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The soap star said that she's "excited" to join the platform via a statement Thursday.

The soap star said that she's "excited" to join the platform via a statement Thursday.

Could Hunter Greene be on the move?

The prolific author of “Children of Blood and Bone” posted a cryptic video Wednesday, apparently grieving the on-set conditions of her novel's film adaptation.

Jim Rickards Slams Tech Bros Running The Marxist Playbook

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Can Marxism offer a framework for understanding artificial intelligence (AI) and the tech bros behind it?

This is not to suggest that Marxism is a viable economic system or a practical alternative to capitalism. It’s not. But Karl Marx was a heterodox economist before he became an ideologue, and some of his ideas are powerful tools for understanding economics, even if his overall program was a failure.

Let’s use some of those tools to understand the rise of AI oligarchs and the future of AI.

We begin with Marx’s main idea: the abolition of private property. How do tech bros feel about private property? They steal it. If you can simply take private property, then it’s not private. Marx would approve.

The AI gang does this by scraping vast amounts of internet content for use in training their large language models (LLMs). That material includes copyrighted books, magazine articles, academic papers, images, music and countless other forms of intellectual property (IP).

Do tech bros pay royalties? Do they pay licensing fees? Sometimes, but often they don’t. They take what they want like internet pirates, or the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

In fact, AI models have used my nine books in their training sets. Google, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta have paid me nothing. Anthropic offered to pay me $37,000 for some (not all) of my books. I accepted the offer, but I still haven’t received the payment. Maybe I’ll call my lawyer about that before their IPO.

The point is that much of the AI crowd behaves no differently than the imperialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, who exploited land, resources and human capital, including slavery, while paying little or nothing in return.

V. I. Lenin called imperialism “the highest stage of capitalism.” But Lenin never met a tech bro. They put imperialists to shame.

YOU Are Paying for the Boom

Marx’s theory was based on the idea that the owners of the means of production (capitalists) used labor but did not pay workers a fair share of the surplus created by the production process. There are a lot of flaws in this theory.

But the tech bros have a better idea: Get rid of human labor completely.

AI allows companies to pay some workers less because a growing share of productivity comes from software rather than labor. More to the point, AI is eliminating certain jobs entirely, as seen in layoffs among software developers and in industries such as healthcare and customer service that are increasingly using AI to perform repetitive or administrative tasks.

In the AI world, capitalists don’t just take more than their share; they take the entire buffet table. The tech bros’ solution to mass unemployment is guaranteed basic income, a handout. This ignores the dignity of the individual, which is achieved largely through productive work.

Other examples of taking public assets for private use include massive demands placed on the electric grid to power hyperscale data centers. Towns and counties around the country could face higher electric bills as hyperscalers compete with residents and businesses for available electricity.

It’s another case of extracting wealth from everyday Americans to feed the AI beast.

Even that’s not enough. AI applications are being crammed into our laptops, tablets and smartphones whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. This is forcing manufacturers to build more powerful devices, which can increase costs for consumers while requiring additional processing power to handle AI features.

Many of these AI features operate by default, even if users never intentionally engage with them. That means you may be using AI without realizing it.

Never mind that AI output can be inaccurate and, at times, dangerous. The problem is compounded as AI-generated content increasingly circulates online and becomes part of future training data. Meanwhile, many AI features collect large amounts of user data from the devices they run on.

Individual AI users also provide fresh inputs to LLMs through prompts, interactions and, in some cases, data collected from their devices. AI operators are hungry for this kind of information because they have already consumed vast amounts of publicly available internet content, while the quality of that content continues to deteriorate as more AI-generated material floods the web.

Are you getting paid for information that may be collected from your device? Do you even know it’s happening? Almost certainly not. This is just another form of digital extraction that enriches the tech bros while helping fuel trillion-dollar valuations.

In addition to authors, artists, local communities and everyday Americans, the AI mafia is also feeding off the government. Subsidies include streamlined permitting for massive data centers, tax incentives and abatements in many jurisdictions, favorable regulatory treatment in some areas and enormous government contracts.

There are costs associated with all of these government benefits, but they are not borne by the AI companies themselves.

They’re borne by everyday citizens in the form of taxes, higher electricity rates, reduced quality of life as data centers reshape small communities and the risk that increasingly capable AI systems could create serious disruptions in sectors such as banking, telecommunications and healthcare if they malfunction or are misused.

The Extraction Economy… And New Revolutionaries

The Chinese are no better. The success of Chinese AI models such as DeepSeek and Moonshot has been aided by their ability to build on advances made by leading U.S. AI labs. It’s a case of one group of pirates raiding another group of pirates.

Both thrive on information they did not create, but the Chinese have become especially adept at turning those advances into low-cost competitors.

This predatory behavior can be likened to imperialism or piracy. The technical economic term for it is externality. That means the profits and benefits of extracting information are kept by AI firms, while many of the costs are pushed onto the public.

It’s no different than a gold mine that keeps the gold but dumps the cyanide used in refining into public waterways. The miner gets the gold and the public gets poisoned. The fact that AI is digital does not make the behavior any more acceptable from a social perspective.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Silicon Valley’s extractive culture is that many CEOs are not only aware of it; they thrive on it. They have perfected the art of turning their own customers into unwilling guinea pigs. A culture of short-termism, disdain for the public and pure greed keeps the extraction racket going.

If there’s one ray of sunshine, it’s that some members of Gen Z appear to be turning their backs on AI, autonomous agents and endless screen time.

