philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Twenty-nine countries sign agreement to establish global AI cooperation body

• Representatives from ​the 29 countries, including Russia, Belarus, ⁠Serbia, Cuba, Brazil and Venezuela, ​as well as 10 African ​and 12 Asian countries, signed the agreement as founding members.
• The organization's headquarters will be ​located in Shanghai, Chinese state ​agency Xinhua said.
• The signing ceremony was held ‌in ⁠Shanghai on the eve of the annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference, where Chinese President Xi Jinping is ​expected to ​outline an ⁠ambitious vision for Beijing's role in global AI ​governance.
• China proposed the creation of ​a ⁠World AI Cooperation Organization at last year's conference but no countries ⁠had ​formally announced membership ​until now.

See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/twenty-nine-countries-sign-agreement-establish-global-ai-cooperation-body-2026-07-16/

The Fight Over Humanoid Robots Has Shut Down a Car Factory for the First Time

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That Atlas lacks a firm deployment date in South Korea means little to Byun Jun-hwan, one of the lead labor negotiators. 

“We have to prepare to ensure there are safeguards in place,” said Byun, the union’s secretary-general. ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/the-fight-over-humanoid-robots-has-shut-down-a-car-factory-for-the-first-time-d45ac3e1

Mira Murati’s AI Startup Releases First Model in Bid to Loosen AI Giants’ Grip

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Rather than focus on raw power like the frontier labs, the Thinking Machines model was designed to balance “cost against performance,” the company said. Of the nearly 1 trillion parameters that Inkling has, only 41 billion are “active,” meaning that only a fraction of the AI’s “brain” will be woken to deal with any query, making it cheaper and faster to use.

The model can be customized through Thinking Machines’ first product, Tinker, a cloud-based fine-tuning tool for AI developers and researchers released last year. The goal of Tinker is to allow a developer sitting at a laptop to customize and train large industrial AI models without having to worry about the supercomputing infrastructure underneath.

Last month, the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates and Thinking Machines released a report on Bridgewater’s use of Tinker to fine-tune the Chinese open-weights model Qwen3-235B on its own data, leading to a model that Bridgewater said outperformed GPT-5 and Claude Opus on financial document triage, while cutting computing costs by over 13 times.  ...

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mira-muratis-ai-startup-releases-first-model-in-bid-to-loosen-ai-giants-grip-e042bb2b

Inside Anthropic’s state-by-state plan to ratchet up AI rules

Artificial intelligence giant Anthropic is pursuing a strategy of one-upmanship that encourages states to impose increasingly tougher AI guardrails, rather than align around a single set of regulations.

The approach stands in stark contrast to the one favored by the company’s archrival, OpenAI, which has pushed state lawmakers toward common ground on regulating the breakthrough technology. ...

“We’re looking for legislation that meaningfully raises the bar on safety for the most capable AI systems.”

Fernandez’s comments came in response to questions from POLITICO about OpenAI’s ongoing campaign to shape states’ AI regulations. The ChatGPT maker’s top lobbyist, Chris Lehane, has coined the term “reverse federalism” to describe its attempts to bypass a paralyzed Congress and build a national AI framework by mirroring bills state-by-state. ...

The veiled jab at OpenAI is on-brand for Anthropic, whose executives left OpenAI in 2020 over concerns the company wasn’t prioritizing safety. Anthropic has consistently pushed for stronger AI safety rules at both the federal and state level — an effort that some critics, particularly those close to the Trump administration and in venture capital, frame as an attempt to hamstring regulators and lock out competitors. ...

See the full story here: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/15/inside-anthropics-state-by-state-plan-to-ratchet-up-ai-rules-00998415

The Three Main Doctrines on the Future of AI

Abstract

This paper develops a taxonomy of expert perspectives on the risks and likely consequences of artificial intelligence, with particular focus on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). Drawing from primary sources, we identify three predominant doctrines: (1) The dominance doctrine, which predicts that the first actor to create sufficiently advanced AI will attain overwhelming strategic superiority sufficient to cheaply neutralize its opponents' defenses; (2) The extinction doctrine, which anticipates that humanity will likely lose control of ASI, leading to the extinction of the human species or its permanent disempowerment; (3) The replacement doctrine, which forecasts that AI will automate a large share of tasks currently performed by humans, but will not be so transformative as to fundamentally reshape or bring an end to human civilization. We examine the assumptions and arguments underlying each doctrine, including expectations around the pace of AI progress and the feasibility of maintaining advanced AI under human control. While the boundaries between doctrines are sometimes porous and many experts hedge across them, this taxonomy clarifies the core axes of disagreement over the anticipated scale and nature of the consequences of AI development.

