The Download: living in a time of arrhythmia, and DNA data storage

—Jenna Ahart

Read next: We’re making more data than ever. What can—and should—we save for future generations? And will they be able to understand it? Read our feature all about the race to save our online lives from a digital dark age.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 Facebook is auto-generating militia group pages
Rather than shutting extremist content down, it’s actually lending a helping hand. (Wired $)
+ X is shoving political content into people’s feeds, whether they want it or not. (WSJ $)
+ Some users say they’re being paid thousands of dollars by X to promote misinformation. (BBC)

2 OpenAI is working on its first in-house chip with Broadcom and TSMC
It’s abandoned ambitious plans to manufacture its own chips. Instead, it’s focusing on the design stage of the process. (Reuters $)
+ Chip designer Arm could become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom. (FT $)

3 Elon Musk has build a compound for his children and their mothers
It is an… unconventional set-up to say the least. (NYT $) 
+ Musk fans are losing a lot of money to crypto scams. (Gizmodo)

4 A quarter of new code at Google is now AI-generated 
That fascinating fact emerged from CEO Sundar Pichai himself on the company’s latest earnings call. (The Verge) 
+ Github Copilot will switch from only using OpenAI’s models to a multi-model approach. (Ars Technica)
+ How AI assistants are already changing the way code gets made. (MIT Technology Review)

5 This app can operate your smartphone for you 
If you live in China anyway—but companies everywhere are working on the same capabilities. (South China Morning Post)
+ LinkedIn has launched an AI agent that purports to do a whole range of recruitment tasks. (TechCrunch) 

6 Universal is building an AI music generator 
But it’s a long way off from demoing it just yet. (The Verge)
+ Rival AI music startups face a big barrier: licensing copyrighted music is very expensive. (MIT Technology Review)

7 Kids are getting around school smartphone bans with smartwatches
But it seems it’s anxious parents that are really driving adoption. (Wired $)

8 Reddit just turned a profit for the first time
It has almost 100 million daily users now. (FT $) 

9 AI is coming to the world of dance 💃
You still need human bodies—but AI is helping with choreography and set designs. (The Guardian)

10 A PhD student found a lost city in Mexico by accident
Luke Auld-Thomas stumbled across a vast ancient Maya city while studying online Lidar survey data. (BBC)