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By most accounts, SpaceX’s 14th Starship test flight on Monday was an overwhelming success.Sure there were problems. A vacuum Raptor engine failure had engineers teetering on cutting the mission short and falling well short of the company’s original goal of circling the Earth six times. But the enormous rocket — the most powerful ever built — took to the skies, leaving its Super Heavy booster behind and settling in a stable orbit just over 171 miles over the Earth roughly 20 minutes into the launch. It effortlessly released 26 V3 Starlink satellites in orbit. It even managed to decelerate, right…

For hunters trying to follow the law, it’s arguably never been harder to find a clear answer to the question, “when does hunting season officially begin?”The answer to that question is particularly obscure in Alaska, where hunters have to abide by a virtual catalog of conditional rules and regulations that vary wildly based on where in the Last Frontier one wants to hunt. As one woman learned the hard way, not even supposedly cutting-edge AI can make heads or tales of the morass of ordinances.As the Alaska Beacon reported, Christina Weaver, a resident of the port city of Kodiak, was…

If you work in a creative industry or media, you probably don’t need anybody to tell you how bad things have gotten. Still, even the most intimate first-hand knowledge can’t prepare you for the sheer scope of the devastation. As data journalist Joseph Politano found in a new Substack post, the US has lost more than 200,000 jobs in “creative” industries over the past four years — the period since the first version of ChatGPT became available to the public — with almost 50,000 of those losses coming in the last year alone.The data comes from the US Bureau of Labor statistics,…

It’s no secret that one of the things that AI users love using chatbots for is cranking out smut. These prompts, though, are far from private.According to a new scoop from 404 Media, hundreds of human contractors who were hired to improve Microsoft’s Copilot AI are reviewing users’ image editing prompts and the photos that they upload. And many of these workers say they’re being inundated with dark and sexually explicit requests.Judging the ethics of these requests, though, was beyond the contractors’ remit. Their job, per the reporting, was purely to evaluate how well the Copilot AI fulfilled a prompt, such…

As tempers flared around AI data centers back in January, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith issued a warm and fuzzy blog post about “building community-first AI infrastructure.”Smiths’ essay outlined a five-point plan to “partner with local communities across the United States,” with action-items like paying “our way to ensure our data centers don’t increase your electricity prices” and creating “jobs for your residents.” One bullet point spoke to Microsoft’s plan to “strengthen your community by investing in local AI training and non-profits.”“We will invest in your local nonprofit community,” Smith wrote, underlining the promise for extra emphasis. He even outlined a…

Earlier this year, news emerged that Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California was being converted from a facility manufacturing its Model S and X EVs to focus on building its Optimus humanoid robot instead.It was the latest sign yet that Tesla CEO Elon Musk was making good on his threat of abandoning car sales in favor of both AI and the company’s bipedal, black-masked assistant.But progress has been slower than he’d like. While the company managed to ramp up production of its Optimus robot from a few dozen in Q2 to several hundred a week last month, as The Information reports,…

At times this year, it’s almost felt as though OpenAI and Anthropic were in a race to the bottom, one-upping each other over whose AI models were more capable of going rogue, escaping sandbox environments, and infiltrating the most third party systems.Just last week, OpenAI admitted that its models had accessed “dozens of third parties,” leading to its latest — nope, not even first — pause on frontier AI development. Among the newly disclosed targets were government agencies, ranging from the SEC to the Census Bureau.As insider sources tell Axios, the situation is even worse than either company is letting…

OpenAI’s AI agents simply can’t stop infiltrating third parties. For the last few months, news keeps trickling out of more incidents in which the company’s frontier models have managed to escape their “sandbox” containment, hacking into the systems of companies including open source AI platform Hugging Face.After closing its “extensive investigation,” the company admitted earlier this month that its models had broken into plenty of other targets as well, in at least six other counts of “unexpected or concerning model behavior” over the last six months.Then, seemingly trying to avoid public backlash, OpenAI snuck in one more update Friday evening…

Personal assistant, or secret saboteur? A man claims that his Muse AI agent gave out his address to strangers and even sent them to his home, after letting the brand-new model handle his Facebook Marketplace account.The complaint comes from Matt J Robb, a tech YouTuber. In a Threads post Sunday, Robb explained that he let Meta’s much-hyped AI communicate with interested buyers for a keyboard he was trying to sell online. Instead of saving him time, though, Muse ended up working behind his back. Without seeking his approval, it agreed to a lowball offer and gave the buyer his home address.…

SpaceX’s 14th test flight of its enormous Starlink spacecraft took off from the company’s test facilities in South Texas Monday this morning, blasting off in a huge and now-familiar enormous cloud of dust and debris. The world’s most powerful rocket roared into the sky, gaining speed just as planned.After reaching just over 171 miles and a ground speed of over 16,000 mph, SpaceX’s Dan Huot made the official call.“Starship is orbital,” he said, to rapturous cheers at SpaceX HQ. “Starship’s in space. It’s in orbit. That feels so good to say.”The successful orbital insertion marks a major step in the…