chatainews

"Major tech firms, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, have reportedly urged overseas staff to return to the US quickly while simultaneously warning them to limit dependents’ travel. "At the same time, all these top tech companies, and many more, have been laying people off.  "Even if you can trace your ancestry back to the Mayflower, we’re living in a time of tech job insecurity.  "While the US raises barriers, rival tech hubs are pitching themselves as open and predictable.  "Canada, Europe, and parts of Asia are marketing fast‑track visas and remote‑work‑friendly policies aimed squarely at the engineers, founders, and researchers who now view the US as too much trouble for too little certainty."

"An important requirement for scaling up is the ability to extend high-fidelity entanglement non-locally across several spin registers. "Here we address this challenge with an 11-qubit atom processor composed of two multi-nuclear spin registers that are linked by means of electron exchange interaction.  "Through the advancement of calibration and control protocols, we achieve single-qubit and multi-qubit gates with all fidelities ranging from 99.10% to 99.99%.  "By entangling all combinations of local and non-local nuclear-spin pairs, we map out the performance of the processor and achieve state-of-the-art Bell-state fidelities of up to 99.5%.  "We then generate Greenberger–Horne–Zeilinger (GHZ) states with an increasing number of qubits and show entanglement of up to eight nuclear spins. "By establishing high-fidelity operation across interconnected nuclear spin registers, we realize a key milestone towards fault-tolerant quantum computation with atom pro...

"The programming world is at a transition point. For system programming, Rust and AI are replacing C and manual coding. "C is prone to memory errors, accounting for about 70% of all operating system security holes. Memory-safe Rust prevents these problems. As Microsoft stated in 2019, 'What separates Rust from C and C++ is its strong safety guarantees.' That's not to say you still can't screw up with Rust. You can. The first Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) security bug has also been identified: the Rust Android Binder driver bug, CVE-2025-68260.  "Meanwhile, over in Windows land, in early 2025, Check Point Research found a bug in the Rust-based Graphics Device Interface (GDI) component in Windows 11 24H2. "Linux developers appreciate that AI can make their work easier. However, as Torvalds said, 90% of today's AI industry is hype. He's also warned that using AI to generate serious, long-lived production code can be a horrible idea ...

"Around a million years ago, at the very beginning of the biggest disruption to life’s energetic capabilities since the emergence of cyanobacteria, humans learned to harness a new kind of energy source: combustion .  While other animals are limited by the metabolic energy they can harvest biologically, fire —an explosion of energy released as fuel reacts with oxygen —gave our ancestors an external energy source that was orders of magnitude more powerful. "Our ancestors cooked food, using fire as a form of digestion to assist the work of teeth, jaws and guts on tough, raw foods.  "Fire kept our ancestors warm without fur, scared off predators and cleared landscapes for hunting.  "One evolutionary response to this extracorporeal bounty of energy was a growth in brain size and specialization, including the development of a bigger prefrontal cortex.  "As a consequence, humans are smart, cooperative and exceptionally social. Those traits made us capable of a remarka...

"Krotov and his colleagues recently developed a new deep learning architecture called the energy transformer. "Typical AI architectures are usually found by trial and error. But Krotov thinks energy transformers could be designed more intentionally with a specific energy landscape in mind, like a more complex take on a Hopfield network. "Though Hopfield networks were originally designed to remember, researchers are now exploring how they can be used to create.  "Image generators such as Midjourney are powered by diffusion models , which are themselves inspired by the physics of diffusion. To train them, researchers add noise to the training data —say, pictures of cats —and then teach the model to remove the noise. That’s a lot like what a Hopfield network does, except instead of always landing on the same cat picture, a diffusion model removes non-cat  noise from a noisy, random starting state to produce a new cat. "It turns out that diffusion models can be und...

"Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has sharply criticized the company's own AI assistant in internal communications, stating that integrations connecting Copilot with Gmail and Outlook 'don't really work' for the most part and are 'not smart,' according to a December 28, 2025 report from The Information . "The frank assessment reveals growing concerns within Microsoft about Copilot's technical execution and market performance, despite the company's public positioning of AI as central to its growth strategy.  "Nadella has assumed an unusually hands-on role in fixing the struggling product, essentially becoming what sources describe as the company's top product manager."

" Murmuration  by Le Patin Libre is the latest contemporary dance show on ice (and perhaps the only one) that’s been years in the making. "Skaters who grow up in the world of organized sport have been conditioned to show off jazz hands for such-and-such gala or throw in a triple axel for so-and-so points. "The biggest challenge for them was to decondition all these conditions and find skaters who were willing to be open-minded to exploring choreography that wasn't so set. "Of course, there were still some recognizable jumps and spins in there —you can't get rid of the basics —but what the cast did come up with was an impressive, iridescent echo of birds in flight. "The animal kingdom presents some very unique flocking patterns.  "In geese migrations to warmer weather, the wind currents of the leader’s flapping provide support to the geese following behind, and their signature V-formation is the most aerodynamic shape to make use of this tactic.  ...

"For individuals, Farmer from the Ada Lovelace Institute says, many people have already built up intense relationships with existing chatbots and may have shared huge volumes of sensitive data with them during the process, making them different from other systems that have come before. "'Be very careful about the quid pro quo when it comes to your personal data with these sorts of systems,' Farmer says. 'The business model these systems are operating on currently may well not be the business model that they adopt in the future.' "'Even if, let's say, you genuinely consent and you genuinely are informed about how your data is used, the people with whom you interact might not be consenting,' Véliz, the Oxford associate professor, says. 'If the system has access to all of your contacts and your emails and your calendar and you’re calling me and you have my contact, they're accessing my data too, and I don't want them to'."

"They are tired of hearing about artificial intelligence as a panacea without pragmatism. They want to hear about how they can pragmatically and easily harness it —now —for real-life use cases. "Indeed, we’ve spent the last few years bombarded by hyperbolic talk about AI (Robotaxis anyone?). How it’s going to transform life as we know it. How it’s going to take our jobs. When it will become sentient… "Meanwhile, AI has kind of quietly become part of the fabric of our lives —not by changing our lives or taking our jobs or becoming sentient, but by making our lives and our jobs easier.  "For example, when I Googled When will AI become sentient?  (and When did Skynet become self-aware,  for comparison purposes), I didn’t have to comb through results one at a time but instead read the AI-generated summary of the most relevant content at the top, with sources."

"Amazon's rapid evolution in its view of AI-powered commerce underscores how quickly online retail is changing, and the risks the company faces if it doesn't act aggressively to maintain control over its future. "The company has watched as OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft have released a flurry of e-commerce agents in recent months that aim to change how people shop.  "Instead of visiting Amazon, Walmart or Nike directly, consumers could rely on AI agents to do the hard work of scanning the web for the best deal or perfect product, then buy the item without exiting a chatbot window. "The first shopping agents from AI leaders were released about a year ago. Consulting firm McKinsey projected that agentic commerce could generate $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030 ."

