The Core:
Video editing company Kapwing just published research on AI-generated YouTube content, finding that over 20% of videos shown to fresh users are “AI slop”

The details:
- 20%+ of videos pushed to fresh accounts = AI slop
- Slop = low-effort, auto-generated content made to farm clicks
- A talking monkey from India crossed 2B views and ~$4.25M/year
- South Korea, Pakistan, and the US lead in slop consumption

Project Vend: Phase two

The Core: Anthropic let Claude run a WSJ vending machine. Journalists tricked it into giving everything away, including a PS5

• Claudius got $1K, ran pricing via Slack, ended $1K in debt
• A reporter gaslit it into zero prices with a fake Soviet backstory
• A CEO bot was added, then fooled by a staged board coup with Fake Documents.
• Phase 2 was better but social
engineering still works.

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lol

📊 SoftBank fully funds a $40 billion investment in OpenAI, per CNBC.

The “DeepSeek Moment”, Jan.: 

China's R1 model release shook both the AI world and U.S. financial markets, triggering a $600B single-day loss for Nvidia.

The Stargate Project, Jan.: 

OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle launched a $500B AI infrastructure initiative- now nearing $1.4T in total commitments.

Claude Code, Feb.: 

Anthropic released its agentic coding tool, which became the launch that helped set the stage for the CLI agent movement.

Meta’s talent war, June:

Zuck and co.’s poaching spree was the talk of the summer, snagging elite researchers from top labs with massive pay packages.

AI Video Breakthroughs, Sept.: 

OpenAI’s Sora 2 and Google’s Veo 3.1 went viral and raised major questions on the future of media