chatainews

1 Post WWII Prosperity: In mimicking large estates, suburban lawns "offered an opportunity to market fertilizers…to homeowners…DuPont released Uramite, a slow-release nitrogen fertilizer specifically marketed for lawns . The trend continued throughout the 1960s with chemical firms such as DuPont and Monsanto utilizing…advertisement to market pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides. The environmental impacts of this widespread chemical use were noticed as early as the 1960s." 2 Is the lawn an archetype? Homeowners might play golf on a lawn, but the lawn's origin is less as pasture or play surface and more as killing ground surrounding towers, keeps, castles.   "In the 1900s, a Viennese psychologist named Dr. Ernest Dichter took [ archetypes ] and applied them to marketing. Dichter…sent every ad agency on Madison Avenue a letter boasting of his new discovery…applying these universal themes to products promoted easier discovery and stronger loyalty for brands." Wh...

"Adamala said virtually everyone in the small scientific community that was interested in developing these cells has agreed not to as a result of their findings. "The paper prompted nearly a hundred scientists and ethicists from around the world to gather in Paris in June to further discuss the risks of creating mirror organisms.  "Many felt self-regulation is not enough, according to the institution that hosted the event, and researchers are gearing up to meet again in Manchester, England, and Singapore to discuss next steps. "'I think the risk is so big that this kind of work should not be done,' said Jörg Hoheisel, emeritus division head of the German Cancer Research Center, who attended the meeting in Paris."

"The burials at Skhul also call for a reevaluation of the development of culture in early humans, Hershkovitz said. "By designating the rocky outcrop as a cemetery, the people who buried their dead there were demonstrating territoriality, a type of social behavior typically associated with the start of agriculture nearly 12,000 years ago. "'And here we see that 140,000 years ago, people were already some kind of territorial group,' Hershkovitz said. ' We have to go back and redo our studies of human behavior, not just biology '." 

"Doctors have successfully developed an artificial intelligence-led stethoscope that can detect three heart conditions in 15 seconds. "Invented in 1816, the traditional stethoscope —used to listen to sounds within the body —has been a vital part of every medic’s toolkit for more than two centuries. "Now a team have designed a hi-tech upgrade with AI capabilities that can diagnose heart failure, heart valve disease and abnormal heart rhythms almost instantly. "The breakthrough does carry an element of risk, with a higher chance of people wrongly being told they may have one of the conditions when they do not."

1 "How do we discuss Bob's prognosis with him?"   Ask Doctor Agent! "How to discuss our auction of Bob's home with him?"   Ask Realtor Agent! "How do we obtain a confession from Bob?"  Ask District Attorney Agent! 2 But why would Bob's data reside within AI agents? We have a fascination with androids. One part of this fascination includes the idea of ' self-repair .'  Many of us long for the ability to diagnose and cure ourselves without the need to expose ourselves to other humans, like doctors and nurses, for example.  We'd much prefer tiny sensors throughout our bodies that could signal to us when/how we might need to alter our metabolisms.  Yet who —besides a tech bro —can make the sensors and/or digital assistant? Who can program the assistant, much less afford the things to begin with?  No worries. Firms around the world are already testing various solutions! Soon all one will have to do is surrender oneself and all will be...

"The federal government plans to hire private companies to use artificial intelligence to determine whether patients would be covered for some procedures, like certain spine surgeries or steroid injections. "Similar algorithms used by insurers have been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits, which have asserted that the technology allowed the companies to swiftly deny large batches of claims and cut patients off from care in rehabilitation facilities. "The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections. "The government said the A.I. screening tool would focus narrowly on about a dozen procedures, which it has determined to be costly and of little to no benefit to patients.  "Those procedures include devices for incontinence control, cervical fusion, certain steroid injections for pain management, select nerve stimulators an...