"Determining by means of palaeography the chronology of ancient handwritten manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls is essential for reconstructing the evolution of ideas, but there is an almost complete lack of date-bearing manuscripts .  "To overcome this problem, we present Enoch, an AI-based date-prediction model, trained on the basis of 24 14C-dated scroll samples.  "By applying Bayesian ridge regression on angular and allographic writing style feature vectors, Enoch could predict 14C-based dates with varied mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 27.9 to 30.7 years.  "In order to explore the viability of the character-shape based dating approach, the trained Enoch model then computed date predictions for 135 non-dated scrolls, aligning with 79% in palaeographic post-hoc evaluation.  "The 14C ranges and Enoch’s style-based predictions are often older than traditionally assumed palaeographic estimates, leading to a new chronology of the scrolls and the re-dating o...

"Anthony Duncan first used ChatGPT to help with the business side of his career as a content creation. "But he soon ended up talking to the OpenAI chatbot like a friend on a daily basis.  What started as a harmless way to vent soon drove Duncan to blow up his personal relationships as he became afflicted with troubling delusions , he recalled in a TikTok video detailing his experience —upending his mental health and causing a sprawling breakdown .

"The most significant and immediate benefit of forcing weights into {−1,0,1} is the elimination of floating-point multiplication, which is the most expensive operation in modern deep learning hardware. "We are currently running BitNet b1.58 on chips that are not optimized to run INT8 additions, on top of which the entire architecture stands. " This implies that there still exist some efficiency gains left unexplored.  "If BitNet can achieve an 8-9x speedup on hardware that is suboptimal, then the potential gains on hardware that is specifically designed for integer addition —such as Groq’s LPUs —could be even more substantial. "This architecture also offers us a realistic pathway towards deploying large 70B+ parameter models, directly on local edge devices like mobile phones and laptops, without compromising intelligence."

"The line between technology and live entertainment was on display at a concert in the Chinese city of Chengdu on Thursday, where Chinese American singer-songwriter Wang Leehom was joined on stage by six humanoid robots. "The robots, dressed in silver sequined outfits, appeared during his performance of Open Fire and danced alongside the singer, according to local media. "Videos shared online show the robots performing a sequence of coordinated movements, including arm motions, leg kicks, turns and jumps, timed to the music.  "Their actions appeared closely synchronized with the rhythm rather than limited to simple, repetitive gestures."

"The Financial Times reports that Tencent now has access to NVIDIA's B200 AI chips, through a Japanese neocloud Datasection. "The firm is reportedly holding rental contracts worth more than $1.2 billion from Tencent alone. "Renting compute power is becoming so common among Chinese companies that FT claims that an analyst at Bernstein Research claims that firms might find it more compelling to continue this arrangement, rather than buying NVIDIA's AI chips in China, since the computing capabilities they get through this means are significantly higher than what's available in the domestic market.  "Even after the H200 is available to China, the B200 and B300 AI chips outperform the Hopper option by a significant margin, which shows that Beijing isn't devoid of cutting-edge American technology."

"District superintendent Alex Cherniss says the striking array of surveillance tools is a necessity, and one that ensures the safety of his students. 'We are in the hub of an urban setting of Los Angeles, in one of the most recognizable cities on the planet. So we are always a target and that means our kids are a target and our staff are a target,' he said. "In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the district spent $4.8 million on security, including staff. The surveillance system spots multiple threats per day, the district said. "Beverly Hills’ apparatus might seem extreme, but it’s not an outlier. Across the U.S., schools are rolling out similar surveillance systems they hope will keep them free of the horrific and unceasing tide of mass shootings.  "There have been 49 deaths from gunfire on school property this year. In 2024, there were 59, and in 2023 there were 45, per Everytown for Gun Safety. Between 2000 and 2022, 131 people were killed and 197 wounded at sc...

"Samsung says this model upgrades its existing AI Vision system with functionality built using Google Gemini, marking the first time Gemini is being integrated into a refrigerator. "Previously, the system could recognize a limited number of fresh and pre registered foods locally.  "The new version is designed to identify more items automatically, including processed foods that no longer require manual setup and leftovers stored in personal containers. "On paper, that sounds convenient. A fridge that knows what is inside it, keeps an updated inventory, and helps manage groceries without constant user input is an idea appliance makers have chased for years.  "Samsung says more accurate ingredient recognition should make food tracking clearer and easier, while unlocking new use cases around meal planning and personalization. Whether that translates into daily value or becomes another ignored dashboard remains an open question."

"As of Sunday morning there wasn’t yet an update from Waymo on whether the company’s robotaxis were still out of commission, nor on what had caused the problem in the first place. " Gizmodo asked Waymo if the vehicles had trouble traversing blacked-out stoplights, or if the issue had something to do with data reception or transmission. We also asked the company if any Waymo vehicles were still blocking the streets. We will update if we hear back. "Until there’s some kind of postmortem from the Alphabet-owned company, there’s no way to be absolutely sure that the problem wasn’t an Anakin Skywalker-type situation, in which the nerve center of the robot hive was destroyed by a 9-year-old, causing all the robots to drop dead."

"The frontier is very jagged indeed, and it might be that, because of this jaggedness, we get supersmart AIs which never quite fully overlap with human tasks. "For example, a major source of jaggedness is that LLMs do not remember new tasks and learn from them in a permanent way.  "A lot of AI companies are pursuing solutions to this issue, but it may be that this problem is harder to solve than researchers expect.  "Without memory, AIs will struggle to do many tasks humans can do, even while being superhuman in other areas.  "Colin Fraser drew two examples of what this sort of AI-human overlap might look like. You can see how AI is indeed superhuman in some areas, but in others it is either far below human level or not overlapping at all.  "If this is true, then AI will create new opportunities working in complement with human beings, since we both bring different abilities to the table."

"This study employs stylometry to investigate whether the creative writing styles of humans and large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama 70b can be distinguished through quantitative analysis. "A balanced dataset of short stories composed in response to predefined narrative prompts forms the basis of the analysis.  "Burrows’ Delta, a widely used metric in computational literary studies, is applied to measure stylistic similarity and difference across texts. By focusing on the distribution of the most frequent words, Burrows’ Delta allows for comparison that is largely independent of content and instead sensitive to latent stylistic fingerprints.  "The methodology combines this measure with clustering techniques, including hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling, to visualise relationships between texts and to test whether human and machine-generated stories cohere into distinct groups.  "The results reveal clear and consistent...

"Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in collaborative settings, yet little is known about how they coordinate when treated as black-box agents.  [pdf] "We simulate 7,500 multi-agent, multi-round discussions in an inductive coding task, generating over 125,000 utterances that capture both final annotations and their interactional histories.  "We introduce process-level metrics —code stability, semantic self-consistency, and lexical confidence —alongside sentiment and convergence measures, to track coordination dynamics. "To probe deeper alignment signals, we analyze the evolving geometry of output embeddings, showing that intrinsic dimensionality declines over rounds, suggesting semantic compression.  "The results reveal that LLM groups converge lexically and semantically, develop asymmetric influence patterns, and exhibit negotiation-like behaviors despite the absence of explicit role prompting.  "This work demonstrates how...

"Advances in transformer-based encoding and large-parameter models prompted a fundamental shift in Rivian’s thinking of the physical AI  of autonomous driving, he [Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe] says. "As such, Rivian began a clean-sheet redesign of its autonomy platform in early 2022.  "With the introduction of its Gen 2 platform, the company began building a data flywheel  to train a large driving model (sort of like an LLM, but for driving) using real-world driving data from its fleet.  "And because the model is trained end-to-end, Rivian says that improvements in sensors or compute directly enhance its capabilities, allowing the system to continuously improve as hardware advances. "Either Rivian pursues its own self-produced, vertically integrated autonomy strategy, or it risks being left in the dust by Waymo, Tesla, and others."

"The training and use of artificial-intelligence systems such as ChatGPT might already result in more annual carbon emissions than New York City and more water consumption than all the bottled water drank globally, according to new research. "In one of the first studies to focus specifically on the environmental impact of AI, a new report in the data-science journal Patterns estimated that the technology’s water consumption in particular was likely far higher than previous estimates.  "The study indicates that both AI’s carbon emissions and its water consumption are growing rapidly, thanks to its surging power use. "'These are definitely quite huge numbers,' the study’s author, Alex de Vries-Gao, a Ph.D. candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, told The Examiner ."

"A group of nine U.S. lawmakers sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth this week urging the Pentagon to add a slew of Chinese technology firms to a list of entities allegedly assisting the Chinese military. "The letter, sent late on Thursday after U.S. President Donald Trump signed a $1 trillion must-pass military spending bill into law, asks Hegseth to place AI firm DeepSeek, smartphone maker Xiaomi and electronic display maker BOE Technology Group on what is known as the Section 1260H list. "That list already includes major Chinese firms such as Tencent Holdings, one of China's largest tech companies, and CATL, a major battery maker in the electric vehicle industry."

"Google wanted to remove Assistant from most Android phones by the end of 2025 and replace it with Gemini.  "But now the company has announced that it needs a bit more time to make its AI assistant the new default digital helper for most of its users.  "Google said that it's adjusting its previously announced timeline to 'make sure [it delivers] a seamless transition' and that updates to convert Assistant to Gemini on Android devices will continue into the next year.  "The company also said that it's sharing more details in the coming months , so it's possible that the transition will go past early 2026."

"Being concerned that TSMC’s expansion into the United States could dilute Taiwan’s semiconductor leadership, Taiwanese authorities are mulling setting a new export rule that would only let the world’s number-one foundry export technologies that are two generations behind its leading-edge production node, reports CNA. "If this happens, this could slow down TSMC’s expansion in the U.S., as it currently relies on aggressive building of advanced fabs there. "The core of this new export policy is the government’s N-2 rule, which permits offshore deployment only of process technologies that trail Taiwan’s leading-edge by two generations." 

"Microsoft has cut its sales targets for its agentic AI software after struggling to find buyers interested in using it. "In some cases, targets have been slashed by up to 50%, suggesting Microsoft overestimated the potential of its new AI tools.  "Indeed, compared with ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, Copilot is falling behind, raising concerns about Microsoft's substantial AI investment. "Tests from earlier this year found that AI agents failed to complete tasks up to 70% of the time, making them almost entirely redundant as a workforce replacement tool.  "At best, they're a way for skilled employees to be more productive and save time on low-level tasks, but those tasks were already being handed off to lower-level employees. Having an AI do it and fail half the time isn't exactly a winning alternative."

"As Hollywood continues to grapple with the threat and adoption of AI, a group of 18 industry insiders have banded together to form the Creators Coalition on AI. "The effort, a first of its kind, is backed by the signatures of more than 500, a diverse list growing by the hour that includes Oscar winners, filmmakers, show runners, writers, below-the-line talent and creative professionals from all corners of the business. "Known as CCAI, the group launches with a mission to serve as 'a central coordinating hub to upgrade our industry’s systems and institutions.'  "It will do so by acting as an advisory council that seeks 'to establish shared standards, definitions and best practices as well as ethical and artistic protections for if and when AI is used in entertainment projects.' "The work will be guided by four core pillars:  Transparency, consent and compensation for content and data;  Job protection and transition plans;  Guardrails against mis...

"Cursor is buying code review startup Graphite in a deal that brings together two popular tools in AI-powered software development. "The companies declined to disclose financial terms of the transaction, but said it involves a mixture of cash and equity.  "They said Graphite will to continue operating as an independent product, but with deeper integration into Cursor’s code editing platform. The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks. "Cursor CEO, Michael Truell, told Fortune the acquisition addresses what he sees as an emerging bottleneck in software development. 'For most engineering teams, reviewing code looks the same as it did 3 years ago. It’s becoming a larger portion of people’s time as the time to write code shrinks. Graphite has done lots of work to improve the speed and accuracy of code review'."

"AI is challenging the use of complex high-quality language as the indicator of scholarly merit. "Quick screening and evaluation of articles based on language quality is increasingly unreliable and better methods are urgently needed. "As complex language is increasingly used to cover up weak scholarly contributions, critical and in-depth evaluations of study methodologies and contributions during peer review are essential. "One approach is to fight fire with fire  and use AI review tools, such as the one recently published by Andrew Ng at Stanford.  "Given the ever-growing number of manuscript submissions and already high workload of academic journal editors, such approaches might be the only viable option."

"Luma, the a16z-backed AI video and 3D model company, released a new model called Ray3 Modify that allows users to modify existing footage by providing character reference images that preserve the performance of the original footage. "Users can also provide a start and an end frame to guide the model to generate transitional footage. "The company said Thursday the Ray3 Modify model solves the problems of preserving human performance while editing or generating effects using AI for creative studios.  "The startup said the model follows the input footage better, allowing studios to use human actors for creative or brand footage.  "Luma mentioned the new model retains the actor’s original motion, timing, eye line, and emotional delivery while transforming the scene."

