Elon Musk Is Cashing In on the AI Romance Boom
Two characters have been added this week to Grok, the chatbot developed by Musk's company xAI, including a flirtatious girl with all the hallmarks of a manga character: enormous eyes, thigh-high fishnet stockings and an exaggerated hourglass figure. Musk spent the early hours of Wednesday promoting the character on X, pointing to how Grok was climbing the app store ranks across the world.
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Yahoo
8 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump readies new hands-off AI 'action plan' that offers a split with Biden
President Trump is expected to release an AI "action plan" on Wednesday that reportedly outlines how the US can win in the global race to develop artificial intelligence by fostering a hands-off regulatory approach to the technology. Media reports suggest the document will likely mark a split from Biden administration policies, which favored restrictions against exports of AI chips and steps to ensure AI was not used to spread misinformation. The White House, according to a Reuters report that cited a summary of the draft action plan, will likely discuss how to make it easier to export AI technology abroad and reduce barriers to its development in the US. That may include everything from faster permitting for building AI data centers to more use of AI at the Pentagon to identifying which federal regulations slow down AI and even withholding federal funding from states with tough AI laws already in place. Trump is expected to discuss the topic during a speech at a Wednesday event titled "Winning the AI Race," organized by White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and his co-hosts on the "All-In" podcast. The strategy announcement from the White House is the outcome of an order Trump signed in his first week that asked for an AI action plan to "sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security." Some executive orders are also expected this week, according to Axios and the Wall Street Journal, that would promote the exports of chips and AI technology to countries considered friendly to the US. There may be an order that targets "woke AI," according to The Wall Street Journal. It would target AI developers that the administration believes create liberally biased algorithms and block them from serving as federal contractors. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment. Two constitutional law scholars who talked with Yahoo Finance said it is doubtful the "woke AI" measure will withstand legal scrutiny. "If you sanction software that is liberal, but not software that is conservative, the challenge will be that the executive order is content-based discrimination," said UC San Francisco School of Law professor Rory Little. "I don't even know how you tell if software is liberal or conservative," Little said, adding that the First Amendment protects intellectual property as forms of speech that the government may not single out for punishment. But the order's constitutional viability may not matter in the short term for companies like Amazon (AMZN), Anthropic ( Google (GOOG), OpenAI ( Microsoft (MSFT), and Perplexity ( all of which are vying to supply AI systems to the government. Even if the order is met with legal challenges, AI developers might not have time to wait out a court solution. "A lot of people are trying to make deals with the Trump administration, so they view these executive orders not as law, but as the opening bid in a negotiation," Little said. "If you're an AI company, like Google, you're probably going to do your best to negotiate something that permits whatever you want to do to go forward," he added. "And you could care less what atmospheric politics might look like, so long as you're making money on your software." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday at a Federal Reserve banking conference in Washington, D.C., that his company now has lots of government work. "We are increasingly working with the government to roll out our services to lots of government employees," Altman said. If such an AI order is issued and then challenged, a court fight is likely to resemble those in multiple ongoing lawsuits against two other DEI-focused executive orders issued by Trump during his first days back in office. Those earlier orders directed all federal contractors to certify that they do not operate DEI programs in violation of anti-discrimination laws. They also shuttered government offices and employment positions focused on DEI. David Coale, a partner with the law firm Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann, said the executive orders get into an area called the "unconstitutional conditions" doctrine, which prohibits the government from conditioning a grant on the exercise of constitutional rights. "This [type of] proposal goes too far," Coale said, explaining that tying the eligibility to an AI's liberal bias presents "serious First Amendment issues." Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed. Error while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data Error while retrieving data
USA Today
9 minutes ago
- USA Today
Elon Musk is building a supercomputer in Memphis. Not everyone is loving it.
