If chivalry isn't already dead, it's certainly circling the drain.
OpenAI CEO and tech billionaire Sam Altman recently admitted that people politely saying "please" and "thank you" to their AI chatbots is costing him bigtime.
When one poster on X-formerly-Twitter <a href="https://x.com/tomieinlove/status/1912287012058722659">wondered aloud</a> "how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying 'please' and 'thank you' to their models," <a href="https://x.com/sama/status/1912646035979239430">Altman chimed in</a>, saying it's "tens of millions of dollars well spent."
"You never know," he added.
While it may seem pointless to treat an AI chatbot with respect, some AI architects say it's an important move. Microsoft's design manager Kurtis Beavers, for example, <a href="https://techsevenpartners.com/ai-etiquette-why-you-should-add-a-please-and-thank-you-when-using-ai/">says proper etiquette</a> "helps generate respectful, collaborative outputs."
"Using polite language sets a tone for the response," Beavers notes. The argument can certainly be made; what we consider "artificial intelligence" might more accurately be described as "<a href="https://hbr.org/2024/11/generative-ai-is-still-just-a-prediction-machine">prediction machines</a>," like your phone's predictive text, but with more autonomy to spit out complete sentences in response to questions or instructions.
"When it clocks politeness, it’s more likely to be polite back," a Microsoft <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/why-using-a-polite-tone-with-ai-matters">WorkLab memo notes</a>. "Generative AI also mirrors the levels of professionalism, clarity, and detail in the prompts you provide."
A <a href="https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/are-you-polite-to-chatgpt-heres-where-you-rank-among-ai-chatbot-users">late 2024 survey</a> found that 67 percent of US respondents reported being nice to their chatbots. Of those who practice courtesy, 55 percent of American AI users said they do it "because it's the right thing to do," while 12 percent did it to appease the algorithm in the <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-meta-yann-lecun-interview/">case of an AI uprising</a>.
That AI revolution is probably a long way off, if it happens at all — many AI researchers doubt we'll ever build a truly "<a href="https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2024/07/01/there-could-never-be-an-artificial-general-intelligence/">intelligent" algorithm</a>, at least based on the current tech of large language models (LLMs) — but the environmental consequences of present-day AI are all too real. Unfortunately, those "pleases" and "thank yous" are adding up, bigtime.
One <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-ai-use-electricity-water-data-centers/">Washington Post investigation</a>, done in collaboration with researchers at the University of California, studied the impacts of generating a 100-word email. They found that just one email requires .14 kilowatt-hours worth of electricity, or enough to power 14 LED lights for an hour. If you were to send one AI email a week over the course of a year, you'd use an eye-watering 7.5kWh, roughly equal to an hour's worth of electricity consumed by 9 households in Washington DC.
Now imagine the tens of thousands of lengthy prompts we're feeding chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT on the daily — not exactly <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/23/1092777/ai-is-an-energy-hog-this-is-what-it-means-for-climate-change/">low-impact</a>.
While AI etiquette might sound trivial, it all underscores the rather grim reality that our queries have consequences, particularly on the environment. The data centers used to power these chatbots already suck up about <a href="https://www.indeed-innovation.com/the-mensch/ais-climate-crisis-are-we-burning-the-planet-to-feed-our-digital-brains/#:~:text=Energy%20analysts%20calculate%20that%20all,transportation%2C%20manufacturing%2C%20or%20agriculture.">2 percent</a> of the world's energy consumption, a number that's likely to skyrocket as AI floods <a href="https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-ai-we-deserve/">every corner</a> of daily life.
So if you're mulling whether or not to thank Grok for its efforts, maybe the better move would be to ditch the chatbot and write the email yourself. The earth — <a href="https://futurism.com/cognitive-decay-ai">and your brain</a> — will thank you.
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/judge-ai-generated-video-court">Judge Goes Ballistic When Man Shows AI-Generated Video in Court</a>

Bad Manners

"You never know."

