The AI spending frenzy is so huge that it makes no sense; The Washington Post, November 7, 2025

Shira Ovide, The Washington Post; The AI spending frenzy is so huge that it makes no sense

" In just the past year, the four richest companies developing AI — Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta — have spent roughly $360 billion combined for big-ticket projects, which included building AI data centers and stuffing them with computer chips and equipment, according to my analysis of financial disclosures.

(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

That same amount of money could pay for about four years’ worth of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the federal government program that distributes more than $90 billion in yearly food assistance to 42 million Americans. SNAP benefits are in limbo for now during the government shutdown...

Eight of the world’s top 10 most valuable companies are AI-centric or AI-ish American corporate giants — Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Broadcom, Meta and Tesla. That’s according to tallies from S&P Global Market Intelligence based on the total price of the companies’ stock held by investors."

Big Tech Makes Cal State Its A.I. Training Ground; The New York Times, October 26, 2025

 

 Natasha Singer

Visuals by Philip Cheung

, The New York Times ; Big Tech Makes Cal State Its A.I. Training Ground

"Cal State, the largest U.S. university system with 460,000 students, recently embarked on a public-private campaign — with corporate titans including Amazon, OpenAI and Nvidia — to position the school as the nation’s “first and largest A.I.-empowered” university. One central goal is to make generative A.I. tools, which can produce humanlike texts and images, available across the school’s 22 campuses. Cal State also wants to embed chatbots in teaching and learning, and prepare students for “increasingly A.I.-driven”careers.

As part of the effort, the university is paying OpenAI $16.9 million to provide ChatGPT Edu, the company’s tool for schools, to more than half a million students and staff — which OpenAI heralded as the world’s largest rollout of ChatGPT to date. Cal State also set up an A.I. committee, whose members include representatives from a dozen large tech companies, to help identify the skills California employers need and improve students’ career opportunities."

Nvidia sued over AI training data as copyright clashes continue; Ars Technica, March 11, 2024

 ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica ; Nvidia sued over AI training data as copyright clashes continue

"Book authors are suing Nvidia, alleging that the chipmaker's AI platform NeMo—used to power customized chatbots—was trained on a controversial dataset that illegally copied and distributed their books without their consent.

In a proposed class action, novelists Abdi Nazemian (Like a Love Story), Brian Keene (Ghost Walk), and Stewart O’Nan (Last Night at the Lobster) argued that Nvidia should pay damages and destroy all copies of the Books3 dataset used to power NeMo large language models (LLMs).

The Books3 dataset, novelists argued, copied "all of Bibliotek," a shadow library of approximately 196,640 pirated books. Initially shared through the AI community Hugging Face, the Books3 dataset today "is defunct and no longer accessible due to reported copyright infringement," the Hugging Face website says.

According to the authors, Hugging Face removed the dataset last October, but not before AI companies like Nvidia grabbed it and "made multiple copies." By training NeMo models on this dataset, the authors alleged that Nvidia "violated their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act." The authors argued that the US district court in San Francisco must intervene and stop Nvidia because the company "has continued to make copies of the Infringed Works for training other models.""

Getty Images promises its new AI contains no copyrighted art; MIT Technology Review, September 25, 2023

 

• Melissa Heikkiläarchive page

, MIT Technology Review; Getty Images promises its new AI contains no copyrighted art

"Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers. 

The generative AI system, announced today, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty’s image library. It does not include logos or images that have been scraped off the internet without consent. 

“Fundamentally, it’s trained; it’s clean. It’s viable for businesses to use. We’ll stand behind that claim,” says Craig Peters, the CEO of Getty Images. Peters says companies that want to use generative AI want total legal certainty they won’t face expensive copyright lawsuits.""