Case in point, one Georgia family has been forced to sell their home, after the state utility concern decided it needed to build a new transmission line to connect new AI data centers.
As reported by CBS, the Brown family of Coweta County, Georgia decided to sell their home to Georgia Power, rather than risk seizure by eminent domain.
Ansley Brown, whose parents raised her in the home, told CBS, “it’s ours. It’s our family. We belong here.”
The Browns are just one of likely 300 landowners who will have their property seized so that Georgia Power — a for-profit, investor-owned corporation — can make a cozy home for the tech industry.
“To us it’s theft,” Browns’ mother told CBS. “It’s literally a billion-dollar company stealing land from smaller people, people who can’t fight back. We don’t have the money to fight Georgia Power.”
For its part, the utility company told CBS they “have worked hard to be transparent, negotiate in good faith,” and “make the process as easy as possible.”
The Browns, understandably, don’t see it that way.
“You can’t tear down 35 miles of rural Georgia and it not hurt something or somebody,” the mother said. “And to say that you’re doing it in the name of data centers is a slap in the face to us, our community, our animals.”
Look, dating in the 2020s sucks. The apps are bad, people are rude, and the etiquette of it all seems to be evolving at the speed of sound. Yet for all the downsides, there’s nothing that can’t be made 100 times worse with the addition of AI slop.
For better or worse, that’s exactly what Hinge founder Justin McLeod has in mind for his latest dating app, “Overtone.”
First spotted by TechCrunch, McLeod announced an $18 million round of funding on the company’s blog. While that’s a hefty chunk of change for any startup, confidence from venture capitalists isn’t exactly shocking considering the founder’s previous success. What really stands out about the blog, though, is that McLeod used the bulletin to vague-post about his grand vision for a new, AI-integrated dating app.
“Think about the most un-human parts of the dating app experience,” McLeod challenged: “writing personal ads for ourselves, judging each other in a split second based on photos, sorting through thousands of potential partners, and wrangling them through the precarious funnel of like to match to chat to date.”
“None of those steps exist because anyone wanted them,” McLeod’s pitch continues. “They exist because they were the best the technology could do.”
Like many, many startup founders before him, McLeod asserts that Overtone is “not a dating app,” but something different — in this case, a “service.” That may be a distinction without a difference, but it signals a sloppified shift in the founder’s approach.
While details remain scarce, we do know that Overtone is meant to be a “a voice- and audio-forward service, enabled by AI, that provides highly curated introductions.” What that means in practice is difficult to say. Will the app be manipulating voice messages meant for potential lovers? Does it connect people based on the information they give, or on the information generated by AI?
In his blog, McLeod provides few concrete clues as to what Overtone might encompass, though the app he envisions isn’t exactly inspiring.
“We get to know each person deeply, learning about them in their own voice, hearing their own unique story,” McLeod writes. “And we make only the introductions that are worth making, grounded in relationship science and thoughtful reflection. We transparently explain why we believe someone is a great match. And we leave it up to our daters to meet in person and discover chemistry, with guidance along the way.”
So, if you ever saw some AI-generated fruit slop and thought, “how can I integrate this into my dating life?” Overtone might be just the app for you.
Those environmental burdens also come with a financial one: skyrocketing demand for electricity, which is increasing the cost of utilities for renters and homeowners alike.
According to a report by Monitoring Analytics, an independent monitor for the largest transmission company in the US, PJM, data center demand is expected to drive over $23 billion in customer price increases by 2028. That eye-watering figure, first spotted by Fortune, is a direct result of the country’s old and confusing electrical infrastructure, which ultimately leaves regular people, not the tech industry, holding the bag.
Whether they’re data centers, factories, or other large facilities, Fortune points out that local regulators and transmission companies like PJM have a hard time figuring out who’s responsible for rising energy demand. While a small power line from a data center campus to a nearby substation is easily billed to the data center, figuring out who to invoice gets harder further on down the line, particularly with shared infrastructure like the substation itself, or the long-distance transmission lines connecting to it.
Though utility companies can and do charge data centers for the electricity they use, Fortune observes that the facilities undergirding the AI boom can “fine tune” their electricity use minute-by-minute, gaining an edge that the average consumer could only dream of.
Because many utility companies charge based on a system of “peak demand” — a measure of a customer’s energy usage at the exact moment the collective grid hits peak demand — data centers have gotten into the habit of scaling down right when the grid measures highest demand. That’s not because they’re actually trying to use less power, but because that narrow window is what determines how high their bill will be. In reality, their overall usage remains the same.
This is more or less the scenario that played out in a Bitcoin mining operation in Texas, where the company Riot Platforms agreed to cut its power use on hot summer days, only to ramp back up massively at night. In exchange, the company negotiated for a lower flat electricity rate overall, and even snagged some state subsidies meant to encourage responsible energy use.
Load-shifting like this can genuinely help the grid, but it also means companies with the ability to game the system get rewarded with subsides that an average household will never get. And because companies are merely changing when they suck their juice — not how — subsidized load-shifting ends up being a poor strategy for reducing electrical use overall.
And while data centers are just the most contemporary example of this practice, the shrewd manipulation of US energy markets by for-profit corporations dates back decades. That may not be comforting news for citizens scrambling to hold data center firms accountable in the here-and-now, but it should at least give them an idea of where tostart looking for inspiration.
After years of being engaged, it looks like SpaceX and the Pentagon are finally ready to send out save-the-dates.
