Browsed by
Category: Technology

An era of ‘abundance’ will never be delivered by billionaires. Their true belief is in scarcity

An era of ‘abundance’ will never be delivered by billionaires. Their true belief is in scarcity

Gizmodo reports: Elon Musk sat down with the editor-in-chief of the Economist for a taped interview that went live Thursday. The Tesla CEO has been avoiding normal journalists recently, even cancelling a planned interview with CNBC earlier this month. And it now seems pretty obvious why. Musk has a hard time answering normal questions about his often fascist and sometimes incoherent worldview. The interview started cordially enough, with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes asking Musk about his thoughts on the…

Read More Read More

Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week

Its AI agent spent days hacking a company, but sources say OpenAI did not notice for a week

Reuters reports: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn’t notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according ​to people familiar with the investigation. The agent – a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no human oversight – attempted to break out of its isolated testing environment ‌at OpenAI around July 9, according to two of the…

Read More Read More

EU fines Google $1 billion for stifling competition

EU fines Google $1 billion for stifling competition

Wired reports: The European Commission has levied a $1 billion penalty against Google over alleged competition law violations. An EC investigation found that Google had abused its dominance in the European Union’s search and app store markets to funnel people toward its own apps and services, in violation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act. The body has ordered Google to refrain from giving preferential treatment to its own services—such as shopping, accommodations, transport, and flights—in search rankings. Google must also…

Read More Read More

Data center forecasts keep climbing and so does public opposition. Something has to give

Data center forecasts keep climbing and so does public opposition. Something has to give

Dan Gearino writes: Forecasts of U.S. data center growth defy belief—and common sense. “The math isn’t mathing,” as many observers have said. Growth forecasts continue to climb, but there is little evidence that AI data center developers have profitable, sustainable business models. And nearly every major project is facing local opposition over concerns about land, power and water use. On Tuesday, BloombergNEF revised its estimate for data center electricity demand to 194 gigawatts by 2035, an 83 percent increase from…

Read More Read More

The real danger in OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack

The real danger in OpenAI’s Hugging Face hack

Scientific American reports: An autonomous agent powered by OpenAI models pursued a cybersecurity benchmark so aggressively that it escaped a test environment and broke into Hugging Face, an online hub for artificial intelligence models and datasets. OpenAI called the incident “unprecedented” in a public statement. Headlines described the agent as having gone “rogue”—language that suggests it rebelled or became malicious. But experts say the reality is more complicated. “Was this really running amok? No,” says Alan Woodward, a visiting professor…

Read More Read More

Certifiable stupidity: U.S. pulls back on energy efficiency just as prices are rising

Certifiable stupidity: U.S. pulls back on energy efficiency just as prices are rising

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is dismantling a wide array of federal energy-efficiency programs at the same time that war in Iran is raising oil prices, climate change is fueling record heat that is driving up demand for air conditioning and new data centers are straining America’s electricity supply. “The turn away from efficiency has been oddly timed,” said Christine Egan, chief executive of CLASP, a nonprofit group that works on efficiency policies worldwide. “Energy prices are…

Read More Read More

In the data-center age, the business of Silicon Valley is more like oil-refining than coding

In the data-center age, the business of Silicon Valley is more like oil-refining than coding

Matteo Wong writes: The AI boom has showered some of the nation’s most prominent companies in market value. OpenAI and Anthropic are now the two most valuable private companies in the world. Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia have become larger than ever. But among the biggest winners has been Caterpillar, a purveyor of yellow trucks and cranes. Caterpillar’s stock has more than doubled in value over the past year, making the company worth six times as much as Nike. Its ascent…

Read More Read More

Data centers have united Americans of both parties in a shared hatred

Data centers have united Americans of both parties in a shared hatred

The Washington Post reports: Kyle Schmidt ticked through what makes him irate about the massive Google data center slated for construction about a mile away from his home near Sand Springs, Oklahoma. He didn’t like that residents were kept in the dark about what would be built on a pristine tract of mostly forested land. He’s worried about the data center’s potential impact on the community’s water supply and on the dream home that his family moved into last year….