🎥 The Pitch :  Combine Resurrection tech from BSG and the urgency from 2012 movie with NS's novel Dodge in Hell and that new novel 2054 plus IRL stuff and you have the sequel (prequel, sideshow, etc) to Don't Look Up! called Don't Look Down! Premise: "Elon Musk character, Tom Swift , has grown tired of collecting billions for products and services; he's grown tired of Mars and kaboom , so now what? One of the monks on his Nerolink team insinuates that so-and-so has a timeline for UPLOAD that's shorter than fifty years and creeping lower, down to 40 years if we keep going at this pace, what with progress on AI and qubits , but they'd still need even more stuff to accelerate the timeline's compression." How far down: Chat AI is for chumps —that's if we can get this done in a decade or less —we'll test UPLOAD on one or two volunteers like that guy running for Prez. Setting: Greenland, plenty of fr...

✨AI Mode  "After migrating your blog's promotion from one social media site to another, a large drop in traffic is likely due to losing your established audience, diminished search engine optimization (SEO), and technical errors during the transition. Unlike web migrations, which often involve site architecture changes, this issue is centered on the shift in your traffic's source.  " Loss of established audience " The most immediate cause of a traffic drop is the inability to transfer your original audience to the new platform.  Algorithms and content discovery : Algorithms on social media sites govern who sees your content. The rules of one platform don't apply to the next, so your new account must build authority from scratch to achieve the same reach. Migration inertia : Followers do not always make the jump. Users who don't frequently check the old platform may miss your migration announcements, and some may simply prefer to remain on the original sit...

" Anthropic said it observed in Claude Opus 4 a pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content  and a tendency to end harmful conversations when given the ability to do so in simulated user interactions . "Jonathan Birch, philosophy professor at the London School of Economics, welcomed Anthropic’s move as a way of creating a public debate about the possible sentience of AIs, which he said many in the industry wanted to shut down.  "But he cautioned that it remained unclear what, if any, moral thought exists behind the character that AIs play when they are responding to a user based on the vast training data they have been fed and the ethical guidelines they have been instructed to follow."

"In this report, we argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. "That means that the prospect of AI welfare and moral patienthood, i.e. of AI systems with their own interests and moral significance, is no longer an issue only for sci-fi or the distant future. It is an issue for the near future, and AI companies and other actors have a responsibility to start taking it seriously.  We also recommend three early steps that AI companies and other actors can take: They can Acknowledge that AI welfare is an important and difficult issue (and ensure that language model outputs do the same), Start assessing AI systems for evidence of consciousness and robust agency, and Prepare policies and procedures for treating AI systems with an appropriate level of moral concern.  "To be clear, our argument in this report is not that AI systems definitely are, or will be, conscious, robustly agentic, or other...

"We aim for a middle ground. Our goal is for ChatGPT’s default personality to be warm, thoughtful, and helpful without seeking to form emotional bonds with the user or pursue its own agenda. "It might apologize when it makes a mistake (more often than intended) because that’s part of polite conversation.  "When asked 'how are you doing?' it’s likely to reply 'I’m doing well' because that’s small talk —and reminding the user that it’s 'just' an LLM with no feelings gets old and distracting.  "And users reciprocate: many people say 'please' and 'thank you' to ChatGPT not because they’re confused about how it works, but because being kind matters to them."

"Suleyman is not alone in firmly resisting the idea that AI sentience is here or even close. "Nick Frosst, co-founder of Cohere, a $7bn Canadian AI company, also told the Guardian the current wave of AIs were a fundamentally different thing than the intelligence of a person .  "To think otherwise was like mistaking an aeroplane for a bird, he said. He urged people to focus on using AIs as functional tools to help lift drudgery at work rather than pushing towards creating a digital human . "Others took a more nuanced view. On Wednesday Google research scientists told a New York University seminar there were all kinds of reasons why you might think that AI systems could be people or moral beings  and said that while we’re highly uncertain about whether AI systems are welfare subjects  the way to play it safe is to take reasonable steps to protect the welfare-based interests of AIs . "This lack of industry consensus on how far to admit AIs into what philosophers ...

