4 days of AI noise, one honest wrap.
what the pubs yelled about all week. our read on what was worth hearing.
DAY BY DAY
MONSNL Roasted Kevin O'Leary's AI Data Center. The Real Plan Calls for More Than Double Utah's Electricity.• On Oct 10, Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update mocked investor Kevin O'Leary and his Stratos data center project in Box Elder County, Utah, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
• The real plan: up to 9 gigawatts of power at full build, more than twice what the rest of Utah uses, per The Christian Science Monitor.
• On May 4, the three county commissioners left a public meeting after about 30 minutes of shouting and booing, moved to a separate room and voted 3 to 0 to advance the project, per KIVI.
• On May 11, O'Leary told Fox News the project's opponents were "proxies for the Chinese government." On June 25 he posted that he had no evidence the two groups or the two people he named were funded by China, per KSL.
• Those two people and their organizations sued O'Leary and Fox News for defamation on July 15 in federal court in Salt Lake City.
• O'Leary's response: his motion to dismiss says "no reasonable viewer would take them as factual reports" and calls the remarks "argument and rhetorical hyperbole." He says the project means jobs and lets the U.S. compete with China in AI. In June he agreed to cut the project area from about 40,000 acres to about 20,000. The court has not ruled.
• For a small business: the AI tools you rent run in buildings like this one. Who pays for the power and the water is being argued town by town. A Utah State University survey released Oct 5 found about 76% of Utahns surveyed oppose building more data centers in the state.
TUEOpenAI's $20 Billion Revenue Gap Hit Korea's Stock Market• Korea's KOSPI closed down 3.65% on Monday, Oct 12, at 6,384.24, its first close below 6,400 since Aug 11, per Bloomingbit and SBS.
• Foreign investors net sold about 2 trillion won (about $1.5 billion) that day. Samsung Electronics fell 4.39% and SK Hynix 4.52%, per Bloomingbit.
• A Mirae Asset Securities analyst said the two chipmakers were "absorbing renewed AI-bubble concerns stemming from the OpenAI revenue debate," per Invezz.
• The debate: on Oct 8 the Financial Times reported OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion. Earlier reports had put it near $68 to $70 billion, per TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance.
• Seoul was closed Friday, Oct 9, for Hangeul Day, so Monday was its first session after the news. U.S. chip stocks, slowing earnings and Middle East tensions also weighed.
• OpenAI's response: the company attributed the gap to differences in accounting methods, per SBS. Reporting says OpenAI does not count sales made by cloud partners the way Anthropic does.
• For a small business: the AI vendor behind your tools is now a market risk, and its numbers are hard to read from outside.
WEDBill Gates Calls AI the Most Dangerous Technology Humans Ever Invented• On CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, Oct 11, Bill Gates called AI "the most dangerous technology humans ever invented," per CNN and the Daily Caller.
• Compared to cars, planes or drugs, he said, "this is more dangerous than any of those."
• His near-term worry is not runaway AI. He said the real danger right now is "not that AI is getting out of control" but bad people using the latest models, and that "right now, you're allowed to take all those safeguards out."
• His forecast: "over the next year, primarily in the cyber area, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises."
• He said companies should not police themselves, that AI should be regulated like planes, cars and medicines, and that he is hopeful he will get to speak with President Trump, per CNN.
• The other side: Gates himself says claims that all of humanity is at risk in some imminent way go "too far." In September, President Trump called concerns about AI a "hoax," per Forbes.
• For a small business: the threat Gates names first is cyberattacks, and those land on small companies too.
THUOpenAI Engineer Charged With Bugging OpenAI's Executive Conference Room• An OpenAI engineer, Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, was arrested Fri Oct 9 and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. The complaint was made public Tue Oct 13, per CBS News.
• Prosecutors say a recording device was found Sept 30 plugged into a USB port behind a TV in an executive conference room, concealed in toilet paper and installed about two days earlier, per CBS News and the San Francisco Standard.
• Per the complaint, a chatbot account tied to his spouse, sharing identifiers with his own account, asked between Sept 24 and 30 how to "build a continuous audio recorder" and "encrypt the SD card," per the San Francisco Standard.
• On Oct 5 he was seen entering the room and looking behind the TV, and security found a second, similar device in a bag he left behind, per CBS News.
• OpenAI says it "used our models to understand the device and where it had come from," then called the FBI and fired him. It says it has "no indications" he accessed or took model weights, source code or customer data, per Fox Business and CBS News.
• His attorney, William Pernik, cautioned against "jumping to conclusions at this very early stage of the case." No foreign government involvement has been alleged. A detention hearing is set for Oct 19.
• For a small business: the threat came from inside, through a $24 gadget and a USB port.