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When Meta first launched its cutesy Muse AI agents to the public, the company was immediately met with a virtual tidal wave of headlines, as major errors and glaring privacy issues rose to the surface.As it turns out, the decision to release Muse was far from unanimous. As fresh reporting from the New York Times reveals, the buggy agent was forced onto the market by its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, even as it went rogue on the very people who built it.According to the NYT, Muse’s development cycle was plagued with disturbing safety errors that delayed its release for months. It…

An Anthropic AI model submitted a bogus tip about an unsolved murder to the Philadelphia police, in a blunder the department called “unacceptable.”The unspecified model, not unlike an unscrupulous prankster, submitted the fake info about the cold case through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com on July 18. Anthropic, however, didn’t find out about it until September 28 — and further waited until October 8 to inform police about what happened.The police didn’t act on the information because it was automatically marked as spam. But the sham AI tip alarmed police officials all the same.“The company must strengthen its safeguards to prevent similar incidents from…

Last week, OpenAI fired three safety researchers because they allegedly mishandled confidential information and shared it outside of the company’s approved channels.Now, the fired employees have published an open letter denying OpenAI’s claims — and warning that the company’s actions are scaring workers into staying silent.“We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI,” the sacked employees — Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni — wrote in the letter.The trio also denied…

In the United States, public sentiment against the rising power of AI labs and their CEOs is overwhelmingly negative. As Wall Street Journal polling from late September found, 63 percent of US adults support an immediate pause on AI development, while a Politico survey found about two-thirds of Americans have at least “moderate” anxieties over AI destroying humanity.When the scope of that public backlash first came into focus, tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg responded with some tone-deaf media stunts, hoping to win back hearts and minds by the millions. Now that this strategy has clearly failed, executives at top AI…

Tesla has admitted a major defeat in its branding.No longer will its notorious driving software be called “Full Self-Driving (Supervised)” in Europe. After negotiations with Germany’s transportation ministry, it’s agreed to rename it “Tesla Assisted Driving,” in a more accurate representation of the software’s capabilities — and a symbolically humiliating submission by Elon Musk’s automaker.The concession, however, will pave the way for Tesla to finally release FSD in European markets, so it’s a tradeoff that Musk will happily accept after years of campaigning to make it happen.The rename has quickly taken effect. Across its European websites in countries including Germany,…

In the age of AI, Meta platforms like Facebook and Instagram have become breeding grounds for content farms peddling in emotionally charged AI slop.Some click mills traffic in racist incitement against minorities, others in violent depictions of child abuse, but all of them converge on a common quality: bizarre and disturbing attempts at attention-hacking users on a platform that’s all but given up on proactive moderation.A new case in point is the rise of AI-generated clips depicting seemingly homeless children being arrested after stealing morsels of food from a store.Shared by accounts with names like “Emotional Tots” and “Tiny Miracle,”…

The first seven days of October mark an important period in China. Known as one of the three “Golden Weeks,” this holiday period begins with National Day on October 1, marking the founding anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, and kicking off one of the busiest travel seasons in the world.With so much holiday traffic, China’s transit authorities regularly deploy unfathomable resources to accommodate travelers. For this year’s National Day celebration, unprecedented demand was met with equally extraordinary supply, with one high-speed rail hub in Guangzhou setting a new record of one million passengers served in just…

It’s safe to say that when it comes to mathematicians, OpenAI isn’t exactly winning hearts and minds.On Tuesday, the ChatGPT maker released hundreds of new papers with purported proofs for all sorts of mathematical problems — fresh off of explosive controversy over how its AI agents arrived at a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations.The handling of the release, as with the Navier-Stokes, has grated experts in the field, who bristle at the company’s models potentially using their work — and at the implied expectation that they should do the hard labor unpacking and verifying the AI model’s sometimes nearly incomprehensible…

Christa Pike, a woman who’s been on death row since she was 20 years old after being convicted of killing her classmate more than 30 years ago, survived her own execution earlier this month, with the botched killing once again sparking a heated debate over the barbaric practice.Now, the Trump administration is doubling down by inviting the country to celebrate the upcoming execution of a mass shooter by livestreaming the grisly event over the internet — a ruthless 21st century twist on a sadistic practice only a handful of countries around the world still allow.It’s such an unfathomable idea that…

We’re one step closer to the final consolidation of America™ into a single unified corporation.On Thursday, the Financial Times reported that centibillion dollar coffee titan Starbucks has explored a takeover of decabillion dollar Chipotle Mexican Grill, in a venti-sized tie-up that would undoubtedly be the largest ever in the restaurant sector.It’s unclear if Starbuck’s takeover plans are still in the works and if it’s submitted a formal offer to Chipotle. But sources familiar with the matter tell the FT that the café behemoth has been working with advisers on a takeover proposal for the burrito chain for months.The revelation had…