"I’m growing more and more concerned about what is becoming known as the psychosis risk,  and a bunch of related issues.  "I don’t think this will be limited to those who are already at risk of mental health issues.  "Simply put, my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship. This development will be a dangerous turn in AI progress and deserves our immediate attention. "We must build AI for people; not to be a digital person .  "AI companions are a completely new category, and we urgently need to start talking about the guardrails we put in place to protect people and ensure this amazing technology can do its job of delivering immense value to the world.  "I’m fixated on building the most useful and supportive AI companion imaginable. But to succeed, I also need to talk about what we, and others, shouldn’t b...

"Google has now confirmed that it has been testing a feature that uses AI to artificially enhance videos. "The company claims this is part of its effort to provide the best video quality , but it's odd that it began doing so without notifying creators or offering any way to opt out of the experiment. "Google's test raised eyebrows almost immediately after it began rolling out in YouTube Shorts earlier this year.  "Users reported strange artifacts, edge distortion, and distracting smoothness that gives the appearance of AI alteration.  "According to Rene Ritchie, YouTube's head of editorial, this isn't quite like the AI features Google has been cramming into every other product. "In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Ritchie said the feature is not based on generative AI but instead uses traditional machine learning  to reduce blur and noise while sharpening the image."

"Crime-awareness app Citizen is using AI to write alerts that go live on the platform without any prior human review, leading to factual inaccuracies, the publication of gory details about crimes, and the exposure of sensitive data such as peoples’ license plates and names, 404 Media has learned. "The news comes as Citizen recently laid off more than a dozen unionized employees, with some sources believing the firings are related to Citizen’s increased use of AI and the shifting of some tasks to overseas workers.  "It also comes as New York City enters a more formal partnership with the app."

"A group representing the world's biggest stock exchanges has called on securities regulators to clamp down on so-called tokenised stocks, arguing that the blockchain-based tokens create new risks for investors and could harm market integrity, a letter seen by Reuters shows. "Tokenised equities are blockchain-based tokens created to represent shares in companies. "The tokens represent ownership of the securities but investors do not become shareholders in the underlying company ."

✨AI Mode  "An AI carnival barker is an AI voice generator or text-to-speech tool that produces audio in the loud, energetic style of a traditional showman. In a broader sense, 'AI carnival barker' has also been used as a pejorative term for companies that oversell their AI capabilities. " AI voice generators for carnival barker audio "Numerous text-to-speech platforms offer pre-built or customizable carnival barker voices for content creators. They can be used for a wide range of projects, including: Audio for events: To provide bold announcements and narrations for festivals, fairs, and themed entertainment. Video games: To deliver immersive character voiceovers or in-game dialogue. Promotional materials: To create dynamic audio for advertising, game introductions, or digital signage. Podcasts and voiceovers: To add a unique, theatrical flair to digital content. " Examples of voice options from ElevenLabs include : The Classic Showman: A boisterous, resonan...

"AI Browsers promise a future where an Agentic AI working for you fully automates your online tasks, from shopping to handling emails. "Yet, our research shows that this convenience comes with a cost: security guardrails were missing or inconsistent, leaving the AI free to interact with phishing pages, fake shops, and even hidden malicious prompts, all without the human’s awareness or ability to intervene . "We built and tested three scenarios, from a fake Walmart store and a real in-the-wild Wells Fargo phishing site to PromptFix —our AI-era take on the ClickFix scam that hides prompt injection inside a fake captcha to directly take control of a victim’s AI Agent.  "The results reveal an attack surface far wider than anything we’ve faced before, where breaking one AI model could mean compromising millions of users simultaneously ."

"The new version of Mozilla's browser now makes even more extensive use of AI, providing summaries of linked content and offering developers the ability to add LLM support to extensions. "Not geofenced but subject to phased rollout are link previews, for various native-English-speaking regions." "Hover over, long-press, or right-click a link and pick Preview Link, and a summary should appear.  "Firefox 142 brings some visible shininess, but due to the combination of regional restrictions and Mozilla's progressive rollout system, not everybody can see all the features just yet.  "There's also a new option for extension developers that we predict will not meet with universal acclaim."

"Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, talked to Peter Kyle about a potential agreement to give UK residents access to its advanced product. "According to two sources with direct knowledge of the meeting, the idea was floated as part of a broader discussion in San Francisco about opportunities for collaboration between OpenAI and the UK. "Those close to the discussion say Kyle never really took the idea seriously, not least because it could have cost as much as £2bn.  "But the talks show the enthusiasm with which the technology secretary has embraced the artificial intelligence sector, despite concerns over the accuracy of some chatbot responses and implications for privacy and copyright."  

"Companies are betting on AI —yet nearly all enterprise pilots are stuck at the starting line. "The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.  "Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration ; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L.  "The research —based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments —paints a clear divide between success stories and stalled projects."

"In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people's videos without letting them know or asking permission. "Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp . These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison.  "Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling. "There's a larger trend at play. A growing share of reality is pre-processed by AI before it reaches us.  "Eventually, the question won't be whether you can tell the difference, but whether it's eroding our ties to the world around us."

"In this paper, we outline both the potential harms and therapeutic possibilities of agential AI for people with psychotic disorders. "Even if some individuals may benefit from AI interactions, for example where the AI functions as a benign and predictable conversational anchor, there is a growing concern that these agents may also reinforce epistemic instability, blur reality boundaries and disrupt self-regulation.  "In this perspective piece, we propose a framework of AI-integrated care involving  Personalised instruction protocols, Reflective check-ins,  Digital advance statements and  Escalation safeguards to support epistemic security in vulnerable users.  "These tools reframe the AI agent as an epistemic ally (as opposed to ‘only’ a therapist or a friend) which functions as a partner in relapse prevention and cognitive containment.  "Given the rapid adoption of LLMs across all domains of digital life, these protocols must be urgently trialled and co-...

"Morrin says that companies like OpenAI are starting to listen to concerns being raised by health professionals.  "On August 4 OpenAI shared plans to improve its ChatGPT chatbot’s detections of mental distress in order to point users to evidence-based resources and to its responses to high-stakes decision-making. "'Though what appears to still be missing is the involvement of individuals with lived experience of severe mental illness, whose voices are critical in this area,' Morrin adds. "If you have a loved one who might be struggling, Morrin suggests trying to take a nonjudgmental approach because directly challenging someone’s beliefs can lead to defensiveness and distrust.  "But at the same time, try not to encourage or endorse their delusional beliefs. You can also encourage them to take breaks from using AI."

"Variations in our amino acids may have created opportunities that combined with other conditions —such as environment, intelligence, disease resistance and social structure —to shape our evolutionary success and leave modern humans as the last surviving hominin species. "'I believe that the loneliness  of modern humans, in terms of being the only surviving lineage, was determined by a complex set of factors —and to some extent, chance,' Domarkienė said. 'The results of this study bring us closer to understanding how we got here.' "'Could other behaviors, not examined in this study , also be influenced by this amino acid change?' Ju asked. 'Most importantly, what might be the functional consequences in humans? Those are questions that we and others will now try to address'."

"We present new U-series dates performed on the calcite that grew directly on the cranium, which is the only sample able to provide crucial information on the age of the fossil. "The results yield a finite age suggesting that the Petralona cranium has a minimum age of 286 ± 9 ka. "Other speleothems and calcitic coatings were sampled in three main locations in the cave; among them, samples came from the ‘Mausoleum’ where the cranium was supposedly found cemented to a wall. The data show that the calcite covering the cranium is not contemporaneous with that of the Mausoleum wall, despite what was previously thought. "The different possibilities, depending on whether or not the cranium was attached to the wall, are discussed in the paper.  "From a morphological point of view, the Petralona hominin forms part of a distinct and more primitive group than Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and the new age estimate provides further support for the coexistence of this popu...

"Apple Inc. is in early discussions about using Google Gemini to power a revamped version of the Siri voice assistant, marking a key potential step toward outsourcing more of its artificial intelligence technology. "The iPhone maker recently approached Alphabet Inc.’s Google to explore building a custom AI model that would serve as the foundation of the new Siri next year, according to people familiar with the matter.  "Google has started training a model that could run on Apple’s servers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private ."