Sam Altman Admits That Saying "Please" and "Thank You" to ChatGPT Is Wasting Millions of Dollars in Computing Power

Meta has been accused of illegally using copyrighted material to train its AI models — and the tech giant's defense is pretty thin.
In the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/sarah-silverman-celebrities-sue-openai-copyright-infringement">ongoing suit</a> Richard Kadrey et al v. Meta Platforms, led by a group of authors including Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company has argued that its alleged <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-books">scraping over seven million books</a> from the pirated library LibGen constituted "fair use" of the material, and was therefore not illegal.
The specious defenses don't end there. As <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/meta-ai-lawsuit">Vanity Fair </a><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/meta-ai-lawsuit">spotlights</a> in a new writeup, Meta's attorneys are also arguing that the countless books that the company used to train its multibillion-dollar language models and springboard itself into the headspinningly buzzy AI race are actually worthless.
Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books' individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM's performance "by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise." 
Thus there's no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says, because "for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange," as quoted by Vanity Fair — "but none of [the authors'] works has economic value, individually, as training data." Other communications showed that Meta employees stripped the copyright pages from the downloaded books.
This is emblematic of the chicaneries and two-faced logic that Meta, and the AI industry at large, deploys when it's pressed about all the human-created content it devours. 
Somehow, that stuff is simultaneously not that valuable, and we should all stop pearl-clutching about the sanctity of art, and anyway an AI <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openais-creative-writing-ai-evokes-that-annoying-kid-from-high-school-fiction-club/">writes creative prose just as well as a human now</a> — but is also absolutely essential to building our new synthetic gods that <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/28/1104588/sorry-ai-wont-fix-climate-change/">will solve climate change</a>, so please don't make us pay for using any of it. That last bit is literally what OpenAI <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-material-parliament">argued to the British Parliament</a> last year — that there isn't enough stuff in the public domain to beef up its AI models, so it must be allowed to plumb the bounties of contemporary copyrighted works without paying a penny.
Seemingly, this is an unspoken understanding at the top AI companies. When one Meta researcher inquired if the company's legal team had okayed using LibGen, another responded: "I didn't ask questions but this is what OpenAI does with GPT3, what Google does with PALM, and what Deepmind does with Chinchilla so we will do it to[o]," per Vanity Fair, from internal messages cited in the suit.
Tellingly, the unofficial policy seems to be to not speak about it at all. 
"In no case would we disclose publicly that we had trained on LibGen, however there is practical risk external parties could deduce our use of this dataset," an internal Meta slide deck read. The deck noted that "if there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues."
More on AI copyright: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-over-copyrighted-work">OpenAI Says It’s "Over" If It Can’t Steal All Your Copyrighted Work</a>

Book Worms

How convenient.

Meta Says It's Okay to Feed Copyrighted Books Into Its AI Model Because They Have No "Economic Value"