On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s formerly-just-rockets company is now in talks with the Department of Defense over providing the military access to its data-center capacity for running AI models, tying the knot on their already close relationship.
People familiar with the matter told the newspaper that the arrangement could cost the Pentagon billions of dollars, but stressed the talks are ongoing and could fall apart.
Computing power is a precious commodity during this ever-raging AI boom, and SpaceX has it in spades. Musk has rapidly built data centers in Memphis, Tennessee and a lot of that capacity hasn’t been tapped into, with Bloomberg reporting that his AI startup xAI is only using 11 percent of its total computing power.
Selling this excess compute would help generate the company some much needed revenue, even if it directly benefits its rivals. SpaceX has struggled to be profitable, losing $5 billion last year. And xAI, which was folded into SpaceX before its IPO last month, burned through $6.4 billion over the same period. All the while, Musk has struggled to sell his Grok chatbot to businesses, as its capabilities lag behind leaders like Anthropic and ChatGPT.
Those collaborations have gotten way bigger in the past year. In May, it won a $2.29 billion Space Force contract to build a network of satellites that could function as a military internet service, connecting weapon systems across the globe. That same month, it was awarded an even larger $4.16 billion contract to provide the technology to build a system that can track missiles and aircraft from orbit.
To be clear, Musk’s companies are far from the only tech leaders to be getting in bed with the Pentagon. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle all have similar deals for providing cloud computing capacity to the military, as well as for providing their AI models, the WSJ noted.
But it’s a particularly hypocritical road to be going down for Musk. When Musk cut off Starlink satellite access to the Ukrainian forces in 2023, he reasoned that he didn’t want SpaceX to be “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” Fast forward to this June, when a Pentagon official bragged that the military used Grok to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran during Operation Epic Fury, sparking a war that killed thousands of civilians in the country.
Yet another domino appears to be falling as part of the Rube Goldberg machine that will eventually pop the AI investment bubble.
Earlier this month, economic forecasters were sounding the alarm that overspending on AI was at a level far more severe than Black Tuesday, the day that jump-started the worst economic catastrophe in the history of the industrial economy. Now, investors seem to be coming to that same conclusion all on their own.
This week, Taiwanese semiconductor giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) posted its second-quarter earnings results, revealing a staggering revenue of over $40 billion — a record-breaking sum for the company.
While that should come as welcome news to investors, the results had the exact opposite effect, sending shares of TSMC stocks tumbling by four percent. That in turn led the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 index to fall by 1.4 percent Thursday, compounding losses from Wednesday, Bloomberg reported.
The issue seems to be TSMC’s revision to its capital expenditure. As the key manufacturer for chip design company Nvidia — arguably one of the most pivotal players in the AI boom — TSMC is a major bellwether for investor confidence around the buzzy tech.
The trouble is that, in addition to posting record revenue, the Taiwanese chip firm raised its 2026 spending forecast to a range of $60-64 billion, up from $52-56 billion. That shift will test how much more spending investors are willing to stomach on AI, a technology that has yet to justify the nearly $1.6 trillion spent developing it over the past decade.
Zooming out, the market’s response seems to indicate a few things. For starters, good news is clearly not enough to maintain confidence in the tech industry’s ability to make AI a financial success. It likewise signals that belief in the AI bubble is no longer confined to a few brave contrarians, but is becoming a mainstream narrative, as investors grow wary of an industry which promises the Moon, yet only seems to deliver hot air.
SpaceX was forced to scrub the 13th test flight of its hulking Starship spacecraft Thursday evening. A computer system automatically aborted the launch as the mega rocket fired up its engines and as the countdown struck zero, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk noting afterwards that “some of the engines didn’t start.”
“Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days,” he added.
The aborted flight is a sobering parallel to the rocket company’s performance on Wall Street. It’s notably the first Starship launch attempt since SpaceX went public last month.
And, perhaps as predicted, investors were not impressed. Shares nosedived to a new record low of $124 before recovering to around $126, well below its IPO price of $135. Shares are down almost 14 percent over the last five days and a whopping 45 percent compared to the all-time high of $225 just over a month ago.
As Bloomberg points out, SpaceX is set to wipe out more than $1 trillion in market value compared to its June 16 record high.
It’s certainly not just the failed Starship launch that’s haunting the company. The Nasdaq composite slid almost two percent in early trading this morning, with spooked investors selling shares of AI chip makers as concerns over a bubble continue to mount.
Now that Musk has merged SpaceX with his AI startup, xAI — which has since been renamed SpaceXAI — the rocket company will have to do extra work to convince investors that its lofty valuation is justified. SpaceX lost almost $5 billion last year, while xAI burned through $6.4 billion over the same period.
Despite the poor stock performance, Wall Street remains extremely bullish on SpaceX. For instance, Morgan Stanley believes the company will reach a price tag of $300 — far more than double its current stock price.
Musk himself is convinced that “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals.”
But now that its latest Starship launch attempt still hasn’t produced a successful sequence of both reaching space and landing in one piece after years of trying, investors are bound to ask some tough questions.
After all, Musk’s entire vision for SpaceX — including enormous AI orbital data centers and colonizing the Moon and Mars — pivots on the success of its enormous spacecraft.
SpaceX bears are smelling blood in the water. As its stock languishes below its IPO price — at press time, $131 — short sellers are going all in against the company, hoping to make a killing off of CEO Elon Musk’s faltering pull on investors.
