Artificial intelligence is more a part of our lives than ever before. While some might call it hype and compare it to NFTs or 3D TVs, generative AI is causing a sea change in nearly every part of the technology industry. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the best-known AI chatbot around, but with Google pushing Gemini, Microsoft building Copilot, and Apple adding its Intelligence to Siri, AI is probably going to be in the spotlight for a very long time. At The Verge, we’re exploring what might be possible with AI — and a lot of the bad stuff AI does, too.
One of the most interesting parts of the OpenAI chief’s appearance on David Senra’s podcast is him trying to explain why he avoids the company’s digital assistant Codex for work as if it’s a kind of personal failing. “It makes no sense,” he said. Altman admitted “I don’t really know” when asked what it would take for him to adopt Codex more deeply.
The open web is rife with AI-generated text, according to new data from Pew Research. Older English-language webpages show fewer signs of AI authorship, but over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released on November 22nd, 2022, “were likely written or substantially edited by AI.”
The Wall Street Journal and New York Times are both reporting on politicians like Greg Abbott and Josh Shapiro suddenly bashing types of projects they once championed. The Washington Post has a chart showing how online posts about data centers from both Democrat and Republican politicians have shifted from being mostly positive in early 2025 to being mostly negative.
On Sunday, Abbott appeared on ABC’s This Week, saying that by moving too fast, the industry “…basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”
The Beats by Dre pair spoke to the New York Times briefly, with former Interscope head Iovine saying AI companies have terrible communication skills but that “I’m very pro-A.I. in music creation. I don’t see the downside at all. There will be some crappy music. There’s crappy music now.”
Dre called anyone against it similar to those who pushed back against drum machines or synthesizers, and said, “I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating.”
[New York Times]
Price hikes aren’t only for laptops, smart speakers, and game consoles, as Bloomberg reports that “some of Nvidia’s biggest customers” have been told that server prices are going up more than 15 percent. Those customers are the companies that build the AI data centers for Oracle, Microsoft, and others that have heavily contributed to the demand spike driving up component prices.
Nvidia has already raised GPU prices this year, and we may hear more about its changes when it reports Q2 earnings on Wednesday.
You may recall Apollo is majorly involved in AI infrastructure financing; it even is one of the “compute is an asset class” consortium. Sounds like the hackers stole a bunch of the usual things, like employees’ social security numbers. If they stole interesting things, like internal data on the AI deals Apollo has been making, that wasn’t disclosed in the breach notification. If you know anything about the hack, hit me up on Signal: lopatto.46.
That’s according to an email seen by The Hollywood Reporter. They’re seemingly visible versions of the voluntary “Transparency Tags” that Apple Music introduced in March. Apple doesn’t say how it will enforce the labels, but it did clarify what they’ll apply to:
“Content providers will be required to include AI Transparency Tags in any instance where AI was used to create a material portion of the content, including tracks that are AI platform generated.
There seems to be some egregious (but unconfirmed) AI slop in art book Spider-Man: Brand New Day - The Art of the Movie, judging by images shared by The Artbook Collector. That any editor allowed this to be included is embarrassing enough, but why even use AI concept art on a project that was rolling in money?
For better or worse, Amazon Alexa and Google Home’s smart voice assistants have been imbued with new generative AI powers.
The promise is you can use natural language with your smart speaker to adjust your thermostat, lock the doors, and find out what your pets have been up to. The reality is smart home voice assistants are going through an identity crisis. I invited Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel onto his own podcast to compare notes on life with Alexa Plus versus Gemini for Home.
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With the Apple Messages plugin, ChatGPT on Mac can “Search messages, catch up on conversations, draft and send replies,” OpenAI says. Here’s a video showing how it works.
Sam Altman is still CEO, but in day-to-day operations, his second-in-command is running the show.
The Verge’s Robert Hart on why new AI discoveries have left the math world ‘shell-shocked.’
