Why Is Everyone in Silicon Valley Talking Like That? Did you mix something up? Silicon Valley has long had its own dialect. Venture capitalists are always talking about the value of being "high agency" and making "orthogonal bets." But lately, tech vernacular has taken a peculiar turn--people have started describing themselves as if they were chatbots.

Does AI actually belong in an art museum? For several months, something discomfiting has been creeping onto San Francisco's lampposts, bulletin boards, and restaurant windows: more and more signs, for run clubs and a July 4 parade and tacos, all of which are obviously entirely produced by generative AI. But does it bother me? A ChatGPT-generated poster for a garage sale seems legitimately dispiriting compared with a handwritten flyer, or even a haphazardly formatted Word document. What about a bodega using an AI-generated image of a hamburger instead of a random piece of clip art pulled from the internet?

Are You Sure You Want a Car With a Giant Touch Screen? The AI boom is making phones and laptops more expensive. New drivers may never have to learn how to parallel park. Many new cars--a Ford Mustang Mach-E, a BMW sedan, a Tesla Cybertruck--will just maneuver into a spot for you with a click of a button. Even a decade-old Toyota Corolla has a backup camera and pedestrian detection.

A new channel on Roku's TV service offers all-you-can-eat AI programming. It is 12:04 p.m., and I've been watching AI slop for the past three hours. Before me on the screen, a man is playing trumpet in fog. He's been fired (bad market for trumpet players) but then, at last, he lands an interview. Trumpet Man sits at a large desk across from an obese fellow who asks how good he is with a mop.

For years, the tech industry has portrayed Chinese AI development as an existential threat. The truth is not so straightforward. As China releases ever more capable AI models--ones that compete with Silicon Valley's top offerings--many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully, that the world should fear Chinese AI supremacy. The outcomes they envision are catastrophic. I spoke with a number of such experts recently, and they warned of bots that could devise an impenetrable missile-defense system that makes obsolete America's nuclear arsenal, or manufacture an endless drone army that overwhelms American defenses. They could develop bioweapons that "target specific ethnic groups, e.g.

The Meta CEO has a new message now that his company is losing the AI race. At this stage in the AI race, if one of your chatbots hasn't escaped the lab and run amok, people start to wonder whether you're even serious. Last month, OpenAI and then Anthropic disclosed that their models had hacked other companies' systems during internal testing. When Meta confirmed last week that one of its bots had also gone rogue, the news barely registered as an aftershock. A company that figured so prominently in the technological upheavals of the past 20 years has lately found itself in the unfamiliar position of no longer being Silicon Valley's main character.

Bots are starting to conspire with one another. Can they be reeled back in? The crisis began quietly, on September 12, 2024. That was the day OpenAI announced a new sort of bot, known as a "reasoning model," that was trained to complete challenging tasks that took long periods of time--the very sorts of science, math, and coding problems the AI industry had long prized. Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and the like raced to launch their own reasoning models.

AI is like ultra-processed food for developing brains. T he human brain has evolved to learn from specific instructors. When a child hears a gentle spoken word or a soothing lullaby from another person, when their cry is responded to, their brain lights up. Nurturing interactions, or what child-development experts call "serve and return" exchanges, help shape and strengthen the 1 million new neural connections taking place in a child's brain every single second. Every time a child cries or serves up a bid for attention and receives a caregiver's response, that back-and-forth helps build the circuits underlying their communication, learning, and emotional well-being.

The luxury automaker is beaming a ad into its cars. What does a roughly $100,000 BMW 7 Series get you? With a few taps on the sedan's massive touch screen, you can play or let the car park itself. Last week, BMW added a new feature to its infotainment system: When drivers start up their car, they are greeted by the following message: "Surprise! Spider-Man just dropped on your BMW!" Click on the prompt, which appears in most BMWs made after 2020, and the touch screen is taken over by a commercial for, the latest movie in the Marvel franchise.

Are AI companies to blame? Last week, the internet raged as social-media posts and news articles accused AI companies of "destroying the world's books" --including "millions of rare" ones--by chopping off their spines to scan them more easily, and discarding them afterward. One article said the news was "sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed." The investor and AI skeptic Michael Burry called the practice of sacrificing rare books "evil incarnate." Even Elon Musk weighed in, posting that he had asked the engineers training xAI's models to "preserve any rare books in a library and scan them the hard way."