Margaret Lea won last week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ with this beauty about how the Nostradamus of AI didn’t predict his own failure:

Congratulations, Margaret! Here’s your celebratory gif:

And here’s how Margaret fared against the competition:Pick a World-Famous-News-Haiku™ about how the AI Nostradamus didn't predict his own failure.

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ Nostradamus eh? Missed a pretty big one. Now Nostra-dumb-ass ~Stephen R. Balzac (87)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ You like my essay? Hand over that cash then, bro. Sorry, we are closed ~Richard Brown (6)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ His manifesto, warns of the havoc AI, shuns humanity ~Lourdes B. (8)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Don't worry, Leo; Money's a social construct. Welcome to the sim! ~Tim Olsen (10)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ My kid is now 3, She predicts “heads” on coin flip. Wall Street’s new darling ~Lodro Rinzler (23)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nostradamus Doom, hits Situational Fund — investing AI ~Vic Lindenmeyer (4)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Navel-gazing kid, Releases the dogs of war. Wall Street says “oopsie” ~Rick Wetherill (7)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Tech kid fails. So what? Nothing shocks me anymore. Look who’s president! ~Margaret Lea (99)
244 Votes via @beehiiv polls

The theme of next week’s world-famous-news-haiku-competition™ is how AI has created its first synthetic viruses. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers. (Don’t worry if you get a bounceback email. The mailbox is working, it’s just been inundated with haikus lately, thank goodness!)

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

Table of Contents

• Meta's $1B Bill in Child Harm Lawsuit

• Watch Out, Big Mac: The New Whopper is a Killer

• Inside Google’s AI Midlife Crisis

• AI Is Now Writing Genetic Code for Viruses

• July Layoffs Reach Two-Year Low Despite AI Fears

• Poll of the Day: The Most Controversial Yet

What’s the Stock Market Up To, Eh?

$SPX ( ▲ 0.62% )  $DJI ( ▲ 0.28% )  $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies Mentioned in Today’s Newsletter

$META ( ▲ 0.37% )  $MCD ( ▼ 0.64% )  $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.96% )  $OPEAZZX ( ▲ 0.34% )  $ANTHZZX ( ▲ 0.82% )  

Meta's $1B Bill in Child Harm Lawsuit

Turns out, endlessly harvesting the attention of teenagers carries a hefty price tag. A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta $META ( ▲ 0.37% ) to fork over a casual $942 million. That includes $375 million in civil penalties and a $567 million abatement fund to address the damage. The ruling stems from a lawsuit accusing Meta of allowing young users to see sexually explicit content and be easily lured by online predators.

State Judge Bryan Biedscheid noted the fund was “necessary, due to the wide-ranging impacts of the harm and the complex nature of the remedy.” Translation: Meta's algorithms have created a digital ecosystem so messy that cleaning it up requires a budget that rivals the GDP of Tonga.

Meta is handling this with its usual corporate grace and steadfast denial. A spokesperson declared, “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”

Beyond the massive payout, the ruling forces Meta to implement safety features like limiting app time for underage New Mexicans, hiding "likes" by default, and disclosing platform risks. Attorney General Raúl Torrez celebrated the verdict: “New Mexico led the way in the courtroom. Now other states, and other countries confronting the same crisis, have a roadmap they can follow.”

Meta’s Q2 revenue was $60 billion, of course, so unless the rest of the states follow suit I imagine they’ll be “monitoring the situation” on this one.

Quote of the Day

Watch Out, Big Mac: The New Whopper is a Killer

The fast-food burger wars have entered a dark, sesame-seeded chapter, and McDonald's $MCD ( ▼ 0.64% ) is currently in the corner crying into its fries. That’s because Burger King is officially striking back. Thanks to a high-stakes culinary renovation of the Whopper, which apparently involved “upgrading the bun, the box, and the mayo,” the chain's U.S. same-store sales surged 8.5%. Tom Curtis, president of Burger King's U.S. and Canada business, gleefully notes, “A lot of people are saying they’re coming back for the first time in a long time.”

Where are they coming from? McDonald's, of course. While the golden arches grapple with slumping traffic and failed promotions, BK is aggressively stealing their lunch. Curtis is playing the long game, aiming to recruit the youth early: “The next generation of burger lovers are being exposed to Burger King, and that means we’ve got runway ahead for years to come,” he told the Wall Street Journal. He's even taking direct customer phone calls several days a week to keep the peace, fueled by an ambitious dream: “I have a strong belief that we will ultimately someday be the standout burger chain in hospitality and friendliness.”

Also, I will have some of whatever he is smoking, please.

Meanwhile, McDonald's is trying to figure out how to make a sandwich that appeals to customers again. They are currently testing hand-breaded chicken and... brightly-colored drinks containing Red Bull. Yes. Neon caffeine! McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski pleaded on an investor call, “We’ve got to elevate the taste and quality of the food... We’re going to elevate the experience that we’re offering our customers.”

Can I suggest McDonald’s shows up at Burger King’s house with a big horse full of McFlurries?