There’s growing fatigue with the amount of time people spend online, along with increasing concern about the pervasive nature of AI. This shift also reflects widespread frustration that much AI output is bland, repetitive or simply wrong.

Some Gen Zers are doing something that now seems almost radical: They’re reading books.

There are many reasons why the AI bubble could burst, but the Gen Z revolt may be one of the least appreciated and most unexpected.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/30/2026 - 14:45

Ten women accused Leto of sexual misconduct in a BBC documentary, “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret," which was released on Wednesday.

Ten women accused Leto of sexual misconduct in a BBC documentary, “Jared Leto: Hollywood’s Dark Secret," which was released on Wednesday.

One millennial mom took her fandom even further — transforming her baby's nursery into an homage to "Gilmore Girls" home, Stars Hollow.

Shark Week launched with a soirée at Watermark at South Street Seaport and was attended by Paul De Gelder, Rei Ami and Emily Morrison.

"Squad" Rep. Ayanna Pressley's husband, Conan Harris, is still involved with a real estate firm that locked down a controversial $2 billion deal for the development of a new courthouse in Massachusetts despite a key partner divesting from that company due to conflict of interest concerns.

Ben Shelton knows how to peak at the right time.

Oprah's such a fan of the brand, she invested after trying the products.

Oprah's such a fan of the brand, she invested after trying the products.

It may be the "happiest place on earth," but it's also getting to be one of the most expensive.

OpenAI Slashes GPT-5.6 Luna Price By 80% As China's Cheaper Models Close In

OpenAI just cut the price of its cheapest GPT-5.6 model by 80 percent, three weeks after launch - the clearest signal yet that the company that kicked off the generative AI boom is being dragged into a price war it did not start.

On Thursday the company said GPT-5.6 Luna, its speed-focused model, now costs 20 cents per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens, down from $1 and $6. GPT-5.6 Terra, the mid-tier model, gets a 20 percent trim to $2 per million input tokens and $12 per million output. Pricing for the flagship GPT-5.6 Sol remains unchanged.

"Our strategy remains focused on advancing both capability and efficiency so each generation of intelligence can accomplish more work at a lower cost," OpenAI said in its announcement.

The move arrives as companies that once encouraged unconstrained "tokenmaxxing" have started looking hard at AI bills that sometimes run into the billions. Enterprises want clearer returns before committing to the most expensive models, and they now have more alternatives than they did in the early ChatGPT era.

OpenAI is framing the cuts as the fruit of efficiency work rather than a margin sacrifice - a day earlier the company said GPT-5.6 had helped make itself cheaper to run, and it is passing those gains through to how usage is counted in Codex and ChatGPT Work subscriptions, with the lower prices rolling out on AWS as well.

Chinese open-weight models have closed the gap quickly. Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, released earlier this month, has beaten some leading proprietary systems on industry benchmarks and can be run on a company's own infrastructure. That development helped spur a round of competitive responses.

The scale of the challenge is hard to overstate. At 2.8 trillion parameters, K3 is the largest open-weight model ever released, and blind developer testing put it in first place in LMArena's front-end coding arena, ahead of Anthropic's frontier Claude Fable 5. Demand has been heavy enough that Moonshot has capped new subscriptions and API access over capacity constraints, and the company's daily revenue has grown roughly sixfold since launch as it seeks a $50 billion valuation ahead of a potential Hong Kong IPO. The economics underneath are brutal: on Artificial Analysis's cost-per-task index, K3 completes a task for 94 cents and DeepSeek V4 Pro for four cents, versus $1.04 for OpenAI's flagship Sol and $1.80 for Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 - and Moonshot reports cache-hit rates above 90 percent in coding workloads that cut K3's effective input cost to 30 cents per million.

Anthropic followed with Claude Opus 5, which it pitches as approaching the performance of its top-tier Fable 5 model at half the price - and beating it outright on some knowledge-work benchmarks - while holding the same rate card as its Opus 4.8 predecessor. Microsoft has been loudly promoting its own cheaper models, including MAI-Cyber-1-Flash, a new cybersecurity-focused offering that AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says delivers "world-leading performance at 50% of the cost." Google, meanwhile, launched a trio of new Gemini Flash models this month and claimed its top Flash model undercuts Kimi K3 and other Chinese systems on a per-task basis.

OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family consists of three tiers: Sol (highest capability), Terra (balanced), and Luna (fastest). By aggressively discounting the middle and low ends while leaving the top model alone, the company is trying to keep volume customers from migrating to open-weight or rival proprietary systems without fully abandoning the premium pricing that funds frontier research.

Whether the cuts are enough to slow the shift toward cheaper alternatives remains to be seen. What is clear is that the era of unconstrained AI spending is giving way to a more pragmatic one - one in which even OpenAI has to compete on price.

Tyler Durden Thu, 07/30/2026 - 14:25

Think of your finest robot vacuum, but for your lawn (who knew?!)

Spain’s interior ministry said it would guarantee the safety of citizens and the integrity of the nation’s border, but that the government could not declare a national emergency over migration concerns.

Dress to impress.

It was these chicks’ plucky day. Dozens of sad-looking chickens and baby peeps were rescued from “torturous conditions” in a Long Island, officials said — thanks to a kitchen fire that could’ve fried the whole place. Westbury resident Victor Xu, 44, was busted Tuesday after officers responding to the fire in his home found 66...

"She is more than what happened to her," Brynn Carnesecca's mother said at her candlelight vigil.