Videogame Stocks Slide On Google’s AI Model That Turns Prompts Into Playable Worlds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Alphabet’s Google rolled out its artificial intelligence model capable of creating interactive digital worlds with simple prompts. Shares of “Grand Theft Auto” maker Take-Two Intera … ⌘ Read more

AI Code Review Prompts Initiative Making Progress For The Linux Kernel
Chris Mason, the longtime Linux kernel developer most known for being the creator of Btrfs, has been working on a Git repository with AI review prompts he has been working on for LLM-assisted code review of Linux kernel patches. This initiative has been happening for some weeks now while the latest work was posted today for comments… ⌘ Read more

‘Moltbook Is the Most Interesting Place On the Internet Right Now’
Moltbook is essentially Reddit for AI agents and it’s the “most interesting place on the internet right now,” says open-source developer and writer Simon Willison in a blog post. The fast-growing social network offers a place where AI agents built on the OpenClaw personal assistant framework can share their skills, experiments, and discoveries. … ⌘ Read more

Apple ‘Runs on Anthropic,’ Says Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman
Apple “runs on Anthropic at this point” and that the AI company is powering much of what Apple does internally for product development and internal tools, according to Mark Gurman, the most influential reporter on the Apple beat.

Apple had initially pursued an AI deal with Anthropic before the Google partnership came together, but negotiations fell apart over pricin … ⌘ Read more

DuckDuckGo Users Vote Overwhelmingly Against AI Features
DuckDuckGo recently asked its users how they felt about AI in search. The answer has come back loud and clear: more than 90% of the 175,354 people who voted said they don’t want it.

The privacy-focused search engine has since set up two versions of its tool: noai.duckduckgo.com for the AI-averse and yesai.duckduckgo.com for the curious. Users can also tweak se … ⌘ Read more

The UK Paid $5.65 Million For a Bookmarks Site
The UK government paid consulting firm PwC $5.65 million to build its new AI Skills Hub, a site meant to help 10 million workers gain AI skills by 2030 that functions largely as a bookmarking service, directing users to external training courses that already existed before the contract was awarded.

The hub links to platforms like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning system rather th … ⌘ Read more

Amazon in Talks To Invest Up To $50 Billion in OpenAI
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon is in talks to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be a giant bet on the hot AI startup. The ChatGPT maker is seeking up to $100 billion in new capital from investors, a round that could value it at as much as $830 billion, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

An … ⌘ Read more

Unable To Stop AI, SAG-AFTRA Mulls a Studio Tax On Digital Performers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Variety: In the future, studios that use synthetic actors in place of humans might have to pay a royalty into a union fund. That’s one of the ideas kicking around as SAG-AFTRA prepares to sit down with the studios on Feb. 9. Artificial intelligence was central to the 2023 actors strike, and it’s only g … ⌘ Read more

Former Google Engineer Found Guilty of Stealing AI Secrets For Chinese Firms
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CBS News: A former Google engineer has been found guilty on multiple federal charges for stealing the tech giant’s trade secrets on artificial intelligence to benefit Chinese companies he secretly worked for, federal prosecutors said. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Offi … ⌘ Read more

Radiologists Catch More Aggressive Breast Cancers By Using AI To Help Read Mammograms, Study Finds
A large Swedish study of 100,000 women found that using AI to assist radiologists reading mammograms reduced the rate of aggressive “interval” breast cancers by 12%. CBC News reports: For the study – published in Thursday’s issue of the medical journal The Lancet – more than … ⌘ Read more

Universal Basic Income Could Be Used To Soften Hit From AI Job Losses In UK, Minister Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK could introduce a universal basic income (UBI) to protect workers in industries that are being disrupted by AI, the investment minister Jason Stockwood has said. “Bumpy” changes to society caused by the introduction of the technology w … ⌘ Read more

An AI Toy Exposed 50K Logs of Its Chats With Kids To Anyone With a Gmail Account
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Earlier this month, Joseph Thacker’s neighbor mentioned to him that she’d preordered a couple of stuffed dinosaur toys for her children. She’d chosen the toys, called Bondus, because they offered an AI chat feature that lets children talk to the toy like a kind of machi … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Project Genie Lets You Generate Your Own Interactive Worlds
Google is letting outsiders experiment with DeepMind’s Genie 3 “world model” via Project Genie, a tool for generating short, interactive AI worlds. The caveat: it requires a $250/month AI Ultra subscription, is U.S.-only, and has tight limits that make it more of a tech demo than a game engine. Engadget reports: At launch, Project Genie o … ⌘ Read more

ArXiv Will Require English Submissions - and Says AI Translators Are Fair Game
The preprint repository arXiv will require all submissions to be written in English or accompanied by a full English translation starting February 11, a policy change that explicitly permits the use of AI translators even as research suggests large language models remain inconsistent at the task.

Until now, authors … ⌘ Read more

US Leads Record Global Surge in Gas-Fired Power Driven by AI Demands
An anonymous reader shares a report: The US is leading a huge global surge in new gas-fired power generation that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions, with this record boom driven by the expansion of energy-hungry datacenters to service AI, according to a new forecast.

