In an Instagram video posted on April 1, lifestyle influencer Melissa Strahle poses outdoors before an American flag as soft instrumental music plays. “AI lets me focus on what matters most,” she tells her 1.4 million followers. “We need to invest in American-made AI to ensure America leads the way in innovation and job creation.” … Read more
The world’s top AI research conference, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems—better known as NeuroIPS—became the latest organization this week to become embroiled in a growing clash between geopolitics and global scientific collaboration. The conference’s organizers announced and then quickly reversed controversial new restrictions for international participants after Chinese AI researchers threatened to boycott … Read more
George Zhang thought OpenClaw could make him rich, even though he didn’t really understand how the viral AI agent software worked. But he saw a video of a Chinese social media influencer demonstrating how it could be deployed to manage stock portfolios and make investment decisions autonomously. Zhang, who works in cross-border ecommerce in the … Read more
move over Sora 2, there’s a hot new AI video model in town. In early February, ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.0, a major upgrade to its flagship video model, which had previously remained fairly obscure. Its powerful capabilities immediately shocked the AI ecosystem in China, even among audiences who had once been skeptical of AI-generated video … Read more
Hearing someone talk about digital censorship in China is always either extremely boring or extremely interesting. Most of the time, people are still regurgitating the same talking points from 20 years ago about how the Chinese internet is like living in George Orwell’s 1984. But occasionally, someone discovers something new about how the Chinese government … Read more
Many people suspect that these bots are part of an AI company’s effort to collect training data from web pages. In 2025, AI bots accounted for a significant portion of overall web traffic, which crawl the internet for text and other information to feed to data-hungry large language models. But there are some key differences … Read more