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Race to AGI Daily Digest - Wednesday, December 17, 2025
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TLDR
Google is seeding India’s AI capacity with $8M for Centers of Excellence in public-sector domains.
Enterprises are reporting stalled generative AI gains, even as usage and infrastructure keep growing.
Urban VPN logging ChatGPT and Claude chats shows AI misuse now lives in everyday tools at the prompt layer.
Illinois and Colorado leaders are pushing back on Trump’s AI order, pulling AI policy into state politics.
Honoris’s Study Better AI rollout shows higher education in Africa becoming a frontline for AI in daily work.
The Full Story
Following Monday’s 16x usage spike in China and Tuesday’s NVIDIA stack grab, today is about the hangover: what happens when the tech keeps racing ahead but people, laws, and budgets start to push back.
On one side, the build-out rolls on. Google is putting $8M into India’s new AI Centers of Excellence, with grants focused on health, language, and other public-sector problems see the CoEs plan ->. It fits neatly after NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3 push: first you fight over GPUs and schedulers, then you fund the places where that compute turns into real workloads check Google’s broader AI profile ->.
But the mood in boardrooms is different. A new report says generative AI projects are stalling because businesses just don’t see clear gains yet read the ROI story ->. So yes, usage is up and stacks are consolidating, but many teams are stuck between cool demos and hard numbers. That tension is exactly what our “AI Reshapes Workforce Dynamics” narrative has been circling track that narrative ->.
Our safety storyline also gets a sharp, very practical update. Urban VPN was caught logging private ChatGPT and Claude chats, the same prompt layer we’ve been talking about all week see the Urban VPN leak ->. Yesterday it was prompt-layer security products; today it’s your VPN quietly watching your conversations. Add in new state-level pushback against Trump’s AI order follow the policy fight ->, and you can feel the guardrails starting to form—messy, local, and very political.
Meanwhile, the Global South keeps turning into a live testbed. Honoris is rolling out Study Better AI across African campuses higher-ed rollout details ->. So we have students in Africa, doctors in India, and workers everywhere bumping into the same question: when does this tech stop being a shiny demo and start making their daily work meaningfully better?
So the week’s story tightens: the stack is maturing and spreading out globally, but the real battle now is over trust, proof of value, and who gets to write the rules at the prompt boundary where humans and models actually meet.
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