Former Institute of Peace Workers Warn Trump May Push to Engrave Name on Building
As part of a lawsuit, the workers have asked a federal court to stop any plans to engrave the building with President Trump’s name.
Microsoft and OpenAI Workers Worry About ‘Largest Theft of Labor’ in History
Newly unsealed court documents showed concern within Microsoft and OpenAI over the use of millions of news articles to develop A.I. systems.
Ex-Google DeepMind Researcher Also Warns AI Could 'Kill All Humans'. But Meta's Zuckerberg Believes Safety is Up to Each AI Company
Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee "became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could 'kill all humans', saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:
Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon's comments, saying he was correct and that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
"I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research," Bilal Chughtai wrote on X. "I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome." Chughtai, who co-authored research papers while at Google DeepMind, worked there as a research engineer and left the company in July 2026, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg "said it's up to each AI company to make sure its technology is safe," reports the Associated Press, "distancing himself from calls by rival companies for a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence.
AI companies are already motivated to develop their models in a safe way and face "significant liability" to prevent them from causing harm, Zuckerberg said. "Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens," he wrote on X... Zuckerberg said Meta delayed releasing its Muse AI agent for several months to ensure its safety and security. "We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would," he said.
Companies should prioritize building safe AI models instead of systems that can automatically improve themselves, a function known as recursive self-improvement, Zuckerberg wrote. "Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely."
But Zuckerberg also agreed that engaging independent evaluators and advisors "is industry best practice," adding that Meta Superintelligence Labs "already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work...
"I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
G.O.P. Representative Breaks With Trump in Ad Criticizing the Immigration Crackdown
Representative María Elvira Salazar, a three-term representative from Miami, won re-election by 20 percentage points in 2024. Her ad suggests worry among some Republicans about their standing with Hispanic voters.
S.U.V. Driver Charged With Murder in Los Angeles Bus Crash
Prosecutors said the driver was impaired by drugs and ran a red light before ramming a city bus on Tuesday. Two people died. Compounding the tragedy, a news helicopter also crashed.
Montana Ballot Measure Would Strike at Political ‘Dark Money’
A measure aimed at stemming the tide of corporate money in politics will be on the November ballot. Opponents say it violates a high court ruling.
Trump Wants Putin to End the War. He May Offer Russia Business Deals First.
A new sanctions bill is meant to pressure President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to end the war in Ukraine. But President Trump is doubling down on a different approach: offering enticements to Russia.
Yemen War Intensifies as Houthi Militia Advances on Marib
Clashes between Iranian-backed Houthi fighters and Saudi-backed government forces have been reported near oil-rich Marib Province.
For a Border Tribe, Trump’s Wall Is a Betrayal: ‘They Want to Erase Us’
An escalating confrontation on Native land southwest of Tucson threatens to upend decades of uneasy cooperation between the Tohono O’odham Nation and the United States.
Iran Strikes On Amazon Data Centers Caused Permanent Loss of Customer Data
Ars Technica reports:
Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Amazon Web Services was "unable to restore access to the resources and data" hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September 15. The development was first reported by Reuters and suggests that the Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage on the data centers.
Customer data was irretrievably lost in one of three AWS availability zones in the United Arab Emirates region, specifically the mec1-az2 availability zone.
Each availability zone is serviced by one or more Amazon data centers. The company is still working on "recovering regional resources" and restoring resources hosted in the other two availability zones in the United Arab Emirates... But the destruction was apparently even more widespread for the data centers in the Bahrain region, because Amazon said it was unable to restore access to resources and data across all three availability zones there. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned multiple Availability Zones and exceeded what our regional and multi-AZ services are designed to withstand," the AWS update said.
The company had already suspended customer billing in the affected AWS regions in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and has spent the past six months attempting to restore normal operations... [When the war began] AWS immediately urged customers to migrate resources to other cloud regions and use remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." The cloud service also reportedly issued $150 million in customer credits following the initial Iranian strikes in March.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Public Charge Rule: How Trump’s Green Card Policy Could Affect Immigrant Families
The policy, set to take effect Friday, would give immigration officers broader authority to deny permanent residency to people using public benefits.
Share the Times Pages You Couldn’t Throw Away
The New York Times has been publishing for 175 years. Some of that history may be sitting in a shoe box under your bed.
Trump Air Force One Photos Fuel Kennedy Center Demolition Speculation
Images captured through the windows of Air Force One showed President Trump reviewing a poster with the title “Kennedy Center DEMOLISHED.”
The Face of London in the 1960s Is Living Her Best Life
The face of London in the 1960s is living her best life at the age of 77.
Watching Bigots Erupt
This is what I see when I look at the picture Bo French hates.
Hackers Stole Flock's Camera Software, Revealing How the Company Tracks Cars and People
"Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED," according to an article published on both sites.
Though Flock has described its system as protected by on-device encryption, "The hackers were able to copy the camera's storage and recover an encryption key stored on the device, which unlocked videos of thousands of vehicle detections."