Unperturbed by the dystopian optics, the Royal Thai Police have deployed a humanoid police robot during a festival.
As the <a href="https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/thailand-unveils-robocop-style-ai-police-cyborg-1-0-officer-to-enhance-songkran-safety">Straits Times reports</a>, the unsettling robot, dubbed "AI police cyborg 1.0" — even though it's technically more of an android and not a cyborg — surveyed the streets during the country's Songkran festival using 360-degree cameras.
According to the report, the cyborg is equipped with facial recognition technology and can notify officers of high-risk individuals and weapons.
But is this really an invention <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/34521508/robocop-ai-police-cyborg/">worthy of the nickname "Robocop</a>?"
<figure id="attachment_349155" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-349155" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-349155 size-large" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/491949830_1103821628457793_3734224749003650233_n-1200x800.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="800" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-349155" class="wp-caption-text">Image credit: Royal Thai Police</figcaption></figure>
It's difficult to judge how effective the Thai police force's latest recruit actually is. Sure, machine learning-assisted video surveillance has been around for years. But what about doing more human stuff, like walking?
We have to see the Thai police's police cyborg actually move. Images <a href="https://www.facebook.com/royalthaipolice/posts/pfbid03W9AmPz8fVNsH9BBmtAsn3JAH7j6kD7qFnY2SXxuZAh2EQ4c7oFrBGih4G2KqxGKl?locale=th_TH">shared by the Royal Thai Police on Facebook</a> show it standing stiff on a raised, metal platform with wheels, suggesting it may not be able to walk on its own accord.
Put simply, what can it do that a tripod with a 360-degree camera and a mobile computer can't? Why bother with an entire bipedal dummy? Wouldn't a swarm of drones <a href="https://futurism.com/nypd-sending-drones-calls">prove far more effective</a> when it comes to reconnaissance and identifying bad guys?
Besides, if it weren't being guarded by a surprising number of human recruits, what would stop a masked vigilante from simply tipping it over?
<figure id="attachment_349157" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-349157" style="width: 1200px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-349157 size-large" src="https://wordpress-assets.futurism.com/2025/04/491342481_1103821625124460_7411130003149387501_n-1200x800.jpg" alt="" width="1200" height="800" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-349157" class="wp-caption-text">Image credit: Royal Thai Police</figcaption></figure>
We've already seen plenty of disastrous rollouts of robots in law enforcement. For instance, police forces across the United States have already deployed security robots developed by California-based security company Knightscope.
In New York, the company's portly robot was <a href="https://futurism.com/eric-adams-subway-robot-redeployed">taken out of commission almost immediately</a>, proving unable to stop crime in any meaningful way before it ended up <a href="https://x.com/nytimes/status/1753468346526233008">collecting dust in an empty storefront</a>.
There have also been reports of robots <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36793790">running over a toddler</a>, as well as being <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/police-robots-security-malfunctioning-fails-knightscope-2020-1">thwarted by mall fountains and narrow sidewalks</a>.
Last year, we also came across a <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chinese-police-deploy-spherical-robot">rolling robot, reminiscent of the android BB-8</a> in the "Star Wars" universe, being deployed by a police force in Eastern China.
Even if the Royal Thai Police were to be accessing the very cutting edge in humanoid robotics, plenty of technical obstacles could still make deploying a "police cyborg" an expensive and ultimately fruitless endeavor.
As of right now, humanoid robots are only starting to learn how to be comfortable on their own two feet, so their deployment would likely demand ample human supervision.
Whether the Royal Thai Police has considered the substantial privacy implications of rolling out facial recognition-powered surveillance tech remains unclear. Law enforcement in the country has been accused of <a href="https://ottawa.citynews.ca/2024/03/20/thailands-national-police-chief-and-his-deputy-are-suspended-amid-rumors-of-a-power-struggle/">corruption and bribery</a>, so civil liberties probably aren't exactly priority number one.
More on robot cops: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chinese-police-deploy-spherical-robot">Chinese Police Deploy Rolling BB-8-Style Robot to Patrol Streets, Chase Down Suspects</a>

Made in Thailand

We have questions.

Thailand Deploys Humanoid Robot Dressed in Police Uniform

When Donald Trump took office in January, volunteer archivists got to work, ensuring that government websites were backed up before the incoming administration had a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-data-hoarders-resisting-trumps-purge">chance to purge more than 110,000 government pages</a>.
As part of the administration's extremist anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda, agencies were forced to take down any material related to anything from supporting transgender youth to <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/trump-nasa-purge-mentions-women">mentions of women in leadership at NASA</a> — a "<a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/02/05/nx-s1-5286577/researcher-calls-out-trump-administration-for-a-digital-book-burning">digital book burning</a>," according to Harvard University social epidemiologist Nancy Krieger.
And now, the Trump administration is exacting revenge. The <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2025/04/17/doge-neh-funding-cuts-sf/">San Francisco Standard reports</a> that Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has spearheaded a <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-lives-destroyed-respond-laugh-cry-emojis">highly destructive</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-doge-failing">ill-conceived</a> gutting of government agency budgets, is now targeting federal grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Among them? One funding the Internet Archive, a nonprofit founded in 1996 with the aim of providing free access to digitized media, including websites, software, music, and print materials.
The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has proven invaluable to researchers, journalists, and archivists, allowing users to go back in time and see how websites looked in the past.
According to the Standard, the nonprofit was halfway through an NEH grant of $345,000 when its funding was abruptly cut.
It's an especially important initiative, considering the organization was <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/23/nx-s1-5326573/internet-archive-wayback-machine-trump">busy archiving websites</a> targeted by the Trump administration.
"This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted," Internet Archive director of archiving and data services Jefferson Bailey told the Standard, "like our museums, our historical societies, our public libraries, our academic libraries — just a lot of people that keep information free and accessible and online."
Fortunately, according to Bailey, the Internet Archive has other independent streams of funding that will keep it afloat for now.
However, smaller nonprofits could suffer greatly as a result of DOGE's NEH cuts. Bay Area-based producer Marc Shaffer called it a "catastrophic development, if not a death blow" for filmmakers.
"NEH documentaries contribute significantly to American culture," he told the Standard. "They are national treasures deserving of far more support than they receive."
While other sources of funding are keeping the Internet Archive afloat, the nonprofit has plenty of other fires to put out as well.
Earlier this week, the Internet Archive <a href="https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1912923563234898329">launched a petition</a> in light of a $700 million lawsuit from major record labels.
However, since then, hundreds of musicians have come to speak out in <a href="https://x.com/internetarchive/status/1912923574043627669">support of the nonprofit</a>.
And it's not just musicians — the Internet Archive has grown to be an extremely important tool to ensure that the Trump administration is unable to simply erase the historical record.
"There's a groundswell of support for the Internet Archive because of the dramatic shift that's going on in parts of the government web infrastructure that you wouldn't imagine would change," Internet Archive founder and director Brewster Kahle <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/23/nx-s1-5326573/internet-archive-wayback-machine-trump">told NPR</a> last month. "People are coming and rallying behind us — by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived — data sets that are under threat or have been taken down."
More on DOGE: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/whistleblower-threats-elon-musk-doge-data">Whistleblower Says He Received Threats After Investigating Whether Elon Musk's Minions Were Stealing Government Data</a>

