chatainews

"If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on .  "We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model, demand externalities trap rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal.  "The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and better  AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity participation, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasian bargaining.  "Only a Pigouvian automation tax can.  "The results suggest that policy should address not only the aftermath of AI labor displacement but also the competitive incentives that drive it."  

"China’s state planner on Monday called for Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Singaporean artificial intelligence startup with Chinese roots. "The decision to prohibit foreign investment in Manus was made in accordance with laws and regulations, the National Development and Reform Commission said in a brief statement. It added that it has asked the parties involved to withdraw the acquisition transaction. "CNBC has contacted Meta for comment. Its stock was up slightly in morning trading. "The deal had attracted scrutiny from both China and Washington, as lawmakers in the U.S. have prohibited American investors from backing Chinese AI companies directly. Meanwhile, Beijing has increased efforts to discourage Chinese AI founders from moving business offshore."

"OpenAI and Microsoft on Monday announced a revamped partnership agreement that will allow the artificial intelligence company to cap revenue share payments and serve customers across any cloud provider. "As part of the new agreement, the companies said revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft will be subject to a total cap , but they will continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress .  "Microsoft no longer needs to determine its response if OpenAI finds that it has reached artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is a term for an AI system that rivals or exceeds human intelligence. "The revenue share between the two companies has existed for years. OpenAI will pay Microsoft at the same percentage, which is 20%, as part of the new deal, according to a source familiar with agreement who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.  "That means, for example, Microsoft continues to get a cut of every ChatGPT subscr...

"This isn’t science fiction built from characters moving through imagined futures. It’s science fiction built from the language systems already shaping those futures. "The flat tone, the procedural cadence, the absence of voice —those aren’t bugs. They’re the subject. "This is not AI mimicking the text of human writers. It is taking on the function that until now had belonged exclusively to human writers. AI has become a writer that can function in the same way as our best wrtiers (sic) —as a perceptual instrument. "Look again at the example . What is happening? AI is detecting and rendering: Reassurance language ('everything is normal') Post-event normalization ('no action required') Conditional permission structures ('access granted under…') Semantic drift ( unchanged  meaning something slightly different every time) "AI is writing about the background radiation of modern life. This is carrying semantic and emotional weight —enough to ...

"Machine code, with its absence of almost any form of redundancy, was soon identified as a needlessly risky interface between man and machine .  "Partly in response to this recognition so-called high-level programming languages  were developed, and, as time went by, we learned to a certain extent how to enhance the protection against silly mistakes.  "It was a significant improvement that now many a silly mistake did result in an error message instead of in an erroneous answer. (And even this improvement wasn't universally appreciated: some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results, and, when judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate the ease of programming  with the ease of making undetected mistakes.)  "The (abstract) machine corresponding to a programming language remained, however, a faithful slave, i.e. the nonsensible automaton perfectly capable of carrying out nonsensical in...

"The AI industry is largely failing to ask a key design question, argues theoretical neuroscientist/cognitive scientist Vivienne Ming. Are their AI products building human capacity or consuming it? "The human qualities most likely to matter are not the feel-good ones. They're the uncomfortable ones:  The capacity to be wrong in public and stay curious; To sit with a question your phone could answer in three seconds and resist the urge to reach for it.  To read a confident, fluent response from an AI and ask yourself, What's missing ? rather than default to Great, that's done .  To disagree with something that sounds authoritative and to trust your instinct enough to follow it.  "We don't build these capacities by avoiding discomfort. We build them by choosing it, repeatedly, in small ways:  The student who struggles through a problem before checking the answer;  The person who asks a follow-up question in a conversation;  The reader who sits with a dif...

"In late-stage testing of a distributed AI platform, engineers sometimes encounter a perplexing situation: Every monitoring dashboard reads healthy , yet users report that the system’s decisions are slowly becoming wrong. "Engineers are trained to recognize failure in familiar ways: a service crashes, a sensor stops responding, a constraint violation triggers a shutdown. Something breaks, and the system tells you. But a growing class of software failures looks very different.  " The system keeps running, logs appear normal, and monitoring dashboards stay green. Yet the system’s behavior quietly drifts away from what it was designed to do. "This pattern is becoming more common as autonomy spreads across software systems. Quiet failure is emerging as one of the defining engineering challenges of autonomous systems because correctness now depends on coordination, timing, and feedback across entire systems."

