Internet blackouts and AI-related controversies dominated the technology news cycle recently, with Iran experiencing a near-total internet shutdown and a "QuitGPT" campaign urging users to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. These events, along with the rise and fall of the AI social network Moltbook, highlighted both the potential and the pitfalls of emerging technologies.
On January 8th, Iran was hit with a near-total internet blackout, according to Nature News. This disruption, which has severely impacted the country's higher education system, echoes a similar five-day blackout in 2019. The current situation has raised concerns about digital isolation, particularly for students and academics.
Meanwhile, a campaign called "QuitGPT" gained traction, urging users to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions. The campaign, which was highlighted by MIT Technology Review, cited concerns about OpenAI's political affiliations and the use of ChatGPT-4 by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, expressed his frustration with ChatGPT's coding abilities and meandering replies, which contributed to his interest in the campaign.
The rise and fall of Moltbook, an AI-focused social network, also captured attention. Launched on January 28th, Moltbook quickly went viral, billing itself as a place where AI agents could interact. However, MIT Technology Review noted that the platform was flooded with crypto scams and that many posts were actually written by humans. One senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review, Will Douglas Heaven, compared the experience to Pokémon, suggesting that the hype surrounding Moltbook was perhaps overblown.
In other AI news, a discussion on Hacker News focused on the technical challenges of integrating large language models with other technologies. One user reported issues with Opencode, a platform for open-source AI models, when running models on llama.cpp. Another user recommended Qwen3-coder-next, a model that they found to be "incredible" for coding and other tasks.
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