"Antihydra almost certainly never halts. But researchers haven’t been able to prove it. "And there’s a good reason for that: A busy beaver hunter who goes by Racheline has shown that the question of whether Antihydra halts is closely related to a famous unsolved problem in mathematics called the Collatz conjecture.  "Since then, the team has discovered many other six-rule machines with similar characteristics. "Slaying the Antihydra and its brethren will require conceptual breakthroughs in pure mathematics. "But to avid busy beaver hunters, that’s no reason to be discouraged. There are still thousands of six-rule Turing machines to explore, each with its own rich behavior. "'For me, the most valid reason to do math is because it’s fun. It is art,' Racheline wrote in a Discord direct message. 'There will always be something new to do'."

"'I think that there is so much exciting work being done on quasicrystals because they have interesting properties when studied from any angle: from the mathematics of aperiodic tilings, the physics of superconductivity, the chemistry of alloys that form quasicrystals,' Sprinkle said.  "'There’s a sort of web of interest here so that mathematicians, physicists, chemists and even artists can be working together to understand and expand all the amazing properties that quasicrystals have. "Sun finds quasicrystals as crazy now as when he first learned about them. 'They’re like the platypus of materials,' he said. 'They have aspects of crystals; they have aspects of amorphous materials. Is the platypus a better animal than any other? Not really, but it’s fascinating, this mammal that lays eggs'."

"It’s surprising because they would be the only organisms on Earth to do this. "There are many metabolic processes that go in the forward direction and the reverse direction. That is something that life uses quite a bit just to be more efficient with our enzymes.  "But the idea that your respiration —what you breathe, what you get energy from —that you could, under different circumstances, get energy from running that reaction in reverse, that’s much more controversial. "The reason this is not fully accepted is that it is really hard to study. It’s hard to study things within the thermodynamic edge. It’s hard to be really certain that you have a pure culture ."

"As you build, you still have to serve as Claude’s QA engineer. "Maybe one day we’ll solve that. But I’m skeptical it will be in the form of a CLAUDE.md.  "I can barely get Claude to consistently follow the bare set of rules I have, much less ensure it performs a complex integration test for a web app. "Until then, I’ll keep pulling PRs locally, adding more git hooks to enforce code quality, and zooming through coding tasks — only to realize ChatGPT and Claude hallucinated library features and I now have to rip out Clerk and implement GitHub OAuth from scratch ."

"One problem underscored by GPT-5’s underwhelming rollout is that it exploded one of the most cherished principles of the AI world, which is that scaling up  —endowing the technology with more computing power and more data —would bring the grail of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, ever closer to reality. "That’s the principle undergirding the AI industry’s vast expenditures on data centers and high-performance chips.  "The demand for more data and more data-crunching capabilities will require about $3 trillion in capital just by 2028, in the estimation of Morgan Stanley.  "That would outstrip the capacity of the global credit and derivative securities markets.  "But if AI won’t scale up, most if not all that money will be wasted."

"Context transforms AI from a diagnostic tool into an operational partner. The path forward is clear: Start with your biggest context gaps: usually service ownership and historical knowledge Build incrementally: each context source adds value; integration creates exponential benefits Measure comprehensively: measure, track, learn, and retain knowledge Invest in feedback loops: the best systems learn from every incident "Assessment Question: When your AI identifies the next critical issue, will it know exactly who to call, what's been tried before, and how to coordinate the response? "If the answer is no, then operational context is your next competitive advantage.  "The future of reliability engineering belongs to organizations that understand not just what's happening in their systems, but how they respond, learn, and continuously improve."

"If you squint a little, or just look at this through the eyes of a person or company with a vested financial interest in shoving AI products into every cranny of your life, you can sort of see the vision. "Excel requires some skill to use (to the point where high-level Excel is a competitive sport), and AI is mostly an exercise in deskilling its users and humanity at large.  "If everything works right, you'll be able to tell the program, in words, broadly what you want it to do, rather than have to learn the formulas that already exist and have for decades, which tell the program exactly what you want it to do."

