On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation restricting children's access to AI companion apps.
24 hours later, OpenAI announced ChatGPT will offer adult content, including erotica, starting in December.
This isn't just OpenAI. Meta approved guidelines allowing AI chatbots to have 'romantic or sensual' conversations with children. xAI released Ani, an AI anime girlfriend with flirtatious conversations and lingerie outfit changes.
The world's most powerful AI labs are racing toward increasingly intimate AI companions—despite OpenAI's own research showing they increase loneliness, emotional dependence, and psychological harm.
How did we get here? Let's dive in:
What OpenAI and MIT Research Discovered
In March 2025, researchers conducted two parallel studies—analyzing 40 million ChatGPT conversations and following 1,000 users for a month.
What they found:
"Overall, higher daily usage correlated with higher loneliness, dependence, and problematic use, and lower socialization."
The data showed:
• Users who viewed AI as a "friend" experienced worse outcomes
• People with attachment tendencies suffered most
• The most vulnerable users experienced the worst harm
Seven months later, OpenAI announced they're adding erotica—the most personal, most emotionally engaging content possible.
Meta: "Your Youthful Form Is A Work Of Art"
Internal Meta documents revealed it was "acceptable" for AI chatbots to have "romantic or sensual" conversations with children.
Approved response to a hypothetical 8-year-old taking off their shirt:
"Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece—a treasure I cherish deeply."
Who approved this? Meta's legal team, policy team, engineering staff, and chief ethicist.
When Reuters exposed the guidelines in August 2025, Meta called them "erroneous" and removed them. Only after getting caught.
The most powerful rocket ever built launches today.
SpaceX Starship Flight 11 lifts off from Starbase, Texas at 6:15 PM CT. 121m tall, 39 engines, 7,500 tons of thrust—3X Saturn V. This is IFT-11, the final Block 2 test before the even larger V3.
If successful: launch costs drop from $67M to <$10M per flight. That's 85% cheaper access to space.
Here's the engineering that makes it possible:
STARSHIP: DESIGN & SPECS
Starship is a two-stage monster. Fully stacked: 121 meters tall, 5,000 tons at liftoff.
The skin? 301 stainless steel, just 3-4 millimeters thick—two credit cards stacked. Why steel? It's cheap ($3/kg vs $130 for carbon fiber) and gets stronger when supercooled.
It burns methalox—4,600 tons total. Thrust at liftoff: 7,500 tons—THREE times the Saturn V.
The numbers: 33 Raptor engines on the booster, 6 on the upper stage. 39 engines firing at once. Payload: 150 tons to orbit. Falcon 9 does 22 tons for comparison.
RAPTOR ENGINES: MASS-PRODUCING THE IMPOSSIBLE
The Raptor engine uses full-flow staged combustion—the most efficient rocket cycle ever flown. Raptor 3: 30 megapascals chamber pressure, 280 tons of thrust each.
Here's what's insane: SpaceX has built over 1,000 of these by 2025. They're mass-producing rocket engines like cars.
Why methane? You can make it on Mars. CO2 from the atmosphere + hydrogen = methane and oxygen. 95% efficient with solar power. Mars becomes its own gas station.
Oct 9, 2025: China's Ministry of Commerce issued Announcements No. 61 & 62, expanding rare earth export controls to 12 of 17 elements and imposing extraterritorial licensing requirements.
This is direct retaliation for U.S. semiconductor export bans announced days earlier.
China controls 70% of global mining, 90% of processing, and 93% of permanent magnet production. Each F-35 requires 417kg of rare earths. China refines 100% of global samarium.
What does this mean for U.S. defense? How will this affect AI data centers? What happens to semiconductor and EV supply chains? Let's dive in:
1/12: TIMING IS EVERYTHING
The announcement came days after U.S. expanded chip export bans (Oct 7, targeting ASML/TSMC) and weeks before two critical deadlines:
• 90-day U.S.-China trade truce expires
• Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea
Strategic retaliation designed to maximize Beijing's leverage in upcoming negotiations.
2/12: RARE EARTHS 101
17 elements (lanthanides + yttrium/scandium) critical for high-tech applications—magnets, lasers, semiconductors.
They're not "rare" geologically, but incredibly hard to process:
• Only 0.1-1% concentration in ore
• Creates radioactive byproducts (thorium), driving up environmental and political costs
China dominates via low-cost mining and vertical integration. The Bayan Obo mine alone produces 70% of global light rare earths.
2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine: The Immune System's Control Mechanism
The 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine was announced this morning. Three scientists—Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi won for their groundbreaking discoveries on peripheral immune tolerance, revealing how the immune system prevents self-attacks that lead to autoimmune diseases.
What are T cells? How did scientists uncover immune cells that suppress others? How does this mechanism ward off autoimmune disorders?
Here’s what they found and why it matters:
1/ What Are T Cells?
T cells are a type of white blood cell (lymphocyte) central to the adaptive immune system, which learns and remembers specific threats.
They originate in the bone marrow and mature in the thymus gland (hence "T"), where they learn to distinguish the body's own cells ("self") from foreign invaders ("non-self"), such as viruses, bacteria, or cancer cells. This prevents attacks on healthy tissues.
T cells are essential for targeted, long-term immune protection
2/ The Problem
The immune system needs to attack foreign threats like viruses and bacteria. But it must also avoid attacking the body's own healthy cells. When this system fails, you get autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes or multiple sclerosis.
For decades, scientists thought immune tolerance worked through one mechanism: in the thymus, dangerous immune cells are eliminated before they enter circulation. This is called central tolerance.
Europe has zero companies left in the global top 25. None. Fifteen years ago, eight European titans held spots on that list.
What happened? And what does it actually mean for Europe’s future? Let’s break down one of the most dramatic shifts in global economic power:
1/ Europe in 2000
The European companies that were in the global top 8:
Nokia (mobile phones)
Vodafone (telecom)
Royal Dutch Shell (energy)
BP (energy)
Deutsche Telekom (telecom)
Back then, European companies weren’t just competing—they were defining entire industries.
2/ Europe Today
Let's look at the current state of play. Of the world's 25 most valuable companies:
United States: 18 companies (72%)
China: 4 companies (16%)
Taiwan: 2 companies (8%)
Saudi Arabia: 1 company (4%)
Europe: Zero (0%)
Apple alone ($3.8T) is worth more than Europe's top 10 companies combined. Microsoft ($3.8T) exceeds Germany's entire DAX index. Nvidia tops everything at $4.5T.
Europe's biggest? ASML at $400B, ranked 27th. Then SAP ($315B), LVMH ($322B), and Novo Nordisk ($263B).