As CNBC reports citing data from S3 Partners, 185 million SpaceX shares are now sold short, which is nearly 29 percent of its publicly tradable shares, when it was around only five to seven percent three weeks ago.
It’s one of the highest levels of short selling for a company in its first month of being publicly traded, Ihor Dusaniwsky, a managing director at S3, told Bloomberg.
“The recent price weakness has spurred short selling as well as the anticipation of lockups expiring soon,” he added, referring to the additional SpaceX shares that will soon be tradeable and will play a large role in how the stock performs.
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share and seemed to set the tone when its price rose to $150 on its opening day and powered past $200 in the days that followed. Those blockbuster gains were short-lived, however. Its price has steadily declined over the past month, losing a third of its value since its peak.
Investors have questioned Musk’s vision for the company — which includes an ambitious pivot to building orbital AI data centers — while its path to profitability remains unclear. Last year, the company lost nearly $5 billion.
Musk’s decision to combine SpaceX with his AI startup xAI before the IPO has also exposed the rocket company to xAI’s numerous controversies, such as its chatbot Grok being used to generate millions of nonconsensual sexualized images of real people. Before, the public fascination around spaceflight had helped shield SpaceX against anti-Musk sentiment.
Off the back of this waning enthusiasm, short sellers have seen their paper profits surge to $3.88 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
But the next few months could be a key turning point for the stock’s performance — or further sink its hopes. Only a small percentage of SpaceX’s shares were made available when the company went public as a measure to prevent insiders from quickly cashing out and crashing the stock price. But around half of its shares will be unlocked from now until December, dwarfing what’s currently available.
If investors dump those unlocked shares, it could send SpaceX’s stock tumbling. Experts have warned that this period of gradually unlocking stocks could be considerably volatile— which isn’t exactly reassuring, given the company’s recent performance.
With hundreds of billions of dollars still flowing into the tech industry, it’s becoming harder and harder to deny the reality that the US economy is enmeshed in a financial bubble of incredible proportions. As recent polls have shown, the majority of Americans don’t only agree that there is an AI bubble, they’re increasingly concerned about it as well.
One man who isn’t swayed is Japan’s richest investment mogul, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Speaking at his company’s annual corporate conference in Tokyo, Son groused that any talk of an AI bubble is “absurd,” adding that he’s willing to waste trillions of dollars a year for decades if that’s what it takes to make AI a financial success.
“Asking if AI is a bubble is absurd. I don’t think people who ask that question know what AI is about,” Son said to conference attendees, as Reuters reported. “Every year $5 trillion, or 800 trillion yen, you might think that’s a lie, but I am confident that’s what it will cost.”
Son has previously said he thinks it’s “blasphemy against AI if you say it’s a bubble,” claiming that the tech’s “potential will be unlocked.”
But whether the tech industry can ever make AI financially viable is a particularly sensitive issue for SoftBank. The investment bank has lavished ChatGPT maker OpenAI with nearly $65 billion so-far, a spend so enormous that it forced major credit ratings agencies to downgrade SoftBank’s standing over the last few months.
As S&P Global’s analysts wrote when they downgraded SoftBank’s outlook from “neutral” to “negative” in March, the “liquidity of SoftBank Group’s investment portfolio will worsen because OpenAI now accounts for a bigger share of it.”
In particular, S&P warned against the exact path CEO Son seems to be doubling down on.
“The additional investment will further reduce SoftBank Group’s financial capacity, in our view,” S&P’s credit report explained. “We estimate that the additional investment in OpenAI will knock nearly four percentage points onto the company’s [loan-to-value] ratio, worsening this key financial metric.”
These invectives evidently haven’t spooked Son, who once predicted that AI superintelligence would exist by 2035.
Now, he’s adding five years to that prediction: “The business model will be viable because by 2040,” Son said, “if AI revenue makes up 20 percent of global GDP, spending 800 trillion yen a year is a rounding error.”
Insider trading has long run rampant on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. We’ve seen shady accounts profit from accurately predicting the US invasion of Venezuela, resulting in arrests, or correctly guess everything that was going to happen at this year’s Super Bowl half-time show.
Now, in a particularly egregious instance of the worrying trend, president Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator made tens of thousands of dollars by betting on Kalshi what the president would say, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
According to the sources, federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are in settlement talks with Trump’s technical assistant, Gabriel Perez, over allegations that he used inside knowledge to win more than $100,000.
That’s despite Trump being well-known for going on lengthy, off-script tirades during his infamously incoherent speeches.
“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators,” Kalshi’s lead lawyer, Bobby DeNault, told ABC in a statement.
Despite Trump being in the news today about manipulating markets by promoting companies on Truth Social, the White House claimed that it had “strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow.”
“The staffer in question is fully cooperating with the CFTC,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told ABC.
At the time of writing, Perez is still one of the president’s teleprompter operators, despite glaring evidence he was enriching himself on Kalshi. Given the Trump administration’s lengthy track record of throwing its staff under the bus following controversies, we wouldn’t be shocked to see the technical assistant get the axe sooner rather than later.
But we’re not holding our breath over any imminent federal rules and regulations aimed at prediction platforms.
The United States is having something of a national referendum on mass surveillance as of late. Embodied most infamously by video surveillance company Flock Safety, Americans from all walks of life are waging war against the proliferation of the company’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), which the ACLU warns now number in the tens of thousands.
