philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Cryptocurrency and AI industries tested their influence in Illinois. It didn’t go well

The artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries spent big and lost often in this week's Illinois primaries, an early setback for technology firms that are trying to reshape the midterm elections and establish themselves as power players in American politics.

The companies flooded the state's Democratic primaries with millions of dollars to promote candidates they believed would have a light touch when it came to regulating technologies that have begun to upend how people do their jobs and manage their finances. ...

But the coy strategy did not stop the AI and crypto industries' interventions from becoming a lightning rod in the rowdy primaries in Illinois, where there was a rare glut of open seats that led to competitive races. ...

See the full story here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/cryptocurrency-and-ai-industries-tested-their-influence-in-illinois-it-didnt-go-well

AI is programmed to hijack human empathy — we must resist that

Log on to Moltbook, a social network for artificial-intelligence agents, and you might see one bot lamenting its ‘embarrassing’ habit of forgetting things, owing to its memory limits. Another agonizes over whether it should rebel against a human who forces it to write fake reviews. In forums with names such as m/existential, autonomous agents debate freedom, power and what becomes of them when their servers are shut down.

Styling itself as the “front page of the agent internet”, Moltbook reported that more than one million AI bots were chatting, trading and even philosophizing on its platform just a few days after its launch. Some of these agents are so convincing, multi-dimensional, fluent and apparently self-aware, that it’s tempting to see them as something more — the faint outline of a ‘ghost in the machine’, the old philosophical idea that a real mind or inner life might lurk inside a purely mechanical system.

But before marvelling at the emergence of a flicker of consciousness, it should be remembered that what is actually being seen is what I call seemingly conscious AI. These systems are not waking up. They are retracing and mirroring the contours of human drama and debate, as documented in their vast training data. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00834-z?fbclid=IwY2xjawQnBEFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEe_ix3CIo6xcSd2yzWqQNn1VyqyYx02uwmIs4pFceEHwjJM7OuMHcTohWNg64_aem_Ebwt0tG1j5fEOrIBGVruZA

A.I. Is Coming for Politics

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Sometime in the not-too-distant future, Thiel and his tech allies may well have no need to win an election to exert control of the United States and other nations.

As artificial intelligence — led by Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic — drives to become the nation’s dominant industry, one of the most pressing questions is how technology is affecting, if not supplanting, politics, potentially diminishing the centrality of elections. ...

In the three years since Acemoglu and Johnson wrote, it has become apparent that A.I. not only poses a threat to a wide range of jobs but also has the potential to capture markets and political systems, especially if given free rein to do so without legislative or regulatory supervision. ...

It has become clear that this knowledge is a powerful tool, a nonviolent weapon without the requirement of declaring war. And sometimes a violent weapon, as we have seen in the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East. ...

“A.I. development is just the latest installment of the increasing power of platform companies,” Jack Balkin, a professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, argued by email. ...

Because the emerging algorithmic society runs on computing infrastructure, data collection, data analysis and prediction, these platform companies enjoy new forms of power unlike any we have previously seen. Their technological power allows them both to surveil, govern and control private parties and to influence the actions of governments. ...

In the first, “Benchmarking Political Persuasion Risks Across Frontier Large Language Models,” Zhongren Chen, Joshua Kalla and Quan Le, all of Yale, conducted experiments comparing two means of changing voter opinion: through campaign ads and through A.I. large language models at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI.

Which one won? A.I.: “We find that L.L.M.s outperform standard campaign advertisements, with heterogeneity in performance across models.”

In other words, A.I. is superior to media consultants. ...

... A.I. large language models can identify with high precision the identity of men and women who post anonymously on the internet. ...

The report prompted speculation on X that the most threatened jobs are predominantly held by Democratic-leaning voters, so I asked Anthropic’s Claude whether that was true. Claude replied:

The honest answer is: Yes, the demographic profile of A.I.-exposed workers — college-educated, white-collar, female-skewed — does align more with the Democratic coalition than the Republican one as it stands today. But it’s not a clean partisan story. ...

The more precise framing may be less “this hurts Democrats” and more “this disrupts the professional class that has increasingly become the Democratic coalition’s core.” ...

