Sunday Links: Copyright, Failure Rates, and Mosquito Drones

I've been out for a big part of this week, so a slightly reduced service (apologies!). I may have missed some big stories, no doubt I'll pick them up next week if so. In the meantime, anyway, there are three that caught my eye:

• Meta wins AI copyright lawsuit as US judge rules against authors. Alongside another judgment in favor of Anthropic vs Authors this week, the US copyright winds are blowing in favor of AI this week. It's unclear how stable these judgments will be. The Meta case in particular argued that there would be no harm to the earning potential of authors from the training. I think that's a very hard argument to make in aggregate. The existence of LLMs will clearly lead to an explosion of fiction works and, hence, (most likely) a more difficult time for new authors to attract an audience. Whether it harms existing authors, I guess, is less clear. I still expect this topic to keep moving back and forth.
• Mosquito-sized drone is designed for Chinese spy missions — military robotics lab reveals incredibly tiny bionic flying robots. Straight out of every Sci-Fi book you've ever read.

And lastly...

• Over 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped by 2027, Gartner says. This really is a nonsense quote and headline. If it were going to be as low as 40% that would be a miracle. Failure rates are always high with new tech, and automated AI agents will be particularly high (80-90%), but that doesn't mean all that effort is wasted.

Wishing you a great weekend! I'm currently in Wales at Long Course Weekend. If you want to torture yourself in the Atlantic + up and down the Welsh hills cycling and running, I can't recommend it highly enough!