GoKawiil
Tech News
Domestic auto manufacturers are lobbying the US government to prohibit the import and sale of cars produced in China. The push reflects growing concern within the industry over competition from lower-cost Chinese vehicles, particularly electric models, entering Western markets.
Nvidia's portfolio of equity stakes in tech and AI companies jumped more than tenfold over the past year, reaching $99 billion as of late July, up from roughly $7 billion a year earlier. The chip maker has committed over $40 billion to financing deals across the AI industry in 2026 alone, alongside separate pledges including up to $105 billion in conditional credit support for an OpenAI data center and a planned $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face.
AI companies have started purchasing used physical books in bulk to feed data into their large language models. This practice follows a copyright settlement earlier this year in which courts determined that buying books and destroying them during the digitization process for AI training qualifies as fair use.
The Trump administration filed a court brief supporting OpenAI in its ongoing copyright dispute with publishers over AI training data. Officials argued that restricting AI firms' access to content for training purposes could pose national security risks.
Chevron announced it will expand operations in Venezuela after receiving additional acreage in the Orinoco Belt, pledging over $7 billion in investment over five years to nearly double output to about 600,000 barrels daily. The move follows a recent Trump administration deal involving Venezuela's oil reserves and a Pentagon profit stake, with Chevron officials and Energy Secretary Chris Wright reportedly visiting the country to unveil the plan.
An audit of Perplexity's Sonar and Sonar-Pro models tested 310 factual questions about 210 tech companies and checked every citation attached to a sentence containing a number. It found that 34.7% of 1,826 such citations linked to pages that either wouldn't load or didn't contain any of the figures stated in the sentence, though scoring by claim rather than by individual citation marker lowered the failure rate to 14.4% of 872 claims.
Hacker News has posted its recurring monthly hiring thread for September 2026, where companies can list open positions directly. The post lays out submission rules, requiring location details and remote-work status, and restricting entries to employees of the hiring company rather than recruiters or job boards. It also links to several third-party search tools for browsing past listings and points to a companion thread for job seekers.
A Glassdoor review analysis found 98% of claims-adjuster reviews mentioning AI were negative, the highest criticism rate among occupations studied. Adjusters like Ahmad Jackson describe AI misclassifying claims during initial loss reporting, forcing workers to correct faulty summaries and reroute files manually. Insurers continue expanding AI into chatbots, damage assessment, and medical record summarization despite these frontline complaints.
New proposed legislation would require companies to build in the ability to throttle, suspend, or fully shut down AI agents if needed. However, the specific technical mechanisms and trigger conditions for when such controls should activate remain undefined.
Google, OpenAI and more than 100 other companies signed a joint letter warning that AI-powered cyberattacks are set to grow more common in the near future. The letter calls on governments and industry to take stronger action to prepare for and counter this rising threat.
LAION has published LAION-BVD, a large open video dataset intended to support multimodal research on video, audio, and image models. The organization says the release is meant for non-commercial, academic use only, aimed at improving reproducibility and transparency in a field increasingly dominated by proprietary corporate datasets.
A new study attributes trillions of gallons of water depletion across the western United States to emissions produced by 122 major fossil fuel and cement companies. Researchers say this marks the first attempt to directly connect specific corporate carbon emissions to regional water scarcity.