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A farmer in Chuzhou, China is counting a costly lesson after trusting an AI chatbot for herbicide advice. The sixty-seven-year-old applied the chatbot's recommendation without verifying it, and nearly twenty-five acres of sesame seedlings were wiped out. It's a stark reminder that AI can sound authoritative while being dangerously wrong.
That same tension around AI trust runs through our next story, where the money keeps flowing regardless of the risks. Cognition, the AI coding startup, is reportedly in talks to raise a new round at a forty billion dollar valuation — just months after closing a billion dollars at twenty-six billion. Whether that reflects genuine progress or investor momentum is a question worth sitting with.
And in gaming, Amazon is stepping back from two titles it helped bring to western audiences. Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty are being handed off to other publishers, signaling that Amazon's ambitions in the live-service games space have quietly narrowed. Running a live game is a long, expensive commitment, and apparently not one Amazon wants to keep making.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
