When OpenAI created its “Superalignment” team in summer 2023, the goal was for it to “steer and control future AI systems that could be so powerful they could lead to human extinction,” reports @engadget. “Less than a year later, that team is dead.”
Jan Leike, one of the team’s leaders, who quit earlier this week, posted a scathing statement on X showing the internal tensions between the safety team and the wider company.
“OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity,” he wrote. “But over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Engadget has more.
If you use Slack for work, your messages and DMs to friends and colleagues are now being used to train the company’s machine learning features — and everyone is opted in by default.
A quiet update to the company’s policy suggests messages, data and files sent by users are helping Slack to improve its in-app features like channel recommendations, search results and emoji suggestions, reports @PCMag. Individual users can’t opt out either, something critics have called a “privacy mess.”
For anyone who watched The Jetsons and dreamed of a future of flying cars, that future could be up for pre-order as soon as this year, according to Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer Xpeng.
Xpeng AeroHT aims to deliver its flying car to customers in 2026, the company’s president told CNBC, with the vehicle currently going through a certification process with the Chinese aviation regulator. Here’s more.
Microsoft is reportedly asking hundreds of its China-based employees working in the company’s cloud computing and AI operations to consider relocating out of the country.
Some 700 to 800 people are said to have been asked about the move, according to the Wall Street Journal, as the U.S. crackdown on Beijing’s access to AI technology continues.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that the company had “shared an optional internal transfer opportunity with a subset of employees” without confirming details on the number and affiliation of staff affected. Here’s more.
The European Union has opened a formal investigation into Meta over concerns it isn’t doing enough to safeguard the mental and physical health of children, reports @theverge.
The probe will assess whether Meta has breached rules under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), noting that Facebook and Instagram’s UI and algorithms may cause “behavioral addictions in children.” There are also concerns that Meta isn’t doing enough to prevent minors from accessing inappropriate content, and that its age-verification tools may not be “reasonable, proportionate, and effective.”
The internet and time spent online is often cited as one of the biggest contributing factors to low self esteem and poor mental health, but a new study has found the opposite to be true.
“Nearly everyone seems to think that internet-powered technologies are driving an epidemic of ill-being and mental health problems,” said lead study author Dr. Matti Vuorre, assistant professor of social psychology at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, in an email to @CNN.
“Our study of over two million individuals from 160+ countries runs contrary to this idea.” Here’s more on the findings.
Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is currently working on a bid to buy TikTok, according to reports.
While it remains to be seen whether TikTok’s parent company ByteDance will agree to a sale to anyone, @Gizmodo reports that “McCourt’s background in utopian tech advocacy makes him an interesting figure to enter the race.” Here’s what we know so far.
If you remember a time when using floppy disks didn’t seem weird, you’re probably at least 30 years old. Floppy disks or diskettes emerged around 1970 and, for a good three decades or so, they were the main way many people stored and backed up their computer data.
However, it’s now been over a decade since the last floppy disc was made, and it wouldn’t even have enough capacity to store a modern smart phone picture. So why do some people still love using them? BBC Future speaks to some of the floppy disk faithful to find out.
Distrust over Chinese-owned tech brands operating in the U.S. continues to grow, with President Joe Biden blocking a Chinese-backed cryptocurrency mining firm from owning land near a Wyoming nuclear missile base.
Calling the proximity to the base a “national security risk”, the order forces the divestment of property operated as a crypto mining facility, and also requires certain equipment to be removed from the site too. Here’s more from AP.
OpenAI has announced the launch of GPT-4o, an iteration of its GPT-4 model that powers ChatGPT — and the rollout starts today.
The latest update “is much faster” and improves “capabilities across text, vision, and audio,” according to a livestream announcement by OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. It’ll be free for all users, and paid users will continue to “have up to five times the capacity limits” of free users, reports @theverge.
Donald Trump is poised to be the first major party nominee to court cryptocurrency traders, reports @politico.
Trump made an overt play for the crypto faithful at Mar-a-Lago last week, telling them that they “better vote” for him, citing the Biden administration’s regulatory crackdown on the industry — a big shift from the criticism he himself placed on it in his first term.
Could crypto help get Trump back to the White House? Here’s more.
“No other American megabillionaire businessperson has so publicly fostered ideological relationships with world leaders to advance personal politics and businesses.”
The @nytimes looks into Elon Musk’s use of X to build influence with nationalist and right-wing politicians, publicly backing their views, aggressively confronting their enemies, and even personally intervening in X’s content policies in ways that appear to aid them — and all to the benefit of his other businesses. Here’s more.
The solar storm that brought the auroras to many parts of the world this weekend also broke vital GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, reports @404mediaco.
One chain of John Deere dealerships even warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors had been “extremely compromised,” and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy would face problems when they go to harvest.
The outages have highlighted the vulnerability of modern tractors to satellite disruption, and the threat this places on our food supply — something experts have been warning about for years. Here’s more.
Futurism wanted to know: What kind of a company creates fake authors for a newspaper or magazine and operates them like sock puppets? What they discovered "should alarm anyone who cares about a trustworthy and ethical media industry." https://flip.it/oxcxAC #Tech#Technology#AI#Journalism
Layoffs are hitting workers at some tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Tesla. Here’s why that may backfire, explains Business Insider’s Tim Paradis. "In short, the effects of layoffs can counter the financial benefits of expenses carved out of a P&L." https://flip.it/KibAk7 #Tech#Career#LayOffs#Google#Microsoft#Tesla