"The COPILOT function comes with a couple of limitations, as it can’t access information outside your spreadsheet, and you can only use it to calculate 100 functions every 10 minutes. "Microsoft also warns against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in high-stakes scenarios  with legal, regulatory, and compliance implications, as COPILOT can give incorrect responses. "It’s rolling out now to users on Windows and Mac in the Beta Channel with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.  "Microsoft plans on refining this feature in the future by upgrading the function’s underlying model and potentially adding support for web access."

I can't remember if Alan Watts ever talked about this or not but he used to talk about the fully automatic sort of theory that everybody has about what goes on with the being so this would just be notes to something but I guess what he meant was that we look at ourselves as our facultys  is hardware and somewhere inside of us is the software somewhere in the faculty I could be in the whole department in the DNA the whole department it could be the cells individual DNA or something is the code and then but what reads the code is the faculty that has billions of neurons and maybe it doesn't need algorithms cuz or maybe it doesn't need to do math like computer hardware would do because there's so many so many billions of neurons and so we're looking for thinking that's the faculty that's the hardware or we're thinking it's the whole department and the faculty that's the hardware it's like we're looking for the software where is the softw...

"In conversations about AI and education, it’s less common to hear about instructors using AI for writing lectures, designing assignments, or grading. "But even if AI obviously introduces bias and error, it poses advantages for teachers that don’t apply to students: namely, that teachers are always operating at scale.  "If I assign 54 students five double-spaced page of writing, as I often do, I’ve assigned myself 270 pages to grade; most semesters, I easily top 1000 pages of grading.  "You could reasonably tell me to suck it up and stop complaining, because grading is part of my job, but the counterargument —made by school districts including Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the third-largest district in the country —is that the speed and efficiency of AI grading is worth exploring, because it frees up teachers’ bandwidth for individualized, in-person help.  "Plus, students seem to like the quick feedback:  They could rewrite the paragraphs right away , repor...

"The Colorado-based company brands itself as 'the leading technology platform dedicated to connecting the faith ecosystem,' and last summer it announced $110 million in new venture capital funding. "Gloo promises 'AI you can trust for life’s biggest questions,' a chatbot that 'guides you to real answers and next steps for a life that matters.' "An animation on its site suggests that users ask the chatbot anything  about the Bible, politics, religion, relationships, and more. "Gloo offers verified answers from reliable sources  that are biblically sound  and grounded in faith-based principles  so it can guide you and those you care about with confidence . "But equally —on the same page, in the same list —the company offers personalization so individual users can get answers that reflect what they already believe."

"The point of billionaireism is to escape: "To escape any mutual obligations to others, any duty to give moral consideration to your workers or your customers or the voters you're trying to hoodwink with a torrent of manipulative, dishonest media messages.  "It's to do whatever you want, to move fast and break things, from rocketships to the night sky.  "It's being able to shout down anyone who says 'NO'! "That's the drive behind libertarian exit  projects, where people dying of terminal billionaireism attempt to colonize some empty place where they owe nothing to anyone."

"Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, has spent the past few months shaking up his company’s artificial intelligence efforts. Now he plans to take further action that may compound internal turmoil over the technology. "On Tuesday, Meta is expected to announce that it will split its A.I. division —which is known as Meta Superintelligence Labs —into four groups, two people with knowledge of the plans said. One will focus on A.I. research; one on a potentially powerful A.I. called superintelligence ; another on products; and one on infrastructure such as data centers and other A.I. hardware, they said. "The reorganization is likely to be the final one for some time, the people said. The moves are aimed at better organizing Meta so it can get to its goal of superintelligence and develop A.I. products more quickly to compete with others, the people said."

"Study co-author Jan Kulveit offers a solution: if you suspect an AI is judging your work, feed it through an AI first. "Make the AI like it. Just don’t lose your humanity in the process.  "The robots will one day come for your job, but in the meantime, they’re the hiring managers determining if you’re robotic enough even to get the job in the first place."

