Technology

The average new-vehicle transaction price is hovering at or near $50,000 today, the highest it’s ever been in the automotive industry. It seems the days of ultra-affordable cars have passed, and even a six-figure salary may not leave enough margin when factoring in the total cost of vehicle ownership.

You've heard of AI vibe coding, one dictionary's phrase of the year for 2025. As of this week, 2026 is shaping up to be the year of the AI vibe shift.

You wouldn't know the shift existed from the tech world's top pronouncements of late; it is, after all, always sunny in Silicon Valley. Microsoft's Build conference, like Google I/O in May, featured tons of techies talking about tokens, the metric by which AI prompts and answers are measured (a token, weirdly, is about three-quarters of a word on average).

Both conferences also centered claims about frontier AI that are dubious to say the least. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis at Google I/O: "Artificial General Intelligence is just a few years away... we are standing in the foothills of the Singularity." Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman: "scaling laws are holding... we are building towards what we call Humanist Superintelligence."

Wall Street was still buying it, but investors were wavering. The ultimate AI bellwether, Nvidia stock, tumbled for a few days, rallied after CEO Jensen Huang insisted AI agents will run everything, everywhere in the future (presumably once they've stopped deleting databases), then got pummeled again on Friday.

Still, for now, Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX continue to chase trillion-dollar IPOs, the latter based in large part on the untested concept of AI data centers in space.

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk found the cheat code for capitalism. The SpaceX IPO proves it.

Regardless, outside the AI bubble, a backlash has been brewing for some time — and not only among students booing pro-AI commencement speakers.

Just 10 percent of Americans say they're thrilled about the future of AI, a Pew poll found in March; that same month, some 80 percent of registered U.S. voters in an NBC poll said neither Democrats nor Republicans are doing a good job on the AI front.

That number also appears in an April survey of white-collar workers: 80 percent are straight-up refusing to use AI even when it's mandated. In the last 30 days, 54 percent of workers reported bypassing company AI tools and completing jobs themselves.

Those numbers suggest general strike-levels of discontent with AI across every industry, out there in the real America beyond Silicon Valley and Wall Street, if not an outright revolutionary mood.

Data center protests, fueled by the 70 percent of Americans who say they don't want data centers near them, are only likely to grow going forward — especially now that they are producing tangible results.

At least 48 data center projects were blocked or delayed in 2025, according to Data Center Watch, and the fight is only getting more fierce. Take the planned Stratos data center in Utah, where local opposition just forced VC and Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary to downsize his land usage by 75 percent.

"We screwed up," O'Leary told local TV news Friday. "We pissed off a lot of people."

'Let them eat tokens'

And the threat of electoral guillotines may explain why politicians are starting to propose serious action.

This week alone, Senator Bernie Sanders came out in favor of the U.S. public owning a 50 percent stake in AI companies, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed an AI tax, and President Trump finally signed an executive order on AI regulation that his AI czar, Silicon Valley titan David Sacks, has long opposed.

On Friday, New York State legislators sent a one-year data center moratorium to the governor's desk — and Trump seemed to come around to Sanders' way of thinking on the government taking an ownership stake in OpenAI. Some who doubt OpenAI's current worth saw it as a bailout.

The White House's AI executive order was announced while Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was making rosy pronouncements on AI at Build, adding to the surreal sense that we're watching a tale of two worlds — the anti-AI people versus an out-of-touch AI regime that says, essentially, let them eat tokens.

But hold the revolution: Just below the surface (and the Microsoft Surface Ultra), the AI regime is showing signs of cracking all on its own — and it's all down to those tokens.

Silicon Valley's AI backlash begins

When it comes to AI true-believer companies, they don't get much truer than Uber. The rideshare giant says 90 percent of its engineers use AI tools, mostly Anthropic's Claude Code. As much as 10 percent of Uber's codebase is written by AI agents.

Uber also had leaderboards that encouraged as much usage of AI tokens as possible; in Silicon Valley, this is known as tokenmaxxing, and it was really hot in 2025.

Then the tokenmaxxing bill came due. "The budget I thought I would need [for 2026] is blown away already,” CTO Neppalli Naga told The Information on April 14 — less than four months into the year.

At the time, however, the information didn't make much of a dent in the AI news cycle — not until Uber's COO confirmed what it meant at the end of May. Naga's busted budget was a "head-exploding moment," Andrew MacDonald told the Rapid Response podcast. Such spending "becomes harder to justify because AI is not free...we're going to have to start talking about token consumption."

Just like that, we started talking about token consumption. Axios reported an unnamed company had burned through half a billion dollars of tokens in a single month "after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses."

