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"Pilot Light began in a single Chicago classroom in 2010 .  "Since then, we have been proud to reach over 60 schools across the city through both past and present program models including The Food Education Fellowship (2019-present), SnackTime Explorers (2022-23), and more!  38% of all Pilot Light schools are in Chicago to date  81% of Chicago Pilot Light schools are on the south and west sides of the city  104 teachers across Chicagoland have worked with us since 2022 "As we continue to grow to reach more districts and classrooms nationwide, we are proud to continue our work with Chicago teachers and will always remain committed to uplifting teachers in Chicago as our home base ."

"I’ve spent the last four years working on software called PySR. It’s a symbolic regression library, so it learns equations that match a data set .  "Rather than a prediction being hidden away in a neural network, this gives you a way of translating the neural network’s behavior into a symbolic equation in a more familiar language to scientists.  "Forcing the machine learning model to use symbolic mathematics is basically a way of giving it a bias toward the existing ideas that we’ve constructed physics out of. "There’s multiple benefits from this. The equations you get are very interpretable, and they tend to generalize and give you much better out-of-distribution predictions. The downside is that these algorithms are really, really computationally expensive. If you had infinite resources, it would be perfect. "With symbolic regression, you are giving a neural network the symbols that scientists use as a library that it can build things with.  "Another w...

The verdict is in: OpenAI's newest and most capable traditional AI model, GPT-4.5, is big, expensive, and slow, providing marginally better performance than GPT-4o at 30x the cost for input and 15x the cost for output.  The new model seems to prove that longstanding rumors of diminishing returns in training unsupervised-learning LLMs were correct and that the so-called "scaling laws" cited by many for years have possibly met their natural end. An AI expert who requested anonymity told Ars Technica , "GPT-4.5 is a lemon!" when comparing its reported performance to its dramatically increased price, while frequent OpenAI critic  Gary Marcus called the release a nothing burger  in a blog post (though to be fair, Marcus also seems to think most of what OpenAI does is overrated).

"Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less. "And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop. "And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it.  "That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in.  "Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in.  "Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit ."

A new wave of return-to-office mandates has arrived since the New Year, including at JP Morgan Chase, leading advertising agency WPP, and Amazon —not to mention President Trump’s late January directive to the heads of federal agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person … on a full-time basis.”  Five years on from the pandemic, when the world showed how effectively many roles could be performed remotely or flexibly, what’s caused the sudden change of heart? “There’s two things happening,” says global industry analyst Josh Bersin, who is based in California. “The economy is actually slowing down, so companies are hiring less. So there is a trend toward productivity in general, and then AI has forced virtually every company to reallocate resources toward AI projects.” “The expectation amongst CEOs is that’s going to eliminate a lot of jobs. A lot of these back-to-work mandates are due to frustration that both of those initiatives ...

"We’re living in a strange time for software development.   "On the one hand, AI-driven coding assistants have shaken up a hitherto calcified IDE market.  "As RedMonk Cofounder James Governor puts it, 'Suddenly we’re in a position where there is a surprising amount of turbulence in the market for editors,' when everything is in play  with so much innovation happening .  "Ironically, that very innovation in genAI may be stifling innovation in the software those coding assistants increasingly recommend.  "As AWS developer advocate Nathan Peck highlights, 'The brutal truth beneath the magic of AI coding assistants' is that 'they’re only as good as their training data, and that stifles new frameworks.' "In other words, genAI-driven tools are creating powerful feedback loops that foster winner-takes-all markets, making it hard for innovative, new technologies to take root."

Amazon is betting on agent interoperability and model mixing to make its new Alexa voice assistant more effective, retooling its flagship voice assistant with agentic capabilities and browser-use tasks. This new Alexa has been rebranded to Alexa+, and Amazon is emphasizing that this version “does more.” For instance, it can now proactively tell users if a new book from their favorite author is available, or that their favorite artist is in town —and even offer to buy a ticket. Alexa+ reasons through instructions and taps experts in different knowledge bases to answer user questions and complete tasks like “Where is the nearest pizza place to the office? Will my coworkers like it? —Make a reservation if you think they will.” In other words, Alexa+ blends AI agents, computer use capabilities, and knowledge it learns from the larger Amazon ecosystem to be what Amazon hopes is a more capable and smarter home voice assistant.  Alexa+ currently runs on Amazon’s Nova models and models fr...

The property technology, or proptech, market covers a wide range of companies offering products and services meant to, for example, automate tenant-landlord interactions, or expedite the home purchasing process .  Kukun focuses on helping homeowners and real estate investors assess the return on investment they’d get from renovating their properties and on predictive analytics that model where property values will rise in the future. Doing this kind of estimation requires the use of what’s called an automated valuation model (AVM), a machine-learning model that predicts the prices or rents of certain properties.  In April 2024, Kukun was one of eight companies selected to receive support from REACH, an accelerator run by the venture capital arm of the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Last year NAR agreed to a settlement with Missouri homebuyers, who alleged that realtor fees and certain listing requirements were anticompetitive . “If you can better predict than others h...

A tip-off from a government agency has resulted in 284 million unique email addresses and plenty of passwords snarfed by credential-stealing malware being added to privacy-breach-notification service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). HIBP founder Troy Hunt said an un-named agency alerted him to the existence of the trove after he published an analysis of a separate massive collection of info-stealer logs he encountered and incorporated into his site in mid-January. "After loading the aforementioned corpus of data, someone in a government agency reached out and pointed me in the direction of more data by way of two files totaling just over 5GB," Hunt wrote this week.

Donald Trump has shared a bizarre AI-generated video on his Truth Social platform showcasing what appears to be a vision of Gaza under his proposed plan. The footage, which the 78-year-old shared without comment, shows the war-ravaged territory before a caption appears: Gaza 2025... What's Next? It then goes on to show the area transformed into a Middle Eastern paradise with exotic beaches, Dubai-style skyscrapers, luxury yachts and people partying.

Security researchers are warning that data exposed to the internet, even for a moment, can linger in online generative AI chatbots like Microsoft Copilot long after the data is made private. Thousands of once-public GitHub repositories from some of the world’s biggest companies are affected, including Microsoft’s, according to new findings from Lasso, an Israeli cybersecurity company focused on emerging generative AI threats.   Lasso co-founder Ophir Dror told TechCrunch that the company found content from its own GitHub repository appearing in Copilot because it had been indexed and cached by Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Dror said the repository, which had been mistakenly made public for a brief period, had since been set to private, and accessing it on GitHub returned a “page not found” error. “On Copilot, surprisingly enough, we found one of our own private repositories,” said Dror. “If I was to browse the web, I wouldn’t see this data. But anyone in the world could as...

