This week, tech companies were either melting down in real time or promising a future where computers are smarter than we are. Investors panicked, calmed down, panicked again, and then bought T-shirts for sea otters. We saw a giant internet outage that reminded everyone just how dependent the modern world is on one company. We also saw a stock that most people had basically pronounced dead suddenly rip higher like it was 2021 again.

There was drama in Washington, too. The White House leaned even harder into AI content as a political weapon, raising a question that has been building all year, which is: Are we entering the AI misinformation era for real, or are we already in it and pretending we aren’t? At the same time, Meta cut jobs in the name of moving faster on artificial intelligence,

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