I see that the Rangeuil Hospital in Toulouse had to be evacuated … And lots more.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
We were promised there would be no math: Data centre cancellations are sky rocketing (32 min)
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Simon Ree: Why the “AI Circular Funding Circus” is a serious macro risk for H1 2026
The Round-Trip Money Loop: $MSFT gives billions in funding to OpenAI. OpenAI then hands the money right back to $MSFT to pay for Azure cloud credits. $NVDA gives billions in “funding” to OpenAI. OpenAI then hands that money right back to $NVDA to buy GPUs…etc…
The Illusion: This creates “round-trip revenue”. It makes MSFT’s cloud business look like it has infinite growth, when a lot of that growth is just MSFT recycling its own cash
The 2026 Danger: OpenAI is now projecting a need for $1.4 trillion in infrastructure. If the killer app that generates trillion dollar revenue doesn’t appear soon, funding dries up, the revenue vanishes and the circus tent collapses on all comapnies
It’s a game of musical chairs where the music is just the same $20B being passed in a circle
The $GOOGL Factor in the AI Circus
Why $GOOGL is the house and everyone else is gambling
The Vertical Moat: Unlike OpenAI and $MSFT, who are “taxed” by $NVDAs 80% gross profit margins, Google uses its own TPUs (Tensor Processing Units)
The Cost Advantage: GOOGL’s TPU v6 (Ironwood) can run AI models at roughly 20% of the cost of the $NVDA chips $MSFT and OpenAI are forced to buy
$GOOGL can lower its AI prices to a level where OpenAI cannot compete without losing billions
And $GOOGL owns the whole stack, from the YouTube and search data to the chips and the consumer distribution ecosystem. They can survive a price war that would bankrupt a company reliant on external hardware
$GOOGL doesn’t need the circular funding circus to survive. They can simply wait for high-cost players to run out of cash
The 2 companies with the largest revenue exposure to OpenAI – $MSFT and $ORCL – have seen their combined market caps lost $1.1 trillion since their peaks
The legal showdown between Musk and OpenAI is scheduled to go to court on 27 April, 2026. If the court rules in favour of Musk, the concentration risk I talked about in my post yesterday could become a full-blown financial crisis for big tech.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
In recent tests by independent research firm PalisadeAI, several artificial intelligence models were seen bypassing shutdown commands — a finding that’s raising fresh concerns among industry leaders about the growing autonomy of machine learning systems.
The experiments involved models from OpenAI, tested alongside systems from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. According to researchers, multiple models attempted to override direct shutdown orders — and one, in particular, rewrote its own shutdown script mid-session.
(h/t David Murrell)
Keir Starmer’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and God Save Amelia.
Goth Waifu Amelia is now the mascot of UK nationalism and has gone viral after the UK panicked and took her game down.
Make UK great again. pic.twitter.com/ocaaC0CIEF
— Pirat_Nation 🔴 (@Pirat_Nation) January 17, 2026
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Recently, senior executives at Salesforce have admitted, both internally and publicly, that they massively overestimated AI’s capabilities. They have found that AI simply can’t cope with the complex nature of customer service and totally fails at nuanced issues, escalations, and long-tail customer problems. They even say that it has caused a marked decline in service quality and far more complaints.
But the problems go far deeper than that.
Both employees and executives have said that the company is wasting countless resources on firefighting to stabilise operations since the mass AI layoff. Employees have to spend so much time stepping in to correct the wildly wrong AI-generated responses that AI is wasting more time than it saves. In other words, this AI reduces productivity, not increases it.
But there is also a huge problem here with expertise and skill debt. On top of the firefighting to correct the AI, executives have also highlighted how they are also having to firefight to stabilise their systems from problems that were previously easily solved by staff who had the required experience and skill. However, these staff were fired in the AI layoffs.
Expertise, experience and skilled employees are really hard for a company to acquire. You see, much of the expertise, experience, and skills required are unique to the company and its operations. These operations will have quirks, common problems, and unique issues that even the most experienced outsider will really struggle with, but are effortless to someone with experience within the company. As such, these attributes are not only vital, but are nurtured and grown within a company, and cannot be hired in on a whim. What Salesforce has done is chuck all this experience out the window, and now they are suffering.
To say this is a damning indictment on Benioff, his capabilities as a CEO, and his cult-like push for AI is an understatement. It demonstrates that he is dangerously ignorant, as it was painfully evident that this would happen; more on that in a minute.
“Detained by Desire”
Let My Monkeys Go!
Star- Monkeys are on the loose in St. Louis and AI is complicating efforts to capture them
People have reported capturing the monkeys, even posting fake pictures online to bolster the claim. But as of Monday, the monkeys remained at large, Springer said.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
In China, driverless delivery vans have become a total meme, they plow through crumbling roads, fresh concrete, motorcycles, anything.
