Free Republic

The challenge the entire industry faces is that in every single location, I don't care whether it's Michigan, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, if you announce you're doing a data center, all of a sudden you get a plethora of misinformation, like it's three times the size of Manhattan, it's so hot it's gonna melt a hole in the ground, the amount of water it's going to use, it's gonna suck the ocean dry. All of this stuff is just not true. I think as we get the real facts out, we'll turn this around. There seems to be an...

U.S. equities gained on Thursday, boosted by a rebound in chip stocks after recent pressure, after President Donald Trump said that he has called off the strikes on Iran scheduled for this evening. The S&P 500 gained 1.1%, while the Nasdaq Composite added 1.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 712 points, or 1.5%. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were last trading around the flatline at roughly $90 a barrel. Oil prices had risen earlier in the day after President Donald Trump said in a post on Truth Social that the U.S. will be attacking Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT.” He...

I very rarely post here, it seems I am not PC enough in the particular flavor of this site. But I don't know of a better venue to make this observation. Large companies have crafted "Systems" that they no longer have control over. They are utterly unable to do what should be simple and routine task as "The system" will NOT ALLOW them. I am going to be specific to the case I have been fighting for what is now months. But I am sure that it is not unique, corporate business tend to adopt similar models and technology. Several...

Musk predicts AI will write machine code directly by year-end, a shift TSLA's autonomy roadmap and MSFT's $37B AI business are already built around. Anthropic reports Claude authored over 80% of its merged code by May 2026, with engineers merging 8x more code daily than in 2024. AI-related layoffs in 2026 have already surpassed all of 2025's total, with software engineers and tech workers cut first. SNIP

In this episode, John and I got to do a real deep-dive with Elon. We discuss the economics of orbital data centers, the difficulties of scaling power on Earth, what it would take to manufacture humanoids at high-volume in America, xAI’s business and alignment plans, DOGE, and much more. Elon Musk -- "In 36 months, the cheapest place to put AI will be space" | 2:49:45 Dwarkesh Patel and Stripe | 1,628,229 views | February 5, 2026

Silicon Valley’s AI millionaires are paying eye-popping rates of up to $6,000 an hour — and $23,000 a day — for escorts who can discuss GPUs, artificial intelligence and the future of humanity before heading to the bedroom. A small but lucrative class of so-called “nerd-first” escorts is cashing in on the tech industry’s wealth explosion by marketing themselves as intellectually curious companions who can match clients’ obsession with AI, cryptocurrency, longevity and other futurist pursuits. There are only a handful of escorts operating in the niche, according to Forbes, but some are commanding rates that dwarf those of traditional...

This college commencement season — from north to south, east to west, state universities to the Ivy League, law schools to military academies — one trend stood out: speeches about AI. Some speakers praised the technology and were booed; others denigrated it and were cheered. But one thing was clear, it’s all anyone can talk about. At least 25 graduating classes have heard some version of the spiel. Yes, talk about AI is timely, but it’s also not all that helpful. Nobody knows where the technology is headed, and students probably have a better grasp of that future than the...

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has secured a massive infrastructure agreement with Google just days before its planned IPO, with the search giant agreeing to pay $920 million per month for AI computing capacity. CNBC reports that according to a regulatory filing, Google will utilize approximately 110,000 Nvidia graphics processing units along with central processors, memory, and additional components located within SpaceX data center facilities. The contract runs from October 2026 through June 2029 at the full monthly rate of nearly a billion dollars a month, with capacity scaling up through September at a discounted fee. A Google Cloud spokesperson communicated to...

President Trump denied Friday that he campaigned on avoiding “endless” wars, as he seeks to reach a deal to end hostilities with Iran. “I didn’t promise anything. I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war,” he told host Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in an interview that aired Sunday. “We’ve been doing this for three months,” Trump added, referring to the Iran conflict that began on Feb. 28. “Much of it has been under… a pretty good form of ceasefire.” The president later said that he would “not have built the strongest military in...

