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Three hikers who extensively used Google’s Gemini to plan their trip to the summit of Mount Shasta in California’s Cascade Range had to be rescued by Forest Service rangers when the chatbot’s advice went horribly awry.As the Chicago Tribune reports, the three young men from outside of Sacramento attempted to reach the potentially active stratovolcano’s 14,179-foot peak earlier this week late into the night, despite hikers being advised not to attempt the trek past noon before turning right back.The three “novice hikers” ended up having to descend the steep slopes well into the dark. They called the Siskiyou County sheriff’s…

Apply for just about any office job these days, and there’s a pretty good chance your first round interview won’t be with a human, but with a crummy virtual AI avatar. Though the practice has become widespread throughout HR departments around the world, a new video released by satirical influencer Graham Zip shows just how humiliating the experience can be — and how straying from the system’s comfort zone can cause the bots to melt down completely.On logging into the interview, Graham is welcomed by a virtual avatar of a woman identified as “Dana Whitfield,” which prompts the interviewee to…

Talking to an AI chatbot can feel like confiding in a mirror, a private exchange equivalent to brainstorming in a Word document. Yet when it comes to the most popular AI chatbots, that mirror is really one-way glass — and you might be shocked to learn how many different people can watch from the other side.Since the rise of easily accessible AI chatbots, untold millions of people have happily fed AI models their deepest, darkest secrets. According to a recent survey conducted by browser company DuckDuckGo and flagged by CNET, a full third of all AI users admit to having…

Dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up around 85 percent of all mass in the universe, forms an essential part of the standard cosmological model, providing the gravitational glue that holds together entire galaxies. What it actually is, though — and even if it truly exists — remains one of the great mysteries of science.Now, a bizarre event that occurred nearly a mile underground at the world’s largest dark matter detector in South Dakota, the LZ detector, could be the first direct evidence of the substance. Or it could be something else entirely. Either way, it has scientists mystified…

If you’re one of the many people chowing down on melatonin gummies to help get to sleep, you may want to check out this study.A new piece of research published by the American Heart Association made an alarming discovery about long-term use of melatonin supplements, an over-the-counter sleep aid used by tens of thousands. Basically, those who use melatonin over a year or more had a 90 percent higher risk of developing congestive heart failure over a five-year period.Before you go flush your gummies down the toilet, there are a few caveats. For starters, the findings weren’t based on a…

Since the start of the data center boom, “job creation” was one of the key promises made to communities weighing whether to host the tech industry’s monstrous computing facilities in their backyards. That was always a gross over-representation of the facts, as most labor required for data centers comes in the form of temporary construction jobs to build them. Still, the tech tycoons who need data centers to keep the AI revolution chugging along could always fall back on promoting the lonely skeleton crews tasked with manually monitoring, patrolling, and maintaining each facility.Now, even that could be going away.According to…

Drilling thousands of miles into the Earth to study our planet’s inner layers — its thin crust, rigid mantle, liquid outer core, and solid inner core — simply isn’t feasible given technological limitations.Instead, geologists typically use clever tricks to explore our planet’s interior, like probing seismic activity triggered by the dynamics of these shifting layers to plumb their mysteries.And much like these layers, that picture continues to evolve. As detailed in a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences analyzed data from over two million earthquakes across the planet that…

While American tech billionaires fret over the capabilities of Chinese AI, one national security advisor has a brilliant idea to flatten the competition: simply bomb their data centers to smithereens.In a new report titled “Superpowers and AGI,” former Obama-era national security official Jacob Stokes calls for United States to begin preparing readiness drills in response to Chinese AI development — up to and including military strikes on the nation’s data centers, the South China Morning Post reported.AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to the theoretical point at which an AI model achieves human, or superhuman, levels of reasoning and intelligence.…

As work conditions go, the transition from licensed taxi cabs to the rideshare model represented a significant step backwards for drivers in the US. Stable wage jobs became “side gigs,” while human managers were replaced by labyrinthine algorithms. And forget fleet maintenance — under the new model, disenfranchised drivers were now responsible for their own vehicle’s upkeep, and all the financial burdens that come with it.Yet with robotaxis from brands like Waymo and Tesla spreading through US cities like wildfire, even the Uber-fied gig economy is starting to become untenable for workers. Rising in its place is the “robotaxi handling”…

OpenAI’s bots have allegedly been behaving badly again: a swarm of rogue agents created by the company reportedly took over an obscure German website and turned it into a messaging forum to communicate.The incident, which was discovered by a team of AI researchers and first reported by Reuters, is the second known OpenAI breach of its kind — and like the other rogue swarm of AI agents to be discovered this summer, it has experts deeply alarmed about the emerging powers of the tech to escape the control of the humans who created it.According to the team of four researchers, who…