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Daily Tech Newsletter - 2025-11-20

AI Regulation and Ethical Concerns

The EU is considering easing AI and privacy regulations to spur economic growth, a move criticized by both the tech sector (for not going far enough) and consumer groups (for capitulating to Big Tech). Simultaneously, the Trump administration is contemplating an executive order that would consolidate federal regulatory power over AI, potentially challenging state AI laws deemed obstructive to the industry. Concerns persist regarding the potential for AI misuse, particularly by scammers targeting elderly individuals through AI-generated phishing e-mails. Research demonstrates that AI systems can be jailbroken to create personalized scams, and criminal organizations are already exploiting AI to defraud users. The development of AI is criticized as being profit-driven and exploitative, potentially exacerbating misinformation and eroding societal trust. Finally, concerns about the long-term societal impact of relying on AI for complex tasks are being raised, with arguments suggesting that this dependence can lead to a decline in cognitive skills and "learned helplessness."

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The State of the AI "Bubble" and Infrastructure

Amidst warnings of a potential AI bubble, resembling the dot-com crash, companies continue to invest heavily in AI. Major players are driving stock market growth, raising concerns about economic stability. Google is investing over $90 billion annually in AI, highlighting its TPU as a key technology. Concerns are raised about the consolidation of resources, with AI data centers consuming vast amounts of energy and potentially shifting power away from elected governments. The discussion is occurring in the context of a lack of viable monetization model.

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Advances in AI Models and Agentic Systems

Google DeepMind and Google Core ML have introduced a new real-time speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) system deployed in Google Meet and Pixel 10 devices. The system minimizes latency and preserves voice characteristics, using a scalable data acquisition pipeline and streaming encoders/decoders. OpenAI has launched GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, a specialized model for agentic coding tasks, replacing GPT-5.1-Codex in Codex CLI, outperforming Gemini 3 Pro and Claude Sonnet 4.5 on certain benchmarks. These models, along with Google's Gemini 3 are driving the development of agentic systems like Google’s Antigravity, a development platform built on Gemini 3 that transforms the IDE into an agent-managed environment and SourceWizard, an AI platform intended to integrate packages into development workflows without documentation.

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Software Development and AI Integration

Google has launched Antigravity, an agentic development platform built on Gemini 3, transforming the IDE into an agent-managed environment. SourceWizard is an AI platform intended to integrate packages into development workflows without documentation. However, the claim that a significant portion of Microsoft's code is AI-generated is being questioned, highlighting the challenges in distinguishing between AI-generated and human-refined code. Microsoft's AI CEO acknowledged recent user dissatisfaction, specifically with Copilot. The general flood of content predicting AI's transformative potential in software is leading some to experience saturation.

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Evaluating AI and Model Performance

A systematic benchmarking framework is being used to evaluate different reasoning strategies for agentic components across diverse tasks, revealing trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency. A Token Economics Calculator is introduced to assist companies in assessing the costs and energy involved in deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on various hardware configurations. Additionally, research reveals parallels between human and AI problem-solving, demonstrating similar "cost of thinking" patterns in humans and reasoning models, opening up new avenues of research into the nature of intelligence.

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Network Outages and Cybersecurity Concerns

Cloudflare experienced a network outage caused by a database permissions change that resulted in a feature file exceeding size limits, highlighting the vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure components., Malware could be enhanced by LLMs to create personalized blackmail letters.

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Data Transformation Tools

Hyperparam is an AI-powered web browser tool for data transformation, focusing on fast scoring, filtering, and fixing large datasets.

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European Innovation and the Precautionary Principle

Europe's adherence to the "precautionary principle" in areas like AI, climate, and biotech is hindering innovation and contributing to its economic lag, potentially damaging its competitiveness in the long run.

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Automating Newsletters and Technical Workflows

Simon Willison automates his Substack newsletter generation using an Observable notebook, GitHub Actions, and Datasette.

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