The Generate Music, Speech, and Sound effects tools are generally available in Adobe Firefly following their beta launches last year. Adobe is also trying to attract more users for its Firefly AI Assistant, so now it has a “free experience with daily generations,” instead of limiting the feature to Firefly subscribers.
Humanoid robot makers are earning much of their revenue selling bots to government-backed training centers, which then sell training data back to the industry, the FT reports. It’s AI circularity all over again, stoking fresh humanoid bubble fears as Unitree soars in its stock market debut despite the US foreign robot ban.
[Financial Times]
The acquisition will combine Stripe’s payments platform with OpenRouter, which connects developers to a range of AI models while aggregating the costs of using each one. Stripe hasn’t disclosed the terms of the deal, but The New York Times reports that it’s purchasing the startup for $7.5 billion.
[The New York Times]
SpaceX approached the AI coding startup with an offer, though “the deal talks are not currently active,” according to a report from Bloomberg. The two companies are still reportedly discussing potential partnerships, which could involve Cognition using SpaceX’s computing capacity.
“This is not true,” Cognition co-founder and CEO Scott Wu says on X. “Huge respect for the SpaceX team but Cognition is not for sale and we haven’t been talking.”
Update: Added post from Cognition’s CEO.
AI data center projects are continuing to pop up across the US, with frequent opposition from locals concerned about their impact. Here are a few recent articles about the projects:
Liquid Death, a marketing company that occasionally sells water, enlisted Jason Kelce to sing a song about sending your pee to help cool data centers. (It’s an obvious stunt: don’t send your pee to strangers.) Ironically, everyone in the video probably needs to consult a doctor about dehydration.
If you happen to be in the Hamptons next weekend, why not roll up to Gwyneth Paltrow’s estate? Puck reports the head of Goop is hosting a “private, off-the-record al fresco dinner at her home in honor of Sam Altman.” Makes sense, since Paltrow has been steadily investing in AI for years.
Jensen Huang wants you to think ‘ah, compute as an asset class’ not ‘oh no more GPU-backed loans.’
A pair of announcements from Anthropic today include the word that access to Claude Cowork on mobile and web interfaces has rolled out to all paid accounts, so you can keep an eye on what it’s doing for you in more places.
Separately, the Google Workspace connectors for Claude now support sending emails in Gmail and managing files in Google Drive — more details here.
After starting to roll out to “select devices” in June, Google’s AI Chrome assistant is now available to all Android users in the US. It adds a Gemini icon to the top-right of your toolbar that opens the familiar chatbot window, allowing Gemini to summarize web pages, answer questions, generate images, and more.
Google won a $10 million bankruptcy auction to acquire a hefty collection of business data from the now defunct Spirit Airlines, which it plans to use for AI training. The data, which includes calendar info, documents, spreadsheets, emails, and employee chats will be “deidentified,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to Axios:
“We will not receive any personal information from this dataset. Any data we receive will be rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt.”
Gemini for Home promises its Nest cameras can recognize my cats by name — but it can’t tell Boone from Smokey.
Musk’s DOGE was supposed to rebuild the nation’s air traffic control system, but it ended up paving the way for Peter Thiel’s company to take over.
According to Bloomberg, a “nearly year-old investigation” is looking into the possibility that a16z “investment partners are improperly serving on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies.” Co-founder Ben Horowitz is on the board of Databricks, while partner Martin Casado was on the board of dbt labs before it was acquired by Fivetran, where he now holds a seat.
AI terminology has broken containment so thoroughly that there’s actually something called “Fries GPT” on the menu at Dave & Buster’s, I regret to inform us. GPT stands for garlic, parmesan, and truffle dust in this case, which is a lot going on, flavor-wise. Personally, I think D&B should have committed to the bit and let you wash them down with an ice-cold LLMonade, but alas.
The new AI Ads tracking data set for ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews pulls insights from anonymized web usage data provided by a panel of Similarweb users, instead of relying on synthetic prompts. Similarweb reports that 26 percent of ChatGPT responses and nearly 30 percent of ad-eligible Google AI Mode queries include a sponsored ad.
