Aza Raskin: The AI alignment problem and its solutions

Aza Raskin: The AI alignment problem and its solutions

  Are we losing control of AI? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore AI cyberhacking breaches, supercoordation, and the game theory of the AI alignment problem with Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and the Earth Species Project. Aza explains why social media was “baby AI,” how the attention economy took shape, and why incentives determine outcomes. Then, we break down what occurred in the Open AI cybersecurity breach (a.k.a The Hugging…

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Trump apparently knew Nvidia CEO was sleeping with a Chinese spy

Trump apparently knew Nvidia CEO was sleeping with a Chinese spy

The New York Times reports: Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw the drafting of the highly classified memo this past spring warning top Trump administration officials that Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, was in a close relationship with a Chinese spy, multiple people briefed on the matter said. The document was based on classified intelligence from electronic surveillance of Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen who was a senior executive at a Singapore-based company that was buying Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence…

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U.S. cleared Nvidia chips to Chinese firms with empty offices and troubling ties

U.S. cleared Nvidia chips to Chinese firms with empty offices and troubling ties

The New York Times reports: In a recently built industrial park on the northwest fringe of Beijing, the listed address of a company called New Matrix stands empty, a hollow gray shell with wires dangling from the ceiling where lights should be. Earlier this year, the Trump administration approved this Chinese firm to assemble Nvidia’s advanced chips into the computers that create artificial intelligence. President Trump allowed the sale of the chips, called the H200, to China late last year….

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Hot fridges, a fake nuclear alert and a $6 billion heist — are we in the foothills of a hacking epidemic?

Hot fridges, a fake nuclear alert and a $6 billion heist — are we in the foothills of a hacking epidemic?

The Guardian reports: Alex Pearce was doing the morning rounds at his fruit and vegetable wholesale business in London on Monday last week when he noticed something odd. The defrost light on refrigeration unit 2 was on, and the panel reading was 150C. Unit 4 was the same. As he approached his biggest unit, its defrost light also blinked on. It was at this point that Pearce thought: is this a cyber-attack? He walked over to the box connecting the…

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Turning Point has ‘become a destructive force in Republican politics’

Turning Point has ‘become a destructive force in Republican politics’

The New York Times reports: Turning Point USA bet big on Arizona. Leaders of the right-wing activist organization founded by Charlie Kirk said the state’s contest for governor was “the most important race in America.” The group’s handpicked candidate, Representative Andy Biggs, a MAGA-aligned Republican, was one of the last politicians Mr. Kirk personally endorsed before his assassination last year. Its political arm spent nearly $20 million to support Mr. Biggs’s campaign. But on Tuesday, Turning Point’s bet went bust….

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AIPAC wanted to shape the debate. Now it has become the debate

AIPAC wanted to shape the debate. Now it has become the debate

Politico reports: Just one day after Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayorship, some of the self-described democratic socialist’s big-money backers gathered in Lower Manhattan to celebrate and discuss how they could build on his victory. During Mamdani’s race against former Governor Andrew Cuomo, they had spent more than $3.4 million on his behalf through a super PAC called New Yorkers for Lower Costs. But the conversation that unfolded in the snug SoHo event space did not focus on affordability….

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How China’s clean-tech machine is reshaping the global climate fight

How China’s clean-tech machine is reshaping the global climate fight

Reuters reports: China sent $132 billion in clean technology and investment to the developing world last year, by far the largest contribution to carbon-dioxide reduction of any country. In fact, the nation’s green-manufacturing juggernaut, built in part through heavy subsidies from Beijing, nearly matches the current total of grants, loans and private finance that all wealthy countries sent to poorer ones in 2024 to help fight climate change, according to analysis. Those loans and grants stemmed from a climate-finance program…

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Michelle Goldberg: How the Democrats did it

Michelle Goldberg: How the Democrats did it

  Ezra Klein: President Trump is primarily responsible for the Republican shellacking on Tuesday. But to get over the finish line in so many places — across the Midwest and deep into the South – Democrats had to run the right candidates, and those candidates ran very different campaigns. So how exactly did those Democrats do it? Michelle Goldberg, my colleague at New York Times Opinion, did amazing work this past year covering the biggest races — traveling to Texas,…

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Judge selects special master to investigate Trump administration’s conduct in golf course case

Judge selects special master to investigate Trump administration’s conduct in golf course case

The New York Times reports: A federal judge on Saturday said that she intended to appoint a former U.S. attorney in Washington to investigate the government’s conduct in the lawsuit over President Trump’s plans to remake the East Potomac Golf Links. Judge Ana C. Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia notified the parties in the lawsuit that she had landed on Jessie K. Liu to be a so-called special master, a role that would require…

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Why investors are dumping AI company stocks after Democrats’ election sweep

Why investors are dumping AI company stocks after Democrats’ election sweep

The Washington Post reports: The Democratic Party’s takeover of Washington and key state capitals — coupled with an abrupt financing chill — threatens the artificial intelligence boom that has been driving U.S. economic growth and stock values. Investors worry that Democrats, emboldened by their landslide win on Tuesday, will slow the nationwide buildout of AI data centers. The shift in political power in states such as Texas, Ohio and Michigan comes as Wall Street’s willingness to finance the industry’s trillion-dollar…

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Tech companies face mounting child safety lawsuits while pushing AI into schools

Tech companies face mounting child safety lawsuits while pushing AI into schools

CNBC reports: Tech companies have spent years telling parents they’re working to make their products safer for children. But ongoing jury trials, settlements and related litigation against the likes of Meta, Google and Snap suggest that they’re not doing enough. The latest examples landed this week. Snap confidentially settled a case claiming that its technology caused severe psychological distress to two teenage users. Meta, TikTok and YouTube previously settled with the plaintiffs in the same suit. And Google was sued…

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Israeli opposition leader chosen to try to form new government

Israeli opposition leader chosen to try to form new government

The New York Times reports: Israel’s president on Saturday selected Gadi Eisenkot, the leading rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to try to form a new government, handing him the daunting task of forging a parliamentary coalition after an indecisive national election last month. Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, said he had held “in-depth talks” with both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Eisenkot before making his decision. He ultimately tapped Mr. Eisenkot, a center-right former Israeli military chief, after more members…

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Tesla’s Cybercab is so safe it’s internal test results are ‘confidential business information’

Tesla’s Cybercab is so safe it’s internal test results are ‘confidential business information’

electrek reports: Tesla has answered NHTSA’s Special Order demanding it prove, under oath, that the Cybercab meets federal safety standards. The response landed on the October 30 deadline, and Tesla asked the agency to keep all of it confidential. The only part of the filing the public can read is a 30-page guide for firefighters. Everything about how a car with no steering wheel, pedals, or mirrors was certified as compliant is blacked out. We reported in September that NHTSA…

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A strange quantum theorem has killed Einstein’s reality

A strange quantum theorem has killed Einstein’s reality

Charlie Wood writes: One of a human’s earliest developmental milestones is an understanding of object permanence. It generally takes less than a year for a baby to realize that when an adult hides their face behind their hands in a game of peek-a-boo, they don’t cease to exist. There’s more to the world around us than what we perceive. This suggests — or at least, it suggested to Albert Einstein — that the world is “real,” in the sense that…

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