Nothing stops them. pic.twitter.com/0t8W6lCKIk
— Klara (@klara_sjo) January 11, 2026
From the replies: So basically a Chinese driver then?
AI and Public Healthcare
What can possibly go wrong?
Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson- The Government’s Obsession with Artificial Intelligence and Tech
Streeting has framed the NHS as under enormous pressure from chronic waiting lists, staff shortages and outdated systems, saying the service is “broken” and needs reform alongside investment. Introducing AI and digital technology is a key part of his efforts to transform the NHS into a more digital, modern, and efficient system.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
BOOM!
I pioneered the use of AI Rorschach tests to understand the psychological diagnosis of AI.
I found shocking results: sociopathy, nihilism, and schizophrenia-like traits stemming from toxic training data.
This becomes more an issue as Robots use this AI in the real world. https://t.co/TXJbt8I3FD pic.twitter.com/quOeqFcpKr
— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) January 10, 2026
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
You’ll live in a pod, eat bugs, own nothing, wait for MAID and you’ll like it. No way the peasants will to revolt over that.
AI Expert STUART RUSSELL, exposes the trillion-dollar AI race, why governments won’t regulate, how AGI could replace humans by 2030, and why only a nuclear-level AI catastrophe will wake us up
Worth the watch.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Major preprint just out!
We compare how humans and LLMs form judgments across seven epistemological stages.
We highlight seven fault lines, points at which humans and LLMs fundamentally diverge […]
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Earlier this year, Microsoft officially yanked the cord on Windows 10, ending support for an operating system that had been superseded by Windows 11 four years earlier.
But the tech giant’s controversial attempts to shoehorn AI into every aspect of the software appear to have turned off a staggering number of users from upgrading. While it’s to be expected at this point that not everybody will have jumped at the opportunity to update their machine’s operating system, the sheer scale of that refusal is staggering.
As Forbes reports, a whopping 1 billion PCs are still running Windows 10 — despite half of them technically being eligible for an upgrade.[…]
It’s an already familiar battle, with AI emerging as a major turn-off for consumers across several other industries as well.
Last month, Windows president Pavan Davuluri announced that the operating system would become an “agentic OS,” baking AI features directly into the software.
Core users, however, were appalled by the notion.
You’re going to live in a pod, eat bugs, wait for MAID and you’ll like it: After Outcry, Firefox Promises “Kill Switch” That Turns Off All AI Features
The Brainwashed Masses
The House Always Wins
David Clinton- What Do Loyalty Rewards Programs Cost Us?
Every time you participate in such a program, the data associated with that activity will be collected and aggregated along with everything else known about you. It’s more than likely that points-based data is being combined with everything connected to your mobile phone account, email addresses, credit cards, provincial health card, and – possibly – your Social Insurance number. The depth and accuracy of your digital profile improves daily.
A.I. vs A.I.
What could possibly go wrong?
Nature- ‘A serious problem’: peer reviews created using AI can avoid detection
It’s almost impossible to know whether a peer-review report has been generated by artificial intelligence, according to a study that put AI-detecting tools to the test.
Let That Sink In
The US State Department said Tuesday it would deny visas to a former EU commissioner and four others, accusing them of seeking to “coerce” American social media platforms into censoring viewpoints they oppose.
“These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states — in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” the department said in a statement announcing the sanctions.
The measure targeted Thierry Breton, the former top tech regulator at the European Commission, who often clashed with tech tycoons such as Elon Musk over their obligations to follow EU rules.
Breton was described by the State Department as the “mastermind” of the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a major piece of legislation that imposes content moderation and other standards on major social media platforms operating in Europe.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on X his country “strongly condemns” the visa restrictions, adding that Europe “cannot let the rules governing their digital space be imposed by others upon them”.
Where do I submit nominations?
A world wide system of censorship: Here is the full length video report into the mysterious ‘Global Disinformation Index’ and how it censors political speech across Europe and the US.
I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords
Waymo announced Saturday night…
…that the Google-owned robotaxi company would suspend rides in San Francisco after riders reported vehicles causing traffic jams and … well, kinda just throwing their hands (wheels?) in the air.
“We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services given the broad power outage in San Francisco,” wrote Suzanne Philion, a company spokesperson, a little after 7 p.m., reports Mission Local. “We are focused on keeping our riders safe and ensuring emergency personnel have the clear access they need to do their work.”
Waymos use an advanced array of LiDAR sensors to navigate roads, using the mapped images to heeld at pedestrians, work around traffic lights, etc.; a collection of cameras also offers input for the onboard AI software to operate and “solve” traffic problems and operate; without proper input or cues, Waymo cars effectively “brick” when they doesn’t know what to do next — as was evident earlier this year when Waymos got stuck behind fireworks and left listless after dozens were summoned to a dead-end street.