Another day, another pile of AI headlines. Money's moving fast, the security folks are sweating, and the people actually running businesses are starting to ask where the payoff went. Here's what caught my eye today.
Nvidia Wants a Piece of Perplexity
Nvidia is reportedly in talks to put equity money into Perplexity, the AI search company, at a valuation north of $30 billion. Perplexity's annualized revenue just crossed $750 million.
Here's the thing that gets me. Nvidia sells the chips everyone needs to build AI. Now Nvidia wants to own a piece of the companies buying those chips. That's not exactly an arm's length deal.
I'm not saying it's wrong. Business does this kind of thing all the time. But when the chipmaker is also the investor, the customer, and sometimes the reference customer in the sales pitch, you start to wonder how much of this AI boom is real demand and how much is money moving in a circle to make the numbers look good.
Watch this one. If Nvidia keeps doing deals like this, ask who's actually paying who.
Your AI Email Summary Might Be Lying to You
Researchers at Forcepoint showed how someone can hide invisible text inside an email that your AI assistant reads but you never see. In their test, over a thousand characters reached the model while you only saw about five hundred.
That gap is the whole problem. Somebody can plant instructions in an email, your AI summarizes it, and you act on words that were never actually in the message you thought you read.
This is the kind of thing that sounds like a lab experiment until it happens to your inbox. If you're letting an AI tool summarize your email or draft replies, don't treat that summary as gospel. Skim the original every once in a while, especially anything money or account related.
Turns Out Most Bosses Don't See AI Doing Much Yet
A survey out from NBER found that more than 90 percent of executives say AI has had no effect on their company's headcount. Eighty nine percent said they've seen no productivity gains from it either.
That's a big gap between what gets said on stage at tech conferences and what's actually happening on the ground. Every keynote says AI is transforming work. Most of the people signing the paychecks say they haven't noticed.
I've said this before and I'll keep saying it. AI is a real tool and it helps with real tasks. But the idea that it's already reshaping companies top to bottom is mostly marketing. Give it time, use it where it actually helps, and don't let anybody tell you you're behind because your headcount hasn't changed.
Actors Are Pushing Back on Fake Voices
A group of actors in the UK, including Nicola Coughlan and Hugh Bonneville, signed an open letter demanding legal protection against having their voices cloned by AI without permission. About eighty people have signed on so far.
Voice cloning tech is good enough now that it doesn't take much audio to make a fake that sounds convincing. The law hasn't caught up. Right now in a lot of places somebody can clone your voice and there's no clean legal path to stop them.
Good for these folks for speaking up. This isn't just an actor problem either. Anybody with a few minutes of audio online, which is most of us at this point, has the same exposure. The law needs to catch up quick.
That's today's roundup. See y'all tomorrow.