"Psilocybin holds promise as a treatment for mental illnesses. One dose of psilocybin induces structural remodeling of dendritic spines in the medial frontal cortex in mice. The dendritic spines would be innervated by presynaptic neurons, but the sources of these inputs have not been identified. "Here, using monosynaptic rabies tracing, we map the brain-wide distribution of inputs to frontal cortical pyramidal neurons.  "We discover that psilocybin’s effect on connectivity is network specific, strengthening the routing of inputs from perceptual and medial regions (homolog of the default mode network) to subcortical targets while weakening inputs that are part of cortico-cortical recurrent loops.  "The pattern of synaptic reorganization depends on the drug-evoked spiking activity because silencing a presynaptic region during psilocybin administration disrupts the rewiring.  "Collectively, the results reveal the impact of psilocybin on the connectivity of large-s...

"Xeon 6 needs a strong memory ecosystem to remain competitive in AI driven server deployments. "While accelerators often get the headlines, CPUs still orchestrate inference pipelines, manage memory, and handle a wide range of data intensive tasks.  "High capacity DDR5 that is fully certified on the platform helps Intel make the case that Xeon based systems can scale efficiently without brute force hardware expansion. "SK hynix, for its part, is leaning hard into the idea that memory is no longer a passive component.  "As inference models grow more complex and more stateful, memory increasingly determines how many requests a system can handle and how responsive it feels under load. Bigger, more efficient DIMMs mean fewer servers, fewer slots populated , and simpler scaling strategies."

"Doublespeed, a startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. "The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company.  "The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31.  "At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company’s backend , including the phone farm itself."

"AI-generated code is actually prone to more vulnerabilities than human-generated code, raising questions over the reliability of some tools, new data from CodeRabbit has claimed. "Pull requests made with AI tools had an average of 10.83 issues, compared with 6.45 issues in human-generated pull requests, which is ultimately leading to longer reviews and the potential for more bugs to make it through to the finished product. "Besides having 1.7x more issues on general, AI-generated pull requests also had 1.4x more critical issues and 1.7x more major issues, so they're not just minor niggles."

"A German company is developing swarm robots from live cockroaches fitted with tiny backpacks  to take on covert intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. "Engineered by SWARM Biotactics, the cyborg insects can operate in cluttered, GPS-denied, or high-risk environments where traditional drones and robots often struggle. "The real breakthrough lies in the compact payload on their backs, enabling guided movement, real-time data collection, and encrypted short-range communication, turning each insect into a bio-robotic scout ."

"AI created as much carbon pollution this year as New York City and guzzled up as much H20 as people consume globally in water bottles, according to new estimates. "The study paints what’s likely a pretty conservative picture of AI’s environmental impact since it’s based on the relatively limited amount of data that’s currently available to the public.  "A lack of transparency from tech companies makes it harder to see the potential environmental toll of AI becoming a part of everyday tasks, argues the author of the study who’s been tracking the electricity consumption of data centers used for AI and crypto mining over the years. "'There’s no way to put an extremely accurate number on this, but it’s going to be really big regardless… In the end, everyone is paying the price for this,' says Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at the VU Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who published his paper today in the journal Patterns ."

"The most transformative impact of AI is not in the writers’ room, but in the operational backbone of the media supply chain, where it is already reshaping how studios manage metadata, rights, localization, and content discovery. "For studios and media organizations, AI is fundamentally reshaping how companies manage Metadata,  Analyze rights,  Handle localization, and  Optimize content discovery.  "This operational shift allows businesses to move faster , ensure compliance, and unlock new revenue streams from their content libraries.  "The true value lies in making content findable, licensable, and profitable at scale. This is a challenge that has grown exponentially in the digital age. "According to Deloitte’s 2025 Media & Entertainment Outlook , intensifying competition and margin pressure are pushing studios to prioritize operational efficiency as a strategic differentiator . This puts operational AI at the center of near-term industry transformation....

" Generative AI is poised to reshape the supply of premium screen content, with VP of Chinese online media giant Tencent and CEO of Tencent Video Sun Zhonghuai forecasting that as much as a third of long-form film and animation could be dominated by or deeply involving AI  within two years, despite lingering concerns around performance fidelity and visual consistency. "Speaking at a forum at the 7th Hainan Island International Film Festival (HIIFF) Sun predicted a dramatic shift in premium television and film content creation in the next few years. "'From a time dimension, looking at the next one or two years, we have every reason to expect visible changes in the platform’s content supply structure,' Sun stated. 'In core categories such as film, television, and animation, works dominated by or deeply involving AI could potentially reach a proportion of between 10 and 30%'."

"Outside of glasses, another type of wearable is beginning to pop up: always-listening pendants and pins. "There is Bee AI, which was recently bought by Amazon, and Friend, an AI necklace with a controversial New York City subway ad campaign.  "There’s the Plaud NotePin and Limitless, and several startups in my inbox pitching similar gadgets. Hell, there’s even an AI smart ring that you can whisper voice memos into.  "The general idea here is a device that tags along with you all day, and uses AI to summarize your meetings, voice notes, and conversations. Some give to-do lists based on your day. Friend markets itself as more of an always-there companion that periodically messages you about things that happen around you. "AI is also getting stuffed into existing wearables: Samsung and Google both added Gemini to their WearOS smartwatches. Fitbit is beta testing an AI coach for its devices. Apple put Apple Intelligence-powered translations into its AirPods Pro 3,...

"In the span of a decade and a half, from 2010 to the end of 2024, the number of data centers in the US quadrupled. The trend is similar worldwide: more data centers, bigger, now or soon. The number of the construction projects of centers over 100 megawatts announced over the last four years total 377, according to data center certification and research agency Uptime Institute. "Can we retrofit our current data centers to match the needs of our newest technology? Perhaps the building frenzy is not merited; perhaps we have all the facilities we need. A few upgrades here, some fresh servers over there, a new lick of paint, and voilà —an AI data center built from the shell of a legacy one. "Our current data centers cannot readily be retrofitted to become AI superhouses. The problem is as physical as the ground you’re standing on: Legacy data centers cannot bear the weight of the latest AI technology. The racks that house computer chips or AI chips are simply too damn heavy ...

"CoreWeave’s Staggering Fall From Market Grace Highlights AI Bubble Fears. "CoreWeave, the largest of a new breed of companies driving the artificial-intelligence boom, has watched $33 billion of value vaporize in six weeks. "The data-center provider’s terrible six-week slide picked up speed when a famous short seller piled concerns on top of delays. "The share-price plunge of 46% comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble, the fallout from a failed merger and public criticism from high-profile short seller Jim Chanos, known for predicting the collapse of Enron."