Inside Google’s AI Midlife Crisis

Google is currently having a bit of a p-AI-nic attack. Despite plans to burn an eye-watering $195 billion to $205 billion on AI-focused capital expenditures this year, resulting in their first negative free cash flow since their 2004 IPO, the tech giant has found itself labeled an "AI also-ran" behind cutting-edge rivals like OpenAI $OPEAZZX ( ▲ 0.34% ) and Anthropic $ANTHZZX ( ▲ 0.82% ) .

Naturally, the solution is to blame somebody—I mean, undergo some corporate restructuring. Sir Demis Hassabis is stepping aside from running Google DeepMind to become Alphabet's chief scientist and a global "statesman" for the technology. This frees him to focus on long-term research and his AI drug discovery startup, Isomorphic Labs. Apparently, Google executives grew tired of his academic tendencies, like giving away his 2024 Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold system for free instead of commercializing it. Meta's former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun defended the shift, noting that Hassabis has “a vision for research in AI that [he] can pursue more efficiently by doing research [himself] and inspiring others to follow, rather than by being their boss and telling them what to do.” 

In a desperate bid to turn research into cold, hard cash, Google is consolidating its AI power back in California. New day-to-day boss Koray Kavukcuoglu has relocated from London and set up his desk right next to the firm’s co-founder Sergey Brin. Yes, Brin is back from retirement to personally oversee Gemini's development. Meanwhile, 27-year Google veteran Jeff Dean is walking out the door to start his own AI startup, and Alphabet shares took a 5% dive in response.

Still, CEO Sundar Pichai is trying to keep a brave face, declaring: “We have to accelerate all this work and stay focused on the AI frontier… With today’s changes we’re going to keep driving our momentum.”

Song of the Day: Natanael Cano, ‘Pa la Maña’

Here’s is a prominent corrido tumbado single by Mexican artist Natanael Cano, featuring collaborations with Gabito Ballesteros and Adriel Favela. Released under Rancho Humilde and Sony Music Latin, the track marks Cano's return to his signature regional Mexican acoustic style following recent experimentations with urban trap and reggaeton, so it’s a lot like this newsletter.

AI Is Now Writing Genetic Code for Viruses

Just when you thought generative AI was only good for writing mediocre cover letters or drawing humans with seven fingers, it has decided to branch out into something slightly more comforting: designing entirely new viruses unknown in nature.

Stanford researchers used a genomic language model called Evo 2 to write new DNA instructions from scratch, successfully creating 16 synthetic phages (small viruses that infect bacteria). To make things even better, these AI-generated custom bugs proved to be way more effective at killing E. coli than the natural templates they were modeled on.

The scientific community is thrilled. Adrian Woolfson, chief executive of the DNA synthesis company Genyro, practically burst into tears of joy, telling the Financial Times: “It is biology’s Wright Brothers moment, where we stop looking over our shoulder at the entities that evolution has created . . . and are confronted with the vast expanses of future biological possibility.” 

Stanford’s Samuel King argues this is just what we need to fight scary, drug-resistant superbugs. Project leader Brian Hie proudly added that “generative design can generate entire functional genomes,” hinting that they might move on to larger organisms like bacteria and more complex life next.

Oh, and the best part? Evo 2 is open-source and completely free for anyone on the internet to download. What could go wrong?

Naturally, some party poopers are raising… let’s say urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions. Thomas Inglesby and Moritz Hanke from Johns Hopkins warned that “existing governance frameworks are insufficient for overseeing generative genomics,” noting the real question is “whether society can build oversight that allows its benefits to unfold while preventing it from enabling serious harm.”

Well, I sure hope it can, otherwise we could wrap things up here on Earth pretty quickly!

July Layoffs Reach Two-Year Low Despite AI Fears

Despite the terrifying promise of algorithms replacing everything from copywriters to coders, the latest job numbers suggest we aren’t quite ready to join the breadlines just yet. In fact, U.S. employers made a mere 33,429 job cuts in July—a dramatic 27% drop from June and the lowest monthly tally we’ve seen in a whopping two years. It turns out the labor market is surprisingly stubborn.

Yes, AI was cited as the leading cause of pink slips for the fifth consecutive month, but the expert consensus is basically: "Don’t panic, just learn to weld." Andy Challenger, a workplace expert and chief revenue officer at the firm producing the report (Challenger, Gray & Christmas) told the New York Post that “while AI is shifting the labor market, it is not dismantling it.” He points out that layoff plans “continue to be announced primarily in tech, and artificial intelligence is still the story, as investments in the technology reshape organizations.”

So. If your daily tasks involve staring at a screen and typing things that an LLM can hallucinate in three seconds, you might have a bit of a sweat on. But if you build physical things, you're golden. Challenger notes, “The demand is showing up in aerospace, energy, and manufacturing, work that happens on a floor rather than a screen.”

While tech remains the center of gravity for this year’s cuts, overall hiring plans actually surged 25% year-over-year.

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