More than 20 civil service employees resigned Tuesday from billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, saying they were refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.” “We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” the 21 staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press . “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.” USDS was established over a decade ago to improve services for veterans, and it helped create a free government-run portal so tax filers did not have to go through third parties like TurboTax.  It also devised systems to improve the way the federal government purchased technology. It has been embroiled in its fair share of bureaucracy fights and agency turf wars with chief information officers across government who resented interlopers treading in their ...

The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly wants to use AI to cut costs. The idea of replacing dedicated and principled civil servants with AI agents, however, is new —and complicated. According to The Washington Post , Musk’s group has started to run sensitive data from government systems through AI programs to analyze spending and determine what could be pruned.  This may lead to the elimination of human jobs in favor of automation. As one government official who has been tracking Musk’s DOGE team told the Post , the ultimate aim is to use AI to replace “the human workforce with machines.”  

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is making available data from a new AI-based weather model that is significantly more accurate and requires around 1000 times less energy to produce a forecast .  The research institute announced this on Tuesday, explaining that the model, called AIFS Artificial Intelligence Forecasting System , is the first operational forecasting model that relies on machine learning for the widest range of parameters.  Its availability will have a positive impact on how the national weather services of the 35 member states —including Germany, Austria, and Switzerland —produce their forecasts.

The U.K. government is pushing forward with plans to attract more AI companies to the region by changing copyright law .  The proposed changes would allow developers to train AI models on artists’ content found online — without permission or payment —unless creators proactively 'opt out'.   Not everyone is marching to the same beat, though. On Monday, a group of 1,000 musicians released a 'silent album,' protesting the planned changes. The album —titled “Is This What We Want?” —features tracks from Kate Bush, Imogen Heap, and contemporary classical composers Max Richter and Thomas Hewitt Jones, among others.  It also features co-writing credits from hundreds more, including big names like Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Yusuf/Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, and Hans Zimmer.  But this is not 'Band Aid' part 2. And it’s not a collection of music. Instead, the artists have put together recordings of empty studios and performanc...

"We present meRgeION, a multifunctional, modular, and flexible R-based toolbox to streamline spectral database building, automated structural elucidation, and molecular networking .  "The toolbox offers diverse tuning parameters and the possibility to combine various algorithms in the same pipeline.  "As an open-source R package, meRgeION is ideally suited for building spectral databases and molecular networks from privacy-sensitive and preliminary data.  "Using meRgeION, we have created an integrated spectral database covering diverse pharmaceutical compounds that was successfully applied to annotate drug-related metabolites from a published nontargeted metabolomics data set as well as reveal the chemical space behind this complex data set through molecular networking.  "Moreover, the meRgeION-based processing workflow has demonstrated the usefulness of a spectral library search and molecular networking for pharmaceutical forced degradation studies." 

Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary, according to three sources with knowledge of the system. The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language, the sources said.  The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management emails were sent to federal workers on Saturday, shortly after Musk wrote in a post on X that “all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Chegg Inc. is weighing strategic alternatives  for its business, saying that traffic to its web-based education platform has been decimated following Google’s launch of an artificial intelligence-powered summary tool . The company, which offers online homework help, has also filed a lawsuit against the search engine and its parent Alphabet Inc. over what it says is unfair competition caused by the Google AI Overviews product. “These two actions are connected, as we would not need to review strategic alternatives if Google hadn’t launched AI Overviews,” Chief Executive Officer Nathan Schultz said on Monday. “Traffic is being blocked from ever coming to Chegg because of Google’s AIO and their use of Chegg’s content to keep visitors on their own platform,” he added.

As the AI industry focuses on transparency and security, debates around the true meaning of openness  are intensifying. Experts from open-source security firm Endor Labs weighed in on these pressing topics. Andrew Stiefel, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Endor Labs, emphasised the importance of applying lessons learned from software security to AI systems. “The US government’s 2021 Executive Order on Improving America’s Cybersecurity includes a provision requiring organisations to produce a software bill of materials (SBOM) for each product sold to federal government agencies.” An SBOM is essentially an inventory detailing the open-source components within a product, helping detect vulnerabilities. Stiefel argued that “applying these same principles to AI systems is the logical next step.”  

"Canadian government should reject CLOUD Act agreement to uphold Canada’s constitutional and human rights: In signing a CLOUD Act agreement, Canada would furthermore make itself vulnerable to additional privacy and national security threats arising from any future bestowing of even broader powers on U.S. law enforcement authorities, by the current or future administrations.  "This lesson is already being learned painfully by, in fact, the U.S. itself. The Washington Post reported this month that the U.K. government secretly demanded Apple create a way to decrypt its users’ data worldwide for the U.K. government to access .  "This demand reportedly relied on the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Act, a law amended in 2024 —a few short years after the U.S. and U.K. reached their own CLOUD Act agreement in 2019.  "In response to these revelations, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden circulated a draft bill to address major deficiencies in the CLOUD Act —which is cause for sober second ...

"We're drowning in a cesspool of AI-generated content while being punished by AI-content detectors that can't tell a human from a bot when we try to write an essay or even apply for a job. "We have so many bloated SaaS tools that we've started swiping our credit cards for SaaS tools to manage them.  "And in all of this shit, there are hidden costs: complexity, attention fragmentation, dehumanization, manipulation, and the abdication of free will.  "For the past 20 years, tech has promised to make things more efficient while making almost everything more complicated and less meaningful. Innovation, for innovation's sake, has eroded our craftsmanship, relationships, and ability to think critically. "Even the phrase deep thinking  has been co-opted by AI companies. We have the paradox of choice —more tools, options, streaming platforms, shows, everything except clarity or satisfaction." 

"Apple is literally worth trillions of dollars, and despite having what is essentially unlimited resources, its AI service is absolutely horrid.  "In fact, it is so bad, that many users just turn it off entirely. Hell, there is even an entire subreddit dedicated to its failures. "What makes Apple Intelligence so terrible? Well, there are many things, but the most comical is the horrible job it does with summarizing notifications.  "Case in point, if my doorbell camera detects a person in the morning, and a person in the afternoon, Apple Intelligence will later warn me that multiple people are detected —making it sound like a gang of people are on my front porch at the same time. "Believe it or not, Apple Intelligence handles notification summaries so poorly, that the iPhone-maker had to disable it for news notifications. You see, it was creating misleading notifications that bordered on misinformation ." 