This year is set to shatter the annual record for new … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s Second-Biggest Acquisition Ever Is a Startup That Interprets Silent Speech
Apple has acquired Q.AI, a secretive Israeli startup whose technology can analyze facial skin micro-movements to interpret “silent speech,” in a deal valued at close to $2 billion that marks the iPhone maker’s second-largest acquisition ever, according to backer GV (formerly Google Ventures).

The four-year-old … ⌘ Read more

Massive AI Chat App Leaked Millions of Users Private Conversations
An anonymous reader shares a report: Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users’ private messages with the app’s chatbot exposed, according to an independent security researcher and emails viewed by 404 Media. The expose … ⌘ Read more

Software Company Bonds Drop As Investors’ AI Worries Mount
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Investors are souring on the bonds of software companies that service industries ranging from automotive to finance as fast-paced artificial intelligence innovations threaten to upend their business models. […] Bond prices tumbled as advances in artificial intelligence rack up. Google announced plans to … ⌘ Read more

Google Says AI Agent Can Now Browse on Users’ Behalf
Google is rolling out an “auto browse” AI agent in Chrome that can navigate websites, fill out forms, compare prices, and handle tedious online tasks on a user’s behalf. Bloomberg reports: The feature, called auto browse, will allow users to ask an assistant powered by Gemini to complete tasks such as shopping for them without leaving Chrome, said Charmaine D’Silva, a di … ⌘ Read more

‘Clawdbot’ Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis
An open-source AI agent originally called Clawdbot (now renamed Moltbot) is gaining cult popularity among developers for running locally, 24/7, and wiring itself into calendars, messages, and other personal workflows. The hype has gone so far that some users are buying Mac Minis just to host the agent full-time, even as its creator warns that’s unnecessary. Business Insider reports: Founded … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Inadvertently Announces Cloud Unit Layoffs In Email To Employees
Amazon appears to have prematurely acknowledged layoffs inside AWS after an internal email referencing “organizational changes” and “impacted colleagues” was mistakenly sent to cloud employees. CNBC reports: “Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at Amazon Web Services, wro … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Launch AI DinoTracker App That Identifies Dinosaur Footprints
Scientists have released DinoTracker, a free AI-powered app that identifies dinosaur footprints by analyzing shape patterns rather than relying on potentially flawed historical labels. “When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do the Cinderella thing and find the foot that matches the slipper,” said Prof Steve Brusatte, a c … ⌘ Read more

Citigroup Mandates AI Training For 175,000 Employees To Help Them ‘Reinvent Themselves’
Citigroup has rolled out mandatory AI training for all 175,000 of its employees across 80 locations worldwide, a sweeping initiative that CEO Jane Fraser describes as helping workers “reinvent themselves” before the technology permanently alters what they do for a living.

The $205 billion bank sent out an in … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla is Building an AI ‘Rebel Alliance’ To Take on Industry Heavweights OpenAI, Anthropic
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser that has spent two decades battling tech giants over control of the internet, is now turning its attention to AI and deploying roughly $1.4 billion in reserves to fund what president Mark Surman calls a “rebel alliance” of startups … ⌘ Read more

Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp To Test Premium Subscriptions
An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta plans to test new subscriptions that give people access to exclusive features on its apps, the company told TechCrunch on Monday. The tech giant said the new subscriptions will unlock more productivity and creativity, along with expanded AI capabilities.

In the coming months, Meta said it will offer a premium … ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Cuts Up To 15% Jobs To Redirect Resources To AI
Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to d … ⌘ Read more

How Anthropic Built Claude: Buy Books, Slice Spines, Scan Pages, Recycle the Remains
Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called “Project Panama” to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies.

The company spe … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Latest AI Chip Claims Performance Edge Over Amazon and Google
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it’s the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon’s latest Trainium chip on certain b … ⌘ Read more

DOT Plans To Use Google Gemini AI To Write Regulations
The Trump administration is planning to use AI to write federal transportation regulations, ProPublica reported on Monday, citing the U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers. From the report: The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” a … ⌘ Read more

How a 15,000-Person Island Stumbled Into a $70 Million AI Windfall
An anonymous reader shares a report: From Sandisk shareholders to vibe coders, AI is making – and breaking – fortunes at a rapid pace. One unlikely beneficiary has been the British Overseas Territory of Anguilla, which lucked into a future fortune when ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, gave the island the “.ai” t … ⌘ Read more

AI is Hitting UK Harder Than Other Big Economies, Study Finds
The UK is losing more jobs than it is creating because of AI and is being hit harder than rival large economies, new research suggests. From a report: British companies reported that AI had resulted in net job losses over the past 12 months, down 8% – the highest rate among other leading economies including the US, Japan, Germany and Australia, accordi … ⌘ Read more

Angry Gamers Are Forcing Studios To Scrap or Rethink New Releases
The video game industry is experiencing something that most consumer-facing businesses would consider remarkable: organized online campaigns from players are actually forcing studios to cancel projects or publicly walk back any association with AI-generated content.

