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Nvidia and AMD reportedly agree to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US

by Evelyn Reynolds 10 August 2025, 23:49

Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenues from chip sales in China, under an unprecedented arrangement to obtain export licenses for the semiconductors, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.The revenue share applies to Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 chips, the report said, citing a US official, noting that the Trump administration had yet to determine how to use the money.The chipmakers agreed to the quid pro quo arrangement as a condition for obtaining export licenses for the Chinese market that were granted last week, according to the unnamed official.According to export control experts, no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licenses, the newspaper reported. But Donald Trump has encouraged firms, and countries, to make investments in the US to, in his words, “buy down” the tariff rates he imposes.Nvidia follows rules the US government sets for its participation in worldwide markets, an Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement. “While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide.”AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The US commerce department started issuing licenses to Nvidia to export its H20 chips to China last week, removing a significant hurdle to the artificial intelligence bellwether’s access to a key market.The US in July reversed an April ban on the sale of the H20 chip to China. The company had tailored the microprocessor specially to the Chinese market to comply with the Biden-era AI chip export controls.Nvidia’s chips are a major driver of the AI boom, and in July the company became the first ever to have its market value surpass $4tn.Complications facing the company are not necessarily over, however, with growing scrutiny of Nvidia by Chinese authorities. Late last month China’s cyberspace watchdog summoned Nvidia to a meeting to discuss whether the chips had any “backdoor” security risks which would allow remote access or control. Nvidia said they did not.But Chinese state media has continued to raise concerns. In a commentary earlier this month, the People’s Daily said Nvidia must produce “convincing security proofs” to eliminate Chinese users’ worries over security risks in its chips and regain market trust. And On Sunday a state media account on Chinese social media platform WeChat said the H20 chips posed a security risk for China. The account, Yuyuan Tantian, claimed Nvidia chips could achieve functions including “remote shutdown” through a hardware “backdoor”. Nvidia has not responded.With Reuters More

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Trump to announce Apple’s plan to invest $100bn in US manufacturing
by Evelyn Reynolds 6 August 2025, 17:49
Donald Trump on Wednesday is expected to celebrate a commitment by Apple to increase its investments in US manufacturing by an additional $100bn over the next four years.“Today’s announcement with Apple is another win for our manufacturing industry that will simultaneously help reshore the production of critical components to protect America’s economic and national security,” a White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, said.Apple’s plan to up its domestic investment comes as it seeks to avoid Trump’s threatened tariffs, which would increase the tech giant’s costs as it relies on a complex international supply chain to produce its iPhones. Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, warned during an earnings call in May that the tariffs could cost the company up to $900m that fiscal quarter alone.Apple had previously said it intended to invest $500bn domestically, a figure it will now increase to $600bn. Apple also claimed that it would directly hire 20,000 US workers over the next four years.“Today, we’re proud to increase our investments across the United States to $600 billion over four years and launch our new American Manufacturing Program,” Cook said in a statement. “This includes new and expanded work with 10 companies across America. They produce components that are used in Apple products sold all over the world, and we’re grateful to the President for his support.”Trump in recent months has criticized the tech company and Cook for efforts to shift iPhone production to India to avoid the tariffs his Republican administration had planned for China. The same day as the White House announcement, Trump doubled US tariffs on India from 25% to 50%.While in Qatar earlier this year, Trump said there was “a little problem” with Apple and recalled a conversation with Cook in which he said he told the CEO: “I don’t want you building in India.”India has incurred Trump’s wrath, as the president signed an order on Wednesday to put an additional 25% tariff on the world’s most populous country for its use of Russian oil. The new import taxes to be imposed in 21 days could put the combined tariffs on Indian goods at 50%.Apple had attempted to get ahead of any tariffs on India in April by shipping as many as 1.5m iPhones from the country into the US, according to Reuters.The company has been uniquely threatened by Trump’s tariffs as iPhones include parts manufactured in dozens of countries and the devices themselves are largely assembled in China. Shifting production of the devices to the US would drastically increase the cost to the point that most analysts view an American-made iPhone as a pipe dream, leaving Apple to navigate the uncertainty surrounding Trump’s trade wars.As part of the Apple announcement, the investments will be about bringing more of its supply chain and advanced manufacturing to the US.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionApple’s new pledge comes just a few weeks after it forged a $500m deal with MP Materials, which runs the only rare earths mine in the US. That agreement will enable MP Materials to expand a factory in Texas to use recycled materials to produce magnets that make iPhones vibrate.Speaking on a recent investors call, Cook emphasized that “there’s a load of different things done in the United States”. As examples, he cited some of the iPhone components made in the US, such as the device’s glass display and module for identifying people’s faces and then indicated the company was gearing to expand its productions of other components in its home country.“We’re doing more in this country, and that’s on top of having roughly 19bn chips coming out of the US now, and we will do more,” Cook told analysts last week, without elaborating.Despite Apple’s struggles with looming tariffs and concern from investors over its lag in fully embracing artificial intelligence, the company’s latest earnings report showed that it made huge gains in iPhone sales and easily beat Wall Street’s expectations for its year-over-year revenue. Apple’s stock, which was down double digits so far this year, spiked upward over 5% on Wednesday following news of Trump’s announcement. More
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What will the AI revolution mean for the global south?
