philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

The AI Boom Is Built on Data That Companies Are Too Afraid to Use | Opinion

... The organizations that truly pull ahead will be the ones that fundamentally rethink how they create value using assets their competitors cannot easily replicate. ...

Organizations today hold enormous volumes of customer records, financial transactions, healthcare information, intellectual property, operational knowledge and decades of institutional expertise. Those datasets could dramatically improve AI systems and keep organizations competitive with startups that carry a lower regulatory burden. But they also carry legal, regulatory and reputational risks if handled carelessly. ...

The mistake is assuming the only options are to expose sensitive data or avoid using it altogether. Until recently, this may have been true. But leaders do not need to give up hope. As technologies that rely on this data advance, so too do the methods for protecting it. ...

The next generation of AI will not be defined by who licenses the largest model or deploys the most agents. It will be defined by who can safely apply proprietary knowledge that competitors cannot replicate. ...

The organizations that ultimately lead the AI economy will not be the ones making the loudest announcements or chasing every new model that reaches the market. .... They will recognize that protecting sensitive information and extracting value from it are no longer competing priorities. ...

See the full story here: https://www.newsweek.com/the-ai-boom-is-built-on-data-that-companies-are-too-afraid-to-use-opinion-12230883

AI Predictions for 2026 – My view on AI this year

By Usama Fayyad, senior vice provost for AI and data strategy and senior advisor to the president at Northeastern University

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3. The build-up of unsustainable “Technical Debt” created by LLM prompts, vibe coding, and RAG pipelines. 2026 will witness an inflection: the mess that has been building up as AI custom solutions are developed will be recognized as serious liabilities in organizations. When programming languages first emerged, organizations rushed to leverage computers and, in the process, created substantial technical debt and “legacy” systems that are expensive to deal with. A similar rush is now happening with natural language “prompt engineering”, vibe coding, and the uncontrolled evolution of RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipelines to deal with the inability to retrain LLMs on new data. The messy developments lead to technical debt accumulating so much faster -- without having a new way of software and systems engineering to help us approach it systematically. ...

10. AI Safety will grow as a major priority and an active field of R&D, learning, and practice - from its infancy to necessity (like vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic). ...

See the full story here: https://usamafayyad.substack.com/p/ai-predictions-for-2026-my-view-on

Mark Zuckerberg Blasts Centralization of A.I. Power

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In an interview on Tuesday with The New York Times, the 42-year-old chief executive of Meta did not call out Anthropic and OpenAI by name. But he said that if leading research labs wanted to develop A.I. technology in a tightly controlled manner — as Anthropic and OpenAI have done — it would be akin to “abandoning our values” in American tech development and stifle innovation. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/technology/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai.html

Elon Musk’s xAI sues to stop Minnesota law banning nudification technology

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The bill prohibiting access to what's known as "nudification" technology was signed into law by Gov. Tim Walz earlier this year and is set to take effect in August. The law, known as HF 1606, also creates a pathway for victims and the state attorney general's office to go after companies that are behind this kind of AI.    

The lawsuit filed Monday in federal court on behalf of xAI against Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison argues that the statute "imposes an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression."  ...

In response to the lawsuit, Walz tweeted, "See you in court, creep." ...

See the full story here: https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/elon-musk-xai-sues-minnesota-law-banning-ai-nudification/

Simulating Worlds (Fei-Fei Li)

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On July 21, SceniX, a robotics and simulation company, joined World Labs. SceniX has been building systems that turn real robots, environments, and interactions into simulations for policy training and evaluation, developing a real-to-sim-to-real (R2S2R) engine that turns one physical task into many controllable, reusable worlds, helping robotics teams train policy models and test changes faster, uncover failures earlier, and reduce costly experimentation on hardware.

The work by the SceniX team deepens World Labs’ technology development in spatial intelligence, and broadens our use cases from virtual to physical environments. As we continue to make progress, our generative world models will not only create realistic 3D scenes but also become increasingly aligned with the reality and variation that robots must interact with, learn from, and be evaluated in. And this is just the beginning.

Today, we share some early results from the R2S2R engine. Using our proprietary technology, our model generates simulations aligned with reality that allow robots to do what has long been considered out of reach: learn complex manipulation tasks with zero real-world training data; predict and evaluate through simulation which robotic policies will succeed or fail in the real world, without extensive and expensive physical trial and error; and then operate reliably for hours on physical robots in real-world settings.

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In our functional taxonomy of world models, spanning renderers, simulators, and planners, we argued that the simulator is the linchpin because it turns a world into a place where agents can act, learn, and be evaluated.  ...

See the full story here: https://substack.com/redirect/bc14fa8f-1dc2-4e3a-b8f2-1ea574c892cd?j=eyJ1IjoiMXZvc2xuIn0.zwOGgeyE8FO4iWufzcD2KbyvQRXYnOuPi8m6mXtrgrk

Jensen Huang just used his first ever X post to warn the AI industry not to make the mistake that software narrowly avoided in the 1980s

Jensen Huang made his first-ever X post on Friday, sharing an open letter signed by 25 companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and Palantir, warning Washington not to repeat the mistake of over-restricting technology the way some feared for open-source software in the 1980s.