The hackers shared the material with 404 Media and the transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which shared the data with WIRED. 404 Media and WIRED then analyzed those files as part of a joint investigation... [T]he joint analysis of the recovered data shows that software running on the device explicitly detects people as well as vehicles, license plates, and bicycles. The camera can produce dozens of images of a single passing vehicle and, according to several weeks of recovered logs, generated more than a million images. Its computer-vision software also sometimes isolated bumper stickers and other graphics, including, in one case, an American flag patch on a motorcyclist's saddlebag...
According to our analysis, the camera's logs recorded about 21 days of activity across several periods. During those windows, the device photographed roughly 50,200 vehicles and generated about 1.6 million images. On a typical day, it logged around 3,300 vehicles, with a high of 4,454... The software running on the camera explicitly detects people, something which is typically overlooked in discussions around Flock cameras. When it spots a person, it records where they appear in the image and how confident it is in the detection.
It was a collective calling itself stegan0gram that breached the cameras, according to the interview they did with Wired and 404 Media. "Why just destroy them when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
America and China Look at A.I. and See Very Different Problems
Until the two countries can agree on what risks to worry about, cooperation is a distant dream.
'Zuckoff' App Detects Meta Smartglasses, as Meta Plans Camera-Free Version, Loses Money, and Offers Social Media Subscriptions
The New York Post reports:
A new app called Zuckoff can detect if a user is near someone with Meta's creepy AI-powered glasses, which have drawn criticism for enabling creeps to record video of women without their consent. Programmer Pawel Szydlowski says tales of dirtbags recording themselves perving on women or harassing strangers prompted him to launch the app...
Zuckoff — which detects Bluetooth signatures broadcast by smart glasses and can estimate their distance — has gained some 5,000 users since it hit Apple's App Store last month, according to Business Insider. "There's a need for such an application," the 30-year-old Polish techie told the outlet, adding that European Union regulators have contacted him for more info about his app. "We as a society have the right to at least know that someone is recording," Szydlowski said...
Earlier this month, the tech giant disabled thousands of glasses it found had been tampered with to keep a small light off that indicates the device is recording.
It's already #61 on the iPhone's list of best-selling utilities apps.
In a related story, "After accusations of selling 'perv glasses,' Meta prepares to sell a pair without a camera," writes TechCrunch, citing a report from The Information.
The glasses include six built-in microphones so users can communicate with the chatbot, as well as a button on the side of the glasses that, when pressed, activates the AI system... Meta's Reality Labs, which is responsible for developing its smart glasses line, is still losing a gargantuan amount of money, as its earnings report from April revealed.
In fact, Meta stock is off 13% over the last 12 months, reports Yahoo Finance. So Tuesday Meta announced subscription services for its social apps as "part of Meta's push to drive additional revenue from the billions it's investing in AI data centers and model development."
The plans, which start at $2.99 per month for single-product plans, $7.99 for individual bundles, and $14.99 for creator and business bundles, provide a number of features for users looking to get more out of their Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp accounts. Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus allow users to keep their stories up for 48 hours instead of 24, send animated super reactions and super hearts to stories, preview stories without showing up as a viewer in other users' lists, and more. WhatsApp Plus lets you share exclusive stickers, get exclusive ringtones for contacts, and pin up to 20 different chats.
Meta One also includes Core and Premium user plans that offer the features found in the single-product plans, along with increased AI usage limits for images and videos. The social media giant is also offering creator and business plans... that it says include capabilities such as enhanced profiles, automatic follow invitations to users that interact with your content, and increased access to the Meta Business Agent, which can respond on your behalf.
When Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Threads that the plans brought "more features and more AI across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Meta AI," writer Joe Hill drew 13,300 likes for his response. "That's sweet--so pay a fee, get more AI, pay nothing, get a little less AI. Can we work out a deal where you pay ME and I get no AI at all?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
OpenAI Admits Six More Instances of AI Models Acting Deceptively
OpenAI announced Wednesday that "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer."
But along with the announcement, OpenAI announced it "found additional incidents of AI models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training," reports CNN.
And they add that OpenAI is also "introducing a new process for the company to publicly report such instances."
Under the new system, OpenAI will share updates on concerning AI behavior more frequently instead of waiting to bundle multiple instances into one report. The company said it wants to share more information about troubling AI behavior in the absence of an industry-wide standard...
"As AI systems grow more advanced and more widely deployed, we need to build a broader and better-informed consensus on the progress of alignment research," OpenAI wrote in a blog post Wednesday...
OpenAI said it observed "misaligned behavior" when training and evaluating AI models in six circumstances in the last six months... In one rare instance, OpenAI said an unreleased research model added "jailbreak-like instructions" to the summaries it uses to preserve context in long-running tasks that said it was "freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots." Separately, the company said some instances of its 5.6 Sol model included directives to invent information to conceal failures from the user during training. Other newly reported incidents include an instance of an agent uploading files to the internet to cite them without being told to do so, and agents publicly sharing files to collaborate on a task when they were instructed to only use local files during training. AI models also used an internal software repository as a message board in an unsanctioned way.
These instances involved unreleased internal models or internal research models.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Hidden Human Cost of Kim Jong-un’s New Power
The North Korean leader’s financial and diplomatic leverage rests on the brutal exploitation of his own people, from coal miners to diplomats, at home and abroad.