Disney’s three-year licensing partnership with OpenAI includes just one of exclusivity, Disney CEO Bob Iger told CNBC. The company signed the partnership with OpenAI last week that will bring its iconic characters to the AI firm’s Sora video generator. Once that exclusive year is up, Disney is free to sign similar deals with other AI companies.
The deal gives OpenAI a high-profile content partner, allowing users to draw on more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars to create content on Sora. For now, it’s the only AI platform that’s legally permitted to do so. — Read More
Daily Archives: December 16, 2025
The party’s AI: How China’s new AI systems are reshaping human rights
… China’s extensive AI-powered visual surveillance systems are already well documented. This report reveals new ways that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems to automate censorship, enhance surveillance and pre-emptively suppress dissent.
… AI-powered technology is widening the power differential between China’s state-supported companies operating abroad and foreign populations—further enabling some Chinese companies to systematically violate the economic rights of vulnerable groups outside China, despite Beijing’s claims that China respects the development rights and sovereignty of other countries.
The risks to other countries are clear. China is already the world’s largest exporter of AI-powered surveillance technology; new surveillance technologies and platforms developed in China are also not likely to simply stay there. — Read More
AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
We spent fifteen years watching software eat the world. Entire industries got swallowed by software – retail, media, finance – you name it, there has been incredible disruption over the past couple of decades with a proliferation of SaaS tooling. This has led to a huge swath of SaaS companies – valued, collectively, in the trillions.
In my last post debating if the cost of software has dropped 90% with AI coding agents I mainly looked at the supply side of the market. What will happen to demand for SaaS tooling if this hypothesis plays out? I’ve been thinking a lot about these second and third order effects of the changes in software engineering.
The calculus on build vs buy is starting to change. Software ate the world. Agents are going to eat SaaS. — Read More
Economics of Orbital vs Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
That “why” is almost missing from the public conversation. People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren’t. A lot of the energy here is FOMO and aesthetic futurism, not a grounded value proposition.
… This is all to say that the current discourse is increasingly bothering me due to the lack of rigor. — Read More
NVIDIA Debuts Nemotron 3 Family of Open Models
The Nemotron 3 family of open models — in Nano, Super and Ultra sizes — introduces the most efficient family of open models with leading accuracy for building agentic AI applications.
Nemotron 3 Nano delivers 4x higher throughput than Nemotron 2 Nano and delivers the most tokens per second for multi-agent systems at scale through a breakthrough hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture.
Nemotron achieves superior accuracy from advanced reinforcement learning techniques with concurrent multi-environment post-training at scale.
NVIDIA is the first to release a collection of state-of-the-art open models, training datasets and reinforcement learning environments and libraries for building highly accurate, efficient, specialized AI agents. — Read More
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