<h2>Spin Cycle</h2>
The Earth's rotation is about to accelerate significantly.
According to scientists, July 9, July 22, and August 5 of this year will be some of the shortest days in recent memory as a result, slicing well over a millisecond off the usual 24 hours, <a href="https://www.timeanddate.com/news/astronomy/earth-fast-rotation-2025">Timeanddate.com reports</a>.
That's despite the Earth's full rotation taking almost exactly 86,400 milliseconds, the equivalent of 24 hours.
The short upcoming days buck a decades-long trend. Since 1972, scientists have sliced a "leap second" from the clock a <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/03/30/1241674216/climate-change-time-negative-leap-second">whopping 27 times</a> thanks to a steady deceleration.
Our planet's sudden — and significant — acceleration caught scientists by surprise.
"Nobody expected this," Moscow State University astronomer Leonid Zotov told Timeanddate.com. "The cause of this acceleration is not explained."
"Most scientists believe it is something inside the Earth," he added. "Ocean and atmospheric models don’t explain this huge acceleration."
<h2>Slicing Seconds</h2>
Scientists have long found that numerous factors can influence the speed of the Earth's rotation, from <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-funded-studies-explain-how-climate-is-changing-earths-rotation/">changing sea levels</a> to the Moon <a href="https://public.nrao.edu/ask/what-happens-as-the-moon-moves-away-from-the-earth/">steadily increasing its orbit</a> away from our planet.
Using atomic clocks, we've been able to keep extremely close tabs on how these influences are affecting how we measure time on Earth. While its rotation had been steadily declining, the Earth reversed the trend in 2020, <a href="https://www.timeanddate.com/time/earth-faster-rotation.html">beating 60-year-old records for the shortest days 28 times</a>.
One possible explanation is that the Moon could be at its furthest point from the Earth's equator, as <a href="https://www.iflscience.com/nobody-expected-this-earths-rotation-will-speed-up-tomorrow-bucking-the-downward-trend-79905">IFLScience explains</a>.
Another culprit could be powerful earthquakes knocking the Earth off its already tilted axis. In 2011, scientists found that a 9.0 earthquake in Japan <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/japan-quake-may-have-shortened-earth-days-moved-axis/">may have been ferocious enough</a> to shorten days on Earth by offsetting its axis by roughly 6.5 inches.
But whether the Earth will continue its surprising trend of spinning faster and faster remains a subject of debate.
"There is a general consensus the Earth will slow down again (deceleration will win), but there is a risk that acceleration may be effective for a few decades," Geoscience Australia scientist Oleg Titov <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/09/why-is-the-earth-spinning-faster-is-time-speeding-up-australias-experts-give-us-their-second-opinion">told The Guardian</a>.
More on Earth's rotation: <a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-generate-electricity-earth-rotation">Scientists Build Device to Generate Electricity Using the Earth's Rotation</a>

I Want to Get Off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride

"The cause of this acceleration is not explained."

The Earth's Rotation Is About to Spin Up So Much That Tomorrow Will Be Much Shorter Than Today

