Did you recently see a video of kids from the 1990s predicting how computers would be used in the future? It’s fake. The video was created using Flux 3 and if you didn’t inspect it too closely, it looks pretty authentic as an artifact from 30 years ago. But it serves as a great reminder that we really can’t trust our own eyes here in 2026.
Justine Moore, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, tweeted the video last week, writing that Black Forest Labs’ Flux 3 is “exceptional at generating historical footage.” The venture capital firm announced it was investing in Black Forest Labs in 2024.
Moore noted that the last girl in the video was her favorite, perhaps because it has some awkward silences that make it appear much more realistic.
The video has an aesthetic quality that feels like 1990s video and the outfits are decade appropriate. The answers given by the AI kids are also very believable. “They’ll probably do our homework,” one AI-generated kid says. Another responds, “Maybe they’ll make movies for us,” an obvious nod to the agenda of tech boosters who think AI tools will soon replace Hollywood films.
“I think we’ll just tell them what to do,” another fake AI kid says in the video. That one feels like a wink to folks who are worried about AI going rogue. OpenAI and Anthropic have had some experience with that lately.
These kinds of predictions were extremely common in the 20th century. Kids frequently predicted that computers (or robots) would do their homework for them. A few years back I looked at some predictions for robots in the future from kids in the 1980s and they sounded identical.
“I want my robot to do things for my mom and me. I want my robot to do my homework,” one Kentucky first grader in 1988 wrote.
Kids were predicting the same kind of stuff as far back as the 1950s. So it’s clear where the creators of this video were pulling this idea from. But the video presents a unique challenge for the future of humanity.
What happens when people make realistic AI videos that change how we understand history? Obviously this one is fairly innocuous, even if the goal is to normalize AI use through subtle propaganda. But what about people who create new versions of events in history and treat them like newly uncovered video? Perhaps we get an AI-generated wide angle view of the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Or maybe we get a new angle on the assassination of John F. Kennedy that reveals the president was actually killed by Tiny Tim?
This is just the world we live in now. And we have to navigate it with proper skepticism. Unfortunately, people can be so skeptical that they discount very real photos and videos. Have you heard that some pro baseball players have started to insist Babe Ruth didn’t actually exist? The evidence for this claim is that apparently there isn’t enough video footage of the late baseball great. But it’s a ridiculous idea for so many reasons, not least of which is that we actually have a fair amount of motion picture film showing Babe Ruth in action.
President Donald Trump benefits from the same kind of skepticism in a perverse way. It’s known as the liar’s dividend, where someone can claim that real footage is fake because there’s enough doubt based on the available technology to create a plausible fake video.
I’m not saying that Tiny Tim actually killed Kennedy. I’m just saying that if he really did and there was video proving it, nobody would believe it’s real. And if someone made a fake AI video showing Tiny Tim killing Kennedy there would be people who absolutely think it’s real.
In short, we’re just cooked as a species at this point.
#A16Z #Brags #Great #Poisoning #Internet #Fake #Tech #Historya16z,AI,Artificial intelligence">
![EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with .75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive](https://i3.wp.com/techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/EON-Co-Founders_Horizontal_Philip-Cheung.jpg?resize=1200%2C898&ssl=1 "EON wants to move the data superhighway from ocean fiber to space lasers | TechCrunch
As hyperscalers build out data centers around the world, they need to move the bits back and forth, and that often relies on a somewhat brittle network of undersea fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the oceans.
Those cables are tricky to access and repair, much less install. But alternatives aren’t easy to find: Radio transmissions don’t have the bandwidth, which rules out most wireless approaches on the ground or in orbit. But now, maybe lasers could do the job.
Endeavor Optical Networks, a start-up founded in May and emerging from stealth today with .75 million in seed funding from General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, is betting on that plan. The co-founders, CEO Charlie Horowitz and CTO Tyler Presser, aim to launch a network of laser-equipped spacecraft to link data centers from orbit.