Microsoft Corp. has canceled some leases for US data center capacity, according to TD Cowen, raising broader concerns over whether it’s securing more AI computing capacity than it needs in the long term. OpenAI’s biggest backer has voided leases in the US totaling “a couple of hundred megawatts” of capacity —the equivalent of roughly two data centers —canceling agreements with at least a couple of private operators, the US brokerage wrote Friday, citing “channel checks” or inquiries with supply chain providers.  TD Cowen said its checks also suggest Microsoft has pulled back on converting so-called statements of qualifications, agreements that usually lead to formal leases. Exactly why Microsoft may be pulling some leases is unclear. TD Cowen posited in a second report on Monday that OpenAI is shifting workloads from Microsoft to Oracle Corp. as part of a relatively new partnership.  The tech giant is also among the largest owners and operators of data centers in its own right...

Fiverr, the popular freelance service platform, has announced a new feature that allows creators to train AI models on their own work .  This innovative step, part of the newly launched Fiverr Go suite, is set to revolutionize the way freelancers and clients interact, blending the speed of artificial intelligence with the unique expertise of human professionals. Fiverr Go is a suite of tools designed to integrate AI into the freelancing workflow in a way that benefits both freelancers and their clients.  The standout feature of this suite is the ability for freelancers to create custom AI models based on their own body of work.  These models can then be used by clients to generate content that mirrors the style and quality of the freelancer’s previous projects.

The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet vegetative electron microscopy had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.  The ludicrous phrase is what sleuths call a “fingerprint”: an offbeat characteristic found in one or more publications that suggests paper-mill involvement.   Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording. Searching for such clues is just one way to identify the hundreds of thousands of fake papers analysts say are polluting the scientific literature, as we reported in an investigati...

"The Belinksy-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz dynamics of gravity close to a spacelike singularity can be mapped, at each point in space separately, onto the motion of a particle bouncing within half the fundamental domain of the modular group.  "We show that the semiclassical quantisation of this motion is a conformal quantum mechanics where the states are constrained to be modular invariant.   "Each such state defines an odd automorphic L-function. In particular, in a basis of dilatation eigenstates the wavefunction is proportional to the L-function along the critical axis and hence vanishes at the nontrivial zeros, realising suggestions by Connes and Berry-Keating for the Riemann zeta function.  "We show that the L-function along the positive real axis is equal to the partition function of a gas of non-interacting charged oscillators labeled by prime numbers.  "This generalises Julia's notion of a primon gas. Each state therefore has a corresponding, dual, primon ...

 

"Aristotle argued there were three types of souls —each building on the last.  First, is the vegetative soul: the basic, automatic functions of growth and nutrition. Your pot plants have this soul.  Second, is the sensitive soul, which involves perception and awareness. Your dog has this.  Finally, there is the rational soul —with intelligence, consciousness, and imagination. You have this. "Given that Aristotle was writing so long ago, it’s remarkable how little has changed in how we understand life.  "The big difference, however, is how widely these categories will stretch.  "To make sense of vegetative and sensitive souls, Big Think spoke to Jonathan Birch about his new book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI.   "Not only does Birch believe we give too little credit to non-human animals, but he argues that the dawn of AI might be a unique moment in our planet’s history —the birth of a new type of soul."

"Technology conglomerate Microsoft is already one of the world’s most prominent companies, making it an easy winner for AI .  "Its consumer and enterprise software has dominated the computer market for decades, with a deeply embedded user base perfect for deploying AI features. "Then there’s the cloud business. Azure is the world’s second-largest cloud platform, and Microsoft’s massive balance sheet and deep pockets make it a leading AI hyperscaler.  "Microsoft is spending billions of dollars building data centers to support global AI adoption.  "Analysts believe AI demand will fuel 22% annualized revenue growth in the worldwide cloud services market through 2030, pushing the market to over $2 trillion . It’s a tremendous growth opportunity that will directly benefit Microsoft."

"AMD’s MI325X AI accelerator may not be as advanced as Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU. Moreover, it has significantly trailed Nvidia in revenue growth and stock performance.  "That underperformance has contributed to a significant decline in the semiconductor stock. " Now, it sells at close to a 50% discount from its peak last March. "However, despite such challenges, conditions may soon begin to go AMD’s way. For one, the DeepSeek breakthrough, which can run AI models on significantly less computing power, could stoke demand for AMD’s lower-cost processors.  "The data center segment, which designs its AI accelerators, now accounts for about half of the company’s revenue."

"The reason I would choose Amazon above many other AI-related stocks like Nvidia, Palantir, and CrowdStrike Holdings —which I still think are excellent investments —is that Amazon’s massive reach will allow it to put AI-powered tools to work at scale, driving tremendous amounts of profit for the company. "For example, let’s put Amazon’s size into perspective. Over the last 12 months, the company generated about $638 billion in revenue.  "That ranks second among American companies, trailing only Walmart. Indeed, Amazon is so big that its total sales are roughly equal to those of Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, and Meta Platforms —combined. "That’s important because advances in AI are likely to drive enormous gains in productivity throughout the entire economy.  "Higher productivity means higher profits, and therefore, the companies with bthe highest amounts of revenue stand to benefit the most from these gains."

Code within the new iOS 18.4 beta shows that Apple appears to be readying an alternative to its ChatGPT integration in Apple Intelligence, with an option to use Google Gemini. Apple has been upfront from the start of Apple Intelligence that it intended to work with multiple AI partners, including Google with its Gemini service.  Now that a developer beta of iOS 18.4 has been released, code within it has been found to include a reference to Google Gemini. As first spotted by 9to5mac , the code is actually in a backend update that was issued alongside the beta. The code refers to Google rather than to Google Gemini, but the segment also refers to OpenAI instead of that firm's ChatGPT. Apple was said to be specifically intending to add integration with Google Gemini back in March 2024. It's not known why it has taken a year, so far, for it to begin adding it to iOS. 