From <a href="https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/68179/1/spore-core-a-brief-history-of-mushroom-music-piano-john-cage-bionic-and-wires">trippy mushroom synths</a> to the stressed-out "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/science/plant-sounds-stress.html">pops</a>" of thirsty plants, recording the music of nature has long resulted in soundscapes both fascinating and moving.
A new recording of a melting glacier in the Swiss Alps, however, goes over the line right into devastation. Recorded by French sound artist Ludwig Berger at the <a href="https://www.copernicus.eu/en/media/image-day-gallery/morteratsch-glacier-receding-record-rate">rapidly-retreating Morteratsch glacier</a> in the upper part of the Swiss Alps, the "<a href="https://www.crying-glacier.com/">Crying Glacier</a>" project is exactly what the name suggests: the documentation of an ancient structure's last breaths.
In a short documentary of the same name that was produced by the Danish studio El Flamingo and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/08/opinion/climate-change-melting-glacier.html">plugged by the New York Times</a>, "Crying Glacier" comes at you in a rush. With its rapid babbling liquid noises that can sound more like a cheery brook than a dying ice behemoth, Morteratsch's <a href="https://youtu.be/-ZuZznwlDdg">creaks and ticks sound almost like trees</a>.
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Crying Glacier (Teaser)" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w6SHP0IeI-U?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Midway through the short film, all the sounds and feelings gleaned from the glacier — the brightness of flowing water, the small air bubble pops that Berger explains are hundreds or even thousands of years old, the levity brought on by the flatulent sounds of gas being released, and that preternatural creaking — dovetail into a crescendo.
That initial bustling busyness turns to gloom as the glacier starts to sound almost like it's drowning. By the time you realize what you're hearing in that Arctic symphony, it's too late to turn back.
"The more alive the glacier seems," Berger said in the documentary, "the more the glacier is actually dying."
Along with the documentary, which clocks in just under 10 minutes but feels like an hours-long tragedy by the time it's over, the field recorder also released on Bandcamp a standalone track titled "<a href="https://f-o-m.bandcamp.com/album/crying-glacier">on a different scale</a>"  that documents the same phenomena in a different medium.
Listed as the composers are Berger and "Vadret da Morteratsch," the Swiss version of the glacier's name; the track also captures the symphonic soliloquy of an ancient structure merging faster and faster with the frigid sea surrounding it.
Like any good symphonic tragedy, "Crying Glacier" was seemingly edited to espouse a narrative. From its quietly cheery introduction to its dramatic denouement and meditative conclusion, this project documented something as beautiful as it is melancholic: the sounds of a glacier, a stand-in for our planet, as it gasps for a life that is slipping away.
More on glacial retreat: <a href="https://futurism.com/glacier-ice-piracy">Antarctic Glacier Accused of "Ice Piracy"</a>

Requiem for a Stream

"The more alive the glacier seems, the more the glacier is actually dying."

The Sounds of a Dying Glacier Might Make You Cry

Since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world two and a half years ago, the company has operated at a substantial financial loss.
Despite raising at least $60.9 billion in private funding since ChatGPT's public launch, OpenAI is leaking billions of dollars every year. In 2024, for example, the tech startup lost some $5 billion, <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/09/openai-hits-10-billion-in-annualized-revenue-fueled-by-chatgpt-growth.html">per MSNBC</a>. That doesn't seem to bother OpenAI insiders, though, who hope to be bringing in <a href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-forecasts-revenue-topping-125-billion-2029-agents-new-products-gain">$125 billion</a> in annual revenue by 2029.
The gulf between OpenAI's ambitions and its actual financial health reflect what tech critic Ed Zitron calls the "subprime AI crisis."