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 August 2025, 10:00
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View image in fullscreenI come from Trinidad and Tobago. As a country that was once colonized by the British, I am wary of the ways that inequalities between the global north and global south risk being perpetuated in the digital age.When we consider the lack of inclusion of the global south in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI), I think about how this translates to an eventual lack of economic leverage and geopolitical engagement in this technology that has captivated academics within the industrialised country I reside, the United States.As a scientist, I experienced an early rite of passage into the world of Silicon Valley, the land of techno-utopianism, and the promise of AI as a net positive for all. But, as an academic attending my first academic AI conference in 2019, I began to notice inconsistencies in the audience to whom the promise of AI was directed. AI researchers can often identify consistent choices for locations where such conferences are hosted, and where they are not. NeurIPS, one of the top AI conferences, has highlighted annual issues for obtaining visas for academic attendees and citizens from the African continent. Attending such a prestigious conference in the field grants one the opportunity to gain access to peers in the field, new collaborations and feedback on one’s work.I often hear the word “democratisation” within the AI community, an implication of equity in access, opportunity and merit for contribution regardless of one’s country of origin. Associate professor of economics Fadhel Kaboub talks about how “a lack of vision for oneself results in being a part of someone else’s vision”, reflecting on how systematically lacking an access to infrastructure results in local trade deficits in economies.As in the time of Nafta’s promise of “free trade”, promises of “AI democratisation” today still exist and benefit mainly countries with access to tech hubs not located in the global south. While the United States and other industrialized countries dominate in access to computational power and research activity, much of the low-paid manual labour involved in labelling data and the global underclass in artificial intelligence still exists in the global south.Much like coffee, cocoa, bauxite and sugar cane are produced in the global south, exported cheaply and sold at a premium in more industrialized countries, over the past few years we have seen influence in AI inextricably tied to energy consumption. Countries that can afford to consume more energy have more leverage in reinforcing power to shape the future direction of AI and what is considered valuable within the AI academic community.In 2019, Mary L Gray and Siddharth Suri published Ghost Work, which exposed the invisible labour of technology today, and at the beginning of my tenure at graduate school, the heavily cited paper Decolonial AI: Decolonial Theory as Sociotechnical Foresight in Artificial Intelligence was published. It has been five years since these seminal works. What would an AI community inspired by the Brics organisation, which united major emerging economies to advocate for themselves in a system dominated by western countries, look like for the global south?I often ask myself how AI has contributed to our legacy, and whose stories it won’t tell. Has AI mitigated issues of mistrust and corruption in less-resourced countries? Has it benefited our civic communities or narrowed educational gaps between less-resourced regions? How will it make society better, and whose society will it make better? Who will be included in that future?A historical mistrust can impede adoption by developing countries. Furthermore, many developing countries have weak institutional infrastructures, poor or nonexistent laws and regulatory frameworks for data projection and cybersecurity. Therefore, even with an improved information infrastructure, they are likely to function at a disadvantage in the global information marketplace.A currency is only as good as its perceived global trust. When thinking about the democratization in AI and a vision of what it could be in years to come, AI’s survival requires including more perspectives from regions such as the global south. Countries from the global south should work together to build their own markets and have a model of sovereignty for their data and data labour.Economic models often consider a definition of development that includes a measure of improvement in the quality of life of the most marginalized of its people. It is my hope that in the future that will extend to our evaluation of AI.
