Category: Semafor

Reed’s view Now that Kimi K3 has been out for a week, we know a lot more about how the Chinese AI model performs in the real world. Compared to other models from the frontier labs, the early technical read is that it’s kind of “meh.” It doesn’t hold a ...

OpenAI and Anthropic have pushed the US government to address the distillation of their top models by Chinese companies, framing the practice as a threat to national security and prompting Trump officials to threaten sanctions on Chinese companies. But there’s also a way to use technology to solve the issue, ...

As companies like Meta push increasingly realistic AI-generated videos, the worst parts of social media and AI are converging. In what appears to be a new dropshipping scam flooding Instagram and TikTok, accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers are posting AI-generated videos depicting teens getting bullied for trying to ...

The News Bernie Sanders is doing his share, but Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has thrown herself even more aggressively into Senate Democrats’ debate over their future direction. She’s taking her show on the road this weekend, with an evening stop today for Minnesota Lt. Gov Peggy Flanagan’s Senate campaign, followed ...

The News Blockratize, the firm that launched Polymarket, received a government loan from the pandemic-era Paycheck Protection Program less than two years before federal regulators fined it $1.4 million for operating an unregistered prediction market. The previously unreported $39,727 loan was approved in June 2020 — the same month Polymarket ...

House lawmakers departed Washington on a campaign footing ahead of the five-week-long August recess. House Speaker Mike Johnson is vowing to crisscross the country in support of GOP candidates and incumbents, and he’s framing the midterms as “common sense versus communism” in an effort to hitch Democratic candidates to insurgent ...

Alani Bankhead, the Democratic nominee in Montana’s Senate race, bashed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee this week for its “absolute lack of support” and said “it’s not too late” for the DSCC to get behind her campaign against Republican Kurt Alme and independent Seth Bodnar. That’s not going to happen. ...

Far-right activist Laura Loomer went from criticizing Ukraine to meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a rapid transformation that came as a pleasant surprise to Europe and Ukraine’s backers. The roots of Loomer’s pivot, which she began a month ago by acknowledging on her show that she “fell for Russian ...

Former West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin is launching the Independent Leadership Council, a new effort to elect independent candidates to Congress that will focus first on competitive seats this election cycle. “We’re trying to build a true independent network,” Manchin told Semafor. “Not a third party, but a movement of ...

Economists predicted that the US’ sweeping new tariffs, which take effect Friday, will not seriously disrupt the global economy. Tariffs’ inflationary effects are “likely to have already peaked,” Commerzbank wrote, pointing to the Trump administration’s propensity for exempting key consumer goods and failing to implement certain threatened levies. While higher ...