Next, we learned Amazon and Meta had shut down their own internal AI leaderboards; other companies like Walmart and Starbucks have scaled back their AI agent plans.

In a leaked email, one Amazon senior vice president told employees to "stop using AI just for the sake of using AI." You'd be forgiven for thinking this obliterates a large chunk of OpenAI and Anthropic's business model.

Both companies have spent years building models that, for the most part, consume more tokens. Now they're promoting agents who can consume tokens on steroids — often as much as 24 times as a regular model.

As high-minded as their missions might be, both companies are in it to sell tokens.

Why tokenmaxxing died A scene from a data center protest in Tucson, Arizona. Credit: Mamta Popat/Arizona Daily Star via Getty Images

Some AI leaders, sensing the shift in the wind, are starting to say that sort of thing openly. Ravi Kumar S., CEO of AI IT firm Cognizant, called tokenmaxxing "a vanity metric" at a Fortune conference on Monday. Kumar took aim at OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei, accusing them of "fearmongering."

Altman and Amodei have walked back previous predictions of an AI jobs apocalypse now that they have IPOs in the offing — reason enough for a vibe shift of its own. But what's really hurting the two CEOs is that they're also cashing in on user confusion over the complex cost of AI.

Earlier this year, Anthropic quietly changed the price of Claude for many customers, charging them per token. OpenAI is looking at dropping its "unlimited" ChatGPT plans — quite a change from a year ago, when Altman promised "intelligence too cheap to meter."

The shift isn't just happening at the two AI giants. Microsoft started cutting token costs for itself and raising token prices for everyone else — even before those rosy pronouncements at Build.

SEE ALSO: Thank the AI industry for tech price increases: See the full list

Microsoft began revoking developers' access to Claude Code, pushing them to Microsoft Copilot instead, in May. On June 1, Github Copilot users were switched from a fixed subscription to a per-token subscription model.

Reddit filled with angry users noting how expensive their AI prompts have suddenly become. In one extreme case, a Claude user blew 50 percent of his monthly credits on a single prompt.

"At the beginning of the year," Altman said in an OpenAI livestream this week, "people were totally happy with the amount they were spending... now, all of a sudden [it's] a huge issue." In a CNBC interview Monday, Altman admitted to a "ton of waste" in AI spending, and said companies were asking, "how long do I have to wait for [AI benefits] to show up in revenue?"

This was, Altman said, a "fair issue." And the closest Altman came to an answer? "The industry will figure that out pretty quickly... in another year or two."

Will the vibe shift burst the AI bubble?

How long OpenAI and Anthropic have to figure out this issue, however, depends largely on what happens in their IPOs.

"Nobody knows when this will all collapse, but 2026 will be remembered in hindsight as the year in which retail investors were left holding the bag," Gary Marcus, a professor and leading generative AI critic, predicted Monday.

Marcus, who has been increasingly proven right in the AI problems he's foreseen since 2022, may yet be off base here. But he does have a hunch, based on comments from Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei, that both companies had burned so much money they were "months from bankruptcy" and had "run out of options" other than to file for trillion-dollar IPOs.

In particular, OpenAI has long been losing more than a billion dollars a month — the cost of serving ChatGPT for free to hundreds of millions of people.

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Financial bubbles built around technologies invariably end with an Emperor's New Clothes moment. Eventually, enough people are pointing and laughing that courtiers can't carry off the hype any longer.

That's what happened to end the dotcom bubble in 2000. A business deal came along that was so ridiculous on its surface (the world's largest media empire, snapped up by the guys who gave away dial-up internet via CDs?!) that markets couldn't help but point and laugh. The vibe shifted. Overhyped, profitless dotcom companies began to look naked, and a stock collapse soon followed.

Human hiring and hallucinations

Times have changed, and the AI bubble is a hardier thing than its dotcom predecessor. It is built atop the one company currently making a fortune out of all this. NVIDIA has sold the picks and shovels to AI gold rush seekers for so many years now that they've started to seem invulnerable. Yet even Nvidia is learning lessons about the prohibitive growing cost of AI.

"The cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees," one Nvidia executive told Axios in April. So even Nvidia is vulnerable to tokenmaxxing. And that's why the hottest thing in AI these days is hiring humans, because they're getting to be cheaper than AI — and are needed for quality control on AI's output anyway.

Cognizant's Kumar boasted about his AI company hiring 20,000 graduates last year, and more this year — a vibe shift if ever we've seen one.