Unarchiver

"This is really going to impact institutions that we take for granted."

Elon Musk Cuts Funding for Internet Archive

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta just <a href="https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/I%27ve_made_a_huge_mistake">made a huge mistake</a>.
Or more accurately, a bunch of huge mistakes, which have drawn the wrath of lawyers for Meta's peers Apple, Google, and Snapchat.
The issue is that during the latest phase of its <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust-trial-ftc.html">massive antitrust trial</a>, Meta lawyers presented slides revealing information it held about other companies. Though technically redacted, third party details compiled by Meta were accessible by anyone with the file — because the redactions were easily reversible.
Luckily, the information revealed wasn't exactly nuclear secrets — one slide notes hat iPhone users prefer Apple's messaging app to Meta's, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/648893/meta-redacted-documents-leak-ftc-antitrust-opening-statement">per </a><a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/648893/meta-redacted-documents-leak-ftc-antitrust-opening-statement">The Verge</a> — but the other companies' lawyers say that's not the point: it's that a company the size of Meta shouldn't be treating sensitive court documents, nevermind the entire proceedings, with such utter disregard.
Snapchat's lawyer slammed Meta's "cavalier approach and casual disregard," <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/649834/meta-redactions-apple-google-snap-angry-ftc-antitrust-trial">according to The Verge</a>, and questioned if Meta "would have applied meaningful redactions if it were its own information that was at stake." Counselors for Apple, meanwhile, implied they might not trust its internal documents with Meta going forward.
Meta has previously been caught trying to leverage user data to <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/27/meta_snapchat_data/">spy on rival platform Snapchat</a>, a strategy the company called "Operation Ghostbusters." It was also hit with a <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ajdellinger/2021/04/03/personal-date-of-533-million-facebook-users-leaks-online/">massive data breach</a> back in 2019, leaking personal information from some 533 million Facebook users after attackers discovered a flaw in the platform's internal security.
The company's most recent privacy debacle comes in the middle of a <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Business/meta-claims-monopoly-landmark-antitrust-trial-gets-underway/story?id=120799633">landmark antitrust case</a> filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which argues that Meta has made a habit of buying out competitors like Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, and Oculus rather than competing with them in earnest.
Among other things, the FTC is trying to prove that Meta's attempted purchase of Snapchat — a bid <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meta-antitrust-trial-snapchat-buyout-bid-2025-4">Snap rejected</a> back in 2013, to Zuckerberg's dismay — represents a standard procedure for the social media giant.
In a recent <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2025/04/ftcs-weak-case-against-meta-ignores-reality/">PR disclosure</a>, Meta raged that the "FTC's weak case against Meta ignores reality," arguing that the company's social media rivals extend far beyond Snapchat, therefore its attempted purchase is no big deal.
"The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows," Meta's report read, that "Instagram competes with TikTok (and YouTube and X and many other apps)."
Meta's not alone in facing scrutiny for monopolistic practices.
A federal judge recently sided with the Justice Department in a suit alleging that Google was operating a <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/17/tech/google-adtech-trial-decision/index.html">web advertising monopoly</a>, a judgment that could shake up the web in a major way. The FTC is likewise taking Amazon to task on antitrust grounds, though that trial <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5328202/ftc-asks-to-delay-amazon-trial-over-dire-resources-then-quickly-backtracks">could be delayed</a> now that DOGE has cancelled the leases on some trade commission offices.
More on Meta: <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-facebook-friends-meta-antitrust">Zuckerberg Tells Court That Facebook Is No Longer About Connecting With Friends</a>

Oh Snap

Whoops.

