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While the US appears to be further away from meaningful AI regulations than ever before, lawmakers certainly have plenty of ideas on how the country could go about setting meaningful rules.It’s a particularly precarious moment as fears over rogue AI models wreaking havoc and endangering humanity continue to mount. Even tech leaders from the majority of frontier AI labs have started to coalesce around the idea that the industry has to slow down the development of the tech to get ahead of a possible catastrophe.Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (VT-D) is intensifying his calls for a ban on the development of…

Despite being one of the world leaders in AI development, the private firm Anthropic has yet to post a quarterly profit. That operating deficit isn’t for a lack of trying — and, as the company tells it, could be reversing very soon, at least if you’re willing to swallow one massive caveat.According to new reporting by the Financial Times, the company behind the Claude told a select group of trusted investors that its adjusted operating income (AOI) is set to be positive for the second consecutive quarter.AOI is an accounting technique that strips out non-recurring costs, giving backers a very…

Remember how Elon Musk vowed that his AI Grok would make an anti-woke, “historically accurate” version of the Odyssey? Well, he ended up throwing together a whole contest around it — and the winner of the first place prize of $100,000 is, as you probably expected, laughable nonsense.The problems run deep. The Cyclops Polyphemus is depicted with three eyes, which feels disqualifying. And just a few cuts later, the famously monocular giant is at least four times as large as he was before. The other creatures and gods look like something out of a mobile game; Poseidon emerges from the sea…

Scientists say that the planet Mercury has been actively shrinking over the billions of years that it’s orbited the Sun, a process that’s leaving cracked-up wrinkles behind like an old apple.At just one-third the size of Earth, it’s already the smallest planet in our solar system — it’s larger than Pluto, but Pluto is no longer classified as a planet — in a title it’s bound to hold on to as its continues to diminish in physical size.Now, as detailed in a new paper by a team of scientists from the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute of Space Research, the…

President Donald Trump continues to push the boundaries of what it means to be out-of-touch after he gave a ringing endorsement for Flock Safety, the deeply unpopular surveillance company behind a national network of AI-powered cameras and license plate scanners.His reasons for backing the firm, however, weren’t particularly illuminating,“I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t,” Trump, told reporters on Sunday, sagaciously. “They think it’s an infringement,” he added, apparently speaking of Flock’s critics. “I like them.”The comments are the first from Trump publicly endorsing Flock, according to the Washington Post. As…

Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in calling for a slowdown in the development of frontier AI models — just days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he was quitting his job, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly.”The desire in Silicon Valley to pump the brakes is palpable. Following several hacking incidents this year, the threat of a rogue AI model wreaking havoc has grown from footnote-level what-if to an active topic of conversation at the highest levels of the industry.But they now face a powerful…

Earlier this week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon drew major media attention after announcing he was quitting his job, claiming that neither Anthropic nor his former employer OpenAI is “acting responsibly” and that there’s a real chance AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”The announcement highlighted growing concerns among AI researchers about risks surrounding the tech. Earlier this year, several frontier labs found that their AI models had escaped their sandbox environments and committed cybercrimes, further escalating those fears.It’s not just the AI industry that’s worried. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are also calling for much broader oversight…

Amazon is catapulting us into the final boss of sub vs dub debates.On Thursday, its Prime Video streaming service announced the launch of a new AI-powered feature that matches actors’ mouth movements to dubbed audio tracks — which we’re sure won’t result in nightmarish hallucinations of facial disfigurement.For now, the company says that the AI-powered lip syncing will exclusively be available on the English dub of the German Series “Maxton Hall,” though there are plans to expand it to other titles in the future.“At Prime Video, we’re constantly innovating with new tools that enhance the viewing experience for our customers,”…

The myriad horrors of the US healthcare system have spawned generations of medical tourism from the wealthiest country on Earth to the periphery: Cuba, Mexico, Costa Rica, Canada, Turkey, and Thailand, to name just a few.Now, Shanghai is quickly rising as one of the top destinations for cancer patients, as China’s biotech sector has spun an experimental treatment developed in the US into a standalone industry.New reporting by the Wall Street Journal took a look at this fast-growth industry, centered around chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T for short. CAR-T is essentially a personalized form of immunotherapy, in which…

Here’s a hazard you probably didn’t expect from too much screen time.Two doctors in the UK reported in the journal BMJ Case Reports the bizarre case of a young boy whose laptop literally toasted his skin over weeks and maybe even months of using it. Thankfully, the kid’s fine and was never in any real pain, so we can dive into this medical oddity without feeling too guilty about it.According to the eyebrow-raising paper, spotted by Ars Technica, the boy was first brought into an emergency department with reddish markings over his abdomen in a lace-like pattern. Nurses first described…