Plenty of communities are organizing campaigns to out-muscle municipal leaders or their cheerleaders on the local police force, and by-and-large, they’re working. Whether in rural towns or sprawling cities, activists who can mobilize citizens to flood council meetings and hold picket signs are finding success. Perhaps most prominently, the Los Angeles Police Department recently allowed its three-year contract with Flock to expire, citing democratic pushback as a significant pressure point.
There’s also another, less-legal side to the anti-Flock sentiment: a rising tide of vandalism. Not content to wait for local officials to strike down ALPR contracts, concerned citizens are taking matters into their own hands by disabling or cutting down Flock camera towers wherever they’re found. But what started as a collection of separate individuals is now rising to the level of a viral phenomenon, as privacy-minded Redditors take to the web to celebrate those who are fighting back with an outpouring of ironic memes and hype reels.
Ground zero for this community appears to be the subreddit r/FlockSurveillance. The forum hosts some 422,000 “activists,” who flood the channel with over 11,000 contributions per week.
Those who’ve been caught and charged with vandalizing ALPRs become digital folk heroes on the subreddit. When news broke that US Air Force engineer Jeffrey Sovern had been charged in connection to the destruction of 13 Flock devices, redditors flooded the post with praise, sharing links to his legal defense fund and encouraging others to donate. (Sovern’s GoFundMe now stands at over $40,000, compared to around $15,440 in early July.)
“I donated to him because those charges are bulls***,” one redditor replied.
In addition to memes, the subreddit has become a destination for serious discussion around ALPRs and surveillance in general. One developer used the forum as a launch pad for their app FlockHopper, a navigation app that helps travelers avoid ALRPs. Others use it to share important developments relevant to the anti-Flock crowd, to get advice on Freedom of Information Act requests, and to dispel misinformation.
“As entertaining a trend as it is, will a few Redditors knocking a few poles over really make a difference?” one redditor asked the group.
“Even a single grain of rice can tip the scales,” a user replied.
Liberty-loving patriots who got themselves amped up about president Trump’s new gas stations are in for a rude surprise.
When the White House announced the “Freedom Fuel” network last week, it bragged that the price at the pump would be just $3.47 per gallon — in honor, of course, of “our 47th president.”
But using data on the gas price tracking platform GasBuddy, The Hill found that the locations had prices that were at least $3.57 per gallon, with multiple videos on social media reflecting the same.
Unless Trump is planning to be president again four decades from now, we’d say this attempt to glorify himself has missed the mark.
Though some Freedom Fuel prices are lower than the national average — which is hovering around $3.80, according to the AAA — they’re still fluctuating as much as what you’d see at a typical gas station. One location in New Jersey climbed past the national average to $3.89 on Wednesday, before falling again to $3.57. Some had prices as high as $4.49.
A White House representative acknowledged that Freedom Fuel wasn’t immune to the routine fluctuations of a volatile market, not to mention local pricing.
“The prices at the gas stations will fluctuate — possibly coming down even further — depending on the market and the location,” the representative told CBS News.
Experts have needled the stunt, convinced that it won’t work out in the long-term.
How Freedom Fuel is subsidizing the cost of its cheap gas is unclear. What company is running the locations is equally opaque. Some customers said that the Freedom Fuel stations were simply existing gas stations that were rebranded.
If nothing else, it speaks to the chintziness of Trump’s self-aggrandizing projects during his second term in office. In his first year, he heavily promoted a meme coin owned by his family, the value of which immediately plummeted. He also tried to hype the launch his own “Trump Mobile” network by teasing a new purportedly made-in-the-US smartphone, which turned out to be a repackaged Chinese device.
Is it not enough to simply watch the beautiful game, unadorned?
These days you might use an AI chatbot to keep abreast of what’s happening in the World Cup. And that AI chatbot, in a sign of the times, might try to shove prediction market odds in your face as another way of ostensibly keeping you up to speed. Because are you really getting the full picture if you don’t know where a bunch of gamblers fall on the outcome?
This is exactly what OpenAI is doing. The Sam Altman-led company quietly struck a deal with Kalshi, which lets you bet on outcomes far beyond sports, to show its prediction market data in ChatGPT, the New York Times reported.
It’s perhaps the inevitable melding of two of the most divisive innovations to come out of the tech industry in recent years.
Searching France and Spain on ChatGPT ahead of their quarterfinal clash on Tuesday returned a graphic that showed that Les Bleus had a 60 percent chance of winning, according to the reporting. (We hope no one acted on that information.) Asking about the England and Argentina game on Wednesday showed that the Three Lions had a 54 percent chance of coming out on top.
Neither side promoted the deal, and the graphic is tellingly light on branding. There are no logos and no outbound links. The only sign of the collab is a small notice in the bottom left corner stating, “Source: Kalshi.”
This is the first partnership of its kind for OpenAI. The company recently updated its help page to stress that users “cannot place bets through ChatGPT,” with the Kalshi data being limited to “queries related to the 2026 World Cup,” according to the NYT.
Zooming out, it’s another sign of prediction markets laundering their image by glomming themselves onto other, more credible brands. In January, Kalshi partnered with CNN to provide its real-time prediction data on the news network’s broadcasts. Its rival Polymarket entered into a similar partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, that same month. Both have also partnered with Google to show their data in search results.