Meta Made a Wild Screwup in the Documents It Showed in Court

Tech CEOs <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/tech/tech-leaders-supported-trump-lost-money-dg/index.html">rallied behind Donald Trump</a> in hopes that he would lower regulations and increase profits — and although he's already done the former, the latter now seems like a pipe dream.
As <a href="https://www.vox.com/technology/409256/trump-tariffs-student-visas-andreessen-horowitz">Vox reports</a>, any gains tech companies have gleaned from Trump's deregulation are minuscule in comparison to the economic havoc the president has wreaked with his foolhardy tariffs.
As the election ramped up last July, tech venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz <a href="https://pmarca.substack.com/p/the-little-tech-agenda">insisted in a Substack blog post</a> that the only way for the United States to maintain "economic and technological preeminence" over China and its "much darker, more totalitarian" policies would be, essentially, to beat our erstwhile trading partner.
Shortly thereafter, the monied pair <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ&amp;ab_channel=a16z">revealed on their podcast</a> that they were all-in for Trump despite being lifelong Democrats because he was, to their minds, America's last best hope at defeating China and becoming the tech utopia they've always wanted.
Though such warmongering sentiments are clearly behind the president's enormous tariffs on Chinese goods, it also undermines the Silicon Valley CEOs who lined up to kiss his ring because, to put it bluntly, almost all the components for American tech <a href="https://www.high-capacity.com/p/chinas-overlapping-tech-industrial">are made in China</a>.
Beyond cutting tech manufacturers off from their Chinese suppliers, the tariffs have also sent shockwaves through the global economy and brought the United States to the brink of a recession. The trickle-down effect from the tariffs has been more like a waterfall, with <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-trump-tariffs-trade-war-04-14-25/card/companies-are-going-bankrupt-at-the-fastest-rate-since-2010-mkBYAFmgfqRA0ZmAi6uE">tech companies going bankrupt</a>, <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2025/04/09/tech-vcs-feel-their-own-special-tariff-pain-00282047">canceling IPOs</a>, and <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-tariff-bezos-musk-zuckerberg-b2727147.html">losing billions</a> in share value.
Though Silicon Valley's biggest Trump supporters haven't started publicly trashing dear leader just yet, one need look no further than the never-ending drama between the president and his unelected aide Elon Musk to see just how badly this administration's trade war is messing with Big Tech.
Earlier in April, the billionaire <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-raging-against-trump-administration">began a fiery spat with Peter Navarro</a>, the president's trade and manufacturing adviser, calling the Trump surrogate "<a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1909605316121198860">dumber than a sack of bricks</a>" as they traded barbs over whether or not the tariffs are a good idea. While that drama played out on Musk's social network, the multi-hyphenate business owner allegedly <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-reportedly-begged-donald-trump-reverse-tariffs">implored Trump in privat</a>e to reconsider the tariffs — a scheme that clearly did not work.
With the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/investing/us-stock-market/index.html">stock market rebound</a> following the president's announcement of yet another 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariffs — for everyone except China, of course — it's not a huge surprise that the tech CEOs who threw their weight and money behind Trump are not talking smack where other people can hear.
Behind closed doors, however, there's unquestionably a lot of hand-wringing and regret going on as these short-sighted Silicon Valley-ers look at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/07/business/economy/trump-economy-tariffs.html">economic forecasts</a> for the coming years.
More on tech: <a href="https://futurism.com/google-border-surveillance">Google Is Helping Government Build an AI-Powered Border Surveillance System</a>

Silicon Schmucks 

Who ever could have guessed this would happen?

