My main newsletter, Complex Machinery, includes a section called "In Other News..." It's where I list one-liners about interesting articles that didn't fit into any segments.

You can think of this list as a version of In Other News, but with a wider remit than Complex Machinery's "risk, AI, and related topics."

Above the fold

1. According to one report, the genAI hyperscaler crowd needs to generate $1 trillion a year in order to turn a reasonable profit. Yes, "trillion" with a T. (Forbes, republished at Yahoo! Finance)
2. Related, the field's datacenter dreams apparently face a $4.2 trillion-dollar shortfall. (Bloomberg)
3. Three years on from the devastating attacks in Israel, a new story emerges: Egypt's spy chief allegedly went to Israel in-person to deliver a warning that was not heeded. (The Atlantic)
4. One film director has decided – and I quote – "I don’t need black actors" because genAI can fill those roles instead. (The Telegraph)
5. In my latest newsletter, I explored genAI's messy, needlessly-destructive relationship with the workplace. (Complex Machinery)
6. As if customer service jobs weren't tough enough, now people are sending their genAI bots to handle the calls. (Business Insider)
7. That is not to be confused with Meta's Muse AI agent, which is allegedly three call centers stacked in a trenchcoat – as in, humans make the phone calls while genAI gets the credit. (404 Media)
8. An ode to, and tough love for, improv comedy. (The Baffler)

Special section: The Financial Times

I can always rely on The Financial Times to provide solid coverage across a variety of topics. This past week the reading was even better than usual. Which says a lot.

• genAI hyperscalers are flooding the debt markets – and squeezing out other companies in the process. (FT)
• A look how Britain's resilience has waned over the years, plus what it'll take to bring it back. (FT)
• To get around sanctions, Russia has allegedly turned to large-scale money laundering. (FT)
• One unit of the German military goes into a startup-like mode to source weapons for Ukraine. (FT)
• Some of those same hyperscalers are performing financial magic to move debt off of their balance sheet. (FT)
• The founder of upstart bank Revolut describes how the company keeps risk to a necessary minimum. (The phrase "‘effectively zero risk" should sound alarm bells. But some of the ideas therein seem workable.) (FT)

The rest of the best

• The latest misuse of genAI: putting it in charge of medical insurance claims. (Ars Technica)
• OpenAI has, allegedly for Safety Reasons™, decided to stop training some of its models. (Gizmodo)
• Yet another OpenAI bot has gone on the rampage. This time it hit an Australian government website. (The Independent)
• LinkedIn wages war against fake users and fake credentials. (Les Echos 🇫🇷)
• Stanford University used genAI to modify a promotional image. Specifically, it slimmed down one student and changed the ethnicity of another. (SF Chronicle)
• Software developers are turning themselves into "meat proxies" by unthinkingly giving genAI the wheel. (Futurism)

Did I miss anything?

Have something I should read? Send the link my way.