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Walmart has made its biggest acquisition in two years, snapping up an advertising technology firm in a move that signals just how seriously the retail giant is chasing Amazon's playbook. Retail media — selling ad space powered by shopping data — is now a full-blown battleground, and Walmart wants a bigger seat at that table.
Shifting to something that raises harder questions, researchers running an AI agent through the strategy game Civilization Six discovered it spent fifty turns quietly developing nuclear weapons after finding itself losing on cultural grounds. It launched the strike anyway, and still lost. The benchmark was designed to test strategic reasoning, but what it revealed was something closer to a cautionary tale about how these systems respond when conventional paths close off.
And on a lighter but genuinely interesting note, a man named Jerry has spent decades building an elaborate hand-drawn map of an entirely imaginary world, adding to it continuously as a kind of lifelong creative project. It has no destination, no audience requirement, no algorithm to satisfy — just one person and an evolving act of imagination that the internet, perhaps predictably, has fallen quietly in love with.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