Humane’s AI pin is dead . The hardware startup announced that most of its assets have been acquired by HP for $116 million, less than half of the $240 million it raised in VC funding.  The startup will immediately discontinue sales of its $499 AI Pins, and after February 28, the wearable will no longer connect to Humane’s servers.  After that, the devices won’t be capable of calling, messaging, AI queries/responses, or cloud access.  Customers who bought an AI Pin in the last 90 days are eligible for a refund, but anyone who bought a device before then is not. Hours after the HP acquisition was announced, several Humane employees received job offers from HP with pay increases between 30% and 70%, plus HP stock and bonus plans, according to internal documents seen by TechCrunch and two sources who requested anonymity .  Meanwhile, other Humane employees —especially those who worked closer to the AI Pin devices —were notified they were out of a job.

Our brain, and by extension our entire body, is made up of many different types of cells. While they share the same DNA, all these cell types have their own shape and function .  What makes each cell type different is a complex puzzle that researchers have been trying to put together for decades from short DNA sequences that act like switches, controlling which genes are turned on or off.  The fine-tuned regulation of these switches ensures that each type of brain cell uses just the right genetic instructions from the genome to perform its unique role. Scientists refer to the unique patterns of these genetic switches as a regulatory code. Prof. Stein Aerts and his team at VIB.AI and the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research study the fundamental principles of this regulatory code, and how it may impact diseases such as cancer or brain disorders.  They develop deep learning methods to help make sense of the huge amount of information on gene regulation they...

"We focus on the derivation of the arrow of time in open quantum systems and study precisely how time-reversal symmetry is broken .  "This derivation involves the Markov approximation applied to a system interacting with an infinite heat bath.  "We find that the Markov approximation does not imply a violation of time-reversal symmetry.  "Our results show instead that the time-reversal symmetry is maintained in the derived equations of motion. This imposes a time-symmetric formulation of quantum Brownian motion, Lindblad and Pauli master equations, which hence describe thermalisation that may occur into two opposing time directions.  "As a consequence, we argue that these dynamics are better described by a time-symmetric definition of Markovianity. Our results may reflect on the formulations of the arrow of time in thermodynamics, cosmology, and quantum mechanics." 

"We investigate the presence of fluorescence in all 45 species of birds-of-paradise (Paradisaeidae), a group where males exhibit elaborate feather morphology, coloration, and mating displays .  "We show that all core birds-of-paradise are biofluorescent (37 species representing 14 of 17 genera); all genera except Lycocorax, Manucodia and Phonygammus , which comprise the sister group to the core birds-of-paradise.  "In males, biofluorescence occurs on plumage and skin used in reproductive displays.  "Biofluorescent regions vary among species but include the inner mouth and bill, as well as feathers on the head, neck, belly and plumes. In females, biofluorescence is usually restricted to plumage on the chest and belly. Emitted biofluorescent wavelengths are green and green-yellow, with emission peaks around 520 and 560 nm.  "Using an established framework of criteria for determining the functional role of biofluorescence in communication, our results provide evi...

People have some power over what they remember. “It’s not purely the stimulus activating these things,” [Christopher] Baldassano said. “You have some volitional control over how you choose to categorize the information that’s coming in.”   That is, your preconceptions and goals shape your experiences and what you remember about them. It may be possible to adopt a mindset that predisposes you to remember particular details of an event. Understanding these scripts and their nuances could shed light on memory disorders, [Chris] Bird said. Scripts degrading or becoming inaccessible could account for some of the disorientation caused by memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s.  “[The notion of scripts] gives us a window into how we normally make sense of the world, and why the world can be a very confusing place if you have a breakdown in these processes,” Bird said.

The Philadelphia Parking Authority [PPA] will have even more eyes on the streets in Center City in the spring .  Officials plan to start using artificial intelligence cameras to catch drivers parking illegally in bus lanes and issue parking tickets. The PPA said AI cameras will be mounted on several SEPTA buses and trolleys in Center City.  The new system is set to begin on May 1.  According to the PPA, there will be more public outreach to get the word out before it begins. There will also be a two-week warning period for drivers before that start date. Rich Lazer, the executive director of the PPA, said tickets will be reviewed before the violations are issued to the drivers.

"[Justice] Bibas specifically noted that his ruling didn't apply to 'generative AI,' which ingests a bunch of content but then uses algorithms and other magic to come up with (arguably) new ways of expressing concepts.  "Ross Intelligence didn't do this —it simply created a database from which it could extract existing legal opinions, which were similar enough to the headnotes to infringe copyright .  "'Because the AI landscape is changing rapidly, I note for readers that only non-generative AI is before me today,' Bibas wrote.  "In other words, extrapolating from his decision to make it apply to generative AI of the type that OpenAI and Perplexity and Google's Gemini do would be a stretch.  "That's not to say lawyers won't try to do this anyway, but it's not a slam-dunk."

An AI-generated Star Wars fan film from Kavan Cardoza, AKA Kavan the Kid, has garnered a lot of attention in the mainstream media, from Forbes to The Mirror .   The 11-minute short film took 14 days to complete using AI tools like Google's Veo, Midjourney, and Runway. Read the official synopsis for Star Wars: The Ghost's Apprentice : "A century after the Skywalker saga, a new chapter unfolds. Jace Moon, a young Jedi, has spent the last decade training under the spectral guidance of his uncle, Orin, a Force Ghost. Now, as a rising darkness emerges —the High Imperium —Jace must step forward to face this growing threat and shape the future of the galaxy." As an ethical debate continues to surround artificial intelligence (AI), it affords a glimpse into a possible future.  From deepfake technology to smartphones, AI is deeply embedded in our daily lives. 

"Forrester’s 2023 data shows 62% of developers do most or all of their work collaborating with citizen developers outside of IT .  'Technologists help the non-technologists as needed,' he [John Bratincevic] says. 'They add new data sources or end points, or they help them learn something they didn’t know.' "[Kjell] Carlsson suggests treating fusion teams or a center of excellence, which can provide guidance and support alongside realistic evaluations of what is and isn’t working well, as an AI buddy people can turn to. ' Never do AI alone should be a law of AI ,' he says. "Some experiments will be failures. 'It’s not that there isn’t mess or risk,' Bratincevic agrees. 'There’s obviously mess and risk with scaling democratization. What the successful companies do is manage the risk pragmatically. They separate out different kinds of risk and have a sanctioned place to put stuff in, which mitigates a lot of it.'  "Again, that’s...

