THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

Thore Graepel may have been the first human to be vanquished by a superintelligence. In 2015, on his first day as a researcher at Google DeepMind, he was challenged to play against the earliest iteration of AlphaGo—a computer program developed by DeepMind that would prove so effective at the ancient-Chinese game of weiqi (or Go, as it is commonly known in the West) that it changed how humans play it, and then upended the field of AI itself.When Graepel faced it, AlphaGo was just a “baby” project, as he put it to me, and he was an accomplished amateur player. But it still took him down. Then, the following year, AlphaGo—now fully developed—plowed through a number of human champions, ultimately crushing Lee Sedol, widely considered the best player in the world, with a match score of 4–1. This month marked the tenth anniversary of that victory.For decades, developing a program that plays Go at an elite level was an infamous problem in computer science. Many considered it unsolvable—far harder than developing a similar program for chess, in which the supercomputer DeepBlue beat the world champion in 1997. In Go, two players take turns positioning stones on a 19-by-19 grid, and their movements are relatively unrestricted. In chess, which has a far smaller grid, a rook can move only horizontally and a bishop only diagonally, but Go pieces can be placed on any open space. The number of possible Go positions is so high that it cannot be easily expressed in words; it is higher than the number of atoms in the observable universe, and orders of magnitude higher than the number of possible chess games. Today, the technical frameworks and approaches that allowed an algorithm to excel at this board game have translated fairly directly into bots that can write advanced code, help tackle open problems in mathematics, and replicate scientific discoveries from scratch.Generative AI is living in AlphaGo’s shadow. Beyond the actual models, “conceptual things emerged from the whole AlphaGo experience which essentially entered the AI vocabulary,” Pushmeet Kohli, the vice president of science and strategic initiatives at Google DeepMind, told me. In many ways, Go and chess provide ideal templates for understanding how the AI boom has unfolded—and a guide for what it may yet wreak.DeepMind’s innovation was to essentially pair two algorithms: one AI model to propose moves and a second model to judge whether a move… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The global economy has become dependent on the AI industry. Trillions of dollars are being invested into the technology and the infrastructure it relies on; in the final months of 2025, functionally all economic growth in the United States came from AI investments. This would be risky even in ideal conditions. And we are very far from ideal conditions.Much of the AI supply chain—chips, data centers, combustion turbines, and so on—relies on key materials that are produced in or transported through just a few places on Earth, with little overlap. In particular, the industry is highly dependent on the Middle East, which has been destabilized by the war in Iran. A global energy shock seems all but certain to come soon—the kind where even the best-case scenario is a disaster. The war could grind the AI build-out to a halt. This would be devastating for the tech firms that have issued historic amounts of debt to race against their highly leveraged competitors, and it would be devastating for the private lenders and banks that have been buying up that debt in the hope of ever bigger returns.For the better part of the past year, Wall Street analysts and tech-industry observers have fretted publicly about an AI bubble. The fear is that too much money is coming in too fast and that generative-AI companies still have not offered anything close to a viable business model. If growth were to stall or the technology were to be seen as failing to deliver on its promises, the bubble might burst, triggering a chain reaction across the financial system. Everyone—big banks, private-equity firms, people who have no idea what’s mixed into their 401(k)—would be hit by the AI crash.Until recently, that kind of crash felt hypothetical; today, it feels plausible and, to some, almost inevitable. “What’s unusual about this, unlike commercial real estate during the global financial crisis,” Paul Kedrosky, an investor and financial consultant, told us, “is all of these interlocking points of fragility.”[Read: Here’s how the AI crash happens]Perhaps the clearest examples are advanced memory and training chips, which are among the most important—and are by far the most expensive—components of training any AI model. Currently, most of them are produced by two companies in South Korea and one in Taiwan. These countries, in turn, get a large majority of their crude oil and much of their liquefied natural gas—which help fuel… [TheTopNews] Read More.

At the age of 14, Braden Peters began injecting himself with mail-order testosterone to make himself into something he wasn’t. By his account, the experiment ended when his parents, Kenneth and Lauren, discovered his supply and trashed it. Young Braden was apparently undaunted. He set up a post-office box and began ordering new chemicals—he’s since claimed to have taken crystal meth to stay lean—anything that would catalyze his transformation. He began tapping his face with a hammer in pursuit of perfect cheekbones. The goal was entirely superficial: to reshape his physical form so that other men would feel inferior in his presence, and so that women would want to have sex with him.This, at least, is the origin story he’s told and retold over hundreds of hours of livestreams and interviews. In the pre-internet age, Peters might have passed through the world without notice, or at least without fame. But in 2026, at age 20, he is a popular influencer who calls himself Clavicular, after the span of his collarbones. He is among the most recognizable adherents of the radical-self-improvement project known as looks-maxxing. Hew closely to the credo, which includes all sorts of steroids and therapies, and you might even ascend. That’s looks-maxxing terminology for becoming really, really hot.Clav, as he’s known, has had a moment this year. Seemingly overnight, he became wildly popular among the lost boys of the internet—the kinds of people who spend their time watching Nick Fuentes, the white-supremacist influencer, and Andrew Tate, the proudly misogynistic elder statesman of the manosphere, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of rape and human trafficking (he has denied the allegations). In January, Clavicular joined Tate, Fuentes, and the extremist podcaster Myron Gaines at a nightclub in Miami. Videos of the group listening to the Kanye West song “Heil Hitler” went viral; Clavicular was singing along.[Read: I watched 12 hours of Nick Fuentes]As his live videos have been clipped and reposted on more mainstream parts of the internet, Clavicular has continued to gain widespread attention. There’s been a temptation among observers, including the media outlets that have covered this story over the past few months, to understand Clavicular as, essentially, a curiosity. He is a strange, attention-hungry young guy—the latest addition to a streaming ecosystem that celebrates extreme provocation. His peculiar online lingo, derived from the looks-maxxing community, has seeped into the culture. Mogging, meaning “outclassing someone,” and… [TheTopNews] Read More.

