Slop is word of the year, US tech force & more (December 16, 2025)

Good morning,

AI didn’t slow down overnight, it just found new angles, policy, culture, infrastructure, and a little existential weirdness. Big platforms are tightening control, regulators are circling, and the cultural mood is shifting from awe to scrutiny. It feels like the moment where experimentation starts colliding with responsibility.

Let’s dig in 👇

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🏛️ Policy, Culture & Society

🧃 “Slop” crowned word of the year

‘Slop’ named word of the year by Merriam-Webster, cementing cultural backlash against low-quality AI content. The term reflects growing frustration with spammy outputs flooding feeds. Ironically, it may push demand for better, not less, AI.

📵 UK pressures Apple and Google on safety

UK to encourage Apple and Google to add nudity-blocking systems on phones, pushing platform-level content controls. This raises hard questions about default censorship versus user choice. Once baked into OS-level tools, these decisions get very hard to unwind.

🇺🇸 US government builds AI task force

Government tech leaders are forming Tech Force, an AI-focused task force to modernize federal systems. It’s a sign Washington finally accepts AI as infrastructure, not novelty. The real test will be execution speed versus private-sector adoption.

🤖 AI, Platforms & Power

🧱 Nvidia doubles down on open source

Nvidia bulks up open source offerings with an acquisition and new open AI models, signaling it wants to be the default backbone for agentic AI. Between Slurm, Nemotron, and tighter ecosystem control, Nvidia is quietly shaping how AI workloads actually run in production. This is less about models, more about owning the plumbing.

🪦 OpenAI stays vague on digital afterlife

OpenAI refuses to say where ChatGPT logs go when users die, raising questions about data ownership, consent, and permanence. The company’s non-answers highlight how unprepared policy is for long-lived AI memory. Expect this to become a real regulatory fight, not just a thought experiment.

📣 OpenAI comms shakeup

OpenAI chief communications officer Hannah Wong has left the company at a sensitive moment. With scrutiny mounting from governments, media, and competitors, messaging discipline matters more than ever. Leadership exits like this usually signal internal shifts before external ones appear.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

→ Okara – Lightweight AI workflows for teams without heavy engineering overhead.
→ Varchive – Smart video archiving and retrieval powered by AI tagging.
→ Qualgent – AI agents designed for automated QA and testing workflows.

⚡ Quick Hits

→ Ford launches battery storage business for data centers and grids.
→ LG reveals micro-RGB TV tech pushing past OLED limits.
→ Echo raises $35M to secure cloud container layers.
→ Nuclear startup Last Energy raises $100M for small reactors.
→ Lightspeed closes record $9B fund amid AI boom.
→ New Chrome extension flagged for advanced browser abuse risks.

🧾 TLDR

Nvidia is quietly owning AI infrastructure, OpenAI faces mounting trust questions, governments are stepping into AI governance, and culture is pushing back on low-quality AI output. The next phase of AI isn’t louder, it’s more structural.

David