So the jobspocalypse vibe has shifted. The tokens vibe has shifted. And the AI data center-building vibe has shifted, too — not just in terms of public and environmental opposition, but in the fact that there aren't as many data centers under construction as we'd been led to expect. (Gadfly journalist Ed Zitron has done yeoman's work here, scouring satellite photos of data center sites for signs of construction).

What's left? Arguably, the only vibe that hasn't shifted is the hallucination vibe, in that users still aren't aware how often most AI models hallucinate. Google, for example, won't say how often Gemini 3.5 Flash hallucinates, but a December Google study found that Gemini may only be accurate 68.8 to 83.8 percent of the time.

SEE ALSO: How often does Gemini 3.5 Flash hallucinate or lie? Google isn't saying.

And hallucinations aren't hard to find these days. The hallucination that OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are genuine trillion-dollar AI giants that deserve to be listed in top index funds despite being unprofitable (breaking news: as I wrote this, the S&P 500 officially opted out of that hallucination).

The hallucination that Nvidia will always remain on top, even as companies making up a majority of its business are developing their own AI chips (which is exactly why Michael Burry, the Big Short guy, continues to short the stock).

The hallucination that customers want AI in everything, when survey after survey says the opposite. The hallucination that AI content will dominate the future, when the generation that will take us there points and laughs at AI slop.

If these hallucinations fade from the fevered brains of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the great AI vibe shift of 2026 will be complete.

This article reflects the opinion of the author.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

I have used Samsung DeX as a PC replacement for much of the past two years. In the process, I learned a lot both to love and not love about Samsung's Android-based desktop. Here are some of the more exciting aspects I wish I had known about sooner.

If you've used a Windows computer, you've likely encountered the NTFS, exFAT, and FAT32 file systems, even if you didn't know it.

When Acura introduced the first MDX in late 2000, it changed what buyers expected from a luxury SUV. Before it arrived, most three-row SUVs were built on truck frames, which made them capable off-road and for towing, but a bit rough on the commute at times. The MDX was different with its car-based unibody platform, which gave it a quieter, smoother ride without sacrificing space for seven passengers.

Even if you have a private DNS set on your router, your Android phone may not be using it. It all comes down to a single setting on your phone. While there isn't a perfect solution to this conflict, resolving it is relatively straightforward and will allow your phone and router to play nice with each other.

In New York, legislators have passed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction, reports The Verge, marking the first statewide ban on a critical component of the infrastructure needed for artificial intelligence. 

Governor Kathy Hochul has yet to sign the bill into law, however, so at this stage it is better understood as a proposed framework than actual policy, but the lawmakers behind the bill say it is designed less as an outright ban than as a means of buying time to assess the many impacts of new data center construction — on the environment, on energy prices, and on local jobs.

SEE ALSO: Meta is building AI data centers in tents

If passed into law, the bill would require any company planning to build a "large" data center, defined as having at least 20 megawatts of capacity, to also fund a public hearing into the desirability of the project among local residents. 

Public opinion on data centers has rapidly soured, even since last fall, with 7 in 10 Americans now opposed to the construction of new data centers in their area, and lawmakers are starting to take note. A similar moratorium was attempted in Maine earlier this year, but the proposal was ultimately rejected by Democratic Governor Janet Mills on the grounds that it failed to exempt a previously planned project. 

Unsurprisingly, representatives from companies backing new data center construction oppose the moratoriums, favoring a case-by-case assessment of new builds. Politico spoke with Stacy Sikes, the current president and CEO of the Long Island Association business group, who warned about the economic ramifications of a blanket ban: "We think it would overall be damaging to the state’s economy, because having a blanket moratorium instead of looking at it at a case by case basis would not allow the state to move forward on a data center project that would actually be helpful to our economy." 

When asked about the likelihood of the bill becoming law, Hochul's spokesperson Kristin Devoe was predictably terse: "The Governor will review the bill." 

Have you ever wondered what those little blinking lights on your router actually mean? I'll admit that I haven't given them much thought until not too long ago. The general rule of thumb is that if they're all lit up in green, everything's fine, so what else is there to think about?

Performance enthusiasts have long argued that the best driver's cars need to send power to the rear wheels. Front-wheel-drive vehicles, no matter how powerful, are often dismissed as compromised alternatives that can't match the balance, engagement, and outright pace of traditional sports cars. Yet a handful of modern performance machines continue to challenge that thinking, proving that clever engineering can sometimes overcome conventional wisdom.

Unless you're typing in IP addresses by hand, every single time you visit a website, you perform a DNS lookup first. By default, your network probably points to a public DNS server, like your ISP's server, Google's 8.8.8.8, or Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. They're convenient and fast, but it also means that a third-party gets an unredacted view of the websites you visit.