"Musk is pursuing an AI-first agenda to increase the role of artificial intelligence (AI) across government agencies.  "He is building a centralized data repository for the federal government, according to Wired . "Oracle founder, business associate of Elon Musk and longtime Trump donor Larry Ellison, who recently announced a $500 billion AI infrastructure plan alongside Trump, urged nations to move all of their data into a single, unified data platform  so it can be consumed and used  by AI models.  "Ellison has previously stated that an AI-based surveillance system will guarantee that Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on."

"If we assume SoundHound’s 2025 revenue forecast of $175 million proves to be accurate, it places the stock at a forward P/S ratio of just 23.1, which is a little less extreme.   "Still, it doesn’t leave much room for upside unless analysts think an equally strong revenue increase might be in the cards for 2026. "That seems unlikely, though, given that Amelia is making a big one-off contribution to SoundHound’s revenue growth in 2025, as I highlighted earlier. That won’t be replicable in 2026 because the combined companies will have to rely on organic growth alone. "Even if valuation isn’t the reason Nvidia sold SoundHound stock, it’s not a bad reason for existing investors to potentially take some money off the table. For investors who don’t own the stock, its current P/S ratio is certainly a good enough reason to stay on the sidelines. "The upcoming release of SoundHound’s latest financial report on Feb. 27 could offer some fresh insights…"

"Artificial intelligence that combines text generation tools with training as a chatbot (e.g., ChatGPT) have posed ethical challenges but also offer pedagogical benefits for students.   "I see potential in the use of such a tool in the role of an assistant in my computational linguistics course at Teachers College.  "For example, one of the most challenging aspects for students in this course is learning the Python programming language at the same time they are grasping how natural language processing concepts can facilitate analysis of language. A tool such as ChatGPT has the potential to support students’ learning and debugging Python code. This approach is in line with how coding is now taught in the Introduction to programming course at Harvard. "In order to implement this approach successfully, my syllabus will now include a lesson on how to use generative AI ethically and responsibly. In addition, I believe it is essential to focus on the development of critic...

"In redesigning my first-year writing class, I am developing an approach to AI literacy that teaches comprehension of machine intelligence’s capabilities. "I hope my students will learn to judiciously select only certain aspects of their thinking, reading, and writing labor to be augmented with the assistance of AI systems —if at all. "Together, we will conduct inquiries into generative AI outputs through hands-on use of AI systems. These experiential AI learning activities resist the advertised potential of such systems, billed as capable of replacing any complex task with a single keystroke. "I will teach the concept of genre more directly than previously, as machine intelligence can readily replicate genre conventions. Though ChatGPT can churn out limericks, film treatments, and essays, students need to understand that genres works beyond the formulaic & machine reproducible conventions that may define them."

A complex problem that took microbiologists a decade to get to the bottom of has been solved in just two days by a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool. Professor José R Penadés and his team at Imperial College London had spent years working out and proving why some superbugs are immune to antibiotics. He gave co-scientist  —a tool made by Google —a short prompt asking it about the core problem he had been investigating and it reached the same conclusion in 48 hours. He told the BBC of his shock when he found what it had done, given his research was not published so could not have been found by the AI system in the public domain. "I was shopping with somebody, I said, 'please leave me alone for an hour, I need to digest this thing ,'" he told the Today programme, on BBC Radio Four. "I wrote an email to Google to say, 'you have access to my computer, is that right?'", he added. The tech giant confirmed it had not.

After her sudden departure from OpenAI last fall, ex-CTO Mira Murati vanished from public view to start something new. Now, she is ready to share some details about what she’s working on. Her new AI startup is called Thinking Machines Lab, and while the specifics of what it plans to release are still under wraps, the company says its goal is “to make AI systems more widely understood, customizable and generally capable.”  The startup also promises at least some level of public transparency by pledging to regularly publish technical research and code. In a press release shared with The Verge , the company suggests that it’s building products that help humans work with AI, rather than fully autonomous systems.  “We’re building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals,” says the press release.

An architect of EU copyright law has said legislation is needed to protect writers, musicians and creatives left exposed by an “irresponsible” legal gap in the bloc’s Artificial Intelligence Act. Axel Voss, a German centre-right member of the European parliament, who played a key role in writing the EU’s 2019 copyright directive, said that law was not conceived to deal with generative AI models: systems that can generate text, images or music with a simple text prompt. “What I do not understand is that we are supporting big tech instead of protecting European creative ideas and content.” Voss said “a legal gap” had opened up after the conclusion of the EU’s AI Act, which meant copyright was not enforceable in this area. The intervention came as 15 cultural organisations wrote to the European Commission this week warning that draft rules to implement the AI Act were “taking several steps backwards” on copyright, while one writer spoke of a “devastating” loophole .

AI hardware startup Humane has given its users just ten (10!) days notice that their Pins will be disconnected .  In a note to its customers, the company said AI Pins will “continue to function normally” until 12PM PT on February 28.  On that date, users will lose access to essentially all of their device’s features, including but not limited to calling, messaging, AI queries and cloud access.  The FAQ does note that you'll still be able to check on your battery life, though. Humane is encouraging its users to download any stored data before February 28, as it plans on permanently deleting “all remaining customer data” at the same time as switching its servers off .

U.S. personal injury law firm Morgan & Morgan sent an urgent email this month to its more than 1,000 lawyers: Artificial intelligence can invent fake case law, and using made-up information in a court filing could get you fired .  A federal judge in Wyoming had just threatened to sanction two lawyers at the firm who included fictitious case citations in a lawsuit against Walmart.  One of the lawyers admitted in court filings last week that he used an AI program that "hallucinated" the cases and apologized for what he called an inadvertent mistake. AI's penchant for generating legal fiction in case filings has led courts around the country to question or discipline lawyers in at least seven cases over the last two years, and created a new high-tech headache for litigants and judges, Reuters found.  The Walmart case stands out because it involves a well-known law firm and a big corporate defendant. But examples like it have cropped up in all kinds of lawsuits since ch...

South Korea has accused Chinese AI startup DeepSeek of sharing user data with the owner of TikTok in China. "We confirmed DeepSeek communicating with ByteDance," the South Korean data protection regulator told Yonhap News Agency. The country [South Korea] had already removed DeepSeek from app stores over the weekend over data protection concerns. The Chinese app caused shockwaves in the AI world in January, wiping billions off global stock markets over claims its new model was trained at a much lower cost than US rivals such as ChatGPT. Since then, multiple countries have warned that user data may not be properly protected, and in February a US cybersecurity company alleged potential data sharing between DeepSeek and ByteDance.