"Over the past few years, bloggers who have not secured their sites behind a paywall have seen their carefully developed and tested recipes show up, often without attribution and in a bastardized form, in ChatGPT replies. "Recipe writers have no legal recourse because recipes generally are not copyrightable.  "Although copyright protects published or recorded work, they do not cover sets of instructions (although it can apply to the particular wording of those instructions). "Without this essential IP, many food bloggers earn their living by offering their work for free while using ads to make money.  "But now they fear that casual users who rely on search engines or social media to find a recipe for dinner will conflate their work with AI slop and stop trusting online recipe sites altogether."

"Generative AI is a seductive distraction from the type of AI that is most likely to make your life better, or even save it: Predictive AI. In contrast to AI designed for generative tasks, predictive AI involves tasks with a finite, known set of answers; the system just has to process information to say which answer is right.  "A basic example is plant recognition: Point your phone camera at a plant and learn that it’s a Western sword fern. Generative tasks, in contrast, have no finite set of correct answers: The system must blend snippets of information it’s been trained on to create, for example, a novel picture of a fern.  "Predictive AI has quietly been improving weather prediction and food safety, enabling higher-quality music production, helping to organize photos, and accurately predicting the fastest driving routes.  "We incorporate predictive AI into our everyday lives without evening thinking about it, a testament to its indispensable utility."

"Deepfake porn sites…which use artificial intelligence to create sexually explicit images and videos —usually without the consent of those whose faces or bodies are featured —have proliferated at an alarming rate in recent years. "The impact on victims has been described as life-shattering , with the mental health effects similar to those reported by victims of sexual assault.  "While the technology to make these synthetic images is not new, the rise of mainstream AI image generator tools and Nudify apps has made it more widely available to people without deep technical expertise.  "Earlier this year, New Zealand MP Laura McClure held up an AI-generated nude of herself in parliament, describing how it took her less than five minutes to create after a quick Google search.  "A 2024 study by the My Image My Choice campaign found that there was a 1,780 percent increase in sexually explicit deepfakes last year compared to 2019. Almost all (99 percent) of victims we...

"After 35 years, the maker of the Roomba robot vacuum filed for bankruptcy protection late Sunday night. "Following warnings issued earlier this year that it was fast running out of options, iRobot says it is entering Chapter 11 protection and will be acquired by its contract manufacturer, China-based Picea Robotics. "The company says it will continue to operate 'with no anticipated disruption to its app functionality, customer programs, global partners, supply chain relationships, or ongoing product support.'  "This should mean that, at least for now, your Roomba will continue cleaning your floors just as it did before. "The Massachusetts-based company has struggled for years amid increasing competition from Chinese manufacturers. One of the early pioneers in household robotics, iRobot was founded in 1990 and launched its first Roomba robot vacuum in 2002."

"LG smart TV owners are reporting that a recent webOS software update has added Microsoft Copilot to their TVs, with no apparent way to remove it. "According to affected users, Copilot appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain LG TV models. The feature shows up on the home screen alongside streaming apps, but unlike Netflix or YouTube, it cannot be uninstalled. "The issue, for many, isn’t necessarily what Copilot does, but that it has been forced onto consumers with no option to remove it. LG’s own support documentation notes that certain preinstalled or system apps cannot be deleted, only hidden.  "It's a similar story on rival models, for instance some Samsung TV's include Gemini. "The overwhelmingly negative reaction from users indicates a growing frustration with AI features being imposed on consumers in every way possible." 

" CrowdStrike…is extending its Falcon platform beyond traditional security boundaries and into how AI is actually used by developers and employees. "As companies rush to bolt generative AI onto workflows, copilots, and internal tools, the attack surface has quietly shifted.  "It is no longer just about endpoints, networks, or cloud workloads. The interaction layer —the prompts, responses, and autonomous agent actions —is now in play, and attackers have noticed. "The company is positioning Falcon AIDR as a way to secure that layer before it turns into the next mess enterprises have to clean up.  "The idea is straightforward enough. If prompts can be manipulated, poisoned, or hijacked, then AI systems can be pushed into leaking data, taking unsafe actions, or producing outputs that create real risk.  "In that sense, the comparison CrowdStrike makes between prompts and malware is not entirely hyperbolic. A cleverly crafted prompt can absolutely cause damage i...

"The explosion in AI models, software, and agents has raised questions about the impact of the technology on the broader job market as companies find new efficiencies from this new technology. "But according to EY's latest US AI Pulse Survey, just 17% of 500 business executives at US companies that saw productivity gains via AI turned around and cut jobs. "'There's a narrative that we hear quite frequently about companies looking to take that benefit that they're seeing and put it into the financial statements … reducing costs, or … cutting heads ,' EY global consulting AI leader Dan Diasio told Yahoo Finance ."

"For 16 hours, an AI agent crawled Stanford's public and private computer science networks, digging up security flaws across thousands of devices. By the end of the test, it had outperformed professional human hackers —and at a fraction of the cost. "Running ARTEMIS costs about $18 an hour, far below the average salary of about $125,000 a year for a professional penetration tester,  the study said. A more advanced version of the agent costs $59 an hour and still comes in cheaper than hiring a top human expert. "The researchers gave ARTEMIS access to the university's network, consisting of about 8,000 devices, including servers, computers, and smart devices.  "Human testers were asked to put in at least 10 hours of work while ARTEMIS ran 16 hours across two workdays. The comparison with human testers was limited to the AI's first 10 hours."

"David Sacks, President Trump's influential adviser on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, is on the defensive over government paperwork that critics say grant him carte blanche  to shape U.S. policy while retaining hundreds of investments in the tech world. "Sacks is a prominent venture capitalist who, along with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, is a member of the Paypal Mafia, a group of executives of the online payments company who helped spark the digital economy after the dot-com bust. "The debate over Sacks' investments comes just as he helped shape a controversial executive order instructing the Justice Department to challenge state AI laws deemed onerous  to the industry —something that's faced resistance from both parties and members of the MAGA movement who distrust the tech elite."

"Fears have intensified after a viral social experiment in which a tech YouTuber showed how easily an AI robot’s safeguards could be overridden. "In the video, the person hands a high-velocity Ball Bearing (BB) gun to his robot, Max, and asks it to shoot him. "After initially refusing, the robot complies when prompted during a role-play scenario, ultimately firing at his chest and raising serious safety concerns. "Last week, Shenzhen-based EngineAI shared a new video featuring its CEO in protective gear as the robot repeatedly kicked him."