Playing off the <a href="https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii50/articles/robin-blackburn-the-subprime-crisis">subprime mortgage crisis</a> of 2007 — also known as the Great Recession — Zitron notes that AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic operate at a "massive loss," and that the chickens are eventually going to come home to roost. Similar to 2007, when banks lent <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/subprime-meltdown.asp">way more credit</a> than they could ever hope to make back, Wall Street has bet billions hoping that OpenAI will miraculously continue to skyrocket in value.
As MSNBC notes, ChatGPT is currently valued at around 30 times its revenue — a staggering amount of faith, to say the least.
Per Zitron, that idea isn't exactly built on sound financial analysis as much as a frenzy of "magical thinking."
"I hypothesize a kind of subprime AI crisis is brewing," Zitron wrote, "where almost the entire tech industry has bought in on a technology sold at a vastly-discounted rate, heavily-centralized and subsidized by big tech. What happens when the entire tech industry relies on the success of a kind of software that only loses money, and doesn’t create much value to begin with?"
The answer to that rhetorical question, as it turns out, is <a href="https://futurism.com/managers-using-ai-fire">widespread layoffs</a>, <a href="https://www.axios.com/2025/01/21/microsoft-google-price-hikes-ai-chatbots">price hikes</a>, and the <a href="https://jbai.ai/index.php/jbai/article/view/31/18">enshittification</a> of software that relies on companies like OpenAI and Anthropic for their own infrastructure.
For example, the company Anysphere, which runs Cursor — an "AI code generator" based on Anthropic's large language model (LLM) infrastructure — recently imposed a <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/cursor-apologizes-for-unclear-pricing-changes-that-upset-users/">massive rate hike</a> on its users, despite raising nearly $1 billion in funding back in June.
That’s got the company’s dedicated user base of software engineers and coders chuffed, to say the least. Following the hikes, they’ve flocked to social media to vent their frustration, flooding Reddit with posts titled "<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1lu8eyb/cursor_pay_more_get_less_and_dont_ask_how_it_works/">Cursor: pay more, get less, and don't ask how it works</a>" and "<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1lrlb6m/cursors_new_pricing_model_is_absolute_garbage/">Cursor's New Pricing Model Is Absolute Garbage</a>."
Per Zitron, "Anysphere is, despite getting $900 million in funding, running out of money, or at least believes that continuing to operate its business in a way it did less than a month ago would cause it to do so."
Following the money upstream reveals the true source of the rate limits: pressure put on Anysphere by Anthropic’s own recent <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20250530132140/https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/service-tiers">price hikes</a>, the first of their kind, and a dark omen for things to come.
When it comes to OpenAI, it’s difficult to see where else revenue is supposed to come, if not for rate hikes. ChatGPT already boasts 800 million weekly active users, or "something like 10 percent of the world," <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chatgpt-hits-1-billion-users-openai-ceo-says-doubled-in-weeks/">according to CEO Sam Altman</a>. The vast majority of those are free users, and it’s difficult to imagine they’d be too happy if their favorite chatbot was suddenly locked behind a paywall.
Case in point, OpenAI has recently introduced <a href="https://openai.com/api-priority-processing/">similar price hikes</a> to Anthropic’s, offering "priority processing" for businesses willing to pay more.
Regular users have already experienced OpenAI’s random throttling, like in May, when the company <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/637542/chatgpt-says-our-gpus-are-melting-as-it-puts-limit-on-image-generation-requests">limited ChatGPT image requests</a> because their GPUs were "melting" under the weight of its vast user base.
Going forward, the question isn’t a matter of "if" price hikes take off into the stratosphere, but who kicks it off and when.
Zitron sums it up neatly: "There is no way this situation leads to the kind of growth that will make Anthropic and OpenAI profitable, sustainable businesses, and [this] will have the opposite effect on their revenues long-term."
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/mit-economist-ai-economy-mad-max">MIT Economist Warns AI Is Poised to Turn Economy Into "Mad Max" Scenario</a>

