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A software engineer says that his Muse AI agent said something so strange and eerie that it convinced him to quit using it entirely.In an as-told-to essay in Business Insider, Ugo Nwune explained that he wanted to try using Meta’s agent because he liked the sense of security that came from an AI made by a trillion-dollar company, instead of the wild west of open source agents.When he set up his agent, he stressed he didn’t give Muse any additional permission on his device except access to his Facebook, Threads, and Instagram accounts.But after he tried Muse and didn’t touch…

Loads of stories have emerged over the past few months of corporate executives realizing their all-out drive to use AI was getting them absolutely nowhere. If anything, it was a net negative, as office workers set about wasting their budgets on costly AI tokens to appear productive.Now, it seems even top tech industry players are cutting back, as they realize their workers are frittering away money and churning out reams of low-effort AI garbage.As Reuters notes, companies like Meta are scaling back ambitious plans to lay off staffers and replace them with AI agents. Microsoft seems to be doing the…

In December 2015, 195 countries at the UN Climate Change Conference signed the Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change. The treaty’s overarching goal was to keep the “temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”While unquestionably meant well, the agreement has quickly turned into little more than a footnote as global warming has stormed ahead. Scientists have long warned that we’re on a path to blaze past that foreboding threshold in a matter of years, possibly by 2030.And now, according to the latest projections, that day is poised to come even sooner. In a new…

It’s not exactly a challenge most of the time to identify a sketchy phishing email that crudely impersonates an otherwise trusted institution or tries to lure you into a too-good-to-be-true deal in a bid to steal your identity.However, your AI agent may not be quite as discerning. As cybersecurity software company Malwarebytes warns in a new post, AI assistants may fall prey to prompt injection attacks, a type of malicious message in which hackers — or possibly rogue AI agents — include hidden instructions designed to influence the victim’s AI.These instructions are frequently made unreadable by humans by concealing the…

Nearly a year ago, news began to spread of an experimental weight loss drug called retatrutide, under development by Eli Lilly. Though the drug hadn’t made it through clinical trials, nevermind been released by a federally licensed manufacturer, a rapidly-growing black market ensured interested customers didn’t have to wait for the real deal.Now, the bill on those black market knockoffs seems to be coming due. As CBS reports, the consequences of the unapproved retatrutide trade have now become deadly.According to the broadcaster, the Food and Drug Administration has received at least two reports of deaths related to the use of…

Police in Cologne, Germany, have seized a humanoid robot after a pair of livestreamers used it to sexually harass a teenage girl.According to a police statement released Monday, the robot “allegedly touched a 16-year-old girl on the buttocks and performed thrusting motions against” her.There’s not much “alleged” about the incident, though, since the IRL streamers recorded everything that happened while live on Twitch.The robot’s owner is 16-year-old German IRL streamer Agaamuza. For the past few weeks, according to 404 Media, he’s been filming himself and his friends wandering the streets of Cologne while accompanied by a humanoid robot from the…

Amazon has officially surpassed a fleet of 1 million robots, an arsenal of mechanical arms, Roomba-like floor loaders, and hulking pallet sorting machines.Each robot is a node in an intricate web allowing the corporation to speed up delivery times and lower overhead. But for the over 1.5 million full- and part-time workers relying on Amazon wages to pay their bills, the company’s bot army represents rising competition — not just metaphorically, but physically.As George Mason University professor of business Brad Greenwood told Ars Technica in a recent interview, Amazon’s warehouse robots aren’t just helping Amazon cut costs on labor, but…

Using the NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a team of researchers led by University of Minnesota astrophysicist Mason Huberty had a closer look at a group of almost 10,000 galaxies spanning billions of light-years in the Fornax constellation. As detailed in a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, they honed in on a small space in the region that they thought was entirely unoccupied.But to their astonishment, they observed a single emission line emanating from it — twice over a span of just three months. Emission lines are bright, narrow bands of light emitted at a specific wavelength by…

Last month, satirical influencer Graham Zip shared a hilarious video of himself pretending to hallucinate during a job interview with a virtual AI avatar. When he rizzed the bot up with plausible-sounding gibberish, it went off the rails and chastised him, displaying some terrifying facial expressions in the process.The enraging trend of employers using an AI to perform screening calls to interview candidates has led to plenty of frustration among increasingly desperate job seekers who are faced with a dire employment outlook — in large part thanks to AI’s effects on the market.Now, Graham has pushed the narrative forward with…

Tesla’s newly unveiled Roadster can apparently fly and spin through the air for a few seconds, using thrusters that work like a giant jet-pack.It feels more like a car you’d buy in “GTA Online” than from an actual dealership, and there’s pretty much no conceivable way that this would ever be street legal, let alone practical. Nonetheless, that hasn’t stopped Elon Musk fanboys from dreaming up improbable scenarios where being able to go airborne in their Roadster — which they’ll definitely be able to afford — would actually be helpful.One even tried to prove his point using the tool of…