In a recently released policy paper entitled "Democratic Governance of Frontier AI: A blueprint for a federal framework," OpenAI put forward its vision of AI regulation, built around five core priorities: promoting transparency, protecting innovation, addressing risks to national security and public safety, advancing democratic governance, and creating "adaptive institutions" capable of keeping up with these rapid technological developments. 

But while those are all laudable goals, there is very little agreement on how to pursue them in practice. And according to reporting by Politico, the timing of this paper is auspicious, coming shortly after the White House released two executive orders on "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security" that would place AI regulation squarely within the government's remit.

As Politico AI reporter Brendan Bordelon points out, the OpenAI paper is an attempt to "nudge" the federal government towards a different approach, one in which civilian institutions are responsible for AI oversight. Outlining a process they call "reverse federalism," OpenAI proposes that states be allowed to "to develop and refine common legal frameworks first," before Congress adopts them at the national level.  

In their vision, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) would act as the main point of contact between artificial intelligence companies and the government, working off a precedent set earlier this year when Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI all signed deals with the Commerce Department to allow the federal government to evaluate their AI models for potential national security risks.  

As AI becomes more ubiquitous across the country, regulators are struggling to catch up. Between the potential for massive job losses, even in manufacturing, and the turmoil caused by AI deepfakes and the "crisis of knowing" they precipitate, people everywhere are looking for clarity and structure, and neither AI makers nor politicians seems able to agree on what that should look like.

This push-pull dance between AI's creators and governments has been going on for some time, and it isn't likely to be resolved any time soon, as evidenced by the latest of Sam Altman's visits to Capitol Hill earlier this week, but it's worth paying close attention to all the same, because the balance struck here will have major consequences for the future of, well, everything.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

It's possible to connect Home Assistant to AI services such as Claude. Depending on the connector you use, your AI chatbot can not only read information about your smart home but also write automations, build dashboards, turn things on and off, and more. I'd seen plenty of people rave about it, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about.

Beach season comes early in Florida, and when I started taking inventory of our usual beach gear, I realized we were missing something we use all the time: a decent portable Bluetooth speaker. I could have just bought a new Bluetooth speaker and been done with it, but I wasn't in a rush. I figured I'd keep an eye out and see what turned up.

When Android was fresh and new, it was desperate for someone to take home screens seriously. That person was Federico Carnales, and his app was LauncherPro. It quickly became the darling child of the Android world, but it disappeared just as fast.

Smart bulbs were the first smart home devices I ever bought, and it didn't take long before they started causing complaints in my home. While smart bulbs can be very useful, allowing you to control your lights remotely or with automations, they have some glaring issues that can cause a lot of frustration. Thankfully, a cheap NFC tag was enough to solve the most annoying problems.

Amy Poehler is that fun, easygoing friend who's somehow good at everything she does. With the launch of the Good Hang podcast, the 54-year-old Parks and Recreation star has quickly amassed a devoted audience that continues to climb.

After releasing the first episode in March of 2025, Good Hang has racked up 709,000 subscribers on YouTube, 2 million on Instagram, and 757,300 on TikTok. Plus, it won the inaugural award for Best Podcast at the Golden Globes.

The format of each 60(ish)-minute episode is pretty straightforward: Poehler has a sit-down chat in a question-and-answer style that's at once engaging and delightful. But the power of its success lies with Poehler herself. She is so enjoyable to watch (or listen to, depending on where you get your podcasts) and clearly loves learning about what lights people up.

In its first 52 weeks on the internet, the podcast has featured a parade of convivial, high-profile guests, including Michelle Obama, Ryan Coogler, and Gwyneth Paltrow, plus a steady stable of Poehler’s former co-stars and collaborators.

The Saturday Night Live alum is effervescent in her role as host, giggling with friends about past projects, exploring the power of female friendships, and celebrating other creators and entertainers across a wide range of genres.

For anyone who's missed having a weekly dose of this comedy queen, Good Hang hits all the right spots.

Mashable talks to creators about how they built their platforms, the gear they swear by, and the trends they see coming next. Read more of our creator coverage to discover the internet's most exciting voices or see more of this year’s Mashable 101.

It's not often you get two of the most accomplished NFL players of all time in the same family, but that's the Kelce brothers for you. Travis Kelce, 36, is a Tight End for the Kansas City Chiefs, while his older brother Jason Kelce, 38, was a Center for the Philadelphia Eagles from 2008 until 2024. Jason is widely regarded as one of the best centers in NFL history, while Travis is considered one of the most accomplished tight ends.