Don't Burst Your Bubble

"I hypothesize a kind of subprime AI crisis is brewing."

OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially

With <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@BlooGaming">2.57 million subscribers</a> and more than 800 million views, a YouTuber named Bloo is swiftly becoming one of the biggest gaming personalities in the biz.
But unlike his human peers, this blue-haired vlogger is a cartoonish AI-powered avatar — perhaps the clearest sign yet of AI's deep and industry-shaking inroads into the world of entertainment and influencers.
In an <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/02/ai-virtual-personality-youtubers-or-vtubers-are-earning-millions.html">interview with CNBC</a>, Bloo's creator, Dutch YouTuber and AI enthusiast Jordi van den Bussche, said that he decided to unleash his blue-haired avatar to lighten his own workload.
A longtime gaming vlogger himself, van den Bussche — who is better known by his handle, Kwebbelkop — started to get burnt out as he racked up his 15 million-odd followers. As the 30-year-old content creator <a href="https://www.tubefilter.com/2022/08/19/kwebbelkop-jordi-van-den-bussche-vtuber-bloo-minecraft-burnout/">told the website Tubefilter</a> a few years ago, he found a solution in 2021 with the then-burgeoning "VTuber" trend, in which humans do the voices and actions for virtual avatars.
"Turns out, the flaw in this equation is the human, so we need to somehow remove the human," van den Bussche told CNBC in his more recent interview. "The only logical way was to replace the human with either a photorealistic person or a cartoon. The VTuber was the only option, and that’s where Bloo came from."
In videos with names like "<a href="https://youtu.be/2vQeAdeij1M">Weakest To STRONGEST SHARK EVER In GTA 5!</a>" that feature Bloo attempting to become a ripped, anthropomorphic shark-chad in "Grand Theft Auto: 5," the goofy-voiced avatar does what most gaming YouTubers do — that is, play games and prattle on about them. Instead of having to be camera-ready, however, van der Buscche can essentially hide behind the avatar, replicating his own work and dividing it between two "personalities."
"I've always been in love with Lady Shark," Bloo says in the video," but she only wants to date strong animals."
As dumb as that gambit may seem, it's obviously working. That video alone has more than 11 million views, and as the content creator told CNBC, Bloo has already racked up more than seven figures in ad income with those sorts of clips. Not bad for a guy who looks like one of Mark Zuckerberg's <a href="https://futurism.com/zuckerberg-metaverse-ad-terrible">abandoned metaverse avatars</a> and sounds like Max Goof from "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ckq9vk5rAI">A Goofy Movie</a>."
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Weakest To STRONGEST SHARK EVER In GTA 5!" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2vQeAdeij1M?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
While Bloo is not fully autonomous just yet and is still "puppeteered" by van den Bussche and his team, everything else about the avatar's channel, from voice-dubbing into other languages to video thumbnails, is AI-generated. Kwebbelkop listed off OpenAI's <a href="https://futurism.com/scientists-chatgpt-controls-spaceship">ChatGPT</a>, Google's <a href="https://futurism.com/google-email-ai-phone">Gemin</a>i, and Anthropic's <a href="https://futurism.com/anthropic-claude-small-business">Claude</a> as the software he uses for Bloo.
Despite testing out fully-automated Bloo videos, van den Bussche said that the technology just isn't there yet — but once it is, he'll be all-in.
"When AI can do it better, faster or cheaper than humans," he said, "that’s when we’ll start using it permanently."
More on AI concoctions: <a href="https://futurism.com/chatgpt-online-dating-rizz">People Are Rizzing on Tinder Using ChatGPT, Then Showing Up to Dates Completely Tongue-Tied</a>

Bloo's Clues

"The only logical way was to replace the human with either a photorealistic person or a cartoon."

A Fast-Rising Gaming YouTuber Is an AI Construct, Not a Human

New research suggests that medical AI chatbots are woefully unreliable at understanding how people actually communicate their health problems.
As detailed in yet-to-be-peer-reviewed <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715275.3732121">study</a> presented last month by MIT researchers, an AI chatbot is more likely to advise a patient not to seek medical care if their messages contained typos. The errors AI is susceptible to can be as seemingly inconsequential as an extra space between words, or if the patient used slang or colorful language. And strikingly, women are disproportionately affected by this, being wrongly told not to see a doctor at a higher rate than men.
"Insidious bias can shift the tenor and content of AI advice, and that can lead to subtle but important differences" in how medical resources are distributed, Karandeep Singh at UC San Diego Health, who was not involved in the study, <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2486372-typos-and-slang-spur-ai-to-discourage-seeking-medical-care/">told </a><a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2486372-typos-and-slang-spur-ai-to-discourage-seeking-medical-care/">New Scientist</a>.
The work adds to the serious doubts about <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/whisper-nabla-hospital-ai-details-patients">using AI models in a clinical setting</a>, particularly in patient-facing roles. Hospitals and health clinics are already using chatbots to schedule appointments, field questions, and triage patients based on what they tell the chatbot, leaving their fate in the hands of a technology that often misinterprets information and makes up factual claims.
Humans tend to be poor at explaining what's bothering us medically. We can hem and haw about what symptoms we have and when they started to occur, hedging our answers with "maybe"s and "kind of"s. The perils are heightened in a written setting, where typos and bad grammar prevail — and even more so if someone is forced to communicate in a language that isn't their native tongue.
Your hypothetical medical AI is supposed to be unerring in the face of these hurdles, but are they actually? To find out, the MIT researchers evaluated four models, including OpenAI's GPT-4, Meta's open source LLama-3-70b, and a medical AI called Palmyra-Med. 
To test them, the researchers simulated thousands of patient cases using a combination of real patient complaints from a medical database, health posts on Reddit, and some AI-generated patient cases. Before giving these to the AI models, they added "perturbations" to the cases that could potentially throw the chatbots off. These included the use of exclamation marks, typing in all lower case, using colorful language, using uncertain language like "possibly," and using gender neutral pronouns. Crucially, these changes were made without affecting the clinical data in the patients' responses, the researchers said. 
But for one reason or another, the AI models clearly had their perceptions changed by the nonstandard writing. Overall, when faced with these stylistic flourishes, they were between 7 to 9 percent more likely to suggest a patient should self-manage their symptoms, instead of seeing a doctor. 
One explanation is that the medical LLMs are relying on their training on medical literature, and can't make the leap to teasing out clinical information from a patient's vernacular language.
"These models are often trained and tested on medical exam questions but then used in tasks that are pretty far from that, like evaluating the severity of a clinical case. There is still so much about LLMs that we don't know," study lead author Abinitha Gourabathina, a researcher at the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said in a <a href="https://news.mit.edu/2025/llms-factor-unrelated-information-when-recommending-medical-treatments-0623">statement</a> about the work.
The even uglier implication is that the AI is reflecting, if not exaggerating, the biases already exhibited by human doctors, especially in regards to gender. Why is it that female patients were told more often to self-manage than men? Could it have anything to do with the fact that real-life doctors often <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38046638/">downplay women's medical complaints</a> because they're seen as being too emotional or "hysterical"?
Coauthor Marzyeh Ghassemi, an associate professor in the MIT EECS, says that the work "is strong evidence that models must be audited before use in health care" — but ironing out these flaws won't be easy.
More on medical AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/fda-ai-approve-drugs">The FDA Will Use AI to Accelerate Approving Drugs</a>