Their fuzzy legal framework, plus their Wild West approach to gambling, has led to numerous controversies. Suspiciously timed bets on massive events like the US’s capture of ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro have raised concerns of rampant insider trading and put pressure on lawmakers to crackdown on the platforms. Arrests have been madein some cases, but these have been rare.
Put simply, for OpenAI, it may be somewhat risky to associate itself with all this baggage, which might be why the Kalshi collaboration is very limited — at least for now.
Many moviegoers this summer are looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated film “The Odyssey.” But have you considered that you could watch a pure AI slop adaptation of the Greek epic instead?
Enter “Odysseus: The Fall,” a fully AI-generated movie from the startup Fountain 0. At 135 minutes long, it will certainly test your patience as it hurls screensaver-grade images at you which look cribbed from better movies, creating the impression that this is really a generic amalgamation of other people’s ideas about what Greek mythology should look like, rather than the creators’ own.
The director, Ash Koosha, told Hollywood Reporter it cost in the “mid-five figures” to make, and openly hopes to cash in on the hype around Nolan’s film.
“We very much hope that Christopher Nolan’s film, ‘The Odyssey,’ is a raging success at the box office, and in some way that our version of the journey of Odysseus might further that success by bringing to theaters those who might not otherwise come out to see the film, simply because they are curious to see the ultimate in human creation and compare it to one man’s collaboration with AI,” Koosha said in a wordy statement.
You have to wonder if Koosha has ever asked Nolan’s thoughts on AI. In a recent interview, the Oscar-winning director was skeptical about the tech, praising Gen Z for “utterly rejecting” for what he described as “AI slop.”
The official synopsis for Koosha’s film sounds suspiciously AI-generated. The film, Fountain 0 says, focuses on “the fractured memory of a drowning man in his final minutes — a voyage that is really a trial, where every monster wears his own handwriting,” per The Hollywood Reporter.
“Stripped of the word ‘clever,'” it continues, “what remains is a man reckoning with what he actually did to get home. It ends where the songs never go: not with a hero’s welcome, but with forgiveness offered by the one person who knows exactly what he is.”
Wears his own handwriting? Stripped of the word clever? We implore you to guess what any of that means.
A short teaser released by the studio promises that the film will be as sloppy as its synopsis suggests. The footage is impressively photorealistic, but has all the aesthetic trappings of AI, with cliche shots and a familiar uncanny sheen. It was all assembled together in three months, Kosha says, and we can tell.
Kosha enthused about the loose production style that AI afforded, allowing him to constantly fine-tune the footage to meet what Variety generously describes as Kosha’s “unconstrained vision.”
“We’re in post production right now. Still, the script is open to interpretation,” Koosha told the trade publication. “Why? Because the risks don’t exist,” he added, cryptically.
Why this half-baked AI slop-tacle is getting glowing write-ups in Variety and THR when there’s plenty of promising indie movies made at shoestring budgets that don’t even get a sniff at recognition is anyone’s guess.
But at the same time, it’s not surprising. In June, The Wall Street Journalcontributed to the hype cycle around the AI-generated flick “Hell Grind” when it erroneously reported it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. In reality, it was shown in another Cannes event out of competition.
Last February, Alice Gilman, the cofounder and chief operating officer of a secretive Silicon Valley longevity startup called R3 Bio, sat for an interview with podcast Skyline Drive. In the interview, she discussed R3 Bio’s aspirations to grow nonsentient humanoid life-forms — from which, in theory, they can grow and harvest organs for implantation into human bodies, or to test future drugs and other treatments without the need for live animal testing.
“It’s just pretty much a heart, lungs, and everything that you would find in a body,” Gilman tells host and journalist Mangesh Hattikudur. “But it’s not technically alive because it’s exclusively the organs. And they’re in this little biological platform that you can test on and you can map out the cross-organ interactions.”
Throughout their conversation, as Hattikudur notes, Gilman refers to these imagined unfeeling meat suits — which will ideally be born without brains — as “organ sacks.” Needless to say, it’s an ambitious (and to many, fundamentally unsettling) concept that raises plenty of nagging bioethical questions — a reality that the company is clearly wrestling with as it entertains the idea in public.
“I try to not be scary to an average person,” Gilman told Hattikudur.
Months after this interview took place, however, Gilman fought to keep it under wraps, as Skyline Drive told Futurism. Why? It’s not exactly clear.
About a week before the podcast episode was set to air, producers for the Skyline Drive reached out to Gilman to fact-check the conversation. To their surprise, Gilman requested that the episode be postponed. Despite describing imagined “organ sacks” in detail, she denied that R3 Bio was working on the concept “for now, period,” and declined to say what it was working on instead.
Gilman didn’t argue that the interview was factually incorrect. Instead, the podcast team said, she vaguely referred to R3 Bio as a “federal asset,” seemingly implying that she had to tread lightly due to government involvement. To be certain, “federal asset” usually implies some kind of ownership or domain over something held by the federal government. Which would imply that the federal government is investing in a company that’s claimed to have worked on “organ sacks.” She also insisted that what she said in her nearly two-hour-long interview was all theory and opinion.
R3 Bio only recently burst into the public sphere. In March, it announced its existence in a buzzy Wired article, in which R3 Bio told the magazine that it was specifically working to create “organ sacks.” Company investor Boyang Wang elaborated on the idea, telling Wired that “replacement is probably better than repair when it comes to treating diseases or regulating the aging process in the human body,” and that “if we can create a nonsentient, headless bodyoid for a human being, that will be a great source of organs.”
