Notices by Dare Obasanjo (carnage4life@mas.to)

Google says new EU regulations are forcing the biggest reduction in Search quality in its 29-year history.

Google integrating hotels, flights and shopping directly into Search makes Search better. It also makes it almost impossible to compete with Google in those businesses.

In the U.S., antitrust is about harm to consumers whereas in the EU it’s more about harm to competitors.

https://www.reuters.com/world/google-warns-lower-quality-it-revamps-europe-search-results-avoid-eu-fines-2026-09-08/

OpenAI: We have invented smarter-than-human AI.

Also OpenAI: We regularly lose control of our AI so much that we want to create a standard our-AI-went-rogue incident report.

There are two different battles in AI & copyright today.

1. Is AI training on copyrighted materials fair use? OpenAI & Microsoft just got hit with new lawsuits.

2. Are AI systems reproducing copyrighted work? Microsoft showed less than 1% Copilot chats contained a 16-word match with news content.

The second question is interesting in the narrow case of using AI as a form of piracy to reproduce copyrighted work.

Summarizing a news article is a much harder argument. If a summary that substitutes for reading the original is copyright infringement, that impacts copyright far beyond AI.

https://www.theverge.com/policy/990267/microsoft-openai-new-york-times-authors-lawsuit

Google’s Gemini Spark can now manage your Google Photos and perform multi-step workflows across Gmail and Docs.

Google and Apple have a competitive advantage in AI assistants as they have our email, calendar, documents, photos, maps, videos and phone.

The question is if consumers find this useful? https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/04/googles-gemini-spark-can-now-manage-your-google-photos-library/

In honor of Uber shutting down in Nigeria this week, here’s my favorite story about Uber in Nigeria.

OpenAI has lost 12 senior executives so far in 2026: CRO, COO, Head of Sora, Head of Data Centers, Head of OpenAI for Science, Head of Ethics, Head of Enterprise AI Sales, VP of Sales for Americas, CTO Business Applications, Chief Futurist, Head of Robotics & Consumer Hardware and Head of Safety Systems.

That is a remarkable amount of leadership churn for a company supposedly preparing to IPO.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/26/how-do-we-explain-openais-executive-exodus/

Australia’s primary music chart will ban AI generated music from its charts after it turned out the most played song on the radio in July was AI generated.

This is a lost battle. If the most popular song on the radio isn’t on your music charts, is your chart even relevant?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-25/ai-generated-music-to-be-banned-from-aria-charts/107072642

Nvidia trying to acquihire Perplexity at a $30B is surprising. This company is a feature not a business.

The same legal doctrine used to sue tobacco, opioid & social media companies is now being applied to ChatGPT.

Florida is arguing in court that ChatGPT causes many societal problems while being marketed as safe especially to kids.

Florida also wants Sam Altman personally liable for his decisions.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2026/08/19/florida-goes-to-court-and-asserts-that-openai-and-sam-altman-are-legally-a-public-nuisance/

For the first time in 13 years of collecting the data, the CBRE has found there are now more tech workers in New York than San Francisco.

This seems to have been driven by AI in two ways; AI-driven layoffs in SF and hiring for AI jobs in Finance in NY.

AI giveth and AI taketh away.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/new-york-san-francisco-tech-talent-cbre.html

Republicans are begging AI companies to start creating positive PR about datacenters because they are at risk of losing elections because the GOP is now the pro-datacenter party.

Who would have guessed there’d be negative repercussions from bragging about all the job loss AI would create?

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/19/gop-data-center-memo-ai-election

Databricks has a great write up of best practices for reducing AI token costs.

1. Adopt open weight/lower cost models. Most tasks don’t need the best models.

2. Harnesses are a form of lock-in, adopt one which allows model flexibility.

3. Avoid hard per developer budgets. Prefer dashboards and spend gates.

https://www.databricks.com/blog/managing-ai-coding-costs-scale

People complain about employers wanting to replace them with AI then fall into the bad habit of responding to questions with “Claude said…” or sharing AI slop documents.

They fail to realize that they’re making the case that they should be replaced with AI. After all, their coworkers can prompt Claude too.

https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

Vibe coded software is free as in puppy not free as in beer. Even if writing code is now cheap, you still have to maintain it.

Someone saying I didn’t actually build a vibe coded app because “you simply pushed a button” is like telling me I didn’t sew my shirt and just clicked [Buy] on Amazon.

I’m sure it’s an insult in some circles but to me this is exactly why technology exists.

Elon Musk has finally launched X Money, a key part of his vision to turn X into an “everything app”.

X Money combines a deposit account, peer-to-peer payments, and a Visa debit card inside X. It’s available to Premium X subscribers.

This is the Cybertruck of debit cards.

https://gizmodo.com/you-can-finally-trust-all-your-money-to-x-the-everything-app-2000791591

Anthropic AI researcher, Julian Schrittwieser, responds to Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang signing a letter supporting Chinese open weight AI models. 😬

This is an unsurprising take for a policy wonk.

Admitting that policy decisions like making it harder to get healthcare, going to war, making it easier to access guns or cutting support for lifesaving food & drugs directly kills people would essentially declare government bureaucrats murderers.

Google just added selfie video as a sign-in and account recovery option.

You can now prove it’s you with a short selfie video designed to resist photos and deepfakes. To fend off deepfakes and impersonation attempts, it requires you to turn your head to prove you are really in front of the camera.

They also encrypt the video and only use it for login purposes.

https://www.engadget.com/2221520/google-adds-selfie-video-log-in/

Pinch me, I must be dreaming.

Elon admitting that not one but three of his product announcements were actually vaporware on an earnings call isn’t something I’d have ever expected.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/reality-bites-elon-musk-and-his-tesla-spacex-believers-1b639591