For many today, artificial general intelligence — AGI — is no longer just a speculative technology. In certain corners of Silicon Valley and the global AI research community, it has taken on the weight of a prophecy.

Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, was famously said to have led team meetings with the chant: “Feel the AGI!” The phrase captures the mood of a whole subculture: AGI is not merely being built; it is being invoked.

In 2024, Sutskever left OpenAI — whose official mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity — to co-found Safe Superintelligence, a company dedicated to making sure that whatever emerges does not “go rogue”. Superintelligence is the hot new flavour: AGI, but more powerful, more autonomous, more dangerous… and more mystical.

In 2008, Time magazine named 23andMe’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing service as “Invention of the Year.” With just a cheek swab, anyone could access their genetic code to uncover their genetic predispositions and ancestry.

Throughout its tenure, 23andMe provided genetic testing services to more than 15 million customers worldwide and amassed a vast trove of genomic data. In March of this year, after years of failing to turn a profit, the company declared bankruptcy. The fate of millions of people’s highly sensitive genomic data soon became uncertain.

The collapse of 23andMe is more than a business story about a failing biotechnology company — it is a reckoning for how the US government regulates the most intimate form of personal data: DNA.

China's cyber regulator on Saturday issued draft rules for public comment that would tighten oversight of artificial intelligence services designed to simulate human personalities and engage users in emotional interaction.

The move underscores Beijing's effort to shape the rapid rollout of consumer-facing AI by strengthening safety and ethical requirements.

To what extent is Starlink's rapid growth making Capitol Hill lawmakers think about whether the $8.5 billion Universal Service Fund and the $42.45 billion BEAD program are becoming obsolete?

A key Republican senator Friday joined the mounting opposition in Washington to Netflix’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Sen. Tim Scott (R, S.C), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and a close White House ally, said the deal raises “significant antitrust problems” and could hurt “moviegoers, on-camera talent, writers, producers, and everyone who loves the entertainment industry.”

In a letter to the Trump administration’s antitrust regulators, Scott said the $83 billion merger risks hurting consumers by entrenching Netflix, which “seems to have the power to increase prices regularly,” as the dominant streaming app. It would also leave Hollywood showrunners with fewer buyers and “create a crisis for brick-and-mortar movie theatres,” Scott wrote. That echoes concerns by Hollywood groups including the screenwriters’ guild and TV unions.

“The transaction warrants rigorous antitrust review under all applicable antitrust merger and monopolization laws and, to the extent appropriate, a lawsuit to block it,” Scott wrote in the letter, which was sent to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission and reviewed by Semafor.

President Donald Trump said he's withholding judgment about whether Paramount Skydance's hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery or Netflix's deal with WBD should prevail.

At a White House briefing with reporters Monday, Trump was asked if he supports Paramount’s takeover bid for WBD. The president responded, “I don’t know enough about it. I know the companies very well. I know what they are doing. But I have to see. I have to see what percentage of market [share] they have. We have to see the Netflix percentage of market [share], Paramount percentage of market [share]. I mean, none of them are particularly great friends of mine. You know, I want to do what’s right. It’s so very important to do what’s right.”

Americans are noticing private equity roll-ups in everything from youth sports to fire trucks to big tech. And they really don't like it. Is a genuine anti-monopoly revolt finally brewing in 2026?

In the winter of 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, a visitor asked Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis if he thought the worst was over. “Oh yes,” he said, “the worst took place before the crash.”

Brandeis, who had predicted the disaster before it occurred, believed that the sunny lies of the roaring twenties had deluded the American people. The depression, as horrible as it was, as shameless were the business tycoons who caused the crash, was fostering a great debunking of myths. As a result, he believed, America would “gain much from her sad experience.”

There’s a misplaced belief that optimism about democratic politics is sunny and naive, reflecting of joyful circumstances, while cynicism is savvy and realistic, reflecting the grittiness of real life. The truth, as Brandeis knew, is the opposite. Disillusionment, a numbness to injustice, is the great villain of democracy. In the 1920s, after two decades of reform and a great war, the voters had become cynics. As one famous Senator, Hiram Johnson, put it, the people had become “docile, and they will not recover from being so for many years.”

It was during that time of great cynicism that the imbalances and corruption unmasked in the 1930s built up. Only when the public recovered its ability to be outraged, to believe in collective action, that Americans could once again see their society as a free people and act upon it. The actual economic collapse started in 1929, and it continued and worsened even as Brandeis became more optimistic. It was the public learning and regaining its liberty that had to come before the material part could be fixed.

