Latest 25 news items

I helped advocate for the following language in the annual US military funding bill from last year. Not very many people are aware that this is part of Federal law: it prohibits nuclear launch automation and requires a human in the loop for nuclear weapons employment.

Dario Amodei’s plans to put third-party safety evaluators inside AI labs are taking shape: Anthropic said that staff from technology consulting giant Accenture will begin working inside the company to scrutinize its models and staff. In a blog post , Anthropic said that Faculty, a company Accenture acquired in January to act as its AI division, will begin…

Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times ’ case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies’ own documentation warned that it was starting a “doom loop” that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the “largest theft of labor in human history,” and that it made a “complete mockery of…

This week, I moderated a panel on world models at the All In conference (no relation to the podcast), and it gave me a chance to dig into one of the most mysterious corners of the AI world. The big players in the space are Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs — and while both have accumulated a lot of buzz and funding, they also rank pretty…

ChatGPT broke Diogo Almeida’s heart. Almeida was an OpenAI researcher who helped build the chatbot and then invent reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the model-training technique perhaps most responsible for our current age of AI.

Disney has hired its first-ever chief technology officer and in a curious twist, the new executive hails from an AI startup that the Magic Kingdom previously accused of infringing on its IP. Karandeep Anand is the former CEO of Character.AI, a company that has weathered numerous legal problems since it was founded in 2021.

You would think that a multimedia conglomerate as large as Disney would have a few chief technology officers by now, but the company has just appointed someone to the position for the very first time. Today, Disney announced that Karandeep Anand is joining the company as its new CTO.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger ordered the state government to take steps that could empower local communities to have a larger say in data center development and slow down approvals in a state that is already home to the data center capital of the world .

The following compilation contains the enacted provisions of Title 18½ governing model training, artificial-agent interaction, computational misconduct, public AI discourse, and related offenses. Select a chapter below to inspect the full statutory text.

Chinese AI startup Manus, which earlier this year had to break off a merger with Meta, is in discussions to raise $500 million at a $4 billion valuation now that it has resumed operations as an independent company, The Wall Street Journal reported , citing anonymous sources. Potential investors in the round include IDG Capital, Boyu Capital, battery maker…

A week after an Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it’s already picked up some industry support , along with some pointed…

A week after an Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company’s CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it’s already picked up some industry support , along with some pointed…

Google is testing a new product designed to help families coordinate with the support of an AI agent. This week, the search giant introduced a new version of CC , an AI agent designed to work across email, calendar, chats, and tasks.

As the tech sector sounds alarms about AI’s potential to destroy humanity, entertainment labor groups are urging the public to stay focused on what’s already happening. The Verge reached out to Disney , Netflix , Amazon , Lionsgate , and other studios who have started using AI, as well film startups focused on bringing generative AI into the mainstream to…

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) is positioning the state to take the lead on AI oversight, including the potential to mandate a “kill switch” for frontier models, with a new executive order issued Friday.

It’s one of the most fascinating years in a while when it comes to iPhone camera upgrades. The big story of the iPhone 18 Pro is the variable aperture main lens, which lets you open the aperture up wider for better low light shots and make the aperture smaller for better depth of field in group photos.

You have an AI product to build. Do you choose a proprietary frontier model and get moving quickly?

A team of three independent security researchers at Hacktron says it took less than 72 hours for them to hack into OpenAI employee accounts using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and 5, The Wall Street Journal reports. They were able to access OpenAI’s GitHub repository, called “Monorepo,” which reportedly contains “OpenAI’s algorithmic secrets,” according to…

The app you use to trade stocks increasingly wants to be the app you use to manage your financial life. Investing, banking, credit, crypto, retirement, prediction markets, and AI-powered trading are converging.

Meta’s new AI assistant app, Muse, is now available on Mac. On the Mac, Muse can interact with your files, messages, calendar, notes and mail, all within their native applications.

FunnyPlaying, a Chinese company known for its Game Boy and GBA upgrade kits, has announced a new handheld that plays original Nintendo cartridges and ROMs. The FPGB Mini’s cartridge support is limited to the Game Boy and Game Boy Color so it isn’t as capable as the Analogue Pocket that’s also compatible with the GBA and Sega Game Gear.

Anyone shopping for a Windows laptop with a $1K budget should head to Best Buy , where for the rest of the day you can get a great deal on a capable Lenovo laptop. The Yoga Slim 7X is a slim 14-inch machine with a 2K 16:10 OLED touchscreen, Snapdragon’s high-end X2 Elite processor with 12 cores, plus 16GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB SSD.

The FCC has announced it’s waiving its rules limiting foreign equity ownership to 25 percent in the Paramount-Warner Bros. case and will allow three sovereign wealth funds run by the governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi to own 49.5 percent of the company.

Exhibit table bookings close tonight, Friday, September 18, at 11:59 p.m. PT.