"Meta will cut thousands of jobs next month as it spends more than ever on artificial intelligence (AI) projects. "The company told employees in a memo on Thursday that it plans to cut 10% of its workforce —roughly 8,000 staff. It said it will also not fill thousands more open jobs it had been hiring for. "A key reason for the layoffs is Meta's increased spending in other areas of the company, including AI, for which it will this year spend $135bn (£100bn). This is roughly equal to the amount it has spent on AI in the previous three years combined, according to a person who viewed the memo. "A spokesman for Meta confirmed the planned job cuts but declined to comment further."

"Language is a defining feature of our species, yet the genomic changes enabling it remain poorly understood. "Despite decades of work since FOXP2’s discovery, we still lack a clear picture of which regions shaped language evolution and how variation contributes to present-day phenotypic differences.  "Using an evolutionary stratified polygenic score approach, we find that human ancestor quickly evolved regions (HAQERs) are associated with spoken language abilities (discovery N = 350, total replication N > 100,000). HAQERs evolved before the human-Neanderthal split, giving hominins increased binding of Forkhead and Homeobox transcription factors, and show evidence of balancing selection across the past 20,000 years.  "Language-associated variants in HAQERs appear more prevalent in Neanderthals, and HAQER-like sequences show convergent evolution across vocal-learning mammals. Our results reveal how ancient innovations continue shaping human language."

"In your day-to-day life you will encounter many examples of fallacious reasoning. And it's fun - and sometimes even useful - to point to an argument and say, 'A ha! That argument commits the fallacy of false dilemma.' "It may be fun, but it is not very useful. Nor is it very enlightened. "The names of the fallacies are for identification purposes only. They are not supposed to be flung around like argumentative broadswords. It is not sufficient to state that an opponent has committed such-and-such a fallacy. And it is not very polite. "This Guide is intended to help you in your own thinking, not to help you demolish someone else's argument. When you are establishing your own ideas and beliefs, evaluate them in the light of the fallacies described here. "When evaluating the ideas and arguments proposed to you by others, keep in mind that you need to prove that the others' reasoning is fallacious. That is why there is a proof  section in the ...

"Mental imagery allows us to remember previous experiences and imagine new ones.  "Animal studies have yielded rich insight into mechanisms for visual perception, but the neural mechanisms for visual imagery remain poorly understood.  "We determined that approximately 80% of visually responsive single neurons in the human ventral temporal cortex (VTC) use a distributed axis code to represent objects.  "We used that code to reconstruct objects and generate maximally effective synthetic stimuli.  "We then recorded responses from the same neural population while subjects imagined specific objects; about 40% of axis-tuned VTC neurons recapitulated the visual code.  "Our findings reveal that visual imagery is supported by reactivation of the same neurons involved in perception, providing single-neuron evidence for the existence of a generative model in human VTC."

"Antimatter is capitalizing on significant investment to develop its first global network of neoclouds, with an initial funding of €300 million dedicated to the deployment of its first 100 Policloud units by 2027.   "These units are expected to utilize 40,000 GPUs, providing a staggering 3.6 exaFLOPS of compute power. By 2030, the planned network is aimed to amass over 400,000 GPUs, equating to 36 exaFLOPS —comparable to five traditional hyperscale data centers. "The company’s footprint will span multiple countries, with each Policloud unit constructed to be modular and easily deployable in less than five months, a far cry from the typical 24-month build time seen in standard facilities. This architecture allows Antimatter to respond swiftly to market demands while maintaining a lower overhead."

"A $70 million movie about the mysterious creator of Bitcoin quietly wrapped principal photography in London last month in a gray box that could have passed for a storage facility. "On the surface, it’s a pretty standard feature —Doug Liman directing a cast that includes Gal Gadot, Pete Davidson, Casey Affleck and Isla Fisher in a globe-trotting thriller about the search for the identity of the person who invented the decentralized cryptocurrency. "Except for one thing: 'Bitcoin: Killing Satoshi' is described as the first fully-generated, studio-quality AI feature film. "Acme AI & FX —founded by Ryan and Matt Kavanaugh, Garrett Grant and Lawrence Grey —produced the independent feature, which was shot entirely on a custom-built soundstage over 20 days, using AI to make what would have traditionally cost $300 million on a much more manageable budget, according to the film’s producers."