WhatsApp criticised restrictions to its service in Russia on Tuesday, accusing the authorities of trying to deprive more than 100 million of the right to private communications before the holiday season.

WhatsApp’s statement followed a repeat warning by Russia’s communications regulator that it would completely block WhatsApp if it did not comply with its demands to bring its services into line with Russian

It was a Thursday before dawn in Silicon Valley when Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan found himself under attack by the president of the United States. 

"The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately," US President Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform at 4:39am Pacific Time on 7 August. Before he was Intel CEO,  Tan had been a prolific investor in companies in China.

Almost immediately after Trump’s attack, Intel scrambled to lock down time with the president, two people with knowledge of the situation said. That culminated in the most pivotal, roughly 40-minute meeting of Lip-Bu Tan’s decades-long career.

Politics was not Tan's top priority. It had been more than 20 years since Tan, 66, had donated to a presidential election campaign. Though he spoke with a handful of US government leaders, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in April, the Intel CEO did not fill the company's top policy job in Washington for months after its prior holder, a Democrat, resigned.

The Valley forgets to factor in that everything in this universe has its limits.

At Technology Review, senior editor Will Douglas Heaven offers a corrective to the continuous yelp in legacy media that AGI — machines that think like people — is just around the corner:

"For many, AGI is more than just a technology. In tech hubs like Silicon Valley, it’s talked about in mystical terms. Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, is said to have led chants of “Feel the AGI!” at team meetings. And he feels it more than most: In 2024, he left OpenAI, whose stated mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity, to cofound Safe Superintelligence, a startup dedicated to figuring out how to avoid a so-called rogue AGI (or control it when it comes). Superintelligence is the hot new flavor—AGI but better! —introduced as talk of AGI becomes commonplace."

“How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time,” October 30, 2025

Mind Matters News readers who have followed the work of Gary Smith (here, for example) will certainly know better. But fame and fortune lie in spinning the tale that terrifies, not reporting the plain old facts.

Heaven is blunt:

JERUSALEM, Dec 28 (Reuters) - Requests to relocate abroad by Israelis working at multinational companies operating in Israel rose in the past year in reaction to Israel's ​two-year war against Palestinian militant group Hamas, a report showed on Sunday.

The Israel Advanced ‌Technology Industries Association (IATI) found that 53% of companies reported an increase in relocation requests from Israeli employees, noting this was "a ‌trend that may, over time, harm the local innovation engine and Israel's technological leadership."

The tech sector accounts for about 20% of Israel's GDP, 15% of its jobs and more than half of its exports. The hundreds of multinationals in Israel include Microsoft, Intel, Nvidia, Amazon, Meta and Apple.

The law follows mounting evidence linking heavy social media use to youth mental health risks and growing pressure on platforms to act.

The state of New York has passed new legislation requiring social media platforms like X and TikTok to add warning labels to their services.

Much like the warnings found on cigarette packaging, the new law — signed by Governor Kathy Hochul — targets platforms that rely on features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, and algorithmic feeds. These services will now be required to display labels cautioning users, particularly young people, about the potential mental health risks associated with prolonged use.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s description of the company’s quarterly earnings in August 2025 as “once in a generation” wasn’t far-fetched. It surpassed US$1

Satellite direct-to-cellphone (D2C) connectivity now is part of the discussion on how best to serve people where the terrestrial network does not reach. To connect to cell phones used by a particular mobile network operator subscriber, the low Earth orbit satellite operator must use spectrum owned by that MNO for downlinks and uplinks between the satellite and the subscriber’s cell phone.

Consequently, satellite operators have partnered with different MNOs in different countries using the MNO’s spectrum. To wit, SpaceX’s Starlink has deals with T-Mobile (U.S.), Roger Communications (Canada), Optus and Telstra (Australia), KDDI (Japan) and VMO2 (U.K.). Similarly, AST SpaceMobile has partnered with AT&T and Verizon (U.S.), Vodafone (Europe/Africa), Rakuten Mobile (Japan) and stc (Saudi Arabia).

