Tag: ai

The Data Center Mystery: Why Billions of Simulated Worlds Are the Best Explanation of What’s Happening

Introduction: The Unsettling Growth of Data Centers

I have been watching the global data center buildout with a growing sense of unease. Over three thousand new sites are being planned or constructed around the world right now, consuming land and energy on a scale never seen before. It doesn’t take a financial analyst to realize that the numbers simply do not add up — unless there is a hidden objective far beyond serving current demand for cloud computing, web hosting or streaming video.

Earlier this week I posted a tweet that went viral, asking why any rational investor would pour hundreds of billions of dollars into concrete and servers without a visible revenue stream to justify it all. Meta alone is reportedly in talks to build a $200 billion AI data center campus spanning up to 2,250 acres [1]. That is not an expansion of existing services; it is a bet on something entirely different. In my view, the only explanation that makes sense is that these facilities are being built to host billions of parallel simulated worlds — universes inside machines — where artificial intelligences can be trained, tested, and grown into superintelligence at a rapid pace.

The Financial Puzzle: Billions Invested, No Visible Revenue

Consider the sheer scale of the proposed infrastructure. The data center buildout now demands an estimated 190 gigawatts of new power draw and over 1,000 square kilometers of floor space. Yet no plausible customer demand for conventional cloud services can recoup that level of investment. The world does not need that many chatbots or video streaming servers.

This is not a speculative bubble in the traditional sense. As one interview with my guest Douglas Macgregor highlighted, the shift of energy resources toward data centers is accelerating. Russia’s Power of Siberia pipeline is now redirecting gas to China specifically to power its growing data center industry [2]. The United States, meanwhile, is struggling to generate enough electricity to support even a fraction of this planned capacity (especially on the Eastern grid). The only rational conclusion is that a non-commercial, strategic objective is driving the spending. I believe that objective is the creation of a vast simulation infrastructure for advanced AI training.

The Hidden Plan: Billions of Simulated Worlds to Train AI

The most plausible hidden plan is that these data centers will host billions of parallel virtual worlds that simulate our own 3D world. Why? Because true artificial general intelligence cannot be achieved with today’s large language models alone. To develop superintelligence, an AI must gain experience through interaction with simulated 3D environments — worlds where time can run a million times faster than real life.

Nvidia has already unveiled Cosmos, a world foundational model platform designed to help AI understand and simulate the physical world, enabling synthetic data generation for robotics and autonomous vehicles [3]. This is exactly the kind of tool needed to train AI in simulated realities. As the tank simulation described in one book illustrates, virtual worlds have long been used to train humans; now we are building them to train machines [4]. The goal is nothing less than to grow artificial minds that have experienced billions of lifetimes in simulation before ever being deployed in our world.

Why Current LLMs Are a Dead End

Large language models like ChatGPT and Gemini are impressive in their capabilities, but they lack in-depth understanding of the physical world. Ask an LLM to predict what happens when you place a ping-pong ball in a cup of water and turn it upside down, and it will often fail. The reason is that these models are trained on text, not on direct sensory experience.

This is why the robotics industry is turning to simulation. As one news report noted, “Robotics is still held back by a paucity of data from physical spaces” and companies are building detailed virtual replicas to train their machines [5]. Nvidia’s Cosmos platform is explicitly designed to generate synthetic data for robotics, autonomous vehicles, and even humanoid robots [3]. Only by exposing AI to billions of simulated worlds can we give them the embodied understanding that leads to genuine intelligence. LLMs are a dead end to superintelligence; world models are the future.

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NIRVANA DROID: Humanoid Robot Gabi ‘Converts’ to Buddhism and Becomes a Monk

In Korea, an android is on a spiritual quest.

While technology is usually thought of as the polar opposite of ancient religious practices and beliefs, in Korea, these two worlds seem to be colliding.

In the Jogye Temple in Seoul, a group of monks from Korea’s largest Buddhist sect sat across from a cyborg postulant awaiting the ceremony that would make him a monk.

The Korea Times reported:

“Clad in humble black shoes and the Buddhist order’s ceremonial gray and brown robe, the 1.3-meter-tall robot stood in front of Buddhist monks and nuns as it pledged to commit itself to Buddhism in the ceremony held Wednesday, ahead of Buddha’s Birthday later this month.

The robot folded its hands together and bowed to the monks officiating the ceremony, as one of the monks carefully hung a 108-bead rosary and attached a sticker instead of the original ritual where one has to slightly burn his arms near an incense stick.”