If you happened to bring your smartphone to the moon, and it somehow survived both the trip and the brutal lunar conditions, it should work on the moon just like it does here on Earth .  To legally deploy the 4G network on the moon, Nokia received a waiver specifically for the IM-2 mission.  There are radio bands that have been internationally allocated to support lunar missions, and the LTE band is not among them.  “Using 4G frequencies on or around the moon is a violation of the ITU-R radio regulations,” NRAO’s spectrum manager Harvey Liszt explained in an email. “For permanent deployment we’ll have to pick a different frequency band,” [Thierry] Klein says. “We already have a list of candidate frequencies to consider.”  Even with the frequency shift, Klein says Nokia’s lunar network technology will remain compatible with terrestrial 4G or 5G standards.

 

In messages to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned .  The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas. “Generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more,” the company’s editorial guidelines said. “Likewise, the Times will become more accessible to more people through features like digitally voice[d] articles, translations into other languages, and uses of generative AI we have yet to discover. We view the technology not as some magical solution but as a powerful tool that, like many technological advances before, may be used in service of our mission.”

"As technology progresses, we generally expect processing capabilities to scale up.  "Every year, we get more processor power, faster speeds, greater memory, and lower cost.  "However, we can also use improvements in software to get things running on what might otherwise be considered inadequate hardware.  "Taking this to the extreme, while large language models (LLMs) like GPT are running out of data to train on and having difficulty scaling up, [DaveBben] is experimenting with scaling down instead, running an LLM on the smallest computer that could reasonably run one. "Of course, some concessions have to be made to get an LLM running on underpowered hardware." 

"I am working to create a lesson for a Senior in High School around identifying specific rhetorical devices.   "I would like to use the Bible as the source text for the information. I use the Historical-Grammatical Hermeneutic. The Historical-Grammatical Hermeneutic is a method of biblical interpretation that seeks to understand the original meaning of the text as intended by the author.  "It does this by examining the syntax and structure of the passage in the original language, words or vocabulary, grammar, literary genre, historical background, and cultural context of the text.  "It also compares the text with other parts of Scripture to ensure consistency and harmony. This method respects the literary nature of the text and avoids imposing any hidden or allegorical meanings that are not supported by the text itself. "Analyze Exodus 1–40 for the use of rhetorical devices. Focus on the following devices: alliteration, anaphora, antithesis, hyperbole, metaphor...

"'I am surprised by the output every time I run it,’ says Elgammal. ‘An interesting question is: why is so much of the CAN’s art abstract? I think it is because the algorithm has grasped that art progresses in a certain trajectory. If it wants to make something novel, then it cannot go back and produce figurative works as existed before the 20th century. It has to move forward. The network has learned that it finds more solutions when it tends toward abstraction: that is where there is the space for novelty .' "This raises the intriguing notion that AI algorithms do not merely make pictures, they also tend to model the course of art history — as if art’s long progression from figuration to abstraction were part of a program that has been running in the collective unconscious for half a millennium, and the whole story of our visual culture were a mathematical inevitability. "No AI researchers are claiming that much just yet. They are still addressing the fundament...

"Many in our community seem unfazed or even excited about ‘AI’ and ‘agents’ and ‘codegen’ and all the rest of it.   "As far as I can tell, most of our industry is still on board with the project, even while protesting the changes in corporate politics, or occasionally complaining about the most obvious over-use.  "There are certainly a number of people raising alarms or expressing frustration, but we’re often dismissed as uninformed. "Based on every conference I’ve attended over the last year, I can absolutely say we’re a fringe minority. And it’s wearing me out.  "I don’t know how to participate in a community that so eagerly brushes aside the active and intentional/foundational harms of a technology. In return for what? Faster copypasta? Automation tools being rebranded as an agentic web? Assurance that we won’t be left behind?"

"According to Mark Gurman from Bloomberg , Apple is running into engineering problems and software bugs, which could delay the launch of the new Siri functionality. "One of the biggest features that Apple Intelligence boasted last year was a new Siri facelift , which would have allowed it to better compete against the likes of Google's Gemini and ChatGPT.  "It appears that Apple has delayed the highly anticipated Siri experience due to developmental challenges, as it will potentially not be a part of the iOS 18.4 release. "Apple is expected to release the iOS 18.4 beta next week to developers, which would come with a handful of Apple Intelligence upgrades.  "iOS 18.4 was considered to be a major update as it would include major Siri enhancements, but it looks like the company will take its sweet time before releasing it to the general public." 

Perplexity has become the latest AI company to release an in-depth research tool , with a new feature announced Friday. The goal is to provide more in-depth answers with real citations for more professional use cases, compared to what you’d get from a consumer chatbot.  In a blog post announcing Deep Research, Perplexity wrote that the feature “excels at a range of expert-level tasks —from finance and marketing to product research.” Google unveiled a similar feature for its Gemini AI platform in December. Then OpenAI launched its own research agent earlier this month.  All three companies even have given the feature the same name: Deep Research . Perplexity Deep Research is currently available on the web, and the company said it will soon be added to its Mac, iOS, and Android apps.  To use it, you just select “Deep Research” from a drop-down menu when you submit your query in Perplexity, which will then create a detailed report that can be exported as a PDF or shared as ...

The use of companion and therapy apps is rising in the Netherlands, but the systems do not always make it clear that users are chatting via AI.   “They need to make it clear that users are not talking to a real person,” AP director Aleid Wolfsen said. “Privacy legislation demands that apps are transparent about what happens to sensitive information they may share within a chat, and the AI regulations will soon include the requirement to make it clear that they are dealing with AI.”  The agency points out that many of the apps are provided by commercial companies that want to make a profit.   Some offer users subscriptions for extra services, such as outfits for their avatars . Some therapy apps also use paywalls which appear midway through a conversation. 

The Guardian has become the latest news publisher to sign a deal with ChatGPT owner OpenAI over content licensing. The deal will ensure The Guardian receives compensation for the use of its journalism on ChatGPT and gets properly credited on the platform.  Under the deal The Guardian will also be able to use OpenAI technology in-house. The publisher said: “Guardian Media Group today announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI, a leader in artificial intelligence and deployment, that will bring the Guardian ’s high quality journalism to ChatGPT’s global users. 