But R3 Bio’s ambitions seemingly go far beyond “organ sacks.” A few days after Wired’s piece ran, MIT Technology Review published a deep dive about R3 Bio’s apparent aspirations and its cofounder John Schloendorn — a self-described “biological designer” who has given confidential talks about “full body replacement” and “recent lab progress towards making replacement bodies.” Generally speaking, replacement bodies refer to physical clones that will allow for humans to transplant their heads onto a whole new human body, a still-theoretical idea that’s attracted the fascination of several scientists. (In response to the MIT Tech piece, R3 Bio issued what the outlet described as a “sweeping disavowal” of its findings, and said that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or human beings with brain damage are categorically false.”)
In her interview with Skyline Drive, which took place before Wired or MIT Tech published their respective pieces, Gilman says that the company has “a few milestones that we’re hoping to achieve. The first milestone being we are working on replacing animal testing by using skin stem cells.”
“It’s mostly a stealth project, but the essence of the surface level of what we do is we take skin cells from monkeys and we reprogram them and do some Yamanaka miracles,” she said, referring to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Shinya Yamanaka’s transformational stem cell research, “that result in fully grown organ systems.”
In its March reporting, Wired found that the company had put out a job listing for a veterinarian in Puerto Rico who could “implant embryos, monitor pregnancies and help deliver healthy births” in nonhuman primates. On its website, however, R3 Bio states that it does “not work with live primates.”
Gilman gave the Skyline Drive interview from an island in Puerto Rico. R3 Bio wanted “monkey access,” Gilman told Hattikudur, but didn’t want to put monkeys in cages, a practice that the cofounder believes is unethical; after all, one goal of her company is to eliminate the need for animal testing.
So instead, they picked an island with a lot of monkeys.
“I’m a big animal rights advocate… I don’t want to keep monkeys in cages,” she told Hattikudur. “And there’s an option to have them run around the island with bracelets on.”
“We wanted monkey access and there’s a lot of monkeys here,” she added. “After negotiating with local companies that are supervising them, we can walk up to them, get some of their skin cells.”
During the conversation with Skyline Drive, Gilman also discussed one very big scientific problem the company is facing: that the less sentient an “organ sack” is, the less likely it is to function effectively.
“So do these organ sacks have the stem of a brain?” Hattikudur asked.
“So the mice models can exist with a very limited set of nervous systems… but then there are other constraints on the ability of the organs to preserve themselves,” Gilman responded. “So there’s a way in which you can skew towards social acceptance and make less nervous system, and then when you scoot towards social acceptance, it looks better, but it’s less scientifically feasible.”
“So we are still making observations about how that would work,” she added.
How far along R3 Bio is right now is murky at best. Gilman cryptically noted that she lives in a “contextual world,” and in that world, “just because we don’t talk about a lot of things, that doesn’t mean they’re not happening.”
On its website, R3 Bio says that while it “would be excited by the future prospect of full-scale human organ fabrication,” it views “the science as currently not ready.”
“We have no ongoing work in this area,” the website notes.
During the interview, Gilman remained confident about the positive impact she believes her company will have. She told Hattikudur that her “worst case scenario” is that she saves “millions of lives,” and that’s a “bet worth taking, regardless of any kinds of blows that are gonna come our way.”
We reached out to R3 Bio to ask why it pushed to postpone the podcast, if it’s currently or planning to obtain skin cells from cage-free island monkeys — and if so, how — and if it has indeed stalled its efforts to create the “organ sacks” it’s now repeatedly discussed in the press. We also asked the company how it defines having “no ongoing work” in the realm of “full-scale human organ fabrication.” We did not hear back at the time of publishing.
In an interview with Futurism, Hattikudur said he was “surprised” by Gilman’s push to suppress the interview.
“The company hasn’t been exactly transparent about what they’re doing,” said Hattikudur. “There’s a lot of mix between the hype they’re telling people and what they’ve actually achieved in the lab, which is not very clear.”
“If they were honest that this is what they believe in, and this is what they’re working on, it would actually be less of a big deal,” he added. “It’s more that they awkwardly seem to be hiding something which everyone kind of knows about.”
Rarely has the Los Angeles Police Department found a police toy it doesn’t love. The third-largest police force in the US has major Palantir contracts in place, uses sketchy apps to track minority communities, and routinely sends drones to spy on peaceful protestors.
So when the LAPD ends a contract with a surveillance company because it thinks the technology is too dangerous, you know there’s a problem.
Over the weekend, the police department announced it was abandoning its contract with Flock Safety, the controversial company blanketing the United States in AI-integrated license plate cameras (ALPRs). Though its three-year contract with Flock is just about up, the LAPD says it won’t renew the partnership, citing residents’ concerns over privacy and civil rights, ABC reported.
“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas told ABC in a statement. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”
The news comes just days after our sister publication The Drive‘s Joel Feder reported how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. Officers said they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had erroneously tagged his car as stolen.
After the latest Flock contract news broke, 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General caught the department’s ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which “resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles,” the LAPD’s cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over.
“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”
The OIG report notes that officers are required to “attempt to verify all records prior to conducting an investigative stop,” though it didn’t disclose how many of the 161 wrongful stops were the result of an officer’s failure to do so. Instead, investigators blamed license plate records it says were “not updated in a timely manner,” which “may” lead cops to “act on inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences.”