But a curve was thrown at this cogent arrangement. SpaceX bought AWS-4 and H-block licenses from EchoStar, as Inside Towers reported. Now Starlink owns, and has exclusive use of, spectrum to connect directly cell phones that are programmed for those frequencies. Such a development means Starlink could bypass MNO networks altogether. Fueling more speculation, SpaceX filed a trademark application for the ‘Starlink Mobile’ name, Inside Towers reported. This scenario begs the question: Will satellites replace cell towers? 

Not according to AT&T.

FORT HALL (KFF Health News) — Standing atop Ferry Butte, Frances Goli scanned the more than half a million acres of Shoshone-Bannock tribal land below as she dug her hands into the pockets of a pink pullover.

The April wind was chilly at one of the tribes’ highest vistas in remote southeastern Idaho.

“Our goal is to bring fiber out here,” Goli said, sweeping one hand across the horizon. The landscape below is scattered with homes, bordered in the east by snowcapped mountain peaks and to the west by “The Bottoms,” where tribal bison graze along the Snake River.

In between, on any given day, a cancer patient drives to the reservation’s casino to call doctors. A young mother asks one child not to play video games so another can do homework. Tribal field nurses update charts in paper notebooks at patients’ homes, then drive back to the clinic to pull up records, send orders, or check prescriptions.

Three years ago, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes were awarded more than $22 million during the first round of the federal Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program. But tribes that were awarded millions in a second round of funding saw their payments held up under the Trump administration.

David Ellison had counted on the Trump family’s support. Now, they’re out of the deal and out of his corner.

In back-to-back salvos Tuesday, the President and his family distanced themselves from Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery — a rebuke to owner David Ellison’s attempt to leverage relationships with the White House to close the $108 billion takeover effort.

President Trump Tuesday afternoon said he had been “treated [...] far worse” by the Ellison-owned CBS since the family closed on a deal for CBS parent Paramount. “If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”

Less than two hours after that message, Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners said it was backing out of the Paramount-led bidding consortium, which also includes three Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Apollo.

If Warner Bros. Discovery was only a movie house, it would have had one of its best years ever. Two of its films (One Battle After Another and Sinners) are front-runners for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it had a string of critical hits and box-office successes with Superman, Weapons, and A Minecraft Movie. But the company is a media conglomerate that counts HBO and CNN among the brands it owns, and it took on lots of debt; its box-office success in 2025 is not enough to make up for its financial struggles.

This year, the company found itself up for auction. After over a hundred years as a major Hollywood studio, Warner Bros. fate seemed unclear. Now months into a process that Netflix formally won, Paramount still hopes to come out on top with a hostile bid. This week even, the billionaire Larry Ellison, whose son, David, controls Paramount, offered a personal guarantee for the deal.

The bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery is a business story that morphed into a future-of-entertainment story and then recently took an ominous turn into politics. President Donald Trump weighed in, saying he would be “involved” in deciding who wins, which put every party on alert that Trump might be particularly watching what happens to CNN, a cable network he has called “the least trusted name in news” and a “political arm of the Democrat Party.”

Solar and wind are beating new power demand, steelmaking is slowly getting off coal, and more clean energy victories are clear in these charts.

In October, Dr. Mallik Tatipamula, the CTO of Ericsson, and Dr. Vinton Cerf, a VP and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, published an article in IEEE Spectrum that postulated that there will be seven stages of the Internet over time.

They say that we have already experienced the first three stages, which include the original Internet, integrating the Internet into mobile devices, and extending the Internet to connect to Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The article postulates about what comes next.

The following are the seven stages:

Town Square Television offers local community cable programming in Northern Dakota County—but that’s a challenge with the decline of cable.

“We’re trying to shift our model,” said Beth Baumann, the new executive director of Town Square Television. “I don’t want to get to survival mode. I want to thrive.

Who Pays for Community TV?

Cable companies used to fund public access and community television through franchise fees on the cable routed through public right of way. But with people cutting the cord and shifting to streaming, those franchise fees are dwindling.

The shift: 80% of households used to have cable TV, now it’s down to 24%.

“We’ve seen the steady decline in franchise fees and PEG (public, education, and government access) fees, that has been our main source of funding,” said Baumann. “So now we’re leveling up on the Town Square side to try to tap the other ways to be funded.”

That means donations, sponsorships, grants, and more. Town Square will lean into grant funding, specifically arts and especially history grants where they’ve already had some success. Last year, Town Square won an Emmy for their story on the 50th anniversary of the Bellows Court apartment explosion.