Futurism

In 2011 — three years after Jeffrey Epstein plead guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution of a minor — Microsoft founder Bill Gates started communicating with him extensively. The disgraced billionaire and philanthropist is being grilled by investigators from Congress’ House Oversight Committee this week over his ties to the deceased sex criminal, with lawmakers trying to figure out how far their relationship went. As the New York Times reports, Gates is seemingly pulling out all the

Ever since it was announced, tech journalists wondered whether president Donald Trump’s “Trump Mobile” smartphone would ever see the light of day. The gaudy-looking golden smartphone, dubbed Trump Mobile T1, finally landed in the hands of a larger pool of tech reviewers this week — and as it turns out, suspicions that it was a shoddily-repackaged phone by Chinese manufacturer HTC were entirely warranted. A recent teardown by repair company iFixit confirmed that the T1 is

OpenAI is facing yet another lawsuit over a user’s death by suicide. The latest lawsuit, filed today in California, accuses OpenAI’s ChatGPT — specifically the chatbot’s now-defunct GPT-4o model — of encouraging the suicide of Alice Carrier, a 24-year-old web developer in Montreal, Canada. “If a person came up to me, and they were clearly in distress and sharing their thoughts of suicide, I would be expected to help them, not encourage them to fixate on th

Lawyers just can’t stop being caught using AI chatbots, polluting their filings with hallucinated citations that infuriate judges when they’re caught. Even prestigious law firms are being humiliated, with some perpetrators getting slapped with fines and facing discipline from the Bar. In a particularly egregious reminder of just how widespread the problem has become, a United States district judge in Mississippi found out that lawyers from both sides of a recent case had used AI.

Earlier this year, Anthropic refused to release its Mythos AI model to the public, saying it was simply too dangerous. At the time, executives claimed the model was capable of punching through powerful cybersecurity safeguards, pointing at researchers who used it to discover thousands of vulnerabilities in widely-used open source code. Months later, Anthropic was finally ready to go public with the model. On Tuesday, the Dario Amodei-led company announced a Mythos-powered model called Fabl

An AI price war is brewing. Corporations are reeling after finding that the cost to access powerful AI tools is soaring — despite showing no clear payoff. In one particularly unfortunate incident, according to Axios, the CFO of a company accidentally racked up half a billion dollars in Claude usage fees in a single month. Put simply, the horrible economics of AI are finally starting to rear their ugly head. Astronomical capital expenditures by AI companies are starting to trickle down to u

The extracted flesh of the dead being used to fulfill the youth-chasing vanities of the living? That’s the crux of alloClae, an injectable filler sold by Tiger Aesthetics that’s made from the sterilized fat tissue of corpses. Despite the product’s grim provenance, it’s become the hot new thing in cosmetics, since it can be quickly injected without anesthetic. New York health regulators, however, aren’t very happy about its growing popularity. As Business Insider

Palantir, the multi-billion dollar AI surveillance company, has been dealt a major blow after London mayor Sadiq Khan blocked a contract with the city’s Metropolitan police force. Named after the seeing stone used by the villain Sauron, the physical embodiment of a cosmic evil in JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” books, Palantir the company is not backing down. According to the Guardian, the surveillance-tech giant has now signaled its intent to sue Khan over his decis

Last week, the Trump administration announced that it was pumping $700 million of federal funding into the US coal industry, a short-sighted investment in a highly polluting source of energy that’s been in decline for decades. It’s never been more obvious that there are far better alternatives. Case in point, according to global energy think tank Ember, solar power generation overtook coal for the first time in US history last month: in May, solar made up 12.8 percent of all elect

The White House and Congress are working on a deal to clamp down on what US citizens are allowed to say online. According to new reporting by Axios, the Trump administration is negotiating with key senators in an effort to shoehorn a massive legislation package which would limit states’ abilities to regulate AI in exchange for placing broad federal limits on digital speech. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the Trump administration’s push to revoke AI regulation from individual

Bot What It Seems In August 2021, Elon Musk’s Tesla held a flashy event announcing its plans to build a humanoid robot. The so-called Tesla Bot, a product that’s since been renamed Optimus, danced onto the stage, pulling off some awkward moves. In reality, the EV maker wasn’t even remotely ready to show off a fully-fledged android. Instead, Tesla had sent out an actor wearing a black and white bodysuit, a cringey gaffe that had investors asking some hard questions. (Five

Who’s the World Cup favorite?  Spain, obviously.  But the other nations might stand a chance if FIFA let them field this absurd soccer-playing robot — which wouldn’t even be close to being one of the craziest things the world soccer association has done lately. Take a look for yourself. In a recently viral video clip, the diminutive T1 robot, built by the Beijing-based firm Booster Robotics, absolutely leathers a ball into the bottom corner of the goal, striking it

Powerful winds capable of destroying entire galaxies could explain why the early universe is littered with “dead” realms when they should be growing and entering their prime, astronomers say. As detailed in a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the researchers used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe a galaxy dating back to just one billion years after the universe was formed. What they found was a slowly unfolding catastrophe: a hug

The inside of a facility where AI chips are made is extraordinarily sensitive. Fabrication plants are filled with equipment so exquisitely delicate that even the tiniest contaminants can result in precious chips being ruined. As Business Insider‘s Olivia Nemec found out firsthand, the list of things she wasn’t able to wear or use ahead of taking a peek inside Intel’s chip factory in Oregon was incredibly extensive — including makeup, hairspray, bluetooth gadgets, velcro, and

Department of Injustice Jalil Richardson of North Carolina is free after spending over 50 days in jail after being wrongfully arrested for a crime he did not commit. According to Action News Jax, Richardson was initially accused of stealing a vehicle in Jacksonville, Florida, after police fed surveillance video from a private business into their AI-integrated facial recognition system. The system then identified Richardson with what it said was an 85 percent facial recognition match, t

No Fault of Our Own Southern California is home to two major fault lines, the San Andreas and San Jacinto, where large tectonic plates grind past each other, occasionally triggering violent earthquakes. While smaller quakes are not uncommon in the region, powerful ones can prove devastating. For instance, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which occurred along the San Andreas fault, became the deadliest incident of its kind in the history of the United States, killing an estimated 3,000 pe

Mysteries of the Deep Something is stirring in the waters off the coast of Greenland, and it isn’t a submarine fleet sent by Donald Trump. According to reporting by the New Scientist, evidence is mounting that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — a massive system of deep sea currents that acts like a conveyor belt for the world’s oceans known as AMOC — is starting to slow its gears. As it does, cold waters from the Greenland ice sheet are allowed to pool in the Nor

Generation Brain Rot Here’s the latest harrowing dispatch from the frontlines of education, as yet another higher education instructor laments that his pupils literally can’t read. In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education, university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read “without complaint” as an undergraduate a decade ago.

NASA announced the crew of four astronauts for its upcoming Artemis 3 mission during a Tuesday announcement, an important stepping stone in its ambitions to return humans to the lunar surface. The space agency also elaborated on what the mission, which is still slated for some time next year, will entail. Instead of taking one big step to the Moon, as originally envisioned, the astronauts will be traveling only to Earth’s orbit inside NASA’s Orion capsule, where they’ll rend

Look, nobody roots for workers to lose their jobs. But some companies are built on such a ridiculous premise that it’s impossible to ignore the cracks in the foundation — making layoffs all but inevitable. On Monday this week, the Sam Altman-founded startup Tools for Humanity announced it was laying off an unspecified number of employees, Business Insider reported. The company, which had employed more than 500 people, is valued at $2.5 billion, with backing from big name tech investors