When I opened Sora this morning, I was met with a flood of strange and disturbing AI-generated videos. On OpenAI’s video app, I scrolled through fabricated scenes of the Iran war and a barrage of fake Donald Trumps blabbering about Jeffrey Epstein. In my least favorite clip, I watched a man deep-fry an infant. The app lets users create fairly realistic-looking AI-generated clips—including of their own likeness—and then post them on a TikTok-like feed. Not all of them are so unsettling, and for better or worse, Sora has been a steady source of internet virality. Within days of its release, it skyrocketed to the top of the App Store.Now Sora will soon be dead. Yesterday, OpenAI said that it was shutting down the app and terminating public access to its video-generating technology. The decision was seemingly abrupt: Just a few months ago, Disney announced plans to invest $1 billion in OpenAI as part of a licensing deal to bring its characters to Sora, and earlier this week, workers from both companies were apparently still collaborating. (Disney has since retracted its investment plans.) Even some Sora staffers themselves were reportedly caught off guard by the announcement. Online, people eulogized Sora by posting their favorite videos—such as one featuring a column of spinning penguins and another in which Jesus walks on water to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming.After OpenAI launched the Sora app in September, Sam Altman predicted that society was about to undergo a stunning artistic revolution. “Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion,” he wrote online. But such a revolution never materialized. It’s not that people hate AI slop. In fact, if anything, people seem to have a surprising appetite for it—the latest TikTok trend is raunchy telenovelas starring AI-generated fruit. In response to a request for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to a public statement that cites “compute demand” as a key factor in the company’s decision. Generating videos is much more costly than generating text is, and Sora has likely been a real financial drain: In the fall, Forbes estimated that Sora might be costing OpenAI millions of dollars daily, and Bill Peebles, who leads Sora, said that the economics were “completely unsustainable.” (OpenAI declined to comment on Forbes’s estimates at the time.)The decision to quickly spin up a project and then suddenly pull the plug has become a classic OpenAI move.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Shower thoughts are typically best left in the shower. Such as: What might Claude the AI chatbot have to say about Claude Monet?Earlier this month, San Francisco’s de Young Museum unveiled its newest exhibition, “Monet and Venice,” which is dedicated to the impressionist painter’s beautiful and meditative canvases of the floating city. And Anthropic, perhaps having seized on a marketing opportunity, is one of the show’s lead sponsors. Through tomorrow, visitors are able to partake in a temporary “interactive experience” that Anthropic set up in a room adjacent to the galleries. Essentially, the AI firm turned two typewriters into interfaces to chat with Claude. You type in a question about the exhibition, and Claude, based on information about Monet that the museum provided, such as exhibit labels, punches out an answer onto the same sheet of cream cardstock.When I approached one of the Claude typewriters, which were placed next to art books and paintbrushes on top of wooden desks, an employee instructed me on how to proceed and stressed, repeatedly, that I should not prompt the bot with more than eight to 10 words. To get things started, Claude typed onto the paper, “What caught your eye in Monet and Venice? Type a word or short phrase and I’ll tell you more.” Questions I really wanted to ask—about the intentions behind and effects of the seemingly coarse weave of the canvases, or how Monet, obsessed with color, selected his pigments—were hard to pare down on the spot. I wrote that I noticed “shimmering water in varying lights.”[Read: The human skill that eludes AI]Claude paused for several seconds, then typed a response about Monet’s approach to painting water that restated, in many instances verbatim, information that I’d learned from wall text throughout the galleries. I had follow-up questions, but the paper ejected too quickly for me to ask them. In theory, Claude the AI was supposed to deepen my knowledge of Claude the painter. But all the typewriter added to my experience was ink and, I suppose, a piece of reprocessed dead tree to take home.Anthropic’s sponsoring of and installation alongside “Monet and Venice” is the latest in a litany of attempts by AI companies to purchase cultural cachet. Typewriters, stationery, fine-art museums, the quintessential impressionist painter—these are all associated with taste, beauty, and craft, as well as with intentionality and care, the opposite of the ruthless technological efficiency that repels… [TheTopNews] Read More.