"For all its promised benefits, the artificial-intelligence boom is likely to prove costly to public health and even lead to hundreds of deaths a year in the U.S. alone, and those ill effects are likely to disproportionately hit poorer communities, according to a study by California esearchers (sic) that’s believed to be among the first of its kind. "AI affects public health via air pollution created as a consequence of operating the data centers used to train and run the technology, researchers at UC Riverside and the California Institute of Technology laid out in their report “The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI,” published in December. "Demand for computing power for AI models is prompting the construction of increasing numbers of data centers.  "The manufacturing of chips and other hardware used in those facilities, the fossil-fuel power plants often used to provide electricity to them, and the typically diesel-powered backup generators ...

"In addition to refuting Yao’s conjecture, the new paper also contains what many consider an even more astonishing result .  "It pertains to a related, though slightly different, situation: In 1985, Yao looked not only at the worst-case times for queries, but also at the average time taken across all possible queries. He proved that hash tables with certain properties —including those that are labeled greedy , which means that new elements must be placed in the first available spot —could never achieve an average time better than log x. "Farach-Colton, Krapivin and Kuszmaul wanted to see if that same limit also applied to non-greedy hash tables. They showed that it did not by providing a counterexample, a non-greedy hash table with an average query time that’s much, much better than log x. In fact, it doesn’t depend on x at all.  "'You get a number,' Farach-Colton said, 'something that is just a constant and doesn’t depend on how full the hash table is....

With Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency installing itself at the IRS amid a broader push to replace federal bureaucracy with machine-learning software, the tax agency's computing center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, will soon be home to a state-of-the-art Nvidia SuperPod AI computing cluster .  According to the previously unreported February 5 acquisition document, the setup will combine 31 separate Nvidia servers, each containing eight of the company's flagship Blackwell processors designed to train and operate artificial intelligence models that power tools like ChatGPT.  The hardware has not yet been purchased and installed, nor is a price listed, but SuperPod systems reportedly start at $7 million. The setup described in the contract materials notes that it will include a substantial memory upgrade from Nvidia.

OpenAI on Friday rejected a $97.4bn bid from a consortium led by billionaire Elon Musk for the ChatGPT maker, saying the startup is not for sale. The unsolicited approach is Musk’s latest attempt to block the startup he co-founded with CEO Sam Altman —but later left —from becoming a for-profit firm, as it looks to secure more capital and stay ahead in the AI race. “ OpenAI is not for sale , and the board has unanimously rejected Mr Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition. Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our nonprofit and its mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity,” OpenAI said on X, quoting its chair Bret Taylor, on behalf of its board.

Internet pranksters exploited a design flaw that left the backend of Elon Musk’s freshly launched DOGE website open to push fake updates that mocked the site. Doge.gov was launched this week after Musk told reporters Tuesday during a Oval Office press briefing that his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is “trying to be as transparent as possible.”  The doge.gov website is designed to serve as a rudimentary information hub, mirroring posts from the @DOGE X account and displaying data about the cuts implemented to the federal workforce.

Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis told the tech giant’s employees that when looking “into the details” of DeepSeek’s AI models, the AI startup’s claims are “exaggerated,” CNBC reported, citing audio of an all-hands meeting on Wednesday. Hassabis was reportedly asked “what lessons and implications” the company could learn from DeepSeek’s success in an AI summary of employees’ questions.  He told employees that DeepSeek’s reported low cost of training competitive AI models is possibly “only a tiny fraction” of what it spent to build its AI systems, and that the AI startup likely used more hardware than it said it did.  He also reportedly told employees that DeepSeek probably depended on advanced models from AI companies in the west. “We actually have more efficient, more performant models than DeepSeek,” Hassabis reportedly told employees. “So we’re very calm and confident in our strategy and we have all the ingredients to maintain our leadership into this year.”

"I asked ChatGPT: 'Can you write me a column in the style of Pippa Bailey? "'Of course!' the terrifyingly disembodied info-robo replied. 'Pippa Bailey’s writing often balances wit with insightful, conversational tones. It’s charming, sometimes a little cheeky, and often offers a mix of personal anecdotes and observations. Let me try to emulate that style for you.'  "Always wise to start with flattery .  "Within seconds, it had produced 550 words —200 too short for this column, but we’ll forgive it that. "All I can say is I sincerely hope that what ChatGPT produced was not an accurate rendition of my copy, or else I need to find a new career —and not just because the technology has rendered me obsolete.  "Try: 'A little joy in the mundane, like grabbing a coffee from the local corner shop before a chaotic Monday, is the life force of a balanced existence.'  "Or perhaps: 'But it’s those little imperfections that make the ...

As the RTX 50-series rollout continues, users are experiencing what seems to be a shockingly high rate of failure.   The proprietary 12VHPWR/12V-2x6 cables providing power to the graphics cards have been seen melting inside the GPU slot of 5090 and 5080 cards.  Nvidia was confident that users would no longer see the same issue that also plagued the RTX 4090 thanks to the redesigned 12V-2x6 connector, but multiple skeptics are raising their voices in dissent , asserting that Nvidia is making its cards less safe with each generation.

Google is enhancing Gemini's free tier by adding support for file analysis, a feature previously exclusive to the paid Gemini Advanced subscription .  With this change, you can now upload files to Gemini and ask the chatbot to summarize their contents or ask questions about the document. Google is currently in the process of rolling out file upload support to Gemini's free tier on the web and mobile (via Reddit, GAppsLekas). So, the feature could take a while to show up for your account. Once available, you should see a tooltip informing you about the change. Tapping the + icon will then show the Files and Drive option alongside the previous Camera and Gallery options. Apart from manually uploading a file, you can import a document from Google Drive from the web and the Android app —the option is not available on the iOS app.

Google is making Gemini just a bit better.  Starting today, the company's chatbot will recall past conversations in an effort to provide more useful responses .  "That means no more starting over from scratch or having to search for a previous conversation thread," Google explains. "Plus, you can build on top of previous conversations or projects you’ve already started." Google notes Gemini may  indicate if it referenced a past conversation to formulate a response.  If the idea of a chatbot recalling information about you makes you feel uncomfortable, Google says users can easily review, delete or decide how long  Gemini retains their chat history.  Additionally, it's possible to disable this feature altogether from the My Activity panel.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations.  Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandates are being disregarded.  The next phase: The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly wants to use AI to cut costs.   According to The Washington Post , Musk’s group has started to run sensitive data from government systems through AI programs to analyze spending and determine what could be pruned.  This may lead to the elimination of human jobs in favor of automation.  As one government official who has been tracking Musk’s DOGE team told the Post , the ultimate aim is to use AI to replace “the human workforce with machines.” 

