Statgeist: Charting the Wired World

Five hauntings from the other side of technology.

Amid a wave of backlash, some industry-friendly groups are employing creative and time-tested strategies to woo the youth.

The French AI lab claims its latest release matches or outperforms even the best models from DeepSeek and Z.ai in coding and cybersecurity.

Paris Marx, author of Hyperscale, has been tracking global data center development for years. The US has a lot to learn from what’s happened everywhere from Ireland to New Zealand.

Online spaces are captured by oligarchs and saturated with slop—and they’re exacerbating humanity’s worst impulses. It’s time to start over.

At Nvidia’s GTC in Berlin, Huang unveiled the company’s new plug-in data center—the DSX Pod—as the key to unlocking Europe’s AI infrastructure lag. Oh, and autonomous humanoid robotics.

Security researchers used AI tools to help uncover years-old vulnerabilities in the PHP web scripting language. Then the AI-assisted attacks began.

With the release of its new trillion-parameter model, Mistral is hoping to demonstrate it’s “still in the race” to build frontier-level artificial intelligence.

A plan to funnel the heat given off by data centers into nearby homes has run aground in Germany. Across Europe, policymakers are weighing AI ambitions against climate objectives.

The company announced it has stopped using secret agreements with county officials and acknowledged that community backlash is leading to data center moratoriums across the country.

Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,  data center projects in rural areas could be eligible for major tax benefits starting next year. Some hyperscalers do not seem eager to take the free cash.

Powerful AI models continue to cause chaos, but their targets aren’t widely seeking justice. Instead, they’re being encouraged to adopt those same tools.