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The next time you’re checking into a hospital, it’s possible that your nurse may actually be 8,000 miles away.That’s the reality at a growing number of hospitals throughout the US and the world, which are turning to low-paid telehealth workers in the Philippines to help fill in the duty roster. As it is for remote driving and AI data labeling, the Philippines has become a wellspring of cheap labor for transnational healthcare companies, which are more than happy to exploit a country where millions of people live in poverty.Stunning reporting by Rest of World detailed the lives of some of…

You might wince at the professional spectacle of two humans beating each other to a pulp. But when it’s two robots? We want maximum carnage.Thankfully, the inaugural Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend (URKL) competition in Shenzhen, China, has delivered on providing the most brutal-but-bloodless spectacle you can lay eyes on.In a video of a cage match between two mechanical humanoids, one of the clanker combatants literally knocks its opponent’s block off by delivering a flying kick to the face.The robot continues to fight with its head dangling from between its shoulders and throws a few punches, but not for long.

When Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE boys started snipping wires across DC, they took out critical programs like the government’s premier climate research website and the hurricane-hunter aircraft gathering data on dangerous storms.While they were at it, the Trump administration also ripped up a project that would have vastly improved the country’s ability to monitor wildfires. The GeoXO program was a project originally encompassing six satellites that would greatly improve the resolution available to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to monitor atmospheric conditions like wildfire smoke, as well as weather events like lightning strikes, and climate observations…

After years of being engaged, it looks like SpaceX and the Pentagon are finally ready to send out save-the-dates.On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk’s formerly-just-rockets company is now in talks with the Department of Defense over providing the military access to its data-center capacity for running AI models, tying the knot on their already close relationship.People familiar with the matter told the newspaper that the arrangement could cost the Pentagon billions of dollars, but stressed the talks are ongoing and could fall apart.Computing power is a precious commodity during this ever-raging AI boom, and SpaceX has…

Yet another domino appears to be falling as part of the Ruth Goldberg machine that will eventually pop the AI investment bubble.Earlier this month, economic forecasters were sounding the alarm that overspending on AI was at a level far more severe than Black Tuesday, the day that jump-started the worst economic catastrophe in the history of the industrial economy. Now, investors seem to be coming to that same conclusion all on their own.This week, Taiwanese semiconductor giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) posted its second-quarter earnings results, revealing a staggering revenue of over $40 billion — a record-breaking sum for the…

A hack revealed in detail how AI music generating app Suno scraped millions of songs, likely including copyrighted ones, from across the web to feed into its AI model, 404 Media reports.Suno, which is currently embroiled in multiple ongoing copyright lawsuits, has already admitted in response to legal action that it used “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet” to train its music-generating AI. According to 404, the hack shed light on how that copyrighted music was obtained and funneled into datasets, with Suno pulling music and lyrics from sites including YouTube Music,…

While Wall Street was fast asleep, a Chinese-made large language model quietly leapfrogged 16 other models to become number one on the AI charts.The model is called Kimi-K3, developed by Beijing-based firm Moonshot AI. On Thursday, the AI benchmark platform Arena.ai announced that Kimi had gone from number 17 in the “Frontend Code Arena” — a measure of an LLM’s ability to perform multi-step web development tasks — to number one, surpassing the buzzy Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol by a mile.In the “Text Arena,” a measure of an LLM’s ability in text-to-text tasks like creative writing, Kimi-K3 earned…

Elon Musk’s xAI is suing a man for using its flagship chatbot, Grok, to create nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women and children.The Grok user, a 67-year-old in South Carolina named Terry Wayne Harwood, was arrested in March on multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. According to the allegations, Harwood possessed and distributed child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Filed earlier this week in Texas, xAI’s lawsuit accuses Harwood of using Grok to do just that, per Reuters. He apparently used two different Grok accounts, according to the lawsuit, and though xAI claims that Grok refused some of Harwood’s requests,…

SpaceX was forced to scrub the 13th test flight of its hulking Starship spacecraft Thursday evening. A computer system automatically aborted the launch as the mega rocket fired up its engines and as the countdown struck zero, with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk noting afterwards that “some of the engines didn’t start.”“Next launch attempt hopefully in a few days,” he added.The aborted flight is a sobering parallel to the rocket company’s performance on Wall Street. It’s notably the first Starship launch attempt since SpaceX went public last month.And, perhaps as predicted, investors were not impressed. Shares nosedived to a new record…

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had linked the outbreak of cyclosporiasis, an infection notorious for inducing explosive diarrhea, to iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms that was supplied to Taco Bell. Per the reporting, Taco Bell said it was voluntarily pulling the lettuce from select states where it received the contaminated produce: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. An announcement from the CDC warned the public not to eat food items with shredded lettuce from Taco Bell, but hasn’t identified Taylor Farms as the source.But while Taco Bell may have served…