Just in case they weren't busy enough, they co-host a weekly sports podcast, New Heights, which has 3.6 million followers on Instagram (@newheightshow) and 3.16 million subscribers on YouTube. In 2024, the podcast signed a deal with Amazon for over $100 million. The name is a nod to the brothers' upbringing in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and the show pulls in big-name guests such as Jon Hamm, Ryan Gosling, and a certain person named Taylor Swift.

Travis and Taylor are betrothed to be wed and announced their engagement in an internet-breaking post with the caption, "Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married." When Taylor made her New Heights debut in August 2025, the podcast achieved record-breaking viewership. The episode gained almost 20 million views in five days on YouTube, prompting a 3,000 percent surge in new Spotify listeners, and a 618 percent rise in female listenership to the podcast.

Travis has 7.7 million followers on Instagram (@killatrav) and 3 million followers on TikTok (@traviskelce), while Jason has 3.2 million followers on Instagram (@jason.kelce) and 626,200 followers on TikTok (@jasonkelce).

Mashable talks to creators about how they built their platforms, the gear they swear by, and the trends they see coming next. Read more of our creator coverage to discover the internet's most exciting voices or see more of this year’s Mashable 101.

If you've ever been in a minor fender bender and wished you had footage to back you up, you'll understand why dashcams have gone from niche accessory to near-essential kit. The VIOFO A329S 3CH takes that logic further than most—it doesn't just cover the front, it covers the front, the cabin, and the rear simultaneously—all in 4K, 2K, and 2K.

The advertising industry presents several major awards, such as the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity and the CLIO Awards. Now, a new awards show honors the best AI-generated ads.

The Generated Awards took place on May 27 in New York City, where the Generated Group presented 9 awards to AI video creators and brands. Many of the nominated ads were "spec ads," unofficial creations by AI hobbyists and creators. However, ads from Google and the Gorilla Glue Company were also considered.

For instance, "Pac-Man Reimagined," winner of the "Best Visual Effects" award, is not actually an advertisement from Bandai Namco Entertainment, which owns Pac-Man.

Still, the event shows just how quickly the advertising agency is adapting to new AI technology. Last year at Google I/O, the company dropped the AI video model Veo 3 like a bomb, and ever since, we've had to question every viral video we've seen. Since then, we've seen rapid advancements in text-to-video models. AI video creators often use multiple video models, including Seeddance 2.0, Kling 3.0, and Luma Ray2, as well as tools to improve the resolution to 4K.

Google has explicitly pitched Veo as a tool for quickly creating advertisements at scale, and multiple ad agencies now specialize in creating low-cost AI ads. Coca-Cola's most recent holiday campaign was centered on a controversial AI video, and Jeep has several AI-generated commercials on the air now.

As I've said before, whether you like it or not, I think artificial intelligence in advertising is a train that can't be stopped.

Over email, I asked Tanya Porquez, the Generated Group CEO, if AI-generated ads should have mandatory disclosure requirements. She said, "I don’t think there should be a required disclosure unless there is a legal requirement."

"We’re going to have a crawl-walk-run situation where 'made with AI' disclosures are present to build public trust. There is a transparency issue where people want to know that they’re not being manipulated by AI tools. For example, in New York they’ve passed legislation to require disclosure of AI-created people, something we welcome. I can understand why they’re asking for it now at this early state."

The Generated Ads: See the winning ads

To see what advertising could look like in the near future, I've gathered all the award winners into this piece. You can watch them for yourself to see if you can tell the difference between what's real and what's not.

Some of the videos are more obvious than others, and feature the tell-tale glossy sheen that's a hallmark of many AI videos. However, as with AI-generated images, the tells are becoming harder and harder to spot.

Though this should be obvious, please note that all of these videos contain AI-generated content.

Best storytelling: "Perfection by Mistake" by Michal Kuzminski Best Direction: "Meet the New Chief Tough Officer at The Gorilla Glue Company" by The Gorilla Glue Company Best Audio Experience: "Instant Grind, Nescafe" by Blackbrightstudio View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Curious Refuge (@curiousrefuge)

Fictional Ad of the Year: "Puppramin" by PJ Accetturo Spec Ad of the Year: "Vans" by Çağlasın Yılmaz and Bilgehan Yoldas Commercial of the Year: "The Watch" by Runway Creative and J. Felipe Orozco

Replacing a polished, multi-billion dollar service like Spotify or Apple Music with self-hosted software seems daunting, but it actually isn't.