Krystal Maughan is a PhD student at the University of Vermont studying differential privacy and machine learning More
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Trump administration launching health tracking system with big tech’s help
by Evelyn Reynolds 30 July 2025, 21:32
The Trump administration is pushing an initiative for millions of Americans to upload personal health data and medical records on new apps and systems run by private tech companies, promising easier to access health records and wellness monitoring.Donald Trump is expected to deliver remarks on the initiative Wednesday afternoon in the East Room. The event is expected to involve leaders from more than 60 companies, including major tech companies such as Google and Amazon, as well as prominent hospital systems like the Cleveland clinic.The new system will focus on diabetes and weight management, conversational artificial intelligence that helps patients, and digital tools such as QR codes and apps that register patients for check-ins or track medications.The initiative, spearheaded by an administration that has already freely shared highly personal data about Americans in ways that have tested legal bounds, could put patients’ desires for more convenience at their doctor’s office on a collision course with their expectations that their medical information be kept private.“There are enormous ethical and legal concerns,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor who specializes in public health. “Patients across America should be very worried that their medical records are going to be used in ways that harm them and their families.”Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who will be in charge of maintaining the system, have said patients will need to opt in for the sharing of their medical records and data, which will be kept secure.Those officials said patients will benefit from a system that lets them quickly call up their own records without the hallmark difficulties, such as requiring the use of fax machines to share documents, that have prevented them from doing so in the past.“We have the tools and information available now to empower patients to improve their outcomes and their healthcare experience,” Dr Mehmet Oz, the administrator for CMS, said in a statement Wednesday. CMS already has troves of information on more than 140 million Americans who enroll in Medicare and Medicaid.Popular weight loss and fitness subscription service Noom, which has signed on to the initiative, will be able to pull medical records after the system’s expected launch early next year.That might include labs or medical tests that the app could use to develop an AI-driven analysis of what might help users lose weight, the CEO, Geoff Cook, told the Associated Press. Apps and health systems will also have access to their competitors’ information, too. Noom would be able to access a person’s data from Apple Health, for example.“Right now you have a lot of siloed data,” Cook said.Patients who travel across the country for treatment at the Cleveland clinic often have a hard time obtaining all their medical records from various providers, said the hospital system’s CEO, Tomislav Mihaljevic. He said the new system would eliminate that barrier, which sometimes delays treatment or prevents doctors from making an accurate diagnosis because they do not have a full view of a patient’s medical history.Having seamless access to health app data, such as what patients are eating or how much they are exercising, will also help doctors manage obesity and other chronic diseases, Mihaljevic said.“These apps give us insight about what’s happening with the patient’s health outside of the physician’s office,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCMS will also recommend a list of apps on Medicare.gov that are designed to help people manage chronic diseases, as well as help them select healthcare providers and insurance plans.Digital privacy advocates are skeptical that patients will be able to count on their data being stored securely.The federal government, however, has done little to regulate health apps or telehealth programs, said Jeffrey Chester at the Center for Digital Democracy.The new initiative would deepen the pool of information on patients for the federal government and tech companies. Medical records typically contain far more sensitive information, such as doctors’ notes about conversations with patients and substance abuse or mental health history.“This scheme is an open door for the further use and monetization of sensitive and personal health information,” Chester said.The health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, and those within his circle have likewise pushed for more technology in healthcare, advocating for wearable devices that monitor wellness and telehealth.Kennedy also sought to collect more data from Americans’ medical records, which he has previously said he wants to use to study autism and vaccine safety. Kennedy has filled the agency with staffers who have a history of working at or running health technology startups and businesses. More
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Trump signs executive orders targeting ‘woke’ AI models and regulation
by Evelyn Reynolds 24 July 2025, 01:01
Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a trio of executive orders that he vowed would turn the United States into an “AI export powerhouse”, including one targeting what the White House described as “woke” artificial intelligence models.During remarks at an AI summit in Washington, Trump decried “woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models”, before signing the orders on stage at the Mellon Auditorium.“Once and for all, we are getting rid of woke. Is that OK?” Trump said, drawing loud applause from the audience of AI industry leaders. He then asserted that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had “established toxic diversity, equity and inclusion ideology as a guiding principle of American AI development”.“So you immediately knew that was the end of your development,” he said, eliciting laughter.The new order requires any artificial intelligence company receiving federal funding to maintain politically neutral AI models free of “ideological dogmas such as DEI” – putting pressure on an industry increasingly seeking to partner with government agencies. It is part of the Trump administration’s broader anti-diversity campaign that has also targeted federal agencies, academic institutions and the military.While the directive emphasizes that the federal government “should be hesitant to regulate the functionality of AI models in the private marketplace”, it asserts that public procurement carries “the obligation not to procure models that sacrifice truthfulness and accuracy to ideological agendas”. The metrics of what make an AI model politically biased are contentious and open to interpretation, however, and therefore may allow the administration to use the order to target companies at its discretion.The other orders were aimed at expediting federal permitting for datacentre infrastructure and promoting the export of American AI models. The executive actions coincide with the Trump administration’s release of a broader, 24-page “AI action plan” that seeks to cement the US’s “global dominance” in artificial intelligence as well as expand the use of AI in the federal government.“Winning this competition will be a test of our capacities unlike anything since the dawn of the space age,” Trump declared, adding: “We need US technology companies to be all-in for America. We want you to put America first.”Earlier on Wednesday, the White House unveiled its long-promised “action plan”, titled “Winning the Race”, that was announced shortly after Trump took office and repealed a Biden administration order on AI that mandated some safeguards and standards on the technology. It outlines the White House’s vision for governing artificial intelligence in the US, vowing to speed up the development of the fast-growing technology by removing “red tape and onerous regulation”.During his remarks, Trump also proposed a more nominal change. “I can’t stand it,” he said, referring to the use of the word “artificial”. “I don’t even like the name, you know? I don’t like anything that’s artificial. So could we straighten that out, please? We should change the name. I actually mean that.”“It’s not artificial. It’s genius,” he added.A second order Trump signed on Wednesday calls for deregulating AI development, increasing the building of datacentres and removing environmental protections that could hamper their construction.Datacentres that house the servers for AI models require immense amounts of water and energy to function, as well as produce greenhouse gas emissions. Environmental groups have warned about harmful increases to air and noise pollution as tech companies build more facilities, while a number of local communities have pushed back against their construction.In addition to easing permitting laws and emphasizing the need for more energy infrastructure, both measures that tech companies have lobbied for, Trump’s order also frames the AI race as a contest for geopolitical dominance. China has invested billions into the manufacturing of AI chips and datacentres to become a competitor in the industry, while Chinese companies such as Deepseek have released AI models that rival Silicon Valley’s output.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Trump’s plan seeks to address fears of China as an AI superpower, the Trump administration’s move against “woke” AI echoes longstanding conservative grievances against tech companies, which Republicans have accused of possessing liberal biases and suppressing rightwing ideology. As generative AI has become more prominent in recent years, that criticism has shifted from concerns over internet search results or anti-misinformation policies into anger against AI chatbots and image generators.One of the biggest critics of perceived liberal bias in AI is Elon Musk, who has vowed to make his xAI company and its Grok chatbot “anti-woke”. Although Musk and Donald Trump are still locked in a feud after their public falling out last month, Musk may stand to benefit from Trump’s order given his emphasis on controlling AI’s political outputs.Musk has consistently criticized AI models, including his own, for failing to generate what he sees as sufficiently conservative views. He has claimed that xAI has reworked Grok to eliminate liberal bias, and the chatbot has occasionally posted white supremacist and antisemitic content. In May, Grok affirmed white supremacist conspiracies that a “white genocide” was taking place in South Africa and said it was “instructed by my creators” to do so. Earlier this month, Grok also posted pro-Nazi ideology and rape fantasies while identifying itself as “MechaHitler” until the company was forced to intervene.Despite Grok’s promotion of Nazism, xAI was among several AI companies that the Department of Defense awarded with up to $200m contracts this month to develop tools for the government. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, all of which have their own proprietary AI models, were the other recipients.Conservatives have singled out incidents such as Google’s Gemini image generator inaccurately producing racially diverse depictions of historical figures such as German second world war soldiers as proof of liberal bias. AI experts have meanwhile long warned about problems of racial and gender bias in the creation of artificial intelligence models, which are trained on content such as social media posts, news articles and other forms of media that may contain stereotypes or discriminatory material that gets incorporated into these tools. Researchers have found that these biases have persisted despite advancements in AI, with models often replicating existing social prejudices in their outputs.Conflict over biases in AI have also led to turmoil in the industry. In 2020, the co-lead of Google’s “ethical AI” team Timnit Gebru said she was fired after she expressed concerns of biases being built into the company’s AI models and a broader lack of diversity efforts at the company. Google said she resigned. More
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Climate advocates outraged at Trump administration plans to fast-track AI sector
by Evelyn Reynolds 23 July 2025, 20:27
The Trump administration has unveiled plans to speed the development of the highly polluting artificial intelligence sector, sparking outrage from climate advocates.Rolled out on Wednesday, the 28-page scheme pledges to remove so-called “bureaucratic red tape” and streamline permitting for datacenters, semiconductor manufacturing facilities and fossil fuel infrastructure.To do so, it will dismantle some environmental and land-use regulations, roll back some Biden-era rules for subsidies for semiconductor plants related to climate requirements, and seek to establish exclusions for datacenters from the National Environmental Policy Act and streamline permits under the Clean Water Act.“We need to build and maintain vast AI infrastructure and the energy to power it. To do that, we will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape, as the Administration has done since Inauguration Day,” the plan says. “Simply put, we need to ‘Build, Baby, Build!’”Trump is also expected to sign three AI-related executive orders on Wednesday during a keynote address at a summit in DC. The announcement will be co-hosted by bipartisan lawmakers with the Hill and Valley Forum and a business and technology podcast hosted by four technology investors and businessmen, including Trump’s AI and crypto czar, David Sacks.The AI sector is already depleting land and water resources and taking a massive toll on the climate, with AI-powered large language models such as ChatGPT taking up to 10 times more energy than a regular Google search, according to an estimate by the Electric Power Research Institute. Last year, ChatGPT used more than half a million kilowatts of electricity every day, equivalent to the daily power use of 180,000 US households.The training of a single AI model can lead to an emissions footprint that is almost five times larger than the lifetime carbon footprint of the average American car. Recent research from Food and Water Watch also found that energy demand from AI servers and datacenters in the US is expected to increase up to threefold from 2023 to 2028, which could lead the US sector to, by 2028, annually consume enough water to fill more than 1m Olympic-size swimming pools and enough electricity to power more than 28m American households.“At its core, President Trump’s AI agenda is nothing more than a thinly veiled invitation for the fossil fuel and corporate water industries to ramp up their exploitation of our environment and natural resources – all at the expense of everyday people,” said Mitch Jones, a managing director Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group.The new plan recommends that regulators review states’ AI laws to see whether they interfere with the agency’s authority. It also says federal agencies will “consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions” and “limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award”.Republicans earlier this year attempted to enact a version of this by placing a moratorium on states’ ability to impose regulations on artificial intelligence into Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but the provision was stripped at the last minute.“Under this plan, tech giants get sweetheart deals while everyday Americans will see their electricity bills rise to subsidize discounted power for massive AI datacenters,” said JB Branch, a big-tech accountability advocate with the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. “States are held hostage: either stop protecting their residents from dangerous, untested AI products, or lose federal funding.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs a counterweight to the new Trump plan, a broad coalition of more than 90 advocacy groups – including climate and environmental justice non-profits, consumer protection organizations and labor advocates – published an open letter calling for a “people’s AI action plan” that prioritizes “public wellbeing, shared prosperity, a sustainable future and security”.“We can’t let big tech and big oil lobbyists write the rules for AI and our economy at the expense of our freedom and equality, workers and families’ wellbeing,” the coalition wrote.Research shows that many datacenters used for AI are placed near low-income communities of color, which are already often overburdened by pollution.“People sacrifice their health, their wellbeing and, too often, their future, so that others can benefit,” said Sharon Lewis, executive director of the Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice. “We’re told these datacenters are harmless, but even though they might seem like they pose no risk, in reality, these energy-hungry, pollution-intensive facilities are just as damaging to our environment and health.” More