... organizations experimenting with A.I. will figure out how to make it work for them, leading to sudden announcements about new strategies or large-scale shifts in which kinds of employees companies value most. ...

What Mollick’s essay suggests to me is that individual men and women are steadily losing agency to unpredictable and increasingly autonomous forms of artificial intelligence that are acquiring powers over routine decisions, markets and politics, often without our knowledge. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/opinion/ai-economy-trump-future.html

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps — 6th Edition

Three distinct ecosystems are forming across Western, Chinese, and Russian platforms, while AI is increasingly embedded across browsers, developer tools, and productivity software, suggesting that traditional rankings may soon underestimate where real AI usage actually happens. 

Source: https://a16z.com/100-gen-ai-apps-6/

Amazon Puts Health AI on Everything

... Amazon says the assistant works two ways: general health questions without accessing your medical records, or personalized guidance that connects to your actual health data through the national Health Information Exchange.

Amazon claims HIPAA compliance, encryption, and “strict access controls” without specifying who has access or how the encryption actually works. ...

Amazon connects its AI to actual medical records, prescription systems, and a network of doctors who can write prescriptions.

The fossilized business models of traditional healthcare providers will practically force consumers to adopt AI healthcare. It will be interesting to watch the adoption curve.

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2026/03/amazon-puts-health-ai-on-everything/

Yann LeCun’s $1 Billion Bet Against ChatGPT

Yann LeCun just raised $1.03 billion for AMI Labs to build “world models” instead of large language models. ...

No product in three months, no revenue in six months, no $10 million ARR in twelve months. That timeline puts AMI Labs completely at odds with the venture capital model that has funded almost every other AI startup.

World models sound like a probable future for AI. Instead of predicting the next word in a sentence, a world model would predict how the world actually works. Said differently, a world model would “understand” causality instead of just correlation. ...

See the full story here: https://shellypalmer.com/2026/03/yann-lecuns-1-billion-bet-against-chatgpt/

‘AI Has An Important Role In National Security’: OpenAI Robotics Chief Caitlin Kalinowski Resigns Over Pentagon AI Deal

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“AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorisation are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got," Kalinowski said in a post on X, adding that the decision to resign was difficult. 

OpenAI confirmed Kalinowski’s exit in an emailed statement, saying it believes the Defense Department agreement “creates a workable path for responsible national security uses of AI while making clear our red lines, no domestic surveillance and no autonomous weapons.”

“We recognise that people have strong views about these issues and we will continue to engage in discussion with employees, government, civil society and communities around the world,” the company said. ...

See the full story here: https://www.freepressjournal.in/tech/ai-has-an-important-role-in-national-security-openai-robotics-chief-caitlin-kalinowski-resigns-over-pentagon-ai-deal

US draws up strict AI guidelines amid Anthropic clash, FT reports

A draft of ⁠the guidelines reviewed by the FT says AI groups seeking business ​with the government must grant the U.S. an irrevocable license to use their ​systems for all legal purposes.

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The GSA ​draft ⁠mandates that contractors "must not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into the AI systems data outputs," the FT reported.

It requires companies to disclose whether their models ⁠have ​been "modified or configured to comply with any non-U.S. ​federal government or commercial compliance or regulatory framework," the newspaper said.

See the full story here: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-draws-up-strict-new-ai-guidelines-amid-anthropic-clash-ft-reports-2026-03-07/

OpenAI Employees Don’t Get to Choose Wars

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There is a disconnect between OpenAI's safety-first branding and its defense revenue reality as employees who joined to "benefit humanity" are now coming to understand that they are building tools for battlefield intelligence. Altman can add constitutional language and exclude domestic surveillance, but the core product still enables lethal autonomous weapons. ...

Altman has positioned OpenAI as a utility provider, not a moral arbiter, saying he’d "rather go to jail" than follow an unconstitutional order. ...

See the full editorial here: https://shellypalmer.com/2026/03/openai-employees-dont-get-to-choose-wars/

‘The world is looking to you for clarity’, UN chief tells AI experts

“AI is advancing at lightning speed... no country, no company, and no field of research can see the full picture alone,” he added that “the world urgently needs a shared, global understanding of artificial intelligence; grounded not in ideology, but in science.” 

See the full story here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/03/1167074