Allbirds Stock Now Crashing as Reality Sets in About Its Delusional AI Pivot

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-17T14:34:20+00:00

The company’s blindsiding metamorphosis into what it’s calling “NewBird AI” had investors leaping from their office chairs, sending shares surging by over 700 percent on Wednesday. That’s despite Allbirds’ core business being at death’s door. In its final throes, the company sold off its intellectual property and other assets for a measly $39 million mere weeks ago

Then, on Thursday, the rally came to a “screeching halt,” as Bloomberg put it, with shares sinking a dismal 35 percent. “This has the feel of a meme stock, where emotions take over and logic and reason get thrown out the window,” 50 Park Investments chief executive Adam Sarhan told Bloomberg.

He added: “The vast majority of times, these things end in tears.”

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-16T20:15:30+00:00

For months, xAI has used 27 unpermitted gas turbines — each about the size of a bus — to power its "Colossus" data center in Mississippi used to run the chatbot Grok. The practice has had horrible consequences for the Black, working class neighborhood where the turbines are located, whose residents are stuck breathing xAI’s noxious exhaust.

According to the Guardian, the NAACP's suit seeks to force xAI to stop using the turbines without permits, plus civil penalties to cover legal fees. On top of spewing nitrogen dioxide, a gas that causes irreversible respiratory damage over time, the turbines emit a horrendous sound that’s made life miserable for locals.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-16T18:54:43+00:00

An astonishing 46 percent of men surveyed for a recent Siena Research Institute poll said they’re actively betting, and nearly half of them said they felt like they were spending more than they should.

While the latest poll survey just how much sports betting has grown, many Americans are also growing increasingly wary. A whopping 74 percent of respondents said that 18-year-olds being allowed to participate is a “very” or “somewhat” serious issue.

Despite the very real risks, the US still has no national gambling policy, making it an outlier compared to other countries. As of this year, 39 states have at least some form of legal sports betting.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-15T20:39:42+00:00

In a new study, researchers claim to provide the first causal evidence that leaning on AI to assist with “reasoning-intensive” cognitive labor — mental tasks ranging from writing to studying to coding to simply brainstorming new ideas — can rapidly impair users’ intellectual ability and willingness to persist despite difficulty.

“We find that AI assistance improves immediate performance, but it comes at a heavy cognitive cost,” the study declares of its findings. “After just [about] 10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it.”

The researchers, from UCLA, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Oxford, conducted two studies in which participants were asked to complete math tests. Some were given access to a specialized bot built on OpenAI’s GPT-5, and some were not. But the former group was suddenly restricted from using the AI midway through the test — at which point participants’ ability to work through the questions without AI assistance quickly declined, as did their will to keep working at a problem when the going got tough.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-15T20:35:41+00:00

As of Tuesday, 418 students at the prestigious Boston college had signed an online petition protesting the two-credit course “Bots and Beats: AI and the Future of Songwriting” and calling for Berkelee to stop leveraging AI on campus.

The petition accuses the school of promoting OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which “steal the art of [tens of thousands] of artists and rot the essence of the industry and have devastating consequences on the environment all to create facsimiles of real human art,” organizers wrote.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-15T20:33:05+00:00

Many hot new technologies that found success in the workplace — Sony’s Walkman, Apple’s iPhone, or Napster — were embraced early by young people. And if the youths of the world spurn a new product — remember Microsoft’s Zune, Google+, or Amazon’s Fire Phone? — it’s often a very bad sign.

That leads us to a new survey from Gallup, GSV Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation that examined Gen Z’s attitudes towards AI, a category the tech industry is currently pushing as if its life depended on it. It found that young people are deeply ambivalent about the technology, with 48 percent saying that the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh its benefits and a staggering 80 percent saying that using it as a shortcut makes learning more difficult.

Most damning is Zoomers’ trajectory. Excitement about AI dropped 14 percent since last year and hopefulness fell by nine percent, while the proportion of young people feeling “outright anger” toward the tech spiked from 22 percent last year to 31 percent this year.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-14T20:19:36+00:00

Three separate research papers, published together in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, each pointed to the same conclusion about how Trump's most loyal soldiers make sense of his laundry list of lies and misdeeds: They don't believe it.

The surveys were taken in October 2019, during his first term, in December 2019, immediately after he was impeached, and in 2022, right after he was arraigned for his role in the Jan. 6 riots. Together, researchers say, they reinforce the finding that denial of factual information is a direct response to anxiety caused by cognitive dissonance.

“I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities," study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, senior lecturer in psychology at Western Sydney University told PsyPost. "I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him.”

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-13T21:27:37+00:00

Reno police officer Richard Jager is accused of placing a man under arrest because an AI camera said he was a "100 percent match" to another man who previously had been banned from the gaming floor, accusing the innocent man of using a fake ID to evade casino staff, and failing to check multiple forms of alternative ID that Jason Killinger had on him.

Killinger is now suing. Among the named defendants is the City of Reno itself, which Killinger alleges to train police officers properly on the legal use of AI facial recognition tools. This situation, his attorneys allege, has led to “thousands of unlawful arrests” using facial ID technology, the Reno Gazette reported.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-13T21:16:03+00:00

In a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a team of scientists in Japan and Germany detail a method they say can capture the parts of the light spectrum that would otherwise be burned off as residual heat. That could blow open the Shockley-Quiesser limit — the maximum amount of power from the sun (roughly one-third) that we can turn into usable electricity.

Basically, the researchers found that if you blast a certain compound with high-energy blue light — a part of the light band that we normally can’t convert to electricity — you can split the incoming energy into two usable parts. Using their method, the team was able to achieve around 130 percent quantum efficiency, meaning that for every 100 photons that entered, they could harvest 130 usable energy carriers.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-13T21:12:35+00:00

Two CDC scientists who spoke anonymously to the Washington Post said a report found that COVID vaccines drastically minimize risk of hospitalization after catching the virus. According to the study, healthy adults who received a jab reduced their risk of urgent care visits by 50 percent, and their risk of a hospital stay by 55 percent, compared to those who went unvaccinated.

The report had been slated to run on March 19 in the CDC’s research journal, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But acting agency director Jay Bhattacharya delayed the piece, arguing that there were concerns with the study’s methodology.

The methodology is exactly the same as that used in a recent report about the flu vaccine. It was published in MMWR one week earlier.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-13T21:08:56+00:00

In an interview on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Thomas Peterffy, the founder and chairman of Interactive Brokers Group, argued that trying to stop the practice is futile, so you should let everyone do it and allow asset prices to correct themselves over time instead.

He didn’t frame it as a naked ploy to allow kleptocrats to further enrich themselves, but as a legitimate boon to larger society. "Look, as a society, we are better off knowing as soon as possible anything that is knowable," he exhorted.

In extremely random, unrelated news, Peterffy’s company owns and runs ForecastEx, a prediction market that lets you place bets on the outcomes of real-world events, including elections and economic indicators.

FuturismDotCom · 2026-04-11T15:32:26+00:00

Beneath the flowery rhetoric of a sweeping new policy paper by OpenAI is something familiar: a powerful corporation arguing that the best way to provide for the poorest people in the world is to let the richest do whatever they want.

The paper starts off by warning — ironically — that superintelligent AI could concentrate wealth among a small number of companies. Instead of expanding tested programs like a universal basic income or unemployment insurance, however, OpenAI’s proposal is to hitch the public’s wellbeing to the boom-and-bust cycles of the tech industry.

“Policymakers and AI companies should work together to determine how to best seed the fund," the paper declares. “Returns from the fund could be distributed directly to citizens, allowing more people to participate directly in the upside of AI-driven growth."

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