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Why are we so fascinated by the Coldplay couple? | Jessica Ciencin Henriquez
by Evelyn Reynolds 23 July 2025, 12:00
It wasn’t just that a man got caught cheating on his wife. It was that he did it in public. With the whole stadium watching. With Chris Martin, unknowingly, teeing it up. With a camera zooming in at the exact wrong – or maybe karmically perfect – moment. The CEO. The HR director. The affair. The panic. The humiliation. All of it caught, dissected and shared a million times over.We didn’t watch that video because we love Coldplay (though, don’t we?). We didn’t watch just for the scandal. We watched because – despite our small steps toward enlightenment – we’re all starving for the satisfaction of seeing someone finally get what they deserve.That’s the part we need to talk about.According to a 2023 study in Computers in Human Behavior Reports, the satisfaction we feel during public shaming isn’t just about justice – it’s about pleasure. Their research found that people experience schadenfreude not only because they believe the person deserved it, but because it simply feels good to watch someone face consequences. We’re not just looking for moral clarity. We’re chasing the emotional high that comes with it. We don’t just want closure, we want content. And cheating, exposed in public, has become the most satisfying genre of all.We as a culture are obsessed with catching cheaters – not just for the drama, but for the justice. We want to see betrayal punished. We want the liar exposed, the philanderer humiliated, the partner who was faithful and trusting to be vindicated. And if we can’t get that in our own lives, we’ll take it from strangers.This hunger has only grown over the years as the morally hollow have made careers out of turning scandal into spectacle and walking away untouched. But when the deception is undeniable, and the exposure unfiltered, it gives us something we rarely get: visible accountability.Within hours of that five-second clip surfacing, the internet did what it does best: turned a private moment into public symbolism. Their names were revealed along with their titles. Until the camera found them, they looked unbothered, cozy. Then her hand flew to cover her face. He ducked and waddled behind the seats. Then the entire internet gasped, and reached for their popcorn and pitchforks.You could feel the collective applause ripple through the comments section. We all know the feeling of being deceived. We know the sharp loneliness of loving someone who’s looking elsewhere, of having suspicions but not proof, accusations returned with a side of gaslighting. So when someone gets caught in 4K, we devour the moment. The visuals were almost too perfect: the Coldplay ballad, the cheering crowd turning confused, the abrupt shift from smug to stunned.Don’t we all wish we had that experience? A camera that didn’t look away. A crowd that said: “We see it, too.” Because in our own lives, we confront; they deflect. We cry; they move on. And there’s no applause, no witness. Just you and an unrelenting ache, their version of what happened and the truth.The CEO and the HR director are merely serving as stand-ins for the guy who ghosted you after two years, the woman who swore nothing was going on with her co-worker, the husband who moved on so fast you wondered if you hallucinated your entire marriage. Watching those two squirm on screen is a kind of spiritual revenge. We tell ourselves it’s about ethics, boundaries, accountability. But at the end of the day, don’t we just want someone to answer for the betrayal we never got closure for?Of course, pain is not performance. And justice is not the same as humiliation. Public shaming feels like accountability – but it rarely is accountability. As Jon Ronson warns in his book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: “An instant digital mob justice can devastate without offering redemption.” Watching strangers get exposed might feel good temporarily. We nod at the cosmic slap, but it doesn’t fix the trust broken in a marriage or the respect damaged in a workplace. It doesn’t change who they were when no one was watching.There’s a flip side to witnessing this embarrassment that flickers just below the surface. We might laugh, but something in us recoils as we imagine the real cost to those involved: lost jobs, fractured marriages, psychological fallout for their children. A hyperlink trail that will follow them to the grave.As Evan Nierman, author of The Cancel Culture Curse and CEO of the crisis PR firm Red Banyan, puts it: “The internet has a way of locking people into their worst moment. When a misstep goes viral, the court of public opinion rarely allows space for explanation, nuance, or repair.”And once the pile-on begins, it escalates fast. “Digital shame operates at a scale and speed our psychology isn’t built for,” he warns. “What starts as a laugh can quickly spiral into character assassination, with consequences that long outlast a viral moment.”Yet this moment – our collective gasp at betrayal made universal – revealed something crucial: we’re craving truth, acknowledgment. We’re craving slow, messy, quiet reckoning with accountability that extends beyond the tap-and-scroll. But in a world where real accountability is rare, a viral headline like this feels close enough – as though love, loyalty and truth might still mean something, even if only for a moment on the Jumbotron.
