Today's Hallucination HQChina's AI Labs Have Been Doing Their Homework — Specifically, Copying ItAnthropic has published a report accusing Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek of running persistent "distillation" campaigns — essentially feeding Claude's outputs back into their own models to absorb its capabilities without the inconvenience of building them from scratch. The attacks have escalated as AI competition intensifies, which is a polite way of saying that when billions of dollars are at stake, some companies apparently treat intellectual property as more of a suggestion than a rule. Source: TechCrunch
Universal Music and ElevenLabs Walk Into a Recording Studio. The Musicians Are Optional.Universal Music Group is partnering with AI audio company ElevenLabs to build a platform where users can remix, mashup, and reimagine tracks from UMG's licensed catalogue. It's a multiyear deal, and notably, it's the label choosing to monetise AI music tools rather than sue them — a meaningful pivot from an industry that spent three years treating AI like a parking ticket it could argue its way out of. Whether artists see meaningful revenue from it remains, as ever, the interesting question. Source: The Verge
Jensen Huang Would Like You to Know That 70% Growth Is Perfectly Normal, Thank YouNvidia's CEO Jensen Huang has explained why his company expects to grow by 70% next year, which is the kind of number usually reserved for startups or accounting errors. Huang's argument: Nvidia has positioned itself across virtually every layer of the AI stack, from chips to software to infrastructure. He also addressed concerns that Nvidia's deals are circular — that its customers are essentially buying Nvidia products with money made by selling Nvidia products — and denied it, with the serene confidence of a man whose net worth ends in eleven zeroes. Source: TechCrunch
The World's AI Runs Through One Corner of Virginia. That Corner Keeps Going Dark.On July 22nd, a transmission line fault in Ashburn, Virginia — home to the world's densest cluster of data centres — yanked more than 3 gigawatts off the grid in seconds. It wasn't a first. Two years prior, a single failed surge arrester took down roughly 60 facilities in the same region. The upshot, per MIT Technology Review, is that AI's energy problem isn't just about quantity of power — it's about the fundamental architecture of how that power is delivered. Building the most sophisticated technology in human history on infrastructure that trips over a blown component is, to put it diplomatically, a design consideration worth revisiting. Source: MIT Technology Review
Slack Now Lets You Build Entire Reports Inside a Chat, Ensuring You Never Leave SlackSalesforce — which owns Slack — is launching "Slackforce Surfaces," a feature that lets users describe what they need to Slackbot, which then pulls from relevant conversations and data to generate interactive reports, dashboards, polls, presentations, and microsites, all without leaving the app. It is, by any measure, genuinely useful. It is also, by any measure, an aggressive attempt to ensure that Slack becomes the only software your company ever opens again — a strategy so straightforward that you have to admire its honesty. Source: The Verge
As always, the AI is learning fast. Whether it's learning the right things from the right people remains, as this newsletter frequently demonstrates, an open question.
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