AI chatbots' "hallucinations," as their mistakes are often called, may never be eliminated. But researchers are learning more about why those errors happen and how to fix them, Axios' Alison Snyder writes.

Why it matters: AI errors carry real risks if people overly rely on chatbots for medical advice, legal precedents or other high-stakes information.

🧠 How it works: Oxford researcher Sebastian Farquhar and his colleagues have developed a new approach to detect when an AI model is giving answers with different meanings to the same question.

Reality check: There's just a lot of uncertainty in the world. It's not like humans are all that great at navigating gray areas or admitting what they don't know, either. So the problem may never be totally licked.

🤷‍♀️ What we're watching: Researchers now are looking at ways to have AI systems communicate the uncertainty in their answers.

• Jenn Wortman Vaughan, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and her team found that people were less confident in AI-generated answers that included some acknowledgment of uncertainty — for example, "I'm not sure, but ... "
• Adding such language might help nudge users not to rely too heavily on AI models.

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Auto dealers nationwide face potentially days of outages due to back-to-back cyberattacks on CDK Global, a software provider with 15,000 car dealerships in North America.

• Dealerships across the U.S. reverted to using pen and paper to process auto repairs and new vehicle sales this week, as CDK worked to bring its systems back online following attacks that began Wednesday, Automotive News reports.

Why it matters: It's a sign of our times that a huge swath of local businesses can be cramped by an attack on a company most of us had never heard of.

CDK shut down its systems as it investigated the first "cyber incident," spokesperson Lisa Finney said in a statement to Axios' Rebecca Falconer.

• The company's dealership management system was restored Wednesday afternoon. But late in the evening, CDK "experienced an additional cyber incident" and "proactively shut down" most of its systems, the statement says.
• CDK sent a note to customers yesterday saying it did "not have an estimated time frame for resolution and therefore our dealers' systems will not be available likely for several days."

🚙 In Detroit, Todd Szott of Szott Auto Group said he'd managed to keep his stores open after finding workarounds. But he wasn't able to register titles and do final paperwork.

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Fundraising ability will be a key factor in former President Trump's choice for his running mate, Republican sources tell Axios' Sophia Cai.

• Why it matters: Whoever Trump picks, raising cash will be one of the would-be VP's top assignments for the rest of the campaign.

🥊 Reality check: Clicking with Trump, and skill on TV, remain essential prerequisites.

• Money is less of a worry for the campaign than it used to be, because so much has rolled in since his convictions.

💰 In figures out last night, the Trump campaign and the RNC said they raised $141 million in May — significantly more than the $85 million Biden's political operation raised for its various accounts.

• Separately, Trump's super PAC raised nearly $69 million in May — including a $50 million donation from billionaire businessman Tim Mellon that rolled in the day after Trump was found guilty.

🐘 State of play: Several of the top contenders to be Trump's VP — North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) — have been particularly active on the fundraising circuit lately.

• The Trump-controlled RNC has been hashing out a fundraising plan for his eventual VP pick, Axios has learned.
• The RNC's finance team meets every Wednesday to discuss VP fundraising, a person familiar with the committee's planning tells Axios.

🧀 On Day 3 of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, there are plans for Trump and his VP pick to host a Strength in Unity Reception.

• The event will raise money for the Trump 47 Committee, the Save America PAC, the RNC and state Republican parties, in that order of priority.

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As the S&P 500 hits yet another new record high, all credit must be given to technology stocks, Axios' chief financial correspondent Felix Salmon writes.

• Why it matters: The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks (Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Tesla) account for 75% of this year's gains.

🔎 Between the lines: The degree to which the S&P 500 is concentrated in a handful of trillion-dollar companies can be seen either as a worrying development — overexposure to a single sector — or as an encouraging sign that the rest of the market still has a substantial amount of upside.

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Former President Trump's call to eliminate taxes on workers' tips is the kind of Vegas gamble a casino would never allow: It has multiple potential payouts and it's being made, essentially, with house money, Axios' Hans Nichols writes.

Why it matters: Trump is signaling to working-class voters — many of whom are frustrated by high inflation — that he wants them to keep more of the money they earn.

• But he's also betting that waitresses and bartenders will care more about a possible tax cut than other workers — who don't get paid in tips — might worry about paying the eventual tab, which could run up to $250 billion over 10 years.

💡 Between the lines: The ex-president hasn't said how he'd make up the revenue lost by making tips tax-free. But there are only two options.

• It would be paid for by tax increases on other — perhaps unsuspecting — groups, or it would just add to the federal deficit, as Trump's tax cuts did.

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🚨 Breaking — Trump on green cards for grads: Trump said on the influential "All-In" podcast that he wants to give automatic green cards to foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges — a sharp departure from his anti-immigrant rhetoric, AP reports.

• "What I want to do," Trump told the Silicon Valley podcast, "and what I will do is: You graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country. And that includes junior colleges too — anybody who graduates from a college."

But in a statement, campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump's proposal would "only apply to the most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers."

• She said the process would "exclude all communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters."

YouTube of the interview.

For the first time this year, President Biden leads former President Trump in FiveThirtyEight's national polling average.

• Why it matters: You've heard the cautionary adage: polls are a snapshot in time, not a forecast. What this data does point to, however, is a small, but clear shift toward Biden in the three weeks since Trump's conviction, Axios' Zachary Basu writes.

🧮 By the numbers: Nationally, Biden gained 1.8 points in the FiveThirtyEight average since Trump's guilty verdict on May 30, according to an analysis by the election enthusiasts at Split Ticket.

• The shift toward Biden also appears in swing-state polls — and is particularly notable given how little the polls had moved before now.

Yes, but: The averages show Trump retaining his lead in five of the seven swing states. Next Thursday's CNN debate could produce momentum in either direction.

There's an "unprecedented" scramble underway to find defense industry workers, according to a new Financial Times survey of nearly two dozen U.S. and European companies in the sector.

• Businesses built to serve defense ambitions are now recruiting at the fastest rate since the end of the Cold War, the FT found.

Why it matters: Russia's invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, coupled with evolving geopolitical risk, have pushed global military spending to new highs, Axios' Hope King and Colin Demarest write.

In 2023, countries spent $2.4 trillion on defense in total — the most ever recorded by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

• At the same time, defense giants have been on their heels after decades of competition with Big Tech over talent.

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The June full moon, overhead tonight, usually appears pink or reddish because it's close to the horizon and the lowest full moon of the year, Axios' Kelly Tyko writes.

• 🍓The Algonquin and other Native American tribes referred to it as the Strawberry Moon, since it coincides with the ripening of strawberries.
• 🍯 Nicknames in Europe include the Honey or Rose moon. The origin of Honey Moon could relate to the tradition of marrying in June, NASA notes.