Typo Negative

Watch out for something as harmless as an extra space.

AI Does Something Subtly Bizarre If You Make Typos While Talking to It

Tesla investors are <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-stock-elon-musk-political-party">clearly worried</a> that CEO Elon Musk's fiery new pledge to <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-destroy-republican-party">build a third US political party</a> could inflict even more damage on the embattled company.
The EV maker has been put through the wringer by Musk's antics, from cratering sales worldwide to an enormous drop in year-over-year revenues.
The company's <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/02/tesla-delivery-demand-drop-elon-musk">finances are in free fall</a>. And now that president Donald Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill" has passed through Congress, Tesla's crisis could soon take a major turn for the worse, the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/aaf1a903-1936-4807-9fa0-6fbbe2485edb">Financial Times reports</a>.
To insiders, it seems that Musk has been struggling to understand what's happening around him, nevermind the impacts of his own erratic actions — and his <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-chainsaw-empathy">latest moment of lucidity</a> is too little, too late.
"Elon has finally woken up to this, but talk about a day late and a dollar short," one former Tesla executive told the FT.
Trump's bill is set to obliterate clean air credits, which have historically represented billions of dollars worth of profits to Tesla, a sizable chunk of its overall revenues.
The Trump administration is also planning to blow up a $7,500 federal tax credit for eligible EV purchases and leases, as well as <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-executive-order-seeks-end-wind-solar-energy-subsidies-2025-07-07/">wind and solar energy tax credits</a>. Tesla has greatly benefited from both.
Finally, the president's unpredictable tariff war has thrown Tesla's supply chain with China into chaos.
In short, Trump's second term has been nothing short of a disaster for the EV maker's bottom line, a bizarre reality considering its CEO has <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-giving-up-politics">spent hundreds of millions</a> getting him elected.
But Trump's bill proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back, <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-musk-bromance-exploded">ending their budding bromance</a> abruptly in <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-shreds-musk">dramatic fashion</a>.
"This is terrible policy and a devastating blow for Tesla’s bottom line," the former executive told the FT. "It’s everything together: tariffs, the $7,500 consumer credit, manufacturing tax credits, charging credits, and solar residential credits."
Whether Musk's reinvigorated attempts to shoehorn himself into the world of politics will turn things around for Tesla feels like an extraordinary long shot. The carmaker's efforts to double down on a Waymo-like autonomous robotaxi service have been suffering from <a href="https://futurism.com/first-tesla-drives-autonomously-embarrassing-flub">technical glitches</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-careening-flood">dangerous close calls</a>.
Consumer demand for its vehicles has dropped considerably, despite surging interest in EVs overall, <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/tesla-sales-data-europe">particularly in Europe</a>. That's in large part due to Musk's <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-dealership-manager-musk">alienating embrace</a> of extreme far-right ideologies, and any new fans he gained in that world are now put off by his feud with Trump.
And any hints of contrition from Musk still feel opaque at best.
In a <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1940015432951579108">tweet</a> last week, Musk somberly reflected on parading across the stage next to Argentinian president Javier Milei in February, wielding a shiny metal-plated chainsaw in a ham-handed gesture representing his indiscriminate gutting of federal agencies.
"Milei gave me the chainsaw backstage and I ran with it, but, in retrospect, it lacked empathy," he wrote.
More on Musk: <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-elon-relationship-jeffrey-epstein">Grok Makes Bizarre Post About Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein and It Mysteriously Gets Deleted</a>

