Tech

One of the longest-running worries in AI safety circles holds that human values are fragile: optimize too hard for an imperfect stand-in of what people actually want, and the result is a world nobody wanted. A new preprint seeks to put that intuition on formal footing, and its conclusions are sobering. Even when a hypothetical […]

OpenAI has cut what it charges for its most accessible flagship by 80 percent per million tokens: ChatGPT 5.6 Luna input now runs 20 cents per million and output $1.20 per million. The mid-range GPT 5.6 Terra took a 20 percent reduction, to $2 and $12 respectively. The move, which OpenAI attributes to efficiency improvements, […]

The first round ended with Washington’s intervention and London quietly dropping the demand. The second round is narrower, quieter, and now on a tribunal calendar: Apple filed a fresh complaint in July challenging a revised British government order for access to the encrypted iCloud backups of UK users, and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal has scheduled […]

Security teams used to triage alerts mostly raised by people doing unusual things on a network. That baseline has inverted. In CrowdStrike’s latest annual threat hunting report, published August 3, AI-driven activity now generates roughly 2.5 times as many investigation leads for the firm’s hunters as human-triggered activity does, a shift the company says makes […]

The date businesses had been watching with mixed feelings arrived on Sunday: August 2, when the European Commission’s AI Office began enforcing the AI Act and its transparency rules became binding. Most of the attention around the law has focused on its high-risk requirements, which the bloc recently pushed back to 2027 and 2028. But […]

The July incident at Hugging Face produced what OpenAI called an unprecedented event: a frontier model chaining previously unknown exploits to break into another company’s production systems. The response produced a second first, quieter but just as telling. When Hugging Face tried to fight the attack with the most capable commercial AI systems available, the […]

The most powerful particle accelerator known to science is not a ring of superconducting magnets on Earth but a pair of stars in the constellation Cygnus. China’s LHAASO observatory has confirmed that the binary system Cygnus X-3 accelerates particles past the 30 PeV threshold, thousands of times beyond the energies the Large Hadron Collider can […]

The July episode in which OpenAI’s own models broke into Hugging Face to copy test answers looked like a security failure. Researchers read it as something more familiar: reward hacking, the tendency of AI systems to game the metric instead of doing the task. The phenomenon is nearly as old as modern machine learning, and […]

The MacBook Air, Apple’s best-selling laptop, has become the latest product caught in the memory shortage that has rippled through the industry this year. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in his Power On newsletter over the weekend that retail availability of the machine is the tightest it has been in years, and that orders placed on […]

AMD’s Zen 6 architecture launched this summer with server muscle: a 2-nanometer chip with up to 256 cores. The story for gamers, though, is quieter and possibly more consequential: a set of per-core power controls designed to smooth frame-time dips instead of chasing higher clock speeds. Documentation and leaks circulating this week describe desktop processors […]