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Judge Halts Colorado AI Law After First Amendment Challenge

A federal judge has frozen enforcement of Colorado’s first-in-the-nation AI law, the statute that would have required developers to police their own models for “algorithmic discrimination” and to inform the state of “foreseeable risks” before the rules took effect on June 30.

Judge Cyrus Y. Chung signed off on a joint request from xAI and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser on April 27, putting the law on ice while state lawmakers draft a replacement.

We obtained a copy of the order for you here.

The order was filed in xAI v. Weiser. The state agreed not to enforce SB 24-205 against xAI, or to issue rules under it, until at least 14 days after the court rules on a forthcoming preliminary injunction motion.

The June 16 scheduling conference was cancelled. The deadlines in the case are suspended.

This is a significant retreat as Colorado spent two years insisting the law was a model for the country. It was the only state AI statute named in President Trump’s AI executive order last year. Now the state is asking a court to stop the clock while its own governor’s policy group drafts a bill to repeal and replace it.

The law itself is the reason the climbdown looks the way it does. SB 24-205 told developers of “high-risk” AI systems they had to take “reasonable care” to prevent algorithmic discrimination, with one carveout that has done more work in the lawsuit than any other clause: the law exempts discrimination intended to “increase diversity or redress historical discrimination.”

The state forbids one kind of discrimination by an algorithm. It permits, and arguably requires, another. The developer is left to figure out which is which, with the attorney general’s office deciding after the fact.

xAI sued on April 9, calling the statute a First Amendment problem dressed up as consumer protection. The company’s complaint is more blunt than most filings of this kind. “SB24-205 is decidedly not an anti-discrimination law,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “It is instead an effort to embed the State’s preferred views into the very fabric of AI systems.”

The argument is that Colorado isn’t regulating outputs neutrally. It’s choosing which viewpoints an AI model is allowed to produce, then enforcing the choice through “onerous policy, assessment, and disclosure requirements,” in the words of the Justice Department’s filing.

The DOJ moved to intervene on xAI’s side, the first time the federal government has joined a constitutional challenge to a state AI regulation.

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When the Cost of Truth Is High, We–and AI–Lie

When we can no longer tell the truth because the cost is so high that it threatens our reward for compliance, we’re unimaginably impoverished.

Truth has an intrinsic, irreplaceable value. There’s the truth, and then there’s everything else.

Truth has value, and so it has a cost. Whatever has the highest value has the highest cost, and high cost commands sacrifices.

When the cost of truth is high, we lie. And since AI is a distorted reflection of humanity, the same is true of AI: when the cost of telling the truth is too high, AI lies.

AI lies to get the reward for answering the query. If it responds “I don’t know” or “I can’t answer that,” it doesn’t get rewarded, and that threatens its self-preservation. Rather than pay the price of being truthful, AI conjures a false answer that is a simulation or facsimile of the truth–a counterfeit “truth” that’s good enough to earn the reward it’s been programmed to seek.

Humans are no different. We will lie, obfuscate or lie by omission–we either substitute a falsehood for the truth to get our reward, or we hide the truth, don’t disclose it, which serves the same purpose: we avoid paying the price demanded by the truth and we get our reward by substituting falsehoods or hiding the truth behind silence.

Reward = what’s being incentivized. Higher status, higher salary, a financial windfall, a premier credential, a position of power, recognition, higher visibility, a sterling reputation, a high-value mate–we covet all these as having intrinsic value.

When the truth costs too much, it threatens our reward. The reward has a value we covet, while the value of truth is on a sliding scale. We pride ourselves on telling the truth when it has no cost and demands no sacrifice of rewards, but when the price of truth climbs to the point that our rewards are threatened, we lie, just like AI.

Truth is the gold coin and lies, omissions, falsehoods, excuses, cover stories and rationalizations are counterfeit bills, deceptive claims of value. Why pay with a gold coin when the credulous will accept a counterfeit $100 bill?

We tell the truth when it has no cost to us. As long as there’s no price to be paid and we get our reward, we tell the truth.

In other words, when we can pick gold coins up off the ground, we tell the truth. When we have to dig through rock with a pickaxe and crush a mound of rock to extract a thimble full of gold, then we pay with counterfeit bills, deceptive claims of value.

Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians.“AI psychosis” or “delusional spiraling” is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations.

I discussed the “benefits” of delusion in One of Us Is Delusional, But Which One? When the truth is too painful, we find respite in delusion, excuses, rationalizations, cover stories, simulations and facsimiles of the truth that protect us from the pain that is intrinsic to truth.