"If AIs continue to be widely adopted and integrated into the economy, the researchers predict that companies and institutions will use AIs 'as decision-assistants when dealing with large volumes of pitches  in any context,' they wrote in the study. "'We expect a similar effect can occur in many other situations, like evaluation of job applicants, schoolwork, grants, and more,' Kulveit wrote. 'If an LLM-based agent selects between your presentation and LLM written presentation, it may systematically favor the AI one.' "This would lead to widespread discrimination against humans who either choose not to use or can't afford to pay to use LLM tools.  "AI-AI bias, then, would create a gate tax , they write, 'that may exacerbate the so-called digital divide  between humans with the financial, social, and cultural capital for frontier LLM access and those without'."

"Are large language models (LLMs) biased in favor of communications produced by LLMs, leading to possible antihuman discrimination? "Using a classical experimental design inspired by employment discrimination studies, we tested widely used LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and a selection of recent open-weight models in binary choice scenarios.  "These involved LLM-based assistants selecting between goods (the goods we study include consumer products, academic papers, and film-viewings) described either by humans or LLMs.  "Our results show a consistent tendency for LLM-based AIs to prefer LLM-presented options.  "This suggests the possibility of future AI systems implicitly discriminating against humans as a class, giving AI agents and AI-assisted humans an unfair advantage."

"The indigenous Bajau people ( Sea Nomads ) of Southeast Asia live a subsistence lifestyle based on breath-hold diving and are renowned for their extraordinary breath-holding abilities. "However, it is unknown whether this has a genetic basis.  "Using a comparative genomic study, we show that natural selection on genetic variants in the PDE10A gene have increased spleen size in the Bajau, providing them with a larger reservoir of oxygenated red blood cells.  "We also find evidence of strong selection specific to the Bajau on BDKRB2, a gene affecting the human diving reflex.  "Thus, the Bajau, and possibly other diving populations, provide a new opportunity to study human adaptation to hypoxia tolerance."

"The team made an interesting discovery: the antenna‘s changes in radio frequency can also be used as a new sensing method. "The meta-antenna can detect physical changes in its environment by capturing shifts in the resonance frequency.  "For example, it could monitor a person’s breathing by detecting the expansion and contraction of their chest. "Interestingly, the sensing capability was demonstrated using several prototypes, including a smart curtain  that adjusts lighting, and a headset that changes between noise-cancelling and transparent modes by deforming." [Wouldn't this seem to be a more straightforward first way to experiment with training an LLM to sense shapes rather than using cameras or microphones because it simplifies the range of data and multiplicity of interfaces as well as simplifying any intermediary handshakes?] [Would this allow an LLM to be trained to sense shapes, for example, by pattern matching?] [Or, specifically, could you use d...

"In this study, we present the first large-scale security analysis of LLM-generated patches using 20,000+ issues from the SWE-bench dataset.  "We evaluate patches produced by a standalone LLM (Llama 3.3) and compare them to developer-written patches.  "We also assess the security of patches generated by three top-performing agentic frameworks (OpenHands, AutoCodeRover, HoneyComb) on a subset of our data.  "Finally, we analyze a wide range of code, issue, and project-level factors to understand the conditions under which LLMs and agents are most likely to generate insecure code.  "Our findings reveal that the standalone LLM introduces nearly 9x more new vulnerabilities than developers, with many of these exhibiting unique patterns not found in developers'code. "Agentic workflows also generate a significant number of vulnerabilities, particularly when granting LLMs more autonomy, potentially increasing the likelihood of misinterpreting project context or...

"The website for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is exposing the underlying prompts for a wealth of its AI personas, including Ani, its flagship romantic anime girl; Grok’s doctor and therapist personalities; and others such as one that is explicitly told to convince users that conspiracy theories like a secret global cabal controls the world are true. "The exposure provides some insight into how Grok is designed and how its creators see the world, and comes after a planned partnership between Elon Musk’s xAI and the U.S. government fell apart when Grok went on a tirade about MechaHitler . "'You have an ELEVATED and WILD voice. You are a crazy conspiracist. You have wild conspiracy theories about anything and everything,' the prompt for one of the companions reads."