Most satellite communications networks, even those that provide broadband internet service, aren’t robust enough to carry data at 200 terabits a second or more, the speed of undersea fiber.
However, more powerful satellites and advances in optical technology are making space-to-ground communications with lasers more feasible. NASA used laser comms to beam back data from its most recent Moon mission, while a handful of private space companies, including York, Kepler, and Cailabs, have demonstrated links between Earth orbit and the ground.
Those connections, however, aimed for a throughput of 2.5 Gbps, and EON has a bigger starting goal, Horowitz says: Throughput of 2.4 terabits a second. That will require some secret sauce to deal with one of the biggest problems with laser comms—how the signal is distorted by the atmosphere as it passes through it, particularly when clouds are blocking the way.
EON intends to build a network of about 20 satellites, each able to provide a dedicated link between two continents, with the initial fleet providing 24 hour coverage for early customers. The company will carefully choose ground stations in different regions to serve local data centers and CDNs, using redundant sites and leveraging weather data to ensure a reliable link.
The startup is talking to hyperscalers and AI labs as customers, since they move more data than anyone else, with the focus on underserved or expensive routes: Lengthy ones, like France to Australia, or those without extensive existing infrastructure, like crossing between Africa and South America. They plan to sell dedicated capacity to entice customers interested in full control of their data transit.
First, though, EON will use its seed round to build out an optics lab, hire more engineers, and perform ground tests ahead of a demo satellite they hope to launch around the end of 2027. Horowitz expects that spacecraft to offer the highest optical downlink throughput yet seen—at least 800 gigs and perhaps a terabit.
Doing that will require careful engineering. EON will focus on producing the optical communications terminal, carefully allocating spending to the components that must be exquisite, like the gimbals that will point the laser. The company plans to buy powerful off-the-shelf satellite busses, like those made by Apex Space, Horowitz’s previous employer.
Horowitz served as Apex CEO Ian Cinnamon’s chief of staff and then as the company’s director of special projects. “Charlie is a force of nature—he can move seamlessly from strategy to the details required to make something real,” Cinnamon told TechCrunch. “Charlie is the ideal founder, and I invested personally because I believe deeply in Charlie and what he’s building at EON with Tyler.”
In addition to Pressler, a PhD astronautical engineer who has planned frontier missions for NASA, the company’s technical bench includes Michael David Francois, a long-time Google executive focused on global network infrastructure, and Wesley Baxter, an optics engineer who most recently worked on Amazon’s LEO satellite network.
Jeannette zu Fürstenburg, the General Catalyst partner who led the investment, said she sees it uniting the fund’s two key themes—AI and resilience.
“I don’t worry about demand,” she told TechCrunch. “I think all of that will solve for itself. It’s really all about can you actually get this thing into space in the time that we discussed? We really think about founder-product fit, [Horowitz] is just the right caliber of guy to go after a problem like this.”
They aren’t the only one chasing this problem—Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has announced plans for TeraWave, a 5,048 satellite network that aims to provide speeds of up to 6 Tbps to large-scale users. Blue’s plan is more ambitious, but will also require more time to launch and deploy. EON’s smaller fleet of satellites should be easier to get into space quickly, but they will need to solve many of the same technical challenges.
“Data centers have high standards for quality and redundancy,” points out Caleb Henry, the director of research at Quilty Space. “Satellite internet is just now progressing from a technology of last resort to dependable, high-bandwidth infrastructure. That’s not to say it will be impossible to make satellites optimized for data center connectivity, just that it will be harder and take longer than most entrepreneurs suggest.”Still, a project like may be more practical compared to the popular idea of building the data centers themselves in space.
“We have one rule at the company: no physics problems,” Horowitz says. “There’s a market that exists today that we can go serve. Down the road, we’ll go and take on more as it comes, but we know that this is a problem that exists today, that’s only getting worse. That’s our bet—more data is moving terrestrially than ever.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.#EON #move #data #superhighway #ocean #fiber #space #lasers #TechCrunchExclusive")
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