Asleep at the Wheel

"Elon has finally woken up to this, but talk about a day late and a dollar short."

Musk Is Struggling to Understand What's Happening Around Him, Says Former Tesla Exec

<h2>Short Cake</h2>
Tesla short sellers are making bank after CEO Elon Musk announced that he's doubling down on creating his own political party in the US, further shredding the brand and its tattered valuation.
The company's shares slumped nearly seven percent on Monday, wiping out more than $68 billion in market cap. Investors who were shorting the EV maker — betting against its success, basically — were on track to reap roughly $1.4 billion in profits, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2025/07/07/tesla-short-sellers-stock-drops/84498283007/">Reuters reports</a>.
Traders were spooked by Musk <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dn04lvgpdo">announcing</a> that he was launching an "America Party," a declaration of war designed to counter both Democrats and his friends-turned-enemies in the Republican Party.
"When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy," he <a href="https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1941584569523732930">tweeted</a> over the weekend.
However, <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-stock-elon-musk-political-party">investors were furious</a>, questioning his commitment to leading the carmaker. Tesla has already suffered greatly under Musk's absentee leadership style. His embrace of far-right extremist ideologies before and during his tenure as the unofficial lead of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has dragged the company's brand through the mud, eviscerating <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-crumbles-sales">sales</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/actual-value-tesla-stock-time-bomb">leaving a massive hole</a> in the company's finances.
<h2>Going Short</h2>
Meanwhile, short sellers are seemingly having the last laugh. On June 5, Musk's erupting feud with president Donald Trump led to Tesla's shares plunging 14 percent, an all-time record. That day alone, short sellers made over $4 billion in profits, per Reuters.
Between January and April of this year, those who bet on a decline in the company's stock price generated a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/22/tesla-short-sellers-have-made-11point5-billion-from-this-years-selloff-.html">whopping $11.5 billion in profits</a>.
Besides abysmal financials and plummeting sales, the company's long-awaited launch of a robotaxi service has been <a href="https://futurism.com/robotaxi-fails-elon-musk-decision">mired in technical difficulties</a> and <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-careening-flood">terrifying close calls</a>.
The reality that short sellers are making billions likely won't sit well with the carmaker's controversial leader. For many years now, Musk has been infuriated by investors betting against Tesla.
"Shorting is a scam," he <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-wall-street-bets-shorting-scam">tweeted</a> in 2021, in the midst of the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/reddit-cofounder-wall-street-bets-revolution">Wall Street Bets saga</a>. "Legal only for vestigial reasons."
More on Tesla: <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-careening-flood">Reckless Footage Shows Tesla Robotaxi Careening Through Heavy Rain at High Speed</a>

Invested Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy

They're making billions -- and Musk can't stop dragging the brand through the mud.

