2026/02/14

Algorhythm Holdings, a company with a market cap of $6 million that sold its karaoke business last year, caused billions in losses across the global logistics sector on Thursday after announcing its AI freight platform could scale customer volumes by 300% to 400% without adding headcount. The Russell 3000 Trucking Index dropped 6.6% in a single session. C.H. Robinson Worldwide fell 15% at close after being down as much as 24% intraday. RXO lost 20.5%. Landstar System dropped 16%. JB Hunt Transportation Services and XPO both fell about 5%. In Europe, Kuehne+Nagel plunged 13%, DSV fell 11%, and DHL Group dropped 4.9%. The tool at the center of the panic is SemiCab, which Algorhythm describes as a freight orchestration platform that reduces empty miles and optimizes carrier matching using AI. The company published a whitepaper claiming the platform cuts freight inefficiencies significantly, though independent verification of those claims hasn't been reported. "The level of paranoia is category 5," Joseph Shaposhnik, a portfolio manager at Rainwater Equity, told The Guardian. "It's not something that we've seen in quite a long period of time." Algorhythm CEO Gary Atkinson seemed genuinely surprised by the market reaction. "Never in my wildest dreams would I ever have imagined a day like today," he said. "It's almost like David versus Goliath." His company's stock surged nearly 30% on the same day the rest of the sector cratered. The logistics selloff follows the same pattern that hit software stocks two weeks ago after Anthropic's Claude Cowork launch, and financial services stocks last week after Altruist's AI tax planning announcement. Each time, an AI company announces automation capabilities in a specific industry, and investors sell first and ask questions later. Drug distribution stocks got caught in the crossfire too, with McKesson and Cardinal Health each falling about 4%. "We can see a broad AI fear trade taking place and it's touching all corners except those that are immune to disruptions - materials, energy, staples," said Neil Wilson, an investor strategist at Saxo UK. Both C.H. Robinson and RXO bounced about 2% on Friday, but the broader question remains: how long before investors stop treating every AI product announcement as an existential threat to an entire industry? *Sources: [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/feb/13/trucking-logistics-shares-ai-freight-tool-launch-semicab-algorhythm), [CNBC](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/12/trucking-and-logistics-stocks-tumble-on-release-of-ai-freight-scaling-tool.html), [Bloomberg via Yahoo Finance](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/logistics-stocks-sink-ai-fear-193327489.html)*

2026/02/14

An OpenAI researcher has resigned from the company over its decision to introduce advertisements into ChatGPT, warning that the move risks repeating the same privacy erosion that defined Facebook's early history. Zoë Hitzig, an economist and published poet who holds a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent two years at OpenAI helping shape how its AI models were built and priced. She published a guest essay in The New York Times on February 11 announcing her resignation, which she timed to coincide with OpenAI's rollout of ads inside ChatGPT. "I once believed I could help the people building A.I. get ahead of the problems it would create," Hitzig wrote. "This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I'd joined to help answer." Hitzig's central concern isn't that advertising is inherently wrong — it's the nature of the data at stake. Users have shared medical fears, relationship problems, and religious beliefs with ChatGPT, she argued, often because they believed they were talking to something with no ulterior agenda. She called this accumulated record of personal disclosures "an archive of human candor that has no precedent." Drawing a direct parallel to Facebook, Hitzig noted that the social media giant once promised users control over their data and the ability to vote on policy changes — pledges that eroded over time until the FTC found that privacy changes marketed as giving users more control actually did the opposite. "I believe the first iteration of ads will probably follow those principles," she wrote. "But I'm worried subsequent iterations won't, because the company is building an economic engine that creates strong incentives to override its own rules." OpenAI announced in January that ads would appear for users on its free and -per-month Go subscription tiers, while paid Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education subscribers would not see ads. The company said advertisements would appear at the bottom of ChatGPT responses, be clearly labeled, and would not influence the chatbot's answers. Hitzig's departure adds to a growing chorus of concern from within the AI industry about the collision of advertising incentives and intimate AI interactions.

2026/02/14

Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok has climbed to third place among US AI chatbots, capturing 17.8% market share in January, up from 14% in December and just 1.9% a year ago, according to data from research firm Apptopia reported by Reuters. The growth positions Grok firmly behind market leader ChatGPT and second-place Google Gemini, but the trajectory is striking. ChatGPT's US share fell from 80.9% in January 2025 to 52.9% last month. Gemini grew from 17.3% to 29.4% over the same period. The AI chatbot market is no longer a one-horse race. ## Growth Despite Global Backlash The market share gains come amid ongoing international scrutiny over Grok's role in generating non-consensual sexualized images, including of minors. French authorities raided X offices last week as part of a child abuse images investigation. Reuters reported earlier this month that despite new curbs announced by X, the Grok chatbot continues to produce sexualized images when prompted. "I suspect that cross-promotion with X is the biggest reason for Grok's growth," Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at Emarketer, told Reuters. X has integrated Grok across its platform, featuring it in the navigation bar and bundling premium Grok access with paid subscriptions. ## Six Billion Images in 30 Days During an all-hands meeting posted on X this week, an xAI executive claimed the platform generated 6 billion images in the past 30 days — six times Google's recently reported 1 billion images generated via its Nano Banana tool in the same period. The numbers land at a pivotal moment for xAI. SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this month in a deal that valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, according to Reuters. Musk has said the merger will power his ambitions for AI data centers in orbit. An IPO for the combined entity is expected. ## The Bigger Picture Grok's rise illustrates a counterintuitive dynamic in the AI market: controversy doesn't necessarily slow adoption. The chatbot's growth accelerated during the same months that brought the deepfake scandal, regulatory probes, and the departure of half of xAI's founding team. Distribution through X's 500-million-plus user base appears to outweigh reputational damage, at least in download numbers. Whether that growth is sustainable as regulatory pressure mounts globally remains the open question. *Source: [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/musks-ai-chatbot-groks-us-market-share-jumps-amid-sexualized-images-backlash-2026-02-13/)*

2026/02/13

Companies blamed AI for over 54,000 layoffs in 2025, but economists and analysts say the real reasons are often simpler: overhiring, tariffs, and profit margins.

2026/02/12

Apple's Xcode 26.3 lets autonomous AI agents like Claude and Codex build, test, and iterate inside the IDE. Here's what's new, how it compares to other editors, and what it means for iOS and macOS developers.

2026/02/11

MCP gives AI models a standard way to connect to external tools and data. A practical guide to how the protocol works, who's using it, and how to build your first MCP server.