San Francisco's AI startups are pushing workers to grind endlessly, hinting at pressures soon hitting other sectors Not long after the terms "996" and "grindcore" entered the popular lexicon, people started telling me stories about what was happening at startups in San Francisco, ground zero for the artificial intelligence economy. There was the one about the founder who hadn't taken a weekend off in more than six months. The woman who joked that she'd given up her social life to work at a prestigious AI company. Or the employees who had started taking their shoes off in the office because, well, if you were going to be there for at least 12 hours a day, six days a week, wouldn't you rather be wearing slippers? "If you go to a cafe on a Sunday, everyone is working," says Sanju Lokuhitige, the co-founder of Mythril, a pre-seed-stage AI startup, who moved to San Francisco in November to be closer to the action.

He Did PR for Zuckerberg, Musk, and Google. Now He Says He'Only Told Half the Story' Thirty thousand feet in the air, Mark Zuckerberg turned to his speechwriter. The duo were flying in Zuckerberg's jet to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the Facebook boss was scheduled to address world leaders. Zuckerberg had a question for his companion. "Wait, what exactly is the UN?" Dex Hunter-Torricke had to hide his surprise. Zuckerberg was, by this point in 2015, the head of a company that was reshaping politics and societies around the world, with 1.5 billion users and counting.

We asked attendees of Super Bowl LX's pregame festivities for their takes on the competing halftime shows, the potential for ICE actions, and the influence of Silicon Valley on the event. To say this year's Super Bowl came at a charged time in American culture and politics is, perhaps, an understatement. While the pair of teams who took the field Sunday--the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots--comprised a pretty classic matchup (no underdogs here!), the rest of the event was set to be anything but. Santa Clara's Levi's Stadium is in the heart of Silicon Valley, just a few miles from the corporate headquarters of Nvidia and AMD, whose chips are powering the AI arms race that had competitors OpenAI and Anthropic sparring via rival Super Bowl ads . There was an explosion in sports "trading" activity on sites like Kalshi and Polymarket in the lead-up to the game, even in states like California where traditional sports betting is illegal. Sunday could prove to be an extraordinary success for prediction markets, as the industry becomes more mainstream . Fresh off a historic Grammy Album of the Year win (a first for a Spanish-language album), the unapologetically political Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny headlined --a choice that sparked a perhaps inevitable MAGA backlash. Meanwhile, Turning Point USA organized an alternative program called The All-American Halftime Show, featuring the likes of Kid Rock and Brantley Gilbert. Never mind that Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, and therefore an American citizen. Rumors were even buzzing about possible actions by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Super Bowl. Even though the NFL and California governor Gavin Newsom said on Thursday that there would be " no immigration enforcement tied to the game," anti-ICE protesters were on the streets. We caught up with football fans at a tailgate five minutes away from Levi's Stadium to hear their thoughts on all the drama. Here's what they had to say.

Even as Big Tech CEOs curry favor with President Trump, Silicon Valley employees are calling on their bosses to use their influence to help stop his immigration policies. The first Trump administration, and the tech industry that stood up to it, are both looking quainter by the day. Here's one example: In 2017, when President Trump issued a series of executive orders instituting a travel ban on foreigners from certain countries (predominantly Muslim-majority ones), people from across the United States vigorously protested the policy. They included some of tech's most elite: Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who joined a demonstration at the San Francisco airport; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who wrote a company-wide email outlining "legal options" that Amazon was considering to fight the ban; and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took to Instagram to describe his own family's immigrant roots. On Saturday, hours after federal agents shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, several prominent tech executives attended a private White House screening of, a documentary being released by (of course) Amazon MGM Studios. The timing was not lost on the group of Silicon Valley workers who recently launched ICEout.tech The letter, posted following Renee Nicole Good's killing earlier this month, has now been signed by more than 1,000 tech employees. Those workers, who come from across the spectrum of Big Tech companies and startups, are asking that executives use their clout to demand Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave American cities, that they cancel company contracts with the agency, and that they speak publicly about ICE's violent and deadly tactics. Worker-led demands like those were commonplace during Trump 1.0, when tech employees at the world's biggest companies often spoke out--internally and externally--about the cruelty of the US administration and the industry's role in facilitating or tempering its most craven policies. Meanwhile, the executives leading those companies have been busy kissing the ring-- over dinner at the White House or with outlandishly expensive documentaries nobody's watching--at every opportunity. Is the dam finally breaking? This week, Silicon Valley leaders including Anthropic heads Dario and Daniela Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Apple CEO Tim Cook finally spoke out about ICE's outrageous overreach.

