Tech bros hate this college student. California should listen to what she’s saying about artificial intelligence
Columnist https://www.latimes.com/people/anita-chabria
... “Whatever long-term future AI creates, whether that’s positive or negative, it’s [my generation] that’s going to experience that,” she told me. “We’re going to inherit the impacts of the technology we’re building today.”
This week, California will make a big decision about that future, as legislators vote on Senate Bill 53. ...
The bill is a basic transparency measure and applies only to the big-gun developers of “frontier” AI models — these are the underlying, generic AI creatures that may later be honed into a specific purpose, like controlling our nuclear weapons, curing cancer or writing term papers for cheating students.
But right now, companies are just seeing how smart and powerful they can make them, leaving any concerns about what they will actually do for the future — and for people like Revanur, whose lives will be shaped by them.
If passed, the law would require these developers to have safety and security protocols and make them public. ...
Big Tech has lobbied full force against the bill (and has been successful in watering it down some). Enter Revanur and the AI safety organization she started when she was 15: Encode. ...
Revanur and her group have gone from being dismissed with a “who are you, you’re nothing” attitude from lawmakers to having “an equal seat at the table” with the clouty tech bros and their billions, Tratten said. And they’ve done it through sheer persistence (though they are not the only advocacy group working on the bill). ...
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/politics/newsletter/2025-09-08/chabria-monday-politics-newsletter-ai-artificial-intelligence-sb-53
How the AI Boom Is Leaving Consultants Behind
... Clients quickly encountered a mismatch between the pitch and what consultants could actually deliver. They found that consultants, who often had no more expertise on AI than they did internally, struggled to deploy use cases that created real business value. ...
Consultants vs. the ‘kid in college’
Advisory heavyweights—including Big Four accounting firms Deloitte, PwC, KPMG and Ernst & Young and pure consulting firms McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group—for years have helped enterprises get up to speed on technologies like the cloud and perform vital but unsexy tech implementations, like enterprise resource planning systems.
That expertise hasn’t translated into a playbook for deploying something as cutting edge as generative AI in the enterprise at scale, tech leaders said. ...
“If I were to go hire a consultant to help me figure out how to use Gemini CLI or Claude Code, you’re going to find a partner at one of the Big Four has no more or less experience than a kid in college who tried to use it,” he said, referring to generative AI tools from Google and Anthropic. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-ai-boom-is-leaving-consultants-behind-c9088fda
China Is Suddenly Deploying AI Everywhere
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Last week, the Chinese State Council unveiled its ten-year plan to fully integrate AI into every aspect of the country's economy by 2035. Called "AI+," the ambitious plan sees AI becoming a "key growth engine for the country's economic development," a transformation mirroring that of the internet age.
...While the US has all but bet the farm on the success of AI, Chinese tech firms like DeepSeek have changed the game by using significantly less resources. ...
While US tech companies do eke out some practical AI software, they do so under the eye of a handful of the most powerful tech monopolies on the face of the Earth. ...
In China, meanwhile, that kind of state backing is reserved for companies working on pragmatic uses for AI. ...
"They [China] see highly impactful AI applications not as something to theorize about in the future but as something to take advantage of here and now," Julian Gewirtz, a former security official with the Biden administration told the WSJ.
Nowhere is this more apparent than Xiong’an, China's "city of the future." Located in the outer-Beijing province of Hebei, Xiong’an is a new city planned from the ground up around the integration of 5G, AI, autonomous driving, and renewable energy. ...
See the full story here: https://futurism.com/china-ai-deepseek-everywhere
Werner Herzog On 6K Restoration Of His Classic ‘Cave Of Forgotten Dreams’: “It Looks Incredibly Crisp And… Beautiful”
Very, very few people have been allowed into the Chauvet cave in Southeastern France since it was discovered in 1994 and found to contain ancient cave paintings dating back more than 30,000 years. Fortunately, one of those admitted was filmmaker Werner Herzog, who was granted permission to bring small cameras into the subterranean limestone system to make a documentary. From that footage, shot in 3D, he made his astonishing Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
Fifteen years after the release of that film, it is getting a 6K restoration that brings it to viewers for the first time in full resolution.
“It looks incredibly crisp and has a beautiful sense of depth,” Herzog tells Deadline. “It’s just almost like watching, not a new film, but the film with different eyes.” ...
Some of the animals are painted with eight legs. Torches held by ancient hands would have given the tableau the illusion of movement. ...
Orson Welles’ Lost Movie Will Use AI to Reconstruct Missing 43 Minutes
Amazon-backed firm Showrunner, led by Edward Saatchi, is using the film as a test case for how Hollywood can overhaul production. The results won't be commercialized — the tech giant hasn't obtained rights from Warner Bros. or Concord. ...
Showrunner, which plans to reconstruct the destroyed 43 minutes of Orson Welles‘ The Magnificent Ambersons. ...