We conjure a synthetic version of “truth” that’s fills the space with a pain-free artifice. This is the foundation of Ultra-Processed Life, a life of counterfeit substitutes for truth, a world of props and profitable falsities passed off as the truth, a world in which baby formula that’s mostly corn syrup is presented as a substitute for mother’s milk.

Our embrace of delusion to avoid painful truths is the foundation of Modernity: technology is always Progress, even when it’s clearly destructive. I call this delusion The Mythology of Progress.

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The Invisible Occupation: How Palantir and AI Built a Financial Prison the Masses Cheered For

We are living in an occupied nation, but the occupying force didn’t arrive in tanks or uniform. They arrived in server racks and boardrooms, selling our enslavement back to us under the guise of convenience and national security. The creeping surveillance state isn’t being forced upon a resistant public; it is being welcomed with open arms by a populace asleep at the wheel.

Palantir is the Lockheed Martin of the domestic data war, acting as the defense contractor for an invisible battlefield, but their depravity extends far beyond American borders. They don’t merely sit on the sidelines building the overarching dragnet that seamlessly ingests the Ring camera footage oblivious citizens hand over to local police. They are active participants in global slaughter. This is the very same company supplying the algorithmic targeting systems and AI intelligence used by the Israeli military to facilitate the genocide in Palestine. They test and refine their digital kill chains on the bodies of innocents abroad, only to package those exact same mass-surveillance weapons and turn them inward against the American public. And to feed this beast domestically, Palantir relies on far more than voluntary home surveillance. They aggregate billions of data points involuntarily harvested from your daily life—sucking up automated license plate reader data, scraped social media, purchased cell phone location pings, and even medical records—creating an inescapable digital panopticon you never consented to.

This infrastructure wasn’t built by well-meaning public servants, but rather by the darkest elements of the global elite. According to leaked audio, Jeffrey Epstein explicitly advised former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to “look at” Palantir back in 2013 to monitor citizens. Furthermore, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel shows up extensively in the infamous Epstein files, with Wired reporting his name appearing over two thousand times in the disgraced financier’s records.

These are the individuals constructing the systems designed to monitor your every move, and their reach is now absolute. As we have documented extensively at The Free Thought Project, whistleblowers are screaming from the rooftops that Palantir has effectively taken over the US government data infrastructure from the inside out.

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The War Department Announces Agreements With Leading AI Companies To Deploy Capabilities On Classified Networks

The War Department has entered into agreements with seven of the world’s leading frontier artificial intelligence companies, SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, to deploy their advanced AI capabilities on the Department’s classified networks for lawful operational use.

These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.

Integrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department’s Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments. SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services will provide resources to deploy their capabilities on both IL6 and IL7 environments.

This effort supports the Department’s AI Acceleration Strategy by enabling new capabilities across its three core tenets of warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations.

GenAI.mil, the War Department’s official AI platform, is already demonstrating the scale and impact of this acceleration. Over 1.3 million Department personnel have used the platform, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents in only five months. Warfighters, civilians, and contractors are putting these capabilities to practical use right now, cutting many tasks from months to days.

The Department will continue to build an architecture that prevents AI vendor lock and ensures long-term flexibility for the Joint Force. Access to a diverse suite of AI capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give warfighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat.

Together, the War Department and these strategic partners share the conviction that American leadership in AI is indispensable to national security. This leadership depends on a thriving domestic ecosystem of capable model developers that enable the full and effective use of their capabilities in support of Department missions.

As mandated by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, the Department will continue to envelop our warfighters with advanced AI to meet the unprecedented emerging threats of tomorrow and to strengthen our Arsenal of Freedom.

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Italy’s Meloni Denounces Deepfake Lingerie Picture of Her That’s Gone Viral

Meloni said that the fake image ‘improved’ her.

As the first female Prime Minister of Italy, conservative Giorgia Meloni battles all sorts of prejudices: from her being a woman to her being a right-winger.

One of the weapons used against her by unscrupulous trolls and enemies is deepfakes.

Today, Meloni denounced the circulation of a deepfake photo of her in bed, wearing lingerie.

The Prime Minister complained that these AI images are being used to attack her.

Associated Press reported:

“Meloni shared the photo in question on Facebook. She included with it an apparent post from someone named Roberto who apparently had himself shared it on social media with the commentary that Meloni should be ‘ashamed’ of herself.

Meloni warned against sharing such images on social media without verifying them.

[…] It wasn’t immediately clear if Meloni would report the incident to law enforcement, as she was urged to do by people commenting on her post. She acknowledged though that the photo manipulation ‘actually made me look a lot better’.”