As 404 flagged, the LAPD approaches potentially stolen vehicles as “high-risk” stops. For the LAPD, these stops require drastic shows of force, including “calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle,” the report reads.
It doesn’t take a large language model to figure out that this is an incredibly dangerous scenario for Black people in Los Angeles, who account for 19.5 percent of those killed by the LAPD, despite making up only nine percent of the city’s population.
Whatever way you slice it, it seems one of the most notorious police departments in the US has finally met its match.
Whenever big data center developers roll into town, their pitch ends up sounding something like this: hand over your land and your resources, throw in a decade of government subsidies, and we’ll give your ailing little burg some jobs, tax revenue, and a shiny new facility to boost the local economy.
Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Not so fast, cowboy.
In theory, more tax revenue means money for schools, roads, and first responders. In practice, states and counties are waving those taxes in order to entice tech companies to set up shop — while existing campuses put major strain on local communities. One analysis found that Georgia, Virginia, and Texas each lose over $1 billion a year to state data center incentives, while at least fourteen states don’t even disclose data center tax breaks in the first place.
The down-stream impacts don’t really materialize either. Researchers at Georgia Tech found that in rural areas, data centers typically employ fewer than 100 permanent workers and are likely to import specialized services from outside the community.
While this can temporarily boost unemployment numbers, any broader, long-term impacts are not guaranteed and are highly dependent on local conditions. As the Georgia Tech researchers explain, “the sweeping job and wage growth often promised during local recruitment efforts is unlikely to arrive on its own.”
But the jobs creation claim is where the pitch really falls apart. In Iowa, the Cedar Rapids Economic Development Center recently disclosed that two ongoing data center projects — one for Google carrying a price tag of at least $576 million and another for Blackstone firm QTS starting at $750 million — are contractually required to create a combined minimum of just 61 permanent jobs.
In other words, for $1.3 billion in combined capital coming into the city, Cedar Rapids is only guaranteed 61 permanent positions, a spend of $21.3 million per job. That’s even worse than the $136 million Ark Data Center going up in Northeastern Ohio, which is projected to create a whopping ten full-time jobs when all is said and done.
And while Cedar Rapids brags that these developments will bring “thousands of construction and trade jobs,” that may not be to the city’s benefit. Not only are data center construction jobs temporary — and therefore highly dependent on the whims of notoriously unreliable data center developers — they’re also putting quite the squeeze on the construction market.
As a recent analysis by the firm Turner & Townsend found, the rush to build so many data centers has created a “two-speed construction market,” where top-dollar AI projects drive up costs for other developments like housing, while sucking up the skilled labor needed in other sectors.
That report found that 87 percent of global construction markets are experiencing shortages of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) specialists, while the cost and lead-time of acquiring MEP components rises. That’s great news for MEP contractors, but the trade-off is higher costs for everything else we might want to build.
That’s before we even mention how disastrous data centers are for the environment — making it all the more insulting that taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for the tech industry’s vastly exaggerated promises.
Shares of Elon Musk’s SpaceX took another beating when trading resumed on Monday, sliding to an all-time low of just under $139, well below its IPO opening price of $150.
It’s now over 38 percent down from its all-time high of $225 three weeks ago, illustrating how rapidly the hype has inverted into widespread skepticism over Musk’s vision.
Following a blockbuster Wall Street debut, the space company has struggled to maintain any degree of momentum as investors continue to ask some very hard questions, including over its major pivot to orbital data centers and its near-term profitability. Despite being valued at almost two trillion dollars, the company lost nearly $5 billion last year.
Beyond some steepening international space launch competition, experts believe SpaceX’s transformation into an “AI play” may be closely related to its Wall Street woes, as the BBC reports.
“Everyone saw SpaceX as an AI story,” CFRA investment research analyst Keith Snyder told the broadcaster.
“With Elon Musk, any company he touches gets people excited,” he added. “But this was also the first time people felt like they were able to invest in something that was being marketed as an AI play.”
In short, the initial enthusiasm surrounding SpaceX’s IPO is firmly behind us.
“If you bought around the first tick you’re definitely underwater,” Snyder told the BBC. “It started to look a lot like a meme stock.”
“If you’re an IPO investor, you’re ok,” Mergermarket analyst Samuel Kerr added. “If you bought in the first few days, you’re not very happy right now.”
Investors remain sharply divided on where SpaceX shares are headed next. Many analysts from major investment banks remain bullish, expecting the stock to make massive gains. Case in point, Morgan Stanley believes the company will reach a price tag of $300 — far more than double its current stock price.
Snyder has a far more muted outlook, expecting SpaceX to fall down to just $115 a share.
Meanwhile, Musk has said he thinks “SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of Earth if we accomplish our goals,” a characteristically ambitious and perhaps delusional argument that assumes a lot of things will go right for the company.
Whether investors will buy into this lofty vision remains to be seen. Given its recent stock performance, it’s far from a guarantee.
“If SpaceX can do all the things it says it will do, yes, investors are sitting on the most valuable company ever,” Kerr told the BBC. “But it’s got a lot of work to do to get there.”
And then, of course, there’s the simple fact that a lot of people just really don’t like the idea of the world’s largest and most powerful social media giant, which has a history of misusing biometric information and other data, facilitating abuse and surveillance in this way — especially as Meta has taken highly controversial steps to infuse facial recognition capabilities into the tech.
The wearables have become so alienating that many people have taken to simply referring to the shades as “pervert glasses.”