The effort won’t be commercialized because Showrunner hasn’t obtained the rights to the film from Warner Bros. Discovery or Concord. If they “see a marketplace for it and a path for it outside of an academic context, then of course they have ownership of it,” Saatchi says. “The goal isn’t to commercialize the 43 minutes, but to see them exist in the world after 80 years of people asking ‘might this have been the best film ever made in its original form?’” ...
The Magnificent Ambersons was filmed in 1941 at RKO’s Gower Street Studios, now Sunset Gower Studios, in Los Angeles. The original cut was 131 minutes long, but Welles had conceded the right to the final cut. And once RKO took over editing, it deleted almost a third of the negatives for the film without the director’s approval to free vault space. That footage was never found. ...
“There was, for example, a four-minute-long, unbroken moving camera shot whose loss is a tragedy,” Rose said in a statement. “The camera moves from one end of a ballroom and then back up the other end [while] you have about a dozen different characters walk in and out of frame, and crisscrossing subplots. It was really ahead of its time. Yet all but about the last 50 seconds of the shot was cut.” ...
See the full story here: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/orson-welles-lost-movie-ai-1236361881/
Disney’s First VP Role to Lead AI Collaboration With Humans
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Now, Disney has posted a job advertisement for a Vice President of Collaboration and AI role.
This role will be based in Burbank, California and focuses on making different departments work together on AI projects rather than hiring more technical specialists. ...
The successful candidate must “ensure alignment with Disney’s global vision and corporate strategies,” Disney says, particularly across the company’s entertainment empire, which spans film studios, theme parks, streaming services and merchandise operations.
These requirements point to coordination problems that many companies face but rarely address directly. ...
See the full story here: https://aimagazine.com/news/disneys-first-vp-role-to-lead-ai-collaboration-with-humans
Apple’s Vision Pro Gaining Traction in Some Niches of Business
Too pricey for most consumers, the $3,500 mixed-reality headset may have found a calling in narrow and deep business applications such as helping train pilots or designing kitchens.
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-vision-pro-gaining-traction-in-some-niches-of-business-16d3c74e
SwitchBot’s New AI Art Frame Lets You Give Prompts to Generate Art in Seconds
... The AI Art Frame's concept and design are easy to grasp and made me wonder why the idea wasn't already more widespread. It uses a colored E-Ink (when was the last time you heard that?) surface that mimics a hanging picture and is made to work with IKEA frames, among other options.
Connect the frame to the SwitchBot app and it allows you to enter text prompts or inspirational ideas for the Art Frame to work with. The Frame then generates its own unique image using AI. If you want to switch to a real photo, you can upload one of your pics for the frame to work with directly, too. Thanks to the low-power E-Ink, the Frame's battery can last for up to two years and you can enter new prompts whenever you want. ...
See the full story here: https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/switchbots-new-ai-art-frame-lets-you-give-prompts-to-generate-art-in-seconds/
Gracenote elevates AI-powered entertainment experiences
... The Gracenote Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server connects LLMs to Gracenote's continually updated knowledge base and validates, corrects and enriches responses to entertainment queries in real-time. This ensures platforms can instantly return the most accurate and relevant information to users based on their content search inputs and discovery preferences. ...
Dynamically connecting to any LLM, the product verifies and grounds responses in editorially-vetted Gracenote entertainment data. This enables advanced conversational search, highly personalized recommendations and compelling discovery journeys leveraging the world's most comprehensive collection of human-verified TV, movie and sports data. ...
- Show me the episodes of Brooklyn Nine-Nine in which Jake references Die Hard.
- The Academy Awards are on this week. List the 20 highest-grossing Oscar-winning films from the last 10 years.
- Where can I watch the Dodgers game tonight?
...
See the full PR here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gracenote-elevates-ai-powered-entertainment-experiences-302544499.html
AI-Powered Drone Swarms Have Now Entered the Battlefield
On a recent evening, a trio of Ukrainian drones flew under the cover of darkness to a Russian position and decided among themselves exactly when to strike.
The assault was an example of how Ukraine is using artificial intelligence to allow groups of drones to coordinate with each other to attack Russian positions, an innovative technology that heralds the future of battle. ...
Swarming marries two rising forces in modern warfare: AI and drones. ...
The drones deployed in the recent Ukrainian attack used technology developed by local company Swarmer. Its software allows groups of drones to decide which one strikes first and adapt if, for instance, one runs out of battery, said Chief Executive Serhii Kupriienko. ...
“You set the target and the drones do the rest,” Kupriienko said. “They work together, they adapt.” ...
Swarmer said it is preparing to test a swarm of more than 100 drones. ...
But the rise of AI in war is raising ethical concerns about the potential for machines to make life-or-death decisions without human oversight. The United Nations has, for example, called for regulation of lethal autonomous weapons. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/world/ai-powered-drone-swarms-have-now-entered-the-battlefield-2cab0f05
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