The images of xAI's Colossus supercomputer versus Memphis' Boxtown neighborhood are stark. David versus Goliath. Power versus pride. Far from the media spotlight where Elon Musk feuds with a sitting president and talks of starting a new political party, a largely unknown controversy is playing out in Memphis as the world's richest man builds what he calls the world's biggest supercomputer. The project is happening in Boxtown, a South Memphis neighborhood that is 99% Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Nearly half of Boxtown's 2,865 residents have annual household incomes below $25,000 a year, yet many are homeowners. The images of xAI's Colossus supercomputer versus Boxtown are stark. David versus Goliath. Power versus pride. The indeterminate future of artificial intelligence versus the tawdry reality of majority African American neighborhoods becoming home to industrial polluters. Clumsy communications and lack of transparency have eroded the project's political support. Answers to the public's questions about environmental damage have been obscured by nondisclosure agreements with public agencies, redacted public documents and explanations coming from the Chamber of Commerce and mayor's office instead of from xAI itself. Michelle Taylor, the Shelby County Health Department director, has criticized the project's lack of transparency, saying her department was kept out of the loop in the early stages of its development. Why is a Memphis community fighting Elon Musk's supercomputer? After months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the Greater Memphis Chamber announced in June 2024 that xAI would build the "world's largest supercomputer" in Memphis. Chamber representatives have often acted as de facto spokespeople for the project, rather than allowing xAI officials to respond for themselves. The project, which has increased in scope since that announcement, has raised many questions about air pollution, water usage and the equity of government incentives for the project. Neighborhood residents and environmental advocates have fought back, but it isn't easy. The swiftness of the project's progress leaves few options for stopping it. Desperate opponents like the Southern Environmental Law Center and NAACP plan to sue, and the nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution has organized to fight the project. Opinion: AI is changing our world. At what point will it change our reality? Colossus critics cite sweetheart deals and environmental racism A leader for the opposition group is state Rep. Justin Pearson, a Democrat from Memphis, who became nationally known when the Republican supermajority in the legislature expelled him after he used a megaphone during a gun control protest on the House floor in 2023. Pearson, who was reappointed to the state office by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners, brings star power to his role with anti-supercomputer protests. He says African Americans are 75% more likely to live near toxic hazardous waste facilities and have higher cancer rates than White Americans. xAi in Memphis: Unpacking how Elon Musk's xAI supercomputer project in Memphis unfolded over the past year Already located near Boxtown are some of the region's largest emitters of hazardous chemicals: Tennessee Valley Authority's Allen Combined Cycle Plant, Valero Memphis Refinery and Nucor Steel. Yet, the nearest air monitoring station is 9 miles away in downtown Memphis. Fueling the opposition is a lack of convincing answers about issues like whether xAI should receive an air-emissions permit for 15 natural gas turbines as a backup energy source, and whether the turbines that have been operating at the site for a year are legal. Supercomputer's opponents face a colossal battle The addition of Colossus in Memphis raises two inconvenient truths: the city's failing grade in air quality (in 2021, the American Lung Association gave Shelby County an "F" grade) and charges of environmental racism in light of the history of locating polluting industries in African American areas of the city. When Memphis Mayor Paul Young hired a firm that concluded there were no dangerous levels of pollutants in Boxtown, critics dismissed it as a political stunt since the results supported the mayor's point of view. Memphis Community Against Pollution has announced that it will pay for air quality sensors for the Boxtown area. Young and others have made much of the fact that Colossus will pay $33 million in city and county taxes. But while the mayor says Musk's operation will get no tax breaks, the $12 billion project is assessed for property taxes at $2.2 billion. In addition, my research found that xAI buys electricity − enough for a city of more than 200,000 − from the local utility at the industrial rate of $64 per megawatt hour. Meanwhile, residents of Boxtown and all other residential customers in Memphis and Shelby County pay almost twice as much, at $122 per megawatt hour. In the rush to support the project, there's been little public discussion about tying the Memphis brand to Musk and becoming home to Colossus, which serves as the engine for what he has called the development of 'truth-seeking' systems. Yet, there's an air of inevitability about the completion of Colossus as it becomes a reminder about how powerful teams of lobbyists and public relations consultants get what they want, while grassroots groups can offer little resistance. Regardless of xAI's success in Memphis, it's clearly created division in a city in need of harmony. Tom Jones is the principal of Smart City Consulting, which focuses on public policy development and strategic planning. He writes a monthly column for Memphis magazine and has written the Smart City Memphis blog for 20 years.
