MAROKO133 Breaking ai: Major AI Companies Aren’t Even Pretending to Make Money Edisi Jam 0

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: Major AI Companies Aren’t Even Pretending to Make Money Ter

In a way, Silicon Valley has always asked investors to suspend disbelief to fund pie-in-the-sky projects, but the AI boom calls for something closer to a full break from financial reality.

It’s 2026. Last year, investors lavished $80 billion on foundation AI companies — the ones building huge, general-purpose AI systems. They all have yet to even break even, let alone turn a profit. That being the case, you may ask yourself: is anyone even trying to make money from all this AI stuff?

The answer, as TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom explains, is a resounding “not really, no.”

In order to keep track of who‘s doing what in the AI space, Brandom came up with a five-level scale to grade AI companies. Of course, with so few projects actually bringing in revenue, financial success isn’t very helpful for tracking performance. Instead, Brandom went with a vibes-based system, rating companies based on how hard they’re trying to make money.

“The idea here is to measure ambition, not success,” he writes.

The scale maxes out at level five — “we are already making millions of dollars every day, thank you very much” — and goes down to level one, where “true wealth is when you love yourself.”

Brandom starts with humans&, a relatively quiet AI company with a name that looks like a typo which has received plenty of good press lately. Despite raising $480 million for a valuation of $4.48 billion, the company has yet to articulate an actual product it plans on shipping, earning it a rating of level three, meaning “we have many promising product ideas, which will be revealed in the fullness of time.”

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a hazy “superintelligent AI” company founded by Ilya Sutskever, the eccentric former chief scientist of OpenAI, gets a level one. SSI is so committed to its vague vision that it turned down a $32 billion acquisition from Meta — an incredibly generous offer for a company that had yet to generate any revenue at the time of its $20 billion valuation.

“There are no product cycles, and, aside from the still-baking superintelligent foundation model, there doesn’t seem to be any product at all,” Brandom writes. “With this pitch, [Sutskever] raised $3 billion!”

Meanwhile, the $2 billion company Thinking Machines Lab could be due for a downgrade from level four to level two, “we have the outlines of a concept of a plan.” Thinking Machines Lab was co-founded by Mira Murati, who had served as the chief technology officer — and very briefly as CEO, during the mutiny against Sam Altman — at OpenAI. Now Thinking Machines is suffering something of a coup of its own over recent weeks, the New York Times reported, with high-level officials defecting to other AI companies as the much-hyped startup descends into a “perpetual soap opera.”

One thing’s for sure: if confidence could be bottled and sold, these companies would be profitable on day one.

More on AI: Scientist Horrified as ChatGPT Deletes All His Research

The post Major AI Companies Aren’t Even Pretending to Make Money appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Chinese Adults Taking Strange AI Devices to Bed With The

China is a country defined by major contradictions. The nation is governed by a communist party that has carefully embraced market forces as part of a long transition away from capitalism. Against this backdrop of ideological tension, it’s no surprise that smaller contradictions abound.

Among them is the country’s embrace of human-like AI systems, which are increasingly being embedded in cuddly, commercial, transactable toys — for adults, strikingly, in addition to children — at the same time that state regulators are considering a broader crackdown on that exact type of tech.

New reporting by China Daily reveals the rise of AI companion toys among adults in China, a trend emerging as more of the country’s citizens live alone than ever before.

Nancy Liu, a 27-year-old interviewed by the publication, says she goes to bed each night cuddled up with an AI toy. She’s drawn to it, she says, by features like simulated breathing, a heating mechanism, and its ability to have casual conversations at all hours of the day.

“It feels like something is waiting for me,” she said. “Not judging, not rushing — just there.” Liu doesn’t detail which device she’s using as a companion, but judging by the explosion of similar toys on the market, she’s far from alone.

At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, there were some 60 AI toy companions on display. Per China Daily, Chinese companies represented about 80 percent of them.

From the egg-shelled Sweekar AI pocket pet to the fuzzy Fuzozo and the autonomously roving TCL AiMe, AI toys are taking China by storm. China Daily reported that transaction volumes for AI toys on the e-commerce giant Taobao jumped by over 1,600 percent in 2025. On e-commerce site JD.com, sales of the Laolao Parrot toy approached some 7 million units sold — a huge number for one toy, likely helped by the fact that each toy is priced at just 159 yuan, or about $23 US dollars.

For all their commercial success, the AI companion toys seem to stand in conflict with recent regulations eyed by lawmakers in Beijing. Right before the new year, the Cyberspace Administration China proposed a slew of reforms meant to ensure AI developers protect consumers’ mental health from chatbot interactions amid reports of people around the world experiencing sometimes-profound mental health problems associated with AI use.

Though the regulations have yet to pass, they would be sweeping, holding Chinese tech firms accountable for AI which generates content promoting suicide, self-harm, gambling, obscenity, violence, or which is found to be manipulating users’ emotions.

Whether such wide-ranging AI behaviors can even be controlled for remains to be seen, but the real test may be whether Beijing can reconcile its regulatory ambitions with a consumer market that has already embraced these toys by the millions.

More on China: All AI-Generated Material Must Be Labeled Online, China Announces

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🔗 Sumber: futurism.com