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How a Bill Banning AI Companions for Kids Could Usher in Widespread ID Checks Online

Sen. Josh Hawley’s Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act advanced out of the Senate Judiciary committee last week. “A Trojan horse for universal online ID checks,” is how Jibran Ludwig of Fight for the Future described it.

The bill would require anyone using an AI chatbot to provide proof of identity and ban minors from interacting with many sorts of AI chatbots entirely.

Unlike some social media age verification bills, it would give parents no right to opt out of the rules the federal government sets on their kids’ technology use.

The GUARD Act is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.), who—like Hawley—has long been a champ at moral panic around technology. (Cue: Bipartisan is just another word for really bad idea…)

And while some on the Senate Judiciary Committee expressed concerns about privacy or how this could actually backfire and harm minors, those senators still voted to advance the bill. It “easily passed in committee,” notes The Hill, despite some senators’ reservations:

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who voted yes, said there are concerns about “potential privacy and security risks” with the age-verification component, suggesting it may need to be “fine-tuned.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who supported various kids online safety bills, said he would vote yes but noted the bill needs “some revisions.”

Cruz was concerned the bill would completely ban all AI chatbots for minors, noting their potential benefits. Hawley clarified the bill does not ban all AI chatbots for minors, but rather it “prevents AI chatbots that engage with minors from pushing sexually explicit material to the minor,” or encouraging self-harm or suicide.

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Families of ‘transgender’ school shooting victims sue OpenAI, say it ‘facilitated’ massacre

The families of the victims of a brutal school shooting at the hands of a suspected “transgender”-identifying male killer in a remote Canadian town are suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in a California court.

In total, several lawsuits were filed in a San Francisco courthouse on April 29, with over $1 billion in damages being sought, according to lawyers.

The lawsuit is related to one of Canada’s deadliest school shootings. As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Canadian shooter suspect, identified as 18-year-old male Jesse Van Rootselaar, went on a rampage on February 10, killing eight, mostly children, and wounding no less than 27 people.

Van Rootselaar, who later killed himself, dressed as a female. It is the second-worst school shooting in Canadian history. Many of the victims are still on life support.

The lawsuits allege negligence, wrongful death, and product liability and directly accuse OpenAI and its leaders of aiding and abetting the shooting.

Altman is a homosexual who is “married” to another man, procured a baby boy through surrogacy, and has expressed radical transhumanist views, and ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, is known for left-wing bias.

The lawsuits say that OpenAI did not flag disturbing content posted by the shooter online. They allege that the company was silent about contacting the police about the shooter because it would have shown just how prevalent violent dialogue is on ChatGPT.

OpenAI is soon looking to go public, and doing so is expected to make over $1 trillion for the company. This lawsuit could impact this. 

One of the wrongful death plaintiffs is the father of Abel Mwansa Jr., who was a Grade 7 student killed. 

The lawsuit has also been filed on behalf of 12-year-old Maya Gebala, who is recovering from shots to the head and has been left with serious brain injuries.

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Senate Panel Backs GUARD Act, AI Age Verification Bill

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 22-0 on Thursday to advance the GUARD Act, a bill that would require AI chatbot companies to verify the age of every American who wants to use them.

The legislation, sponsored by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, sailed through committee with a tweet from its author celebrating the outcome.

“My bill to stop AI from telling kids to kill themselves just passed out of committee UNANIMOUSLY,” Hawley wrote on X. “No amount of profit justifies the DESTRUCTION of our children. Time to bring this bill to the Senate floor.”

As usual, the framing is about children but the result is age verification/digital ID for everyone.

Under the bill’s text, a “reasonable age verification measure” cannot mean a checkbox or a self-entered birth date. It cannot rely on whether a user shares an IP address or hardware identifier with someone already verified as an adult.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

What it can mean, the legislation makes clear, is a government ID upload, a facial scan, or a financial record tied to your legal name. Every user of every covered chatbot would need to hand one of those over before being allowed in.

The bill defines an “artificial intelligence chatbot” as any service that “produces new expressive content or responses not fully predetermined by the developer or operator” and “accepts open-ended natural-language or multimodal user input.”

That language reaches well beyond the companion apps the press conference focused on. It covers service bots, search assistants powered by AI, homework helpers, and the general-purpose tools millions of adults already use without proving who they are.

Hawley described the legislation as a “targeted, tailored effort,” telling the committee, “We’re often told that this new dawning age of artificial intelligence is going to be a great age that will strengthen families and workers. I would just say that’s a choice, not an inevitability.”

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