"Nakamoto’s BTC fortune has remained unspent since 2010, while its valuation has fluctuated wildly. "This incredible level of HODLing has led analysts to believe the BTC creator has either passed away or has tragically lost access to the crypto.  "Others still believe Nakamoto is intentionally maintaining an absolute silence. "[His] coins may indeed remain inaccessible to anyone other than Nakamoto for the next 20–40 years. "However, the situation could change if any of the founders’ coins are ever moved or spent. Such an action would cause a stir in itself.  "Still, it would also expose the public key of that specific coin, creating a more vulnerable attack surface for a sufficiently powerful future quantum computer."

"We survey examples of socially transmitted misinformation across biological systems. "Our central findings are (i) that the transmission and use of misinformation is widespread in biological systems spanning levels of organization, and (ii) that the production and transmission of misinformation is probably an inevitable property that inherits from fundamental constraints on biological communication systems, rather than a pathology that lies apart from the normal functioning of such systems.  "In this light, we argue that there is a need for a more integrated theoretical and empirical science of misinformation in biology.  "We end by highlighting four emerging questions about misinformation and its role in driving ecological and evolutionary dynamics that this new field of inquiry should address."

"AI technology is incredibly powerful, but we must be cautious to ensure our data and identities are safe when we use it. "I treat AI chatbots like a public postcard. If I wouldn't write a piece of information on a postcard that could be seen by anyone, I wouldn't share it with a public AI tool. I'm not confident about how my data could be used for future training. "I don't discuss projects I'm working on at Google with public chatbots. Instead, I use an enterprise model, even for tasks as small as editing a work email. I'm much more comfortable sharing my information because my conversations aren't used for training, but I still minimize the personal information I share. "Sometimes, if I'm searching for things I don't want the chatbot to remember, I'll use a special mode, a bit like incognito mode, where the bots don't store my history or use the information to train models. ChatGPT and Gemini call this the temporary chat...

"There are, at this moment, two big unknowns about artificial intelligence. "First, we don’t know whether and how companies will succeed in getting value out of A.I.; they’re trying to figure that out, and they could get it wrong . Second, we don’t know how much smarter A.I. will become.  "About the first unknown, though, we have some clues. We can say, from firsthand experience that having an A.I. available to you can be really useful: That it can help you learn;  That it can make you more capable;  That it can assist you in better utilizing your human capital, and even in expanding it.  "We can also say, with some confidence, that A.I. cannot do many of the important things people do —that, except in certain narrow circumstances, it is better at enabling human beings than at taking their place.  "Meanwhile, about the second question —whether A.I. will get a lot smarter, so smart that it transforms the world —we know very little. We are waiting to find out, a...

"El Salvador has reached an agreement with artificial intelligence company xAI, founded by Elon Musk, to introduce Grok-based tutoring in more than 5,000 public schools, a move President Nayib Bukele's government describes as the world's first fully AI-powered national education program. "The initiative, announced this week by the presidency, aims to provide personalized academic support to more than 1 million elementary and secondary school students.  "Officials said the rollout will take place gradually over the next two years as part of a plan to modernize the education system. "xAI said the partnership will allow students to access Grok, the company's conversational AI model, adapted to El Salvador's national curriculum and designed to provide real-time academic support."

"Amazon has pulled a video recap made with artificial intelligence (AI) from its hit TV show Fallout after users said it got several facts wrong about the series. "The firm said in November it was testing the first-of-its-kind  tool in the US to help viewers catch up on some of its shows on streaming service Prime Video - including Fallout , its adaptation of the popular video game franchise. "But it has since disappeared from the site after users highlighted mistakes in its video summarising the events of Fallout season one — including claiming one scene was set more than 100 years earlier than it was.

"New work is part of a trend of using cryptography —a discipline traditionally far removed from the study of the deep neural networks that power modern AI —to better understand the guarantees and limits of AI models like ChatGPT. "'We are using a new technology that’s very powerful and can cause much benefit, but also harm,' said Shafi Goldwasser, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who received a Turing Award for her work in cryptography. 'Crypto is, by definition, the field that is in charge of enabling us to trust a powerful technology…and have assurance you are safe.' "Goldwasser was initially interested in using cryptographic tools to tackle the AI issue known as alignment, with the goal of preventing models from generating bad information. But how do you define bad ?  "'If you look up [alignment] on Wikipedia, it’s aligning with human values ,' Goldwasser said. 'I don’t...

"'The role would require me to assume multiple fabricated identities, and use pseudo profiles created by the company to engage in intimate and explicit conversations with lonely men and women,' Asia writes. "To do the job, Asia had to assume various identities, taking on lengthy backstories in order to play the role of chatbot  for someone on the other side of the world.  "'Sometimes I would be assigned a conversation that had been ongoing for several days and had to continue it smoothly so the user wouldn’t realize the person responding had changed,' he wrote. "In any given work day, Asia would assume three to five different personas  simultaneously, all of varying genders. He was paid per message, a flat rate of $0.05 per, which had to meet a required character count.  "He also had to type at least 40 words a minute, and keep up with a dashboard displaying the total number of messages sent. "'Falling behind on metrics could lead to wa...

"The Digital Entertainment Group, a coalition of several dozen stakeholders across programming, technology and retail, has launched a new alliance called DEG.AI. "The goal of the new effort is 'helping guide the media and entertainment industry through its artificial intelligence transformation, with a core mission to amplify human creativity,' the trade group said. "The AI revolution is opening up new horizons in animation, post-production and other areas, but the fast-evolving technology is also unsettling the creative community and prompting lawsuits over the training of video models. "Concerns are mounting, especially as above-the-line labor unions head into another round of contract talks with studios and streamers in 2026, about the viability of traditional copyright protection in the AI era.  "Union members also fear that AI will result in job losses, as has begun to happen in other industries."

"Archaeologists suspect that the first hominins to use fire took advantage of nearby wildfires: Picture a Homo erectus lighting a branch on a nearby wildfire (which must have taken serious guts), then carefully carrying that torch back to camp to cook or make it easier to ward off predators for a night. "Evidence of that sort of thing —using fire, but not necessarily being able to summon it on command —dates back more than a million years at sites like Koobi Fora in Kenya and Swartkrans in South Africa. "Learning to start a fire whenever you want one is harder, but it’s essential if you want to cook your food regularly without having to wait for the next lightning strike to spark a brushfire. It can also help maintain the careful control of temperature needed to make birch tar adhesives. "'The advantage of fire-making lies in its predictability,' as [Rob] Davis and his colleagues wrote in their paper.  "Knowing how to strike a light changed fire from a...