Tech CEOs Realizing They Made a Terrible Mistake by Supporting Trump

Shares of Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company behind the groundbreaking GLP-1 weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, have been absolutely plummeting.
The company's stock price slid over eight percent on Thursday, after its main competitor in the space, US-based pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Wellness/new-weight-loss-pill-benefit-people-type-2/story?id=120899245#:~:text=Drugmaker%20Eli%20Lilly%20said%20that,7.9%25%20of%20their%20body%20weight.">announced</a> promising Phase 3 trial results for its GLP-1 pill orforglipron, which is being marketed under its brand name CagriSema.
According to the results, the once-a-day pill improved blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetes patients while helping them to lose weight, showing very similar benefits to injectable GLP-1 drugs — except in a convenient pill form instead of a shot.
The timing couldn't be worse for Novo Nordisk. The company's shares are down roughly 34 percent so far this year following major supply line disruptions pushing <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/novo-nordisk-downgraded-bmo-eli-184129564.html">physicians to prescribe</a> Eli Lilly's tirzepatide-based injection drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro instead. Over the past six months, its once-ascendant stock value is down a grim 50 percent.
While Novo Nordisk is getting thrashed, Eli Lilly shares shot up by 14 percent in light of the latest news.
As <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2025/04/18/biotech-news-eli-lilly-novo-nordisk-fda-makary-gsk-fda-sanofi-the-readout/">STAT points out</a>, Novo Nordisk doesn't have any comparable small-molecule drug to Eli Lilly's orforglipron. Its own injectable peptide, semaglutide, which is the active ingredient in both Ozempic and Wegovy, is also difficult to manufacture, suggesting Eli Lilly may have a competitive edge.
Eli Lilly's <a href="https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/lillys-oral-glp-1-orforglipron-demonstrated-statistically">Phase 3 trial results</a> are an early indication of the emergence of a next generation of obesity drugs. The company found that participants lost an average of 16 pounds over 40 weeks, compared to a placebo group.
Side effects included mild to moderate gastrointestinal issues. Not everybody was so lucky; the development of a weight loss pill by COVID-19 vaccine maker Pfizer <a href="https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/wellness/video/pfizer-stops-work-pill-obesity-120817464">was scrapped earlier this week</a> after a participant reported a liver injury during a clinical trial.
Eli Lilly's "promising" results could hint at the pill being a viable alternative to Novo's Ozempic and even the company's own drugs Zepbound and Mounjaro — but it's still too early to draw any definitive conclusions or declare winners just yet.
Next, the company is planning to submit data from its latest trials to the FDA by the end of the year for weight loss management and for treating type 2 diabetes in early 2026.
But considering the major market moves this week, investors have seen enough, embracing Eli Lilly as having taken the lead in the hotly contested obesity drug market.
Whether their call will turn out to be the right one in the long term? Well, if there's one thing we've come to expect in this space, it's a series of radical shakeups.
More on obesity drugs: <a href="https://futurism.com/neoscope/diet-industry-ozempic-meltdown">The Diet Industry Is Reportedly in Total Meltdown Over GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs</a>

Novo No-Dice

Developments

It's getting hammered.

Novo Nordisk Is Getting Absolutely Destroyed

<h2>Levee Johnston</h2>
A man and his brother in western Tennessee deployed a clever system to save their family home from devastating river surges triggered by a catastrophic storm earlier this month.
As the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/04/15/tennessee-floods-mississippi-river/">Washington Post reports</a>, farmers Tucker Humphrey and his brother Justin constructed levees with an excavator that saved the house from flooding.
Dazzling <a href="https://x.com/foxweather/status/1912445873788797332">aerial footage</a> of the flood shows the home and its surrounding rectangular property virtually untouched by the brown floodwater that has engulfed everything else in the region.
The idea of constructing a levee, a technique that humans have <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/a-brief-history-of-levees/402119/">known about and deployed for many thousands of years</a>, was passed down from the two brothers' father, who died several years ago, according to WaPo.
"Just normal things around here," Tucker Humphrey told the newspaper. "Doing what we have to do to save the house."
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Aerial footage shot last week shows a home in the northwestern Tennessee town of Ridgely appearing like an island amid a sea of brown floodwaters. The property was protected by levees the family had constructed, preserving their home as the area around them was devastated. <a href="https://t.co/qffDbaKXXL">pic.twitter.com/qffDbaKXXL</a>
&mdash; FOX Weather (@foxweather) <a href="https://twitter.com/foxweather/status/1912445873788797332?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 16, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<h2>Paul Wall</h2>
To protect the home, the pair constructed a barrier up to nine feet tall in certain places.
And as it turns out, the artificial embankment was sorely needed. In just hours, the Obion River, which runs adjacent to their hometown of Bogota, rose nine feet at the beginning of April.
Around 100 people had to be rescued in the area. The storm itself, which tore through much of the South, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/03/16/at-least-34-dead-as-storms-rip-through-south-and-midwest/">killed more than 30 people</a>.
The Humphreys have no plan to move away from the flood-prone area, and are ready to construct even higher barriers.
"I’ll build it 30 feet tall if I got to," Tucker told the WaPo.
More on floods: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/flood-nasa-spacecraft">Flood Wreaks Havoc on NASA Spacecraft</a>