"The UK technology secretary has urged the country to 'make AI work for Britain,' brushing off fears about its impact on jobs and cybersecurity as the government announced its first investment under a £500m sovereign AI fund. "Liz Kendall said the UK had to seize the opportunity offered by AI despite concerns underlined this month when US startup Anthropic revealed it had developed an AI model that posed a potentially significant cyber threat. "Asked how the government makes the case for embracing a technology that could disrupt jobs and now cybersecurity, Kendall said: 'We have to seize this to make it work, for Britain, for our jobs, for solving the biggest challenges we face as a world'."

"The honest description of what is on my machine is this: pre-installed spyware capability, silently placed, dormant , waiting for activation. "The moment a paired extension lands, whether the user installs it, an enterprise policy pushes it, an attacker plants it, or Anthropic's own next update bundles it, the word dormant vanishes. "Anthropic will argue the binary is not currently doing anything harmful. That argument does not survive contact with the facts.  The capability is installed.  The trust relationship is established.  The opt in was never requested.  "On the day the trigger arrives, none of that changes, except the binary starts running. "That argument also doesn't save them legally —the mere placing of the binary on the device and the creation of the folders to store it is a direct breach of Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC and a multitude of computer trespass and misuse laws."

"The National Security Agency is said to be using Mythos Preview, Anthropic’s recently announced model that it withheld from public release, Axios reports. "The news comes weeks after the NSA’s parent agency, the Department of Defense, labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk , after the company refused to allow Pentagon officials unrestricted access to its model’s full capabilities. "Anthropic announced Mythos earlier this month as a frontier model designed for cybersecurity tasks, but claimed the model was too capable of offensive cyberattacks to be released publicly. As a result, the AI firm limited access to Mythos to around 40 organizations, of which it has publicly named only a dozen.  "The NSA appears to be among the undisclosed recipients, and is said to be using Mythos primarily for scanning environments for exploitable vulnerabilities . The UK’s AI Security Institute has also confirmed it has access to Mythos."

"The Connection Keeper is a round puck that houses two microphones for recording around the table. "The recorder was developed in partnership with StoryCorps, the 23-year-old nonprofit that has recorded conversations with more than 720,000 people about their lives. "'Everything now is AI, and everyone has their phones on the table,' says Elyce Henkin, a managing director of StoryCorps studios and brand partnerships. 'It interrupts the conversation and the flow. We wanted to get rid of that and go back to the basics and have everyone talking to each other.' "The pucks come packaged with cards inspired by StoryCorps, designed to prompt conversations between family members. Some are aimed at kids; some are aimed at parents or other family members."

"The Reasoning with Machines Laboratory at the University of Oxford got a team of doctors to create detailed, realistic scenarios that ranged from mild health issues you could deal with at home; through to needing a routine GP appointment, an A&E trip, or requiring calling an ambulance. "When the chatbots were given the complete picture they were 95% accurate. "But it was a very different story when 1,300 people were given a scenario to have a a conversation with a chatbot about in order to get a diagnosis and advice. "It was the human-AI interaction that made things unravel as the accuracy fell to 35% —two thirds of the time people were getting the wrong diagnosis or care."

"AI is being used to prove new results at a rapid pace. Mathematicians think this is just the beginning.  'The biggest annual mathematics conference in the world is held every year in early January. In 2026, in Washington, D.C., nervous jokes about being made obsolete by AI were plentiful, even if, on the record, everyone insisted that AI will be a helpmate to human mathematicians .  " [Geordie] Williamson —who has been working with AI for years and is very excited by it —was chosen to deliver a series of prestigious lectures about AI and math to the entire conference.  "He told the audience that it’s a mistake to react to AI developments with ignorance and fear. "But he said he understands where the fear comes from. He sees mathematics as a ' craft that people have spent their lives —dedicated their lives —towards. There is some possibility that its value may be greatly diminished in the future'."