Why Google's custom AI chips are shaking up the tech industry Ironwood is Google's latest tensor processing unit Nvidia's position as the dominant supplier of AI chips may be under threat from a specialised chip pioneered by Google, with reports suggesting companies like Meta and Anthropic are looking to spend billions on Google's tensor processing units. The success of the artificial intelligence industry has been in large part based on graphical processing units (GPUs), a kind of computer chip that can perform many parallel calculations at the same time, rather than one after the other like the computer processing units (CPUs) that power most computers. 'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day GPUs were originally developed to assist with computer graphics, as the name suggests, and gaming. "If I have a lot of pixels in a space and I need to do a rotation of this to calculate a new camera view, this is an operation that can be done in parallel, for many different pixels," says Francesco Conti at the University of Bologna in Italy. This ability to do calculations in parallel happened to be useful for training and running AI models, which often use calculations involving vast grids of numbers performed at the same time, called matrix multiplication.

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic announced a $50bn investment in computing infrastructure on Wednesday that will include new datacenters in Texas and New York . "We're getting closer to AI that can accelerate scientific discovery and help solve complex problems in ways that weren't possible before," Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, said in a press release. Building the massive information warehouses takes an average of two years in the US and requires copious amounts of energy to fuel the facilities. The company, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, popular with businesses adopting AI, said in a statement that the "scale of this investment is necessary to meet the growing demand for Claude from hundreds of thousands of businesses while keeping our research at the frontier". Anthropic said its projects will create about 800 permanent jobs and 2,400 construction jobs.

Several new sites such as this are in the pipeline in the UK. Several new sites such as this are in the pipeline in the UK. 'A lot of this is speculative': faith and fear mix amid $3tn global datacentre boom The global investment spree in artificial intelligence is producing some remarkable numbers and a projected $3tn (£2.3tn) spend on datacentres is one of them. These vast warehouses are the central nervous system of AI tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Veo 3, underpinning the training and operation of a technology into which investors have poured vast sums of money. Despite concerns that the AI boom could be a bubble waiting to burst, there are few signs of it at the moment.

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He's one of the loudest voices of the AI haters--even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention. In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like "Sam Altman is full of shit and "Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul." Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this. Flacks want to touch base, hop on the phone, clear up a few things about the allegation that their CEO is a "chunderfuck." And that really is one of the things with guys like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei from Anthropic," Zitron was saying over burgers on a fine Manhattan afternoon in September. "I work with founders all the time. I'm a founder myself, I guess--I don't like the title. But when you are a person that has to make more money than you lose, otherwise you lose your business, and you see these chunderfucks burning 5, 10 billion dollars in a year--and everyone's celebrating them? We were talking about whether any of Zitron's ranting about the AI industry had cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. There was the one client who felt Zitron was being a little mean toward Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and the biggest chunderfuck of all, as far as Zitron is concerned. Founding a company is hard, the client said. "I said, 'I appreciate the comment, but, like, this isn't about you,'" Zitron told me. "His company is burning billions of dollars.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. A teenager demonstrates Character.AI, an artificial intelligence chatbot platform that allows users to chat with popular characters. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Gov. Gavin Newsom has until mid-October to decide whether to sign AI chatbot safety bills into law but faces opposition from tech companies.

The Signal Foundation president recalls where she was when she heard Trump cabinet officials had added a journalist to a highly sensitive group chat. In March of this year, Meredith Whittaker was at her kitchen table in Paris when Signal, the encrypted messaging service she runs, suddenly became an international headline . A colleague sent their group chat the story ricocheting across the globe: "The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans." Of course, you know the rest: In the piece, The Atlantic's editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, detailed how he'd been added to a Signal chat about an upcoming military operation in Yemen. Over the following days and weeks, the incident would become known as " SignalGate "--and created a legitimate risk that the fallout would cause people to question Signal's security, instead of pointing their fingers at the profoundly dubious op-sec of senior-level Trump officials. In fact, Signal's user numbers grew by leaps and bounds, both in the US and around the world. It's growth that, Whittaker thinks, is coming at a time when "people are feeling in a much deeper, much more personal way why privacy might be important." On this week's episode of, I talked to Whittaker, who also cofounded the AI Now Institute, about the aftermath of SignalGate, the trajectory of artificial intelligence, and the tech industry's current relationship with politics. Nice to see you, Katie. Nice to see you, too. Brace yourself, we always start these conversations with a little warmup, so I'm going to ask you some very fast questions. I knew you were gonna say that. What's the weirdest AI application you've ever seen? A chatbot that pretends to be your friend.