See the full article here: https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IASEAI/article/view/43012

Alex Karp Is Saying What Every Angry CEO Is Thinking About AI

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“Anthropic has launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, and of course Claude Code—each expanding into categories previously served by companies building on top of their models,” Sacks posted on social media. “The pattern is consistent: Watch where value is being created, then move in directly. Dominate the model layer, then use that position to capture the most lucrative verticals.”

The big question now being spoken out loud is where do traditional businesses fit in an AI world? Who captures the value created by AI: the companies deploying it or the labs developing the actual AI? ...

So, was Karp angry? 

“No,” he said. “This is the voice of American business that is being channeled through me.”

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/alex-karp-is-saying-what-every-angry-ceo-is-thinking-about-ai-7f5f7c0c

The AI race is shifting from bigger models to cheaper, smarter systems

• AI companies are moving beyond a simple race over who has the biggest or newest model.
• Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says the real product is becoming the system that chooses which model to use for each task.
• Benchmark’s Peter Fenton says open-weight models could soon handle most AI usage, putting pressure on the economics of the biggest model providers.

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“The model alone is no longer the product,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC. “It is the harness, the orchestration system that puts the model inside a very capable harness and pairs the model with a lot of tools.” ...

The emergence of alternative models comes as corporate America tightens its belt on AI spending, and presents another challenge for OpenAI and Anthropic, which have flourished over the past few years by selling the most cutting-edge technology. ...

Perplexity this week previewed a new system for its computer-use product built around GLM 5.2, an open model from China’s Z.ai. The system is designed to let a cheaper model handle more of the work while calling in a stronger model only when needed. ...

The rise of open models also creates a strategic challenge for the U.S. Many of the most competitive open-weight models are coming from Chinese labs, including Z.ai and DeepSeek. That has made open-source AI a business issue, a policy issue and a national competitiveness issue. ...

See the full story here: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/10/the-ai-race-is-shifting-from-bigger-models-to-cheaper-smarter-systems.html

USC Studies Aim to Advance Self-Driving Cars, Transform Robot “Brains” and Understand Workplace AI Use

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Titled “World Models for Next Generation Autonomous Driving Policy Learning,” one of Wang’s projects focuses on making autonomous vehicles capable of navigating safely anywhere in the world by teaching them to reason through unfamiliar and extreme road scenarios. His second project, “Reasoning in Motion: Dynamic Adaptation and Intelligent Execution of Large Behavior Models,” focuses on developing humanoid robots that can learn and adapt in real time through daily interactions and feedback within home environments. ...

... world models ...

By teaching AI to understand environmental context, such as realizing that a basketball rolling into the street likely means a child is close behind, the research aims to create self-driving systems that can navigate extreme “out-of-distribution” scenarios safely anywhere in the world, without hitting obstacles, coming to a dead stop or encountering scenarios they have not seen. ...

See the full story here: https://www.isi.edu/news/85440/usc-studies-aim-to-advance-self-driving-cars-transform-robot-brains-and-understand-workplace-ai-use/

Major AI offerings at a glance

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Here's a look at some of the ​major AI offerings available to consumers:

And here are some of the major AI models available to enterprises:

Reporting by Anhata Rooprai in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai and Maju Samuel

See the full story here; https://www.reuters.com/world/china/major-ai-models-glance-2026-07-08/

Pritzker Signs Landmark AI Regulation Bill That Aims to Mitigate Risks

Gov. JB Pritzker signed artificial intelligence legislation modeled after similar bills in California and New York on Monday, furthering a push for a state-driven national framework in lieu of federal regulations. ...

Senate Bill 315, also known as the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, increases transparency and accountability requirements for the largest artificial intelligence models — those that generate more than $500 million in annual revenue and are trained using massive computing power.

The bill mirrors California’s SB-53 and New York’s Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, which were each signed in late 2025. It establishes new reporting standards for the possibility that the AI model could be used for large-scale harms, such as by providing users assistance in creating a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon or committing cyber-attacks. ...

The new law requires model developers to publish an AI framework outlining how the developer identifies and assesses “catastrophic risk,” defined as the likelihood that incidents that could cause death or serious injury to more than 50 people or more than $1 million in property damage.

Developers will also be required to report any incidents that could cause harm to the state within 72 hours of identifying the incident, or 24 hours if it poses an imminent risk for death or serious physical injury. ...

See the full story here: https://news.wttw.com/2026/07/06/pritzker-signs-landmark-ai-regulation-bill-aims-mitigate-risks