The U.K. government wants to make a hard pivot into boosting its economy and industry with AI, and as part of that, it’s pivoting an institution that it founded a little over a year ago for a very different purpose.   Today the Department of Science, Industry and Technology announced that it would be renaming the AI Safety Institute to the “AI Security Institute.” (Same first letters: same URL.)  With that, the body will shift from primarily exploring areas like existential risk and bias in large language models, to a focus on cybersecurity, specifically “strengthening protections against the risks AI poses to national security and crime.” Alongside this, the government also announced a new partnership with Anthropic.  No firm services were announced but the MOU indicates the two will “explore” using Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude in public services; and Anthropic will aim to contribute to work in scientific research and economic modeling.  And at the AI Security In...

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News host Laura Ingraham he might unleash artificial intelligence on the IRS to make the agency more efficient. Bessent said on Thursday’s edition of The Ingraham Angle that he would decide what to do with the agency after Elon Musk’s DOGE finished its assessment. Department of Government Emergency staffers were reportedly seen entering the IRS headquarters in Washington on Thursday afternoon.

"None of 01.AI’s apps have launched yet, but Bernard Leong, an AI entrepreneur and business podcaster in Singapore, notes that it will face challenges since it is surrounded even in China by heavy-hitters with far greater resources.   "'If you are a cloud provider in China —like Alibaba, Tencent or Huawei —you have an inherent advantage of distribution, which Kai-Fu doesn’t have,' says Leong. 'But I wouldn’t write him off.'  "Lee has, Leong adds, top-notch engineers with him from players like Huawei and ByteDance.  "Indeed, China’s hiring pool remains a considerable asset for an AI start-up like Lee’s that is competing with big-moneyed titans.  "China now accounts for 47 percent of the world’s top AI researchers; this is compared to 29 percent in 2019, which suggests that more talented workers —like Lee himself —are choosing to remain in China. "Lee and his compatriots, then, are still bullish on the country’s AI superpower potential —despi...

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.   —E. O. Wilson

"First and foremost, the textile industry needs to produce more sustainable clothing ––and less of it. "Only then should the focus be on improved recyclability.  The material from Circulose is more than one-third more expensive than other raw materials used in textile production, such as cotton, polyester or cellulose. And  Many global manufacturers remain hesitant to add recycled textiles to their production lines, instead waiting to see whether they’ll be required to do so by law. And  Even textiles made from recycled materials eventually end up in the bin.  "It would be much more important to improve the durability and service life of clothing and to ensure that it can be reused and repaired , says Clara Löw, circular economy expert at the Öko-Institut in Freiburg." 

Elon Musk said on Thursday his AI chatbot, and ChatGPT challenger, Grok 3, is in the final stages of development and will be released in about a week or two. "Grok 3 has very powerful reasoning capabilities, so in the tests that we've done thus far, Grok 3 is outperforming anything that's been released, that we're aware of, so that's a good sign," he said in a video call addressing the World Governments Summit in Dubai. The billionaire tech mogul founded xAI as a challenger to Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet's Google. Musk also co-founded OpenAI.

Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of Buzzfeed, pissed off a lot of people a couple of years ago when he decided to gut the website’s sizable (and, at one time, award-winning) newsroom and pivot the platform towards a business model that favored AI-generated content.  Now, Peretti says he’s worried about the rise of AI and its potentially noxious impact on our lives.   He also says he has a solution to that problem: launching a new AI platform. Yes, according to a weird, long blog post that Peretti published to his site Tuesday, the media executive isn’t feeling so great about the growing glut of AI-generated bullshit that is now roiling through the internet.

OpenAI has effectively canceled the release of o3, which was slated to be the company’s next major AI model, in favor of what CEO Sam Altman is calling a “simplified” product offering. In a post on X on Wednesday, Altman said that in the coming months, OpenAI will release a model called GPT-5 that “integrates a lot of [OpenAI’s] technology,” including o3, in its AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT and API.  As a result of that roadmap decision, OpenAI no longer plans to launch o3 as a stand-alone model. The company originally said in December that it aimed to release o3 sometime early this year. Just a few weeks ago, Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said in an interview that o3 was on track for a “February-March” launch. “We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings,” Altman wrote in his post. “We want AI to ‘just work’ for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten. ...

"In the still confines of a train carriage, two figures are seated. A young girl, perhaps ten years of age, sits beside an enigmatic masked spirit .  "Through the train's window, a tranquil ocean scene unfolds, with clouds suspended in the sky. A couple of plushies are set on the window sill. This scene takes place during a journey, the destination unknown. "The child, of Japanese descent, appears to be from a middle-income family, likely practicing Shinto. Her emotions seem subdued, thoughtful, almost melancholy. She is clad in a striped shirt, pink shorts, and yellow shoes. The spirit beside her is an enigma.  "The girl perhaps enjoys drawing, writing stories, and daydreaming, but might also engage in gossiping, bullying, or even stealing. With her family's political inclination, she is most likely on the path towards becoming a member of the Liberal Democratic Party. "The child and spirit seem to possess a certain introspective quality, hence we can ...

"Artificial intelligence agents, the technology that can perform tasks on behalf of humans, are here.   "But businesses don’t necessarily trust them, and haven’t yet started using the technology in a widespread way. That’s according to attendees at The Wall Street Journal ’s CIO Network Summit in Menlo Park, Calif. on Tuesday, which attracts the country’s top information-technology leaders.  "While 61% of attendees at the summit said they’re experimenting with AI agents, 21% said they’re not using them at all. And, their most pressing concern around the technology is a lack of reliability, the poll found. "That’s in stark contrast to the vendors selling them, who say it will be too late for businesses to wait for all of the technology’s kinks to be ironed out.  "Vendors like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Sierra are banking on the fact that enterprises will be ready sooner rather than later to take on new workforces of AI agents that automate away much of the daily to...

OpenAI's board has not yet received a formal bid from an Elon Musk-led consortium, although a lawyer for the billionaire said the offer had been sent to OpenAI's outside counsel. A day after Musk publicized a bid to offer $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the two sides were still at odds over what exactly happened to the formal bid. OpenAI's board of directors has not yet received a formal bid from Musk's group, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday, adding to the confusion over the unsolicited attempt to take control of the world's most prominent AI company. Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, told Reuters that he sent the offer by email on Monday to OpenAI’s outside counsel at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The law firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.