The letter argued instead that open-weight AI models should be preserved as a foundation for American leadership, suggesting that Huang and his ilk genuinely fear that they won’t be.

“Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty,” Huang wrote. “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.”

He drew a direct parallel between today’s fight over open-weight AI and the 1980s open-source software movement, arguing that just as open-source code became foundational to the modern internet despite early skepticism, open AI models must be allowed to flourish rather than face “premature restrictions.” ...

See the full story here: https://fortune.com/2026/07/24/jensen-huang-open-source-letter-nvidia-kimi/

‘Decoupling of income from labour’: Are we on the cusp of an AI-fuelled ‘age of abundance’?

... The only debate now is about the scale and speed of the economic shock on the horizon, who’s going to lose their jobs — and whether you think any of this is a good thing, not that you have a say one way or another.

“The future is going to be very, very different from the past and there is no analogy or metaphor that illustrates the magnitude of change we’re going to experience here,” Elon Musk said this week.

Speaking to The Economist in his first sit-down interview since SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO, the world’s first trillionaire offered the maximalist techno-optimist view of AI.

He believes that within just a few years, artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence, there could be as many as one billion humanoid robots, and an AI-fuelled “age of abundance” will make cash meaningless. ...

“We’re moving from machines that answer questions to machines that participate in society,” he said.

“That’s a much bigger transition than generative AI.”

See the full story here: https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/decoupling-of-income-from-labour-are-we-on-the-cusp-of-an-aifuelled-age-of-abundance/news-story/7d680a5e720187d010c0dab223d63d7d

Head of US AI safety agency resigns

U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation Director Chris Fall has resigned just ​three months after being appointed to lead the federal ‌AI testing institute at the Department of Commerce, a department spokesperson told Reuters, marking the latest shakeup in the Trump administration's plans on AI. ...

The institute is responsible for working with leading AI labs such as Anthropic, Google's ​DeepMind and OpenAI ​to test their ⁠unreleased models for vulnerabilities. The group is staffed by scientists and engineers, who are focused on calculating ​the "demonstrable risks" posed by advanced AI models, according to ​the ⁠institute's website. They want to limit opportunities for U.S. adversaries to use AI to develop chemical or biological weapons, or corrupt the data used ⁠to ​train American AI models. ...

See the full story: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/head-us-ai-safety-agency-resigns-2026-07-20/

Travis is Back

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The lesson of Uber was, if people really want the product, then their everyday use of the product is undeniable legitimacy for your case to operate. And every battle, ultimately, is about your legitimacy to exist. ...

The backdrop to company-building today, unfortunately, is that a lot of people out there think AI shouldn’t exist, or shouldn’t be built by private companies, or other stances like that that are plain wrong. As a result, fast-growing companies that do things in the physical world will have to play on Hard Mode, and secure their social license to operate. This means, becoming essential to people, quickly. Uber won its battles, city after city, because they became essential to people so quickly that their social license with everyday citizens overcame the political and regulatory pressures to stop it. 

This lesson is going to be applied over and over again as AI and Robotics get deployed into the physical world. The future belongs to those products that become legitimate by bringing some hustle to industries that have waited for technology to happen to them.

This is the art and science of building “self-creating realities”. The ability to call your shots here, and execute on them, is like using the Force. ...

See the full story here: https://www.a16z.news/p/travis-is-back

My posted comment: You're celebration of “self-creating realities” is the Silicon Valley reality distortion field for what is actually creating the new Pharoah/slave society. How many Uber drivers were able to advance thru the barrier of the algorithm and advance their lives within the company? If it is 1% I'd be shocked. Uber drivers started off benefiting from the gig economy, but I haven't heard happy comments from Uber drivers in years. I don't see a whole lot of "thriving" except for Uber management. Similarly with his ghost kitchens and now this. All the "thriving" looks like a repeat of business models that simply consolidate wealth rather than improve people's lives.

Have You Even Heard of RASCOM? A Command for America’s Robot Army

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Tucked into the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027, a provision called section 917 would allow for the creation of a Robotic and Autonomous Systems Command (RASCOM). ...

In a press release, SASC chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) hailed the prospective combatant command as a means to help the military “embrace 21st century warfare.”

RASCOM “would standardize the way the entire armed services use unmanned systems in combat,” Wicker wrote, The armed service branches would be able to set up offices within RASCOM, “ensuring that [they all] adopt the latest systems.” ...

Beyond concerns over bureaucratic bloat and mission creep, experts observe that RASCOM’s proposed organizational structure could create other operational problems.

For example, most existing combatant commands are organized around geographic missions, or by function. In contrast, RASCOM would be structured around a class of tools. ...

See the full story here: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/what-is-rascom-robot-command