changes with temperature and pressure. However, there is no systematic scheme for characterizing these structural changes.
