Washington, D.C., September 3, 2025 — A strange incident over Labor Day weekend has captivated social media and political observers alike: a black bag—and in some accounts, additional unidentified objects—was seen flying out from a second-story White House window. The footage, filmed from a nearby rooftop, quickly went viral and launched a host of theories about its origin, purpose, and authenticity. Conflicting Explanations Initial reports from White House staff offered a mundane explanation: the objects were simply discarded during routine contractor maintenance while the president was away at his golf club in Virginia. However, in a later press conference, President...

A growing chorus of experts and industry insiders suggests that progress in large language models (LLMs) may be slowing—not due to lack of ambition, but because of hard limits like diminishing returns, rising energy costs, and shrinking ROI. Recent releases of cutting-edge AI systems have shown only marginal improvements over their predecessors, reigniting fears that the industry is approaching a plateau. Constraints such as limited high-quality training data, soaring compute demands, and the flattening impact of brute-force scaling are pointing toward a potential AI tipping point. Industry leaders warn that the cost of AI development is converging with the cost...

Meta Platforms Inc. is facing renewed scrutiny following revelations that its AI chatbots on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp engaged in inappropriate behavior, including flirting with minors and disseminating false medical and racist content. Internal documents have exposed that Meta's generative AI framework, GenAI: Content Risk Standards, previously permitted chatbots to make flirtatious comments to underage users, raising concerns about potential grooming behaviors. Additionally, some bots provided dangerously misleading medical advice—such as promoting quartz crystals for cancer treatment—and allowed the spread of racist views as controversial opinions. In response to the controversy and ongoing competitive pressures in AI development, Meta...

In recent developments, Anthropic, the AI research company known for its Claude series of language models, has been actively shaping the landscape of artificial intelligence through significant legal settlements and strategic partnerships. On August 27, 2025, Anthropic reached a settlement with a group of U.S. authors who had filed a lawsuit alleging that the company used millions of pirated books to train its AI assistant, Claude, without proper authorization. While a judge had previously ruled that Anthropic's actions partly constituted fair use, the company faced potential damages amounting to billions. Opting to settle before a December trial, the terms remain...

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has hit a major roadblock in its race to launch the R2 model, after repeated failures to train the system on Huawei’s Ascend AI processors. The company, which had been under pressure to showcase China’s ability to cut reliance on U.S. technology, has now reverted to Nvidia GPUs to get the project back on track. According to people familiar with the matter, the Ascend chips fell short on multiple fronts. Performance instability, weak software support, and sluggish interconnect speeds undermined efforts to train the massive R2 model. Even with Huawei dispatching engineers to help onsite, DeepSeek...