President Donald Trump said on Friday that he is talking with the leaders of the largest artificial-intelligence companies about having the government acquire “pieces” of their firms. It could prove to be among the most significant federal interventions in the private sector in modern history. The president’s comment confirmed NOTUS reporting that he has been discussing the idea with tech executives for more than a year. He said he is aiming to invite “all of them” to the White House as soon as next week. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has talked to Trump about having shares of AI...

A tech investor who shaped the Trump administration’s pro-industry artificial intelligence policies will depart the White House at the end of the month. Sriram Krishnan has informed administration officials that he plans to leave his post as the White House senior policy adviser for AI to start an outside institution that will influence technology policy, according to a person familiar with his plans.

I started out asking Copilot about a news story that identified an organization as racially segregated, and ended up having a very interesting discussion about AI's political biases. I've skipped the initial parts of the conversation and omitted identifying details, because I don't know it's not racist, and that's not the point of posting this here. My point is to identify the grave situation conservatism is in with AI, and how to have useful discussions anyway. User: Since journalists have been dominated by those whose politics align with a single political party [rephrased], do you really think it's fair to...

For most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work. Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for. Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is...

Anthropic says AI could soon improve without human intervention Development pause will allow society to deal with AI's implications, startup says Previous attempts to halt AI progress have not been successful SNIP

SpaceX has just announced that they have entered into a $920 million per month agreement with Google to provide compute capacity, according to a new filing. "On June 5, 2026, we entered into a Cloud Service Agreement with Google with respect to access to compute capacity. The customer has agreed to pay us $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029, with capacity ramping up through September at a reduced fee. The compute capacity provided includes approximately 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs, CPUs, memory, and other related components. After December 31, 2026, the agreement may be terminated by either party...

Anthropic is proposing that the world’s top artificial intelligence companies come up with a coordinated way to pause development of advanced AI systems, warning the technology is improving so quickly there’s a risk humans would lose control. The company behind the Claude chatbot said in a blog post Thursday that as cutting-edge AI gets increasingly faster at carrying out tasks, “it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause” its development. Anthropic said its internal research institute plans to explore the issue in collaboration with others and “take actions” to help build the...

For most of AI’s history, humans drove every step in its development cycle. But at Anthropic, we are delegating a growing share of AI development to AI systems themselves, which is speeding up our work. Taken far enough, and given enough compute, that trend points to an AI system capable of fully autonomously designing and developing its own successor. This is called recursive self-improvement. We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for. Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is...

College is extraordinarily expensive and becoming less useful, and those who insist otherwise are working from a model of the labor market that stopped describing reality sometime in the 1990s. Four-year courses at private institutions often cost more than $70,000 a year, and it should come as no surprise that student debt has tipped over $1 trillion . This situation is ridiculous for a film student, but it is also ridiculous for a computer science graduate whose program could not keep pace with the industry it was preparing him for – and who learned more in four months on GitHub...

Co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, who serves as the cloud giant's CTO, has been part of the tech industry's furniture for decades now. Looking ahead, he projects the rise of technologies such as AI, drones, and additional monitoring systems. “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on." — Larry Ellison, September 2024 The modern surveillance state Ellison's warning came during an hour-long Q&A at an Oracle financial analyst meeting in September 2024. This world that Ellison describes revolves around AI technologies processing huge amounts of video footage from the explosion...

Monterey Park voters made history Tuesday by passing the first permanent ban on data centers nationwide. Voters are on track to overwhelmingly approve the ban, with 86% in favor according to the latest ballot count, leading organizers to claim victory (the official results won’t be certified until July 10). Where other jurisdictions have passed temporary measures to curb the controversial development of these massive server farms, Monterey Park voters’ decision in this election will keep developers at bay unless voters want to revisit the decision in a future election. “It really goes to show the power of community,” Monterey Park...