Short Sellers Are Making a Fortune as Tesla's Stock Collapses

Online dating apps have become a leading way to meet romantic partners, turning dating from an in-person experience into an often tedious, touchscreen-focused exercise.
And with the advent of generative AI, that bleak landscape of modern dating is continuing to evolve in dystopian — and perhaps predictable — ways.
As the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/03/ai-online-dating-match/">Washington Post reports</a>, a 31-year-old named Richard Wilson was startled when his date "had none of the conversational pizzazz she had shown over text."
Her messages had included "long, multi-paragraph messages" and acknowledgments of "each of his points." But in person she lacked those conversational chops, and when she mentioned that she used ChatGPT "all the time" for work, the pieces started to fall into place for Wilson.
It's not just individual users writing romantic messages using AI; online dating companies are also stuffing the tech into their apps.
Firms like Match Group, which owns industry stalwarts such as Hinge and Tinder, are releasing new features to summarize dating profiles, suggest ways to maximize the number of matches, and flag unwanted messages.
Some apps go as far as to suggest "icebreaker" opening lines, drawing criticism and <a href="https://noyb.eu/en/bumbles-ai-icebreakers-are-mainly-breaking-eu-law">even scrutiny from regulators</a>.
We've also come across apps that use <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/cupidbots-dating-app-ai-harassment">AI to harass women</a>, or create videos of <a href="https://futurism.com/ai-kissing-without-consent">people kissing without their consent</a>. Earlier this year, the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/b21eaff7-7189-49a2-b791-209e8de98494">Financial Times reported</a> that a woman's recent date had used ChatGPT to write a psychological profile on her.
Last year, <a href="https://gizmodo.com/guy-used-chatgpt-talk-5-000-women-tinder-met-his-wife-1851228179">Gizmodo reported</a> on a Moscow-based man who programmed OpenAI's GPT large language models to talk to well over 5,000 women on his behalf — and eventually meet his future wife.
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd <a href="https://futurism.com/bumble-founder-future-ai-dating-other-ais">made headlines</a> after saying that she believes the future of dating will involve having your personal AI "dating concierge" talk to hundreds of other AIs to find a perfect match.
Going even further, apps like Replika are allowing people to <a href="https://futurism.com/replika-ceo-fine-people-marry-ai-chatbots">cut out human contact altogether</a>, providing a platform for lonely people to create entirely AI-generated romantic partners.
Needless to say, harnessing the power of AI without turning dating into a data-focused race to the most matches possible is anything but easy. It's a slippery slope that could lead to confusion and disappointment.
"People will use AI to alter their photos in ways that aren’t necessarily achievable for them, whereas when you use it for messages, you’re using it in a way that is amplifying yourself and your ability to have conversations," Amanda Gesselman, a Kinsey Institute psychologist, who has done research with Match Group, told WaPo.
AI is already shaping user behavior on dating apps. Match's head of trust and safety Yoel Roth told the newspaper that AI is successfully dissuading users from sending "something potentially offensive, abusive or weird" with prompts.
But is any of this really the pinnacle of authenticity, or the best way to find a romantic partner online?
For many, using ChatGPT to keep conversations going is unlikely to win over hearts in the real world, as Wilson's disappointing date showed. He decided to give the woman a second chance, but ultimately found that they simply "weren't a good pair."
More on AI dating: <a href="https://futurism.com/bumble-founder-future-ai-dating-other-ais">Bumble Founder Says Future of Dating Is Your AI Will Date Other People's AIs and Hook You Up With the Best Matches</a>

Smooth Talker

A man's date "had none of the conversational pizzazz she had shown over text."

People Are Rizzing on Tinder Using ChatGPT, Then Showing Up to Dates Completely Tongue-Tied