Flood, Sweat and Tears

"I’ll build it 30 feet tall if I got to."

Brothers Build Clever System to Keep Their Family Home Dry While Everything Around It Floods

President Donald Trump's escalating tariff war is putting Tesla in serious danger.
As <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/17/ideological-twist-elon-musk-tariff-opposition-00295173">Politico reports</a>, the trade war has put Tesla CEO Elon Musk in an extremely awkward position politically.
While the president's top henchman's businesses are somewhat insulated thanks to a strong manufacturing presence in the United States, Musk's ambitions to turn Tesla into the "most valuable company in the world" by focusing on autonomous driving and robotics could be thwarted by flatlining international trade.
Free trade is the "lifeblood of the auto industry," Wedbush Securities analyst and Tesla bull Dan Ives told Politico. "It’s the lifeblood of autonomous and robotics and the future, not just thinking about domestically, but globally."
Trump's disastrous trade war could make it extremely difficult for Musk to deliver on his characteristically overzealous promises. For instance, he told investors last year that his EV maker will "solve autonomy," an extremely ambitious goal that will require major breakthroughs in self-driving technologies. (It's worth noting that the mercurial CEO has made such a promise <a href="https://futurism.com/video-elon-musk-promising-self-driving-cars">every year for a decade</a>.)
Musk has also <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/the-electric-musk-confirms-his-mission-has-changed-make-tesla-a-lot-more-valuable?rc=st1fhw">made baffling claims</a> that the company's Optimus humanoid robot "will be overwhelmingly the value of the company" and rake in $10 trillion in revenue, making it the "biggest product in history."
But given China's extremely dominant role as the top producer of humanoid robotics, Trump's extremely steep tariffs could make achieving such a goal extremely difficult, according to experts — if not outright impossible.
Optimus, in particular, "would be the place that you would see [the impact of tariffs] because a lot of those components are not necessarily coming from the US," Constellation Research founder Ray Wang told Politico.
Musk has already aired his grievances with Trump's plan to shut down international trade and economically isolate the US from the world.
Earlier this month, Musk broke against Trump, <a class="underline hover:text-futurism hover:no-underline transition-all duration-200 ease-in-out" href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-rages-against-donald-trump-tariffs">railing against the architect</a> of his catastrophic tariff policy, advisor on trade and manufacturing, Peter Navarro, calling him a "moron."
He also <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tariff-rift-peter-navarro-getting-ugly-2025-4">publicly stated</a> that he thinks people should be able to work in both Europe and North America as they please and that there should be a "free trade zone" between the two.
The reality: no company of Tesla's size and complexity is well-positioned for Trump's tariffs.
"Over the years, we’ve tried to localize our supply chain in every market, but we are still very reliant on parts from across the world for all our businesses," Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja warned during an earnings call in January, as quoted by Politico. "Therefore, the imposition of tariffs, which is very likely, will have an impact on our business and profitability."
The EV maker has already seen the effects of those interventions, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/12/business/tesla-china-tariffs-musk/index.html">suspending new orders</a> for both Model S and Model X vehicles on its Chinese websites last week.
The timing couldn't be worse. Tesla has seen <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-sales-data-europe">sales plummet worldwide</a>, in large part thanks to <a href="https://futurism.com/poll-favorability-elon-musk-doge">spiking anti-Musk sentiment</a>. Investors are fearful of terrible news ahead of next week's first-quarter earnings call.
Even Musk's SpaceX could suffer from collapsing supply lines as it relies on Chinese-made tech. The space company begged a US trade representative for tariff exemptions, as <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-spacex-pleads-trump-155049996.html">The Telegraph reported</a> late last month.
SpaceX is now scrambling to move production to the US.
It remains to be seen where Trump and Musk's rapidly deteriorating bromance will lead next. But considering the extremely unfavorable stock market and massive volatility, Musk will likely waste no time in trying to beg Trump for some reprieve.
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/cybertruck-disaster-production">The Cybertruck Is Turning Into a Complete Disaster</a>