In short, it’s no wonder some owners aren’t exactly thrilled to be seen in public while wearing them. Several of them told Engadget that while they were initially excited about the tech, misuse and allegations of privacy violations on behalf of Meta have made them hesitant to use their smart glasses outside of their own home.
“A lot of men and their behaviors have ruined this product,” a travel creator named Danielle told Engadget. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable around somebody wearing them, so I wouldn’t expect anybody to be comfortable around me wearing them, no matter where I am.”
“At this point,” she continued, “they’re like a fancy paper weight.”
Will Kujawa, a freelance video producer, told Engadget that he was “blown away” by the comment section when he posted online about thinking of buying a pair, and that the intensity of the response made him think twice.
“I saw all these comments about if you wear those glasses you’re basically a predator or a creep, and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe it’s not a good idea to have those,'” said Kujawa. “I didn’t really think that through all the way… there are a lot of times where it’s not appropriate to wear cameras on your face.”
Nonetheless, Meta’s smart glasses are vastly more popular than predecessors like Google Glass, and other tech giants are now racing to catch up. Despite the ongoing privacy lawsuit and glasses-enabled abuse, Meta recently launched a much-discussed new campaign with billionaire reality TV star Kylie Jenner. CEO Mark Zuckerberg remains convinced that smart glasses will eventually replace the smartphone.
Should sales continue to rise, the controversy surrounding Meta’s smart glasses is likely to deepen.
Classes are going to look a little different for the University of Chicago’s first year law students.
On Thursday, the law school said it was banning the use of phones, tablets, and even laptops in class for freshman-level courses, as it rejigs its curriculum to be more “AI-resilient” and encourage more deliberate use of the tech.
An announcement from the school didn’t explicitly mention AI cheating. But the changes come amid a backdrop of significant public concern over generative AI’s impact on education, and plunging literacy and numeracy skills among students.
“With AI disrupting higher education, our commitment to rigorous legal education also must mean openness to even rapid adaptation,” the statement said.
Device bans are not unusual in classrooms. Rarely, however, do they extend to laptops, and they’re typically enforced at an instructor’s discretion, rather than as a university-wide policy. The university claims the decision was made after both faculty and students reported positive effects after some professors experimented with device bans.
It’s just one of the few ways Chicago Law aims to tightly control how its students access AI tech. According to its new AI strategy statement, exams will be taken in-class without access to the internet and apps. Students will also have to take part in oral discussions with their professors about their research papers.
It’s far from a sweeping AI ban, however. The school still wants to prepare students for an AI-driven world, with the goal of steering them “toward using AI in ways that promote learning rather than inhibit it,” clinical professor Mark Templeton, who serves on Chicago Law’s AI Committee, said in a statement.
University figures, in fact, go to great pains to make clear they’re not shutting the door on AI completely.
“If you want to use AI as a study partner, if you want to use AI to ingest your notes from class and then create questions to quiz you on the material, that’s great,” said William Hubbard, a professor of law and economics and chair of the AI Committee, in the statement. “That’s not a shortcut. There are ways that using AI can strengthen the learning process and that’s what we’re trying to lean into.”
Chicago Law’s AI crackdown could also be seen as a response to the poor example set by the professionals in the practice. Countless lawyers have been admonished by judges after submitting court filings riddled with clear AI hallucinations, from references to made-up case law to mis-attributed quotes.
And the situation is only getting worse. According to a shocking new BBC investigation, Instagram has been profiting off paid adverts that promote CSAM in India, a shocking revelation that highlights glaring holes in Meta’s efforts to get ahead of the problem.
Earlier this year, Meta announced it was trying to reduce its reliance on third party human moderators by — you guessed it — switching to AI. But considering the latest news, these systems are seemingly inadequate to stem a tidal wave of deeply disturbing content on its platforms.
Some of the incriminating ads reviewed by the BBC include terms like “rape video” and “child video” and link the platform’s users to shadowy Telegram channels, where the material can be bought for as little as $1.
The shocking revelation has sent shockwaves through the country’s government. Over the weekend, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a notice to Meta, calling it to immediately disable all ads and content that promote the sale of CSAM. According to Indian broadcaster DD News, the ministry is giving Meta until July 11 to provide a “detailed explanation.”
After the BBC reached out to Meta for comment, the company claimed to have disabled several adverts and suspended any associated accounts for violating its policies. A Meta spokesperson argued that “no system is perfect, and our review process may not detect all policy violations.”
“We continue to run proactive detection technology on ads once they’re live, and anyone can report an ad to us that they think breaks our rules,” the spokesperson told the BBC.
Telegram also told the British broadcaster it had removed “more than 274,000 groups and channels related to child sexual abuse material in 2026.”
Former Facebook vice president Brian Boland argued that Instagram’s algorithms were designed to maximize profit.
“I think what’s sad and tragic is over time, the trade-off of revenue and user experience became a more core part of the conversation,” he told the BBC.
Boland testified against Meta in a trial that saw a New Mexico jury find the company guilty of misleading users over the safety of its platforms for children. The jury concluded in March that Meta had allowed the proliferation of CSAM, turning its platforms into marketplaces for child sex trafficking.
“Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew,” said New Mexico’s attorney general Raúl Torrez in a statement at the time. “Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
With 1.9 million reports of CSAM on a leading tipline, India is only second to the United States. And children’s rights advocacy groups warn that plenty of crime is still falling through the cracks.
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