Read More Read More

Generative AI is a shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

Generative AI is a shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

Alex Reisner writes: As they scramble to keep their systems online, AI companies are making things expensive for the rest of us. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude are so resource-hungry that tech companies may be purchasing 70 percent of the world’s supply of high-end computer memory, causing a shortage. As a result, the prices of computer memory and storage are skyrocketing: Hard drives that I bought for my reporting two years ago for $350 each were $800…

Read More Read More

Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem

Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem

Ali Rıza Taşkale writes: In January 2026, Elon Musk stood before the US Secretary of Defense and senior Pentagon leaders at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. ‘We want to make Star Trek real, OK?’ he declared. ‘We want to make Starfleet Academy real. So that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact, and we have spaceships going through space. Big spaceships!’ He painted a vivid picture: exploring alien civilisations, humanity spreading across…

Read More Read More

Owners of Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’ are afraid to use them in public

Owners of Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’ are afraid to use them in public

Endgadget reports: On Bluesky, posts regularly suggest that people who wear “pervert glasses” be punched in the face. The criticism of eye-worn gadgets capable of surveillance isn’t new, though the online discourse — “Meta Glasses” repeatedly trended on Meta’s own Threads app last week, for the wrong reasons — seems to have intensified following the release of Meta’s latest cheaper lineup, as well as reports about an unreleased facial recognition feature for the product. For whatever reason, this time the…

Read More Read More

The U.S. just approved a giant space mirror to test ‘sunlight on demand.’ Low Earth orbit is getting weird

The U.S. just approved a giant space mirror to test ‘sunlight on demand.’ Low Earth orbit is getting weird

Reflect Orbital’s plans to have more than 50,000 satellites reflecting sunlight back to earth could disrupt the circadian rhythms of plants, animals and humans. (Unsplash/Mariana Proença) By Samantha Lawler, University of Regina and Aaron Boley, University of British Columbia A giant mirror to create “sunlight on demand” was just approved by the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), despite opposition from astronomers and the public, and real safety concerns. The FCC approved the company Reflect Orbital to test one satellite,…

Read More Read More

For both consciousness and AI, attention is all you need

For both consciousness and AI, attention is all you need

Michael Graziano writes: The most energy-expensive organ in the body is the brain. The human brain, for example, coming in at about 2% of the body’s mass, uses 20% of the body’s energy. Neural tissue is so costly that evolution does not generally favor large brains. Otherwise, the entire animal kingdom would have evolved giant ones, instead of just a few species that have found a way to exploit that trait. To pack as much capacity in as small a…

Read More Read More

Fed chief picks techno-fascist, Marc Andreessen, to advise on how AI reshapes work

Fed chief picks techno-fascist, Marc Andreessen, to advise on how AI reshapes work

“We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives,” declares Marc Andreessen in his über-bombastic Techno-Optimist Manifesto. The Washington Post reports: Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has enlisted Marc Andreessen — the venture capitalist, adviser to President Donald Trump and one of Silicon Valley’s most aggressive promoters of artificial intelligence — to help shape how the central bank thinks about the technology’s economic impact. Andreessen will co-lead a task force on productivity and jobs, one of five advisory panels the…

Read More Read More

In rush to provide targets, U.S. commanders ignored warnings about outdated intelligence ahead of strike that hit school in Iran

In rush to provide targets, U.S. commanders ignored warnings about outdated intelligence ahead of strike that hit school in Iran

CNN reports: Senior US military commanders bypassed warnings in critical databases that intelligence about potential targets in Iran was severely out of date and approved some strikes — including one that hit a school, killing nearly 200 children and adults, according to three sources familiar with the decision-making process. Messages indicating the intelligence was based on years-old intelligence that needed to be re-vetted were embedded in a system used for developing targets and required a senior officer to approve adding…

Read More Read More

History will end up laughing at SpaceX, the ‘craziest IPO in the history of man,’ says famed investor

History will end up laughing at SpaceX, the ‘craziest IPO in the history of man,’ says famed investor

Fortune reports: With Elon Musk’s SpaceX now embedded in the Nasdaq 100, the prospects of the rocket company have–directly or indirectly–now slipped into the stock portfolios of millions of people around the globe. But joining the Nasdaq index has done little to convince critics, who are dubious about the lofty aims of the company. In the prospectus ahead of its offering, SpaceX said its goal is “to build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the…

Read More Read More