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Daily Tech News 22 July 2025

Top Story

• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and inveterate sitzpinkler, says the company could be operating 100 million GPUs by the end of this year. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except that he doesn't. At all. The quoted tweet says that he expects the company to have one million AI GPUs in operation by the end of the year.
  
  That will already cost around $30 billion, which is quite enough.
  
  Tom's Hardware, shame.

Tech News

• I'm tired of talking about AI. (Paddy Carver)
  
  Me too, Paddy. Me too.

  LLMs have no theory of the system, and cannot form one.

  100% correct. For all the talk about AGI - artificial general intelligence - the AI companies are not working towards any such thing.
  
  LLMs are pattern matchers, not model builders. A complex enough pattern matcher can fake building a model, but it becomes infinitely fragile, as this user found:

  Claude 4 just refactored my entire codebase in one call.
  
  25 tool invocations. 3,000+ new lines. 12 brand new files.
  
  It modularized everything. Broke up monoliths. Cleaned up spaghetti.
  
  None of it worked.
  But boy was it beautiful.

  Paddy goes through various put-downs by the AI true believers, and gets to this one:

  You would've argued against smartphones or the internet.

  No. But I would've argued against Chia Pets or Labubus. (What is even the plural of Labubu?)
  
  
  
• Speaking of LLMs: LLMs do not reason (Reddit)
  
  Pretty open-and-shut demonstration here.
  
  Asked to write a program in the language Brainfuck - a deliberately and notoriously tedious language in which to achieve even the simplest tasks - to produce the text LLMs do not reason, ChatGPT and Claude produced "Hello world" and Google Gemini produced gibberish.
  
  The way to make LLMs reason is to have them run each step in a loop, checking their work as they go.
  
  This has been tried.
  
  The error rate goes into the ionosphere.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has released an emergency patch for the Sharepoint severs that were being exploited all over the world. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Nice work, guys. I guess.
  
  
  

Not Even Remotely Tech News

The big vtuber agencies in the West - since Nijisanji burst into flames - have come down to Hololive and VShojo. (Yes, I'd count Phase Connect myself, but even the largest Phase talents don't have the subscriber numbers of a Hololive or VShojo talent.)

And then there was one: VShojo imploded today in a way that puts every other vtuber drama in the shade. (MSN / Economic Times)

Ironmouse - possibly the most popular English-language vtuber in the world now that Gura has reincarnated - abruptly left the company and engaged lawyers over two alleged issues:

First, a tale as old as time, they were slow to pay their talents.

Second, and far more damning, the company was still holding on to half a million dollars in donations she raised a year ago for the Immune Deficiency Foundation, a cause close to her heart, literally, because she is immune deficient herself.

The company has gone into radio silence, and the talents and fans are rioting. Kson - leading lady of VShojo Japan and former drug-dealing shitposting Yakuza dragon of Hololive's Gen 4 - is demanding answers.


Musical Interlude




Disclaimer: The third one burned down, fell over, sank into the swamp, exploded, and sent us a bill for damages.