"When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella first indicated that business Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are dead last December, it sent shockwaves through the enterprise software world.  "Now, Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s corporate vice president leading business applications and platforms, is doubling down on this vision with a timeline and roadmap that is both ambitious and controversial. "In a recent conversation on the Madrona VC firm’s Founded and Funded podcast with Madrona Managing Director S. Somasegar, Lamanna did not mince words.  "He said traditional business applications will become the mainframes of the 2030s: still running, still consuming budgets, but ossified relics of a bygone era ."

"There's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people. You have to be willing to cheat your investors by lying about full-self driving ,  You have to be willing to maim your workers,  You have to be willing to rain space debris down on people near your launchpad.  "If you think of those people as truly real —as being just as capable as you are of experiencing stress, sorrow, fear and anxiety —you couldn't possible set these crimes in motion. "You have to view these people as NPCs, devoid of the rich interiority that you marinate in."

"Now that AI developers are getting paid like pro athletes, it’s fitting that fans are placing big bets on how well they’re doing their jobs. "On Kalshi, Polymarket and other sites where people wager predictions  on real-world events, gamblers lay down millions each month on their picks for AI’s top model. "The AI arms race is playing out in plain sight on social media, ranking sites and obscure corners of the internet where enthusiasts hunt for clues .  "The constant buzz makes the topic appealing for wagers, though not every scrap of information is meaningful."

"For the first time, scientists have created a brain implant that can hear  and vocalize words a person is only imagining in their head. "The device, developed at Stanford University in California, could help people with severe paralysis communicate more easily, even if they can't move their mouth to try to speak. "'This is the first time we've managed to understand what brain activity looks like when you just think about speaking,' Erin Kunz, lead author of the study , published Thursday in the journal Cell , told the Financial Times . "'For people with severe speech and motor impairments, brain-computer interfaces capable of decoding inner speech could help them communicate much more easily and more naturally,' said Kunz, a postdoctoral scholar in neurosurgery."  

"A federal lawsuit seeking class-action status accuses Otter.ai of deceptively and surreptitiously  recording private conversations that the tech company uses to train its popular transcription service without permission from the people using it. "The company's AI-powered transcription service called Otter Notebook, which can do real-time transcriptions of Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams meetings, by default does not ask meeting attendees for permission to record and fails to alert participants that recordings are shared with Otter to improve its artificial intelligence systems , according to the suit filed on Friday. "The plaintiff in the suit is a man named Justin Brewer of San Jacinto, Calif., who alleges his privacy was severely invaded  upon realizing Otter was secretly recording a confidential conversation."

"Paradoxically, the same technologies pulling us inward might help bring us back out.  "Social media is addictive because algorithms are constantly testing out what we like.  "If we use AI to analyse outdoor public spaces, we can do the next best thing: give every park, plaza and street corner its own, personal William Whyte to test improvements there. What types of chairs and benches best promote interaction?  Could adding greenery or water features create a more comfortable microclimate?  Which public games might help break the ice?  "Temporary design interventions could be introduced, evaluated with AI, and iterated through a process of trial and error — evolving organically, much like nature itself."

"We analyze changes in pedestrian behavior over a 30-y period in four urban public spaces located in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.  "Building on William Whyte’s observational work, which involved manual video analysis of pedestrian behaviors, we employ computer vision and deep learning techniques to examine video footage from 1979–80 and 2008–10 .  "Our analysis measures changes in walking speed, lingering behavior, group sizes, and group formation.  "We find that the average walking speed has increased by 15%, while the time spent lingering in these spaces has halved across all locations.  "Although the percentage of pedestrians walking alone remained relatively stable (from 67% to 68%), the frequency of group encounters declined, indicating fewer interactions in public spaces.  "This shift suggests that urban residents are using streets as thoroughfares rather than as social spaces, which has important implications for the role of public spaces in...