Jessica Ciencin Henriquez is a writer in Ojai, California, and the author of the forthcoming essay collection, If You Loved Me, You Would Know. You can find her on social media @TheWriterJess More
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OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI
by Evelyn Reynolds 22 July 2025, 21:09
During his latest trip to Washington, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, painted a sweeping vision of an AI-dominated future in which entire job categories disappear, presidents follow ChatGPT’s recommendations and hostile nations wield artificial intelligence as a weapon of mass destruction, all while positioning his company as the indispensable architect of humanity’s technological destiny.Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement.“Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,” he said, singling out customer support roles. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re on target and AI, and that’s fine.”The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: “Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It’s like a super-smart, capable person. There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it’s done.”The OpenAI founder then turned to healthcare, making the suggestion that AI’s diagnostic capabilities had surpassed human doctors, but wouldn’t go so far as to accept the superior performer as the sole purveyor of healthcare.“ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better – it’s like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” he said. “Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like, maybe I’m a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop.”His visit to Washington was aligned with the Trump administration’s unveiling of its “AI action plan”, which is focused defining and easing some regulations and promoting more datacenters. Altman’s latest engagement is with the federal government under Donald Trump, which has taken on a new tune compared with years past. While much has changed with the tech over the years, under the Biden administration, OpenAI and its rivals asked the government to regulate AI. Meanwhile under Trump, they talk of accelerating to beat China.At the fireside chat, he said one of his biggest worries was over AI’s rapidly advancing destructive capabilities, with one scenario that kept him up at night being a hostile nation using these weapons to attack the US financial system. And despite being in awe of advances in voice cloning, Altman warned the crowd about how that same benefit could enable sophisticated fraud and identity theft, considering that “there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOpenAI and Altman are already under way on their big pivot to Washington, attempting to crash a party at which Elon Musk once held the golden ticket. Along with announcing plans to open his company’s first office in Washington next year, Altman faced the Senate commerce committee for his first congressional testimony since his high-profile appearance in May 2023 that propelled him on to the global stage. More
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Leftists are determined to date each other – and not settle for liberals: ‘Politics are the new religion’
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 July 2025, 11:00
Zohran Mamdani gave Hinge an unofficial boost last month when the New York mayoral candidate revealed that he met his wife, Rama Duwaji, through swiping. “There is still hope on those dating apps,” he said on the Bulwark podcast a week before his stunning victory in the Democratic primary. The tidbit spread over social media, cementing the 33-year-old democratic socialist’s status as a millennial everyman. A subsequent Cosmopolitan headline read: “Zohran Mamdani could make history (as the first NYC mayor to meet his wife on Hinge).”Representatives for Hinge would not comment, but plenty of eligible New Yorkers did, claiming they would redownload the app due to Mamdani’s success, in spite of their dating fatigue. “Now I’m clocking in like it’s a full-time job,” one user posted on TikTok. “If he can find love on that app maybe I can,” another wrote in a caption.However, they could run into an ideological hurdle while filling out their profiles. Alongside answering basic questions – “Do you smoke, drink or do drugs? Where did you go to college?” – Hinge ask singles to choose their political affiliation: liberal, conservative, moderate, not political, or the mysterious “other”.Some people to the left say the label “liberal” does not encapsulate their socialist views. They associate it with establishment figures such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – or Mamdani’s rival, former governor Andrew Cuomo. Many liberals deem proposals by Hinge’s golden boy (freezing rent, taxing the super-rich, making buses free) too radical. A socialist might want to distance themselves from such center-leaning liberalism and instead embrace the “hot commie summer” that hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb warned his fellow billionaires of.“There’s a real appetite to date leftists now,” said Abby Beauregard, fundraising chair for Democratic Socialists of America’s New York chapter. She said that Mamdani’s victory reinvigorated the dating scene in in the city, “but it’s really hard to find explicitly leftist dating spaces. Most dating apps have a liberal option, but no leftist option, and it’s not a turn-on to see ‘other’, because that could mean anything.” (For instance, far-right or communist.)So lefty singles are finding more explicit ways to signal their politics to like-minded love matches, on Hinge and beyond.View image in fullscreenSome have turned their dating profiles into mini-manifestos, writing out their entire belief system as answers to the apps’ prompts. It’s common to see watermelon emojis as euphemisms for solidarity with the Palestinian people. Some users will warn that they’ll swipe left on Terfs (the acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminists), cops or Donald Trump supporters.