philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

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

...

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

...

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

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

...

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

...

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