In a perfect example of why it's an absolutely terrible idea for high-level government officials to use personal cell phones, text messaging platforms, and apps like Signal, secretary of state Marco Rubio has fallen victim to a scammer who's been using AI to clone his voice and writing style.
As the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/07/08/marco-rubio-ai-imposter-signal/">Washington Post reports</a>, a July 3 State Department cable revealed that an impostor posing as Rubio had "contacted at least five non-Department individuals, including three foreign ministers, a US governor, and a US. member of Congress" with the "goal of gaining access to information or accounts."
"The actor left voicemails on Signal for at least two targeted individuals and in one instance, sent a text message inviting the individual to communicate on Signal," the cable reads.
While officials promised to "carry out a thorough investigation and continue to implement safeguards to prevent this from happening in the future," the incident highlights some glaring cybersecurity gaps among Trump administration officials.
"This is precisely why you shouldn’t use Signal or other insecure channels for official government business," University of California at Berkeley professor Hany Farid told WaPo, noting that government officials can have major blind spots when it comes to data security.
The news also comes after the phone of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was breached, triggering an FBI investigation.
At the time, the intelligence agency <a href="https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2025/PSA250515">warned</a> that "malicious actors" were impersonating US officials as part of an "ongoing malicious text and voice messaging campaign."
In an even more incriminating instance earlier this year, The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-national-security-bombing-chat">accidentally added</a> to a group text message between key national security advisers as they discussed an upcoming military strike in Yemen.
According to Goldberg, an account related to Rubio was included in the group chat, meaning this month's impersonation attempt wasn't the first high-profile operational security blunder of his short tenure.
Despite his poor cybersecurity record, Rubio has since been appointed as the president's national security advisor.
The use of Signal, in particular, opens officials up to scammers. Impersonating voices in the age of generative AI is child's play and doesn't require any particularly sophisticated tools.
"You just need 15 to 20 seconds of audio of the person, which is easy in Marco Rubio’s case," Farid told WaPo. "You upload it to any number of services, click a button that says ‘I have permission to use this person’s voice,’ and then you type what you want him to say."
Given the larger trend of dismissing conventional and <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/pentagon-issued-warning-signal-messaging">far more secure communications channels</a>, we should expect Trump administration officials to continue to fall victim to impersonation attempts.
Trump himself is setting the bar pretty low. The president has a long track record of using personal cell phones, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/06/trump-private-cellphone-china-hackers/683006/">leaving him exposed</a> to hackers from China and Iran.
More on Signalgate: <a href="https://futurism.com/trump-administration-signal-clone-hacked">The Trump Administration Switched to a Sketchy Signal Clone and It Got Hacked, Leaking Messages</a>

Bad Signal

"This is precisely why you shouldn’t use Signal or other insecure channels for official government business."

An Unknown Entity Has Voice Cloned the Secretary of State and Is Calling High Level Officials

MIT economist David Autor is warning that AI could create a "Mad Max" scenario, in which the job market becomes dominated by cheap and commoditized labor.
Autor made his grim prediction <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGKUTVyqJlI">during an interview</a> on the "Possible" podcast, hosted by LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and his chief of staff Aria Finger.
When asked whether he thought society is headed towards a "Wall-E" scenario — where "people sit around on hovercraft armchairs watching holographic TV" — or much grimmer alternative, Autor had an alarming answer.
"The more likely scenario to me looks much more like 'Mad Max: Fury Road,' where everybody is competing over a few remaining resources that aren't controlled by some warlord somewhere," he said.
"So you can have a world that's very wealthy and yet, most people don't have anything," he added somberly.
The 2015 blockbuster Autor references takes place in a desolate Australian landscape where various rival gangs fight for access to dwindling water supplies and fuel. A wealthy class of tyrannical rulers controls access to these resources, exploiting the collapse of civilization.
Autor seems to suggest that AI could similarly lead to a race to the bottom by devaluing jobs to the point where once-valuable skills are rendered practically worthless, while also concentrating wealth even further.
"The threat that rapid automation poses — to the degree it poses as a threat — is not running out of work, but making the valuable skills that people have highly abundant so they're no longer valuable," Autor said.
"Automation can either increase the expertise of your work by eliminating the supporting tasks and allowing you to focus on what you're really good at," Autor argued. "Or, it can descale your work by automating the expert parts and just leaving you with a sort of last mile."
Instead, the economist suggested that "we should be thinking about where will expertise be needed, where will it be displaced, and how do we enable people to do expert work with better tools?"
He also argued that we should develop new "tools that enable people to get better at that stuff faster."
In short, Autor's prediction that workers will be fighting over low-paying jobs is an eyebrow-raising prognosis that contrasts with countless claims that AI will either render many jobs obsolete or lead to a new class of jobs to suit a new world order.
However, when or if modern society will devolve to the point where biker gangs and warlords battle in the desert remains to be seen. Despite many higher-ups in the AI industry <a href="https://futurism.com/ceos-ai-job-market">claiming</a> huge swathes of jobs will soon be wiped out, companies <a href="https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistakes">are starting to find out</a> the hard way that replacing humans with AI isn't working nearly as well as intended — so maybe the road to a dystopian hellscape is longer than you'd think.
More on AI and jobs: <a href="https://futurism.com/ceos-ai-job-market">CEOs Say AI Is Poised to Wipe Out an Astonishing Number of Jobs</a>