Tariff'd Up

His businesses greatly depend on free trade.

Elon Musk Is in Huge Trouble Over Donald Trump's Tariffs

By pretty much any account, Blue Origin's publicity stunt of sending an all-female crew into space <a href="https://www.theverge.com/blue-origin/651540/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-stunt-flop-katy-perry">was a major flop</a>.
The Jeff Bezos-owned New Shepard capsule spent mere minutes in <a href="https://www.app.com/story/news/2025/04/17/what-is-an-astronaut-is-katy-perry-an-astronaut-for-going-to-space/83138253007/">kinda-sorta-maybe space</a>, giving its extremely wealthy passengers a momentary glimpse of weightlessness — though more in the way a rollercoaster ride causes you to shift out of your seat than in the microgravity of actual orbit (unlike a theme park ride, though, a ticket for the jaunt set passengers like pop star Katy Perry back hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.)
Adding to the drama, a peculiar moment captured during the live stream had audiences scratching their heads.
As <a href="https://x.com/Mappy6984/status/1912280839636881792">spotted by eagle-eyed netizens</a>, and later <a href="https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/04/17/blue-origin-capsule-door-bezos/">confirmed by Snopes</a>, the door to the capsule briefly opened inwards and shut again after it softly landed in the West Texas desert. A female employee can be seen hurrying over to the door in an apparent attempt to tell the occupants to shut it again, around the 1:45:30 mark in the <a href="https://youtu.be/cSqyRWQooJM?list=PLAXaf_0Jgf8FXcIXZ_pnA8CG6GrbM3yl4&amp;t=6331">official stream</a>.
A nearby Bezos laughs while gazing through one of the windows. Roughly two minutes later, he purposefully walks up to the door to use a tool to open the capsule and greet his fiancée — even though the door could clearly already be opened. A flurry of activity including countless camera shutters can be heard, suggesting this was a moment constructed for maximum publicity.
Even more strangely, the tool in Bezos' hand appeared to temporarily make contact with the door, but didn't seem to actually engage with any locking mechanism.
"Oops, she didn't really close it again!" a laughing Bezos can be heard saying.
The moment raised plenty of questions. Why did Bezos have to use a tool to open the door if the hatch could've easily been opened from the inside? Just how much of the launch was a silly, rehearsed publicity stunt designed for everybody to fall in love with their favorite billionaires again?
A more forgiving interpretation of the moment could indicate that Blue Origin crew members — and not the capsule's passengers — were simply following protocol, forcing the crew to wait until they got the all-clear.
Did the passengers, who spent a mere couple of days in preparation for the stunt, screw up the proceedings by opening the latch too soon?
Naturally, the internet, which already came out in full force to mock the entire charade, had a field day.
"Did anyone catch them prematurely opening the door and clearly being told to close it?" one user on TikTok <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@thejamieleee/video/7493175595317103915">wrote</a>. "AND then Jeff Bezos opens it with a tool?"
Of course, conspiracy theories latched onto the opportunity to argue that the New Shepard launch was entirely faked — despite ample evidence suggesting the rocket did indeed reach the Kármán line, the internationally agreed-upon edge of space.
But considering the media circus surrounding the launch, which was haphazardly played up as a groundbreaking moment in the history of women in space exploration, there's a good chance Blue Origin was simply trying to ensure it milked every photo opp available.
There's already been plenty of speculation about which one-percenter will dare to ride Bezos' rocket next — though considering how this week's launch played out, maybe publicists will think twice before trying to get their client on board.
More on the launch: <a href="https://futurism.com/rich-women-astonished-backlash-trip-space">Zillionaire Girlbosses Astonished by Backlash to Their Frivolous Trip to Space</a>