“It’s important for me to see those signifiers,” said Caroline, a 38-year-old florist who lives in Queens. (She and other sources are going by their first name for privacy reasons.) “There’s a nice feeling on the apps right now with people being proud to be communists or leftists, and they’re saying that.”But she’s wary of anyone who comes off as too lefty. “That seems kind of tryhard,” she said. “It can read as too performative, that you’re fishing for alt-girls or you’re a centrist who just wants someone freaky from Bushwick.”Tinder, OK Cupid and the kink-friendly app Feeld allow users to write their own bios, unlike Hinge, and they can choose within those bios whether they reveal their political affiliations. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Tinder also launched profile “stickers” so users could signal the issues they felt strongly about, such as “voting for reproductive rights”.For her part, Caroline, who uses Feeld, wrote in her profile that she’s “far left” and “COVID-cautious”. That feels like enough for her. “Saying ‘I love vaccines!’, ‘free Palestine!’ or ‘fuck Trump!’ would be trite. It’s all implied.”Dennis Mulvena describes himself as “very left-leaning”. He used to keep his affiliations private on Hinge because he believed there was room for nuance in discussing politics, but recently listed himself as liberal.“With the return of Trump in the last two years, it’s important to have that out there,” said Mulvena, 30, who works in customer service for a car manufacturer. “Admittedly gay people who live in Brooklyn tend to lean left, but I have had the experience of going on a date with someone who then revealed he was part of his college’s Young Republicans club.” That was the last time he assumed that everyone he matched with would share the same views as him.According to an NBC News poll from April, the partisan gap between gen Z women, who are more likely to say they are Democrat, and gen Z men, who have shifted right, is the widest of all generations. And, increasingly, a person’s politics have an impact on their perceived desirability. While past generations may have thought nothing about a conservative and liberal romantic pairing (“don’t talk about politics or religion at the dinner table”), 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds think it’s important to date or marry someone who shares their political beliefs.“Politics is the new religion,” said Dr Jess Carbino, a former sociologist for Bumble and Tinder who studies dating apps. “It’s become the way that people choose to frame how they look at the world and their values.”Lily, a 23 year-old socialist who was recently laid off, is wary of seeing someone identify as “not political” on Hinge. “I’m immediately scared of what that means,” they said. “As a queer person living through everything that’s happening in this country, I need to know someone has a baseline care for people and their community.”In New York, more voters between the ages of 25 and 34 – a mix of gen Z and younger millennials – turned out to vote in the Democratic primary than any other age cohort, indicating a vigor for leftist politics. Recently, Lily has seen young people write on Hinge that they’d only go out with someone who voted for Mamdani or that they’d never go out with a Cuomo supporter. They have seen multiple people answer the Hinge prompt “when was the last time you cried?” with: “when Zohran won”. (They presume these were happy tears.)This is not to say New York is a young Bolshevik paradise: conservatives in the city are also trying to find each other. Some have gone into voluntary exile from mainstream dating apps, creating their own options. “Our dating apps have gone woke,” reads the description for Date Right Stuff, one such app backed by Peter Thiel. “Connect with people who aren’t offended by everything.”In March, Date Right Stuff hosted a singles event at New York’s Trump Tower called “make America hot again”. It was a coming-out night for what the app’s former chief marketing officer Raquel Debono called “city conservatives”, or Republicans who prefer urban life to small towns and tradwifedom.They are not the only ones going off-app: the Mamdani effect on New York’s lefties could not be contained to Hinge.In early July, young people gathered inside a cocktail bar on the Lower East Side for a “sexy socialist singles” event hosted by New York’s DSA. Those looking for something casual – or, as the host put it, “if you just want fast and free, like Zohran’s buses” – were sent to one part of the bar, while those who wanted “a slow burn, like taxing the fucking rich” went to another. At one point, organizers directed polyamorous attendees to a room upstairs, where they could mingle with other non-monogamous individuals.Upstairs, Sven, 25, an economics master’s student who lives in Bushwick, said that young people view the DSA as a social club just as much as a platform for socialist candidates. “I saw a post on Reddit talking about how all Zohran’s canvassers are hot, and we have soccer leagues and book clubs,” they said. “It’s a great way to make friends.”Downstairs, back in monogamyville, Lauren, a video editor who lives in Astoria (the Queens neighborhood Mamdani represents as a New York assemblymember), waited for a friend who was off flirting. “There’s definitely an energy when I wear my Zohran T-shirt out,” she said. “People are revved up. They’ll call you from across the street saying, ‘What’s up?’ or ‘I love that guy.’ It’s a real conversation starter.”New York’s DSA will continue its sexy socialist mixers in youth hubs Bushwick and Williamsburg, and in the Upper West Side for those over 30. In the meantime, singles will have to keep parsing political signifiers on dating apps. More

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