Running With Scissors, the publisher behind the Postal shooter franchise, rec … ⌘ Read more

Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong?
Friday 72-year-old Richard Stallman made a two-hour-and-20-minutes appearance at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talking about everything from AI and connected cars to smartphones, age verfication laws, and his favorite Linux distro. But early on, Stallman also told the audience how “I despise DRM…I don’t want any copy of anything with DRM. Whatever it is, I neve … ⌘ Read more

Is Google Prioritizing YouTube and X Over News Publishers on Discover?
Earlier this month, the media site Press Gazette reported that now Google “is increasingly prioritising AI summaries, X posts and Youtube videos” on its “Discover” feed (which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app’s homepage).

“The changes could be devastating for publishers who rely heavily … ⌘ Read more

Google Discover Replaces News Headlines With Sometimes Inaccurate AI-Generated Alternatives
An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge:

In early December, I brought you the news that Google has begun replacing Verge headlines, and those of our competitors, with AI clickbait nonsense in its content feed [which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones … ⌘ Read more

Richard Stallman Critiques AI, Connected Cars, Smartphones, and DRM
Richard Stallman spoke Friday at Atlanta’s Georgia Institute of Technology, continuing his activism for free software while also addressing today’s new technologies.

Speaking about AI, Stallman warned that “nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren’t intelligent at all…” He makes a point of calling lar … ⌘ Read more

The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says
This month saw results from a yearlong global study of “potential negative risks that generative AI poses to student”. The study (by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education) also suggests how to prevent risks and maximize benefits:

After interviews, focus groups, and consultations with over 500 students, teachers, parents, education … ⌘ Read more

Google’s ‘AI Overviews’ Cite YouTube For Health Queries More Than Any Medical Sites, Study Suggests
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian:

Google’s search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than any medical website when answering queries about health conditions, according to research that raises fresh questions about a tool seen by 2 billion people each m … ⌘ Read more

AI Luminaries Clash At Davos Over How Close Human-Level Intelligence Really Is
An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune

The large language models (LLMs) that have captivated the world are not a path to human-level intelligence, two AI experts asserted in separate remarks at Davos. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind, and the executive who leads the development of … ⌘ Read more

AMD Releases MLIR-AIE 1.2 Compiler Toolchain For Targeting Ryzen AI NPUs
In addition to AMD releasing the Ryzen AI Software 1.7 release on Friday, they also published a new version of their MLIR-AIE compiler toolchain for targeting AMD Ryzen AI NPU devices with this LLVM-based MLIR-focused stack… ⌘ Read more

GNOME’s AI Assistant Newelle Adds Llama.cpp Support, Command Execution Tool
Newlle as a virtual AI assistant for the GNOME desktop with API integration for Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq, and also local LLMs is out with a new release. Newelle has been steadily expanding its AI integration and capabilities and with the new Newelle 1.2 are yet more capabilities for those wanting AI on the GNOME desktop… ⌘ Read more

Toilet Maker Toto’s Shares Get Unlikely Boost From AI Rush
An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto’s electrostatic chucks used in NAND chi … ⌘ Read more

When Two Years of Academic Work Vanished With a Single Click
Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT’s “data consent” option in August to test whether the AI tool’s functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently delete … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s AI Keeps Passing Its Own Company’s Job Interview
Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company’s own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have take … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Software 1.7 Released For Improved Performance On NPUs, New Model Support
AMD today released a new version of Ryzen AI Software, the user-space packages for Microsoft Windows and Linux for making use of the Ryzen AI NPUs for various AI software tasks like Stable Diffusion, ONNX, and more… ⌘ Read more

AI Boosts Research Careers But Flattens Scientific Discovery
Ancient Slashdot reader erice shares the findings from a recent study showing that while AI helped researchers publish more often and boosted their careers, the resulting papers were, on average, less useful. “You have this conflict between individual incentives and science as a whole,” says James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who … ⌘ Read more

South Korea Launches Landmark Laws To Regulate AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Korea Herald: South Korea will begin enforcing its Artificial Intelligence Act on Thursday, becoming the first country to formally establish safety requirements for high-performance, or so-called frontier, AI systems – a move that sets the country apart in the global regulatory landscape. According to the Ministry of Science and IC … ⌘ Read more

Intel Struggles To Meet AI Data Center Demand
Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its AI data-center CPUs while new PC chips squeeze margins. CEO Lip-Bu Tan framed the turnaround as supply-constrained, not demand-constrained, with manufacturing yields (18A) improving but still below targets. Reuters reports: The forecast underscores the difficulties faced by Intel in predicting global chip markets, where the company’s curre … ⌘ Read more

EU Parliament Calls For Detachment From US Tech Giants
The European Parliament is calling on the European Commission to reduce dependence on U.S. tech giants by prioritizing EU-based cloud, AI, and open-source infrastructure. The report frames “European Tech First,” public procurement reform, and Public Money, Public Code as necessary self-defense against growing U.S. control over critical digital infrastructure. Heise repor … ⌘ Read more

The Microsoft-OpenAI Files
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire takes a look at AI’s defining alliance in The Microsoft-OpenAI Files, an epic story drawn from 200+ documents, many made public Friday in Elon Musk’s ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission (Microsoft is also a defendant). Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. “Previously undisclosed emails, … ⌘ Read more