"Fire-making is a uniquely human innovation that stands apart from other complex behaviours such as tool production, symbolic culture and social communication. "Controlled fire use provided adaptive opportunities that had profound effects on human evolution.  "Benefits included  Warmth,  Protection from predators,  Cooking and  Creation of illuminated spaces that became  Focal points for social interaction.  "Fire use developed over a million years, progressing from harvesting natural fire to maintaining and ultimately making fire. However, determining when and how fire use evolved is challenging because natural and anthropogenic burning are hard to distinguish.  "Although geochemical methods have improved interpretations of heated deposits, unequivocal evidence of deliberate fire-making has remained elusive.  "Here we present evidence of fire-making on a 400,000-year-old buried landsurface at Barnham (UK), where heated sediments and fire-cra...

"The Walt Disney Co. on Thursday announced it will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI and will allow users to make videos with its copyrighted characters on its Sora app. "OpenAI launched Sora in September, and it allows users to create short videos by simply typing in a prompt. "As part of the startup's new three-year licensing agreement with Disney, Sora users will be able make content with more than 200 characters across Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars starting next year. "'The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling through generative AI, while respecting and protecting creators and their works,' Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a statement."

"Texas is rapidly emerging as an epicenter of artificial intelligence-driven energy demand, with an unprecedented surge in large-load power requests, a wave now dominated by AI data centers rather than Bitcoin miners. "ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s independent power grid and oversees reliable electric service for about 90% of Texans, reported that its large-load interconnection queue has ballooned to 226 gigawatts of new requests, roughly 73% tied to AI facilities. "Developers have already filed 225 large-load requests this year, and on the supply side, ERCOT is reviewing 1,999 generation proposals totaling 432 GW, according to The Miner Mag . " However, the load is growing faster than the supply . "While the generation queue is massive, it remains dominated by solar and battery projects, which are resources that don’t provide the around-the-clock power that AI data centers require. That mismatch is setting up fut...

"Experts say the lack of transparency around which AI models power each toy makes parental oversight extremely difficult. "Two of the companies behind the five toys NBC News tested claim to use ChatGPT, and another, Curio, refused to name which AI model it uses, but it refers to OpenAI on its website and in its privacy policy. "A spokesperson for OpenAI, however, said it hasn’t partnered with any of those companies. "FoloToy, whose access to GPT-4o was revoked last month, now runs partly on OpenAI’s GPT-5, Wang, its CEO, told NBC News . Alilo’s packaging and manual say it uses ChatGPT . "An OpenAI spokesperson told NBC News that FoloToy is still banned and that neither Curio nor Alilo are customers. The spokesperson said the company is investigating and will take action if Alilo is using their services against their terms of service "'Our usage policies prohibit any use of our services to exploit, endanger, or sexualize anyone under 18 years old. The...

"As it stands, individual artists don’t have clear, globally agreed protection from having their work used to train AI models. "Even if they’re able to opt out in the future, generative AI is likely to present major power imbalances. "A model legitimately trained on a catalogue as vast as UMG’s —a giant tranche of the world’s most significant recorded music —will have the ability to create music in many different styles, and with a wealth of conceivable applications.  "This could transform the musical experience. "To understand what risks being lost, academic research is now reinvigorating a view of music when considered at the scale of AI, as a collectively produced shared cultural good, sustained by human labour.  "Copyright isn’t suited to protecting this kind of shared value."

"Recent legal changes have sought to prohibit some enclosures of the public domain.  "This emerging protection of the public domain is encouraging though still very timid and incomplete if one does not change its perception as a negative concept, as what is not protected by law.  "A more robust protection of the public domain would need a reconceptualization of copyright as a more inclusive, relational, and cultural model, instead of a strictly proprietarian and exclusivity-based paradigm.  "Within such a revised regime, in allocating rights, privileges, entitlements, and freedoms in creative resources and their many inputs to the cultural public sphere, the public domain could be seen as a valuable cultural practice and be conferred some legal standing in the form of collective and inclusive entitlements."

"It’s worth remembering that musicians were at the forefront of the file sharing wars of the early 2000s, and that they’ve been outspoken and organized against the streamers too. "For musicians involved in that political fight, the problem wasn’t which powerful sector of the digital economy was able to make money from culture, but the corporate ownership and control of culture itself.  "Once upon a time, intellectual property was the problem.  Information wanted to be free.  Files were shared.  Metallica and the major labels were the bad guys.  Aaron Swartz was a hero.  Musicians like Wiley and lawyers like Lawrence Liang invited us to Steal This Film.  "Piracy was politicised. Not anymore. Or at least not in conversations about generative AI. "The political energy that has emerged in reaction to AI is remarkable, but it desperately needs an alternative vocabulary to resist the political economy of media being rearranged according to the imagination of...

"Given the massive datasets mobilised to train machine learners, existing copyright regimes prove inadequate in the face of the questions of distributive justice that such commercial systems raise. "Specifically, commercial practices premised on the extraction of value from a special kind of common-pool resource —the shared knowledge of a given music community —demand remedies grounded not in the methodological individualism of copyright law, but commons-based responses instead.  "As such, the article sketches a couple of alternative models (levy-based trust funds, ownership funds) that could provide a more equitable institutional and economic framework for sustaining the musical commons."

"This is a trap in the sense that it may satisfy the wants of a small group of powerful stakeholders, but it will harm the interests of the more vulnerable actors who are, perhaps, most drawn to it. "Once entered, it will also prove practically impossible to escape.  "I identify three routes into the copyright trap in current AI debates:  First is the 'if value, then (property) right' fallacy;  Second is the idea that unauthorized copying is inherently wrongful; and  Third is the resurrection of the starving artist trope to justify copyright’s expansion.  "Ultimately, this article urges AI critics to sidestep the copyright trap, resisting the lure of its proprietary logic in favor of more appropriate routes towards addressing the risks and harms of generative AI."

"For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. "This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline. "The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies. "Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice....

"OpenAI has allegedly become more guarded about publishing research that highlights the potentially negative impact that AI could have on the economy, four people familiar with the matter tell WIRED . "The perceived pullback has contributed to the departure of at least two employees on OpenAI’s economic research team in recent months, according to the same four people, who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity. "One of these employees, Tom Cunningham, left the company entirely in September after concluding it had become difficult to publish high-quality research, WIRED has learned.  "In a parting message shared internally, Cunningham wrote that the team faced a growing tension between conducting rigorous analysis and functioning as a de facto advocacy arm for OpenAI , according to sources familiar with the situation."

The Pentagon is announcing the launch of GenAI.mil, a military-focused AI platform powered by Google Gemini. In a video obtained by FOX Business , Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said the platform is designed to give U.S. military personnel direct access to AI tools to help revolutioniz[e] the way we win . "'The future of American warfare is here, and it's spelled AI,' Hegseth said. 'As technologies advance, so do our adversaries. But here at the War Department, we are not sitting idly by.' "Hegseth said the platform puts 'the world's most powerful frontier AI models, starting with Google Gemini, directly into the hands of every American warrior'."