Axios
9 minutes ago
- Axios
What news sources AI chat bots read
News stories or content generated by external sources like journalists, influencers, customers, or the general public are the top sources for AI bots like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, a new Muck Rack report finds. Why it matters: AI is increasingly being used for search, and how a brand, company or public figure shows up in AI-generated responses could impact their ability to attract customers, investors and talent. By the numbers: Muck Rack input more than 1 million realistic user prompts into ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude and analyzed the citations. 96% of links cited by AI sit squarely within the purview of communications and corporate affairs, per the report. 37% of inquiries cite external blogs or content (those not owned by the company or product targeted in the query) and 27% cite news stories produced by journalistic entities. 9% cite owned content and government or NGO websites, 7% cite aggregators and 6% cite academic research. Social media and marketing content each make up 2% of the results, while press releases make up 1%. Between the lines: A key difference between AI-generated search results and traditional SEO is that paid marketing and sponsored links rarely populate. "Based on the data, we can see that the models are pretty clearly avoiding marketing materials," says Matt Dzugan, senior director of data at Muck Rack. "Essentially, the models are trying to earn the trust of [their] audience and don't want to regurgitate salesy materials." Instead of paid marketing, owned content like thought leadership, fact sheets or corporate blogs "seem to be the sweet spot for for getting your content cited by these models," he added. State of play: Fact-based queries and prompts are more likely to cite news outlets in the responses, the report found. The outlets most cited include Reuters, the Financial Times, Time, Axios, Forbes and the Associated Press. Of note, most of these outlets have publisher partnerships with OpenAI, however many are also cited regularly across other LLMs. Yes, but: New media, like Substack newsletters and podcasts, are showing up too, but in more indirect ways. As of now, this content is populating through social citations. For example, if "the podcast is on YouTube, and then YouTube generates a transcription file, then Google, in particular, will cite it," says Dzugan. "If you're a PR person evaluating which podcasts to go on, it's important to know that if you go on one that also publishes on YouTube, you have a better shot at influencing Google Gemini than you would with an [audio only] podcast," Muck Rack CEO Greg Galant added. LinkedIn, Reddit and Glassdoor — places where user-generated content and reviews can be found — can also influence an LLM's response, he added. Driving the news: To handle this new reality, Muck Rack will launch Generative Pulse, a tool the monitors how brands are represented in generative AI platforms, says Galant. "In this new GEO [generative engine optimization] world, recent content or news stories are what's driving the answers," says Galant. "Journalism and [third-party] articles really affect the outcome, and that impacts the work of the PR function much more than marketing," he added. Zoom out: Citations can change based on how the query is asked and each LLM has its own habits when responding, says Dzugan. For example, the report found that Claude uses media outlets the least and is more likely to pull from academic, federal and technical sources. ChatGPT is the heaviest user of news citations, pulling from mainstream publications like Reuters, AP, FT, Time and Axios. Zoom in: Niche websites, trade publications and web encyclopedias are also permeating AI-generated responses, the report finds. Wikipedia is cited most across all industry-specific inquiries, according to the Muck Rack report. Scientific and medical databases are frequently cited in AI-generated responses relating to health care and education, while government sites are most likely to inform responses related to energy. Inquiries about government will see federal agencies cited in responses from Claude and Gemini, while ChatGPT incorporates news sources as well. The bottom line: These citations are not random, says Dzugan. "If you study it, you can find the patterns and identify [the] niche journalists, publications or even which Wikipedia pages to prioritize within your industry." "It's on the comms professionals to learn the patterns and then take action on them," he added.