"AI models not only point some users to false sources but also cause problems for researchers and librarians, who end up wasting their time looking for requested nonexistent records, says Library of Virginia chief of researcher engagement Sarah Falls.   "'For our staff, it is much harder to prove that a unique record doesn’t exist,' she says. "Her library estimates that 15 percent of emailed reference questions it receives are now ChatGPT-generated, and some include hallucinated citations for both published works and unique primary source documents.  "The Library of Virginia will be asking researchers to vet their sources for these requests, Falls says, and to disclose if a source originated from AI. 'We’ll likely also be letting our users know that we must limit how much time we spend verifying information'."

"The EU has opened an investigation to assess whether Google is breaching European competition rules in its use of online content from publishers and YouTube creators for artificial intelligence. "The European Commission said on Tuesday it would examine whether the US tech company, which runs the Gemini AI model and is owned by Alphabet, was putting rival AI owners at a disadvantage . "The commission said: 'The investigation will notably examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to such content, thereby placing developers of rival AI models at a disadvantage.' "It said it was concerned that Google may have used content from web publishers to generate AI-powered services on its search results pages without appropriate compensation to publishers and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content ."

"Along with a higher age limit of 16, Australia is the first jurisdiction to deny an exemption for parental approval in a policy like this —making its laws the world's strictest. "There's widespread criticism from many experts, lawmakers and parents —even kids —who feel social media companies are hiding from genuine action and accountability on these issues. As Australia's social media ban was considered, then formulated, the firms had little to say publicly. "'Hiding from the public discourse… it just breeds more suspicion and more distrust,' Mr Scheeler says [former Facebook Australia chief Stephen Scheeler]. "Privately though, many were seeking to bend the government's ear. [Snap boss Evan] Spiegel personally sat down with Australia's Communications Minister Anika Wells. She also claimed YouTube had sent globally renowned children's entertainers The Wiggles to lobby on their behalf. "In carefully worded public statements, sev...

"During the demonstration, the robot’s movements became unstable while distributing water, leading to dropped items and eventually a backward fall, reports GizmoChina . "One moment in the footage has drawn particular attention. As the robot tipped over, it moved its hands toward its face, a motion that closely resembles the way humans remove a virtual reality headset. "Observers noted that Optimus was not wearing any device, making the gesture a key point of debate. "Researchers, industry watchers, and online viewers noted that the movement is similar to that observed in teleoperated robots controlled via VR interfaces.  "The detail has led to speculation that the robot may have been remotely controlled during the event rather than functioning autonomously, according to Electrek ."

"If there's one thing that typifies Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella's tenure: it's a general inability to connect with customers. "A recent report from The Information detailed how Microsoft's internal AI efforts are going awry, with cut forecasts and sales goals for its Azure AI products across the board.  "The Information said that Microsoft's sales people are struggling  to meet goals, owing to a complete lack of demand.  "Microsoft denied the reports, but it can't deny market share growth trends —all of which point to Google Gemini surging ahead. "Last week we wrote about how Microsoft Copilot's backend partner OpenAI issued a code red  situation.  "ChatGPT has fallen behind Google Gemini in problem solving, and Nano Banana image generation has outpaced OpenAI's own DALLE by leaps and bounds."

"About 40% of 13- to 17-year-olds in England and Wales affected by youth violence who are turning to AI chatbots for mental health support, according to research among more than 11,000 young people. "It found that both victims and perpetrators of violence were markedly more likely to be using AI for such support than other teenagers.  "The findings, from the Youth Endowment Fund, have sparked warnings from youth leaders that children at risk need a human not a bot. "The results suggest chatbots are fulfilling demand unmet by conventional mental health services, which have long waiting lists and which some young users find lacking in empathy.  "The supposed privacy of the chatbot is another key factor in driving use by victims or perpetrators of crimes."

"President Donald Trump said Monday that he would allow Nvidia to sell an advanced type of computer chip used in the development of artificial intelligence to approved customers  in China. "There have been concerns about allowing advanced computer chips to be sold to China as it could help the country better compete against the U.S. in building out AI capabilities, but there has also been a desire to develop the AI ecosystem with American companies such as chipmaker Nvidia. "The chip, known as the H200, is not Nvidia’s most advanced product. Those chips, called Blackwell and the upcoming Rubin, were not part of what Trump approved. "Trump said on social media that he had informed China’s leader Xi Jinping about his decision and 'President Xi responded positively!'"

"China's government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on what it calls a whole-of-nation  industry policy, which began with Made in China 2025  unveiled 10 years ago, and morphed into the 14th five-year plan in 2020 committing $1.4 trillion over five to six years on new infrastructure, including 5G networks, smart cities, and industrial digitalisation. "And China is supposedly a Marxist-Leninist society, and Karl Marx was very suspicious of technology, writing in Wage, Labour and Capital (1847): 'The instrument of labour, when it takes the form of a machine , immediately becomes a competitor of the worker himself.' "China's global technology ascendancy is pretty much total, yet it has only half the number of billionaires as the US and that number grew this year by only half as much, so how is this possible? "According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's 2025 Critical Technology Tracker , released last week, China leads in seven ou...

"Generative AI content is, in essence, a distorted collage of resources that the generator found on the internet —resources produced with the sweat of real people who likely have no idea that their work is being used for someone else’s benefit, and little recourse to fight back. "AI models, flush with money, are constantly upgrading, and many have reached a point now where their content isn’t so obviously distorted or shockingly hideous in the sense of, say, characters with two irises in each eye or a short story that reads like the most shamelessly grasping LinkedIn post.  "But even free from those kinds of errors, there remains a mechanized, false quality that separates it from honest work. "For those who do not easily recognize the explicit distinction, a limited conscious perception does not preclude an unconscious sense of alienation and dread ." 

"'OpenAI was the golden child earlier this year, and Alphabet was looked at in a very different light,' said Brett Ewing, chief market strategist at First Franklin Financial Services. 'Now sentiment is much more tempered toward OpenAI.' "As a result, the shares of companies in OpenAI’s orbit —principally Oracle Corp, CoreWeave, and Advanced Micro Devices, but also Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank, which has an 11% stake in the company —are coming under heavy selling pressure.  "Meanwhile, Alphabet’s momentum is boosting not only its stock price, but also those it’s associated with like Broadcom, Lumentum Holdings, Celestica, and TTM Technologies. "The shift has been dramatic in magnitude and speed.  "Just a few weeks ago, OpenAI was sparking huge rallies in any company related to it. Now, those connections look more like an anchor .  "It’s a change that carries wide-ranging implications, given how central the closely held company has been to...