RFK Jr. has declared that AI could make the FDA “irrelevant,” with entirely predictable effects on The Verge’s long-suffering health and wearable expert Victoria Song.
Jose Kent:
I just know Victoria screamed into a pillow when she read this.
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The new supervision feature shows the topics that teens have asked Meta AI about over the last week and is available now in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and Brazil. It also works on Facebook… as if teens use Facebook. It builds upon previous work to alert parents if their kids repeatedly search for self-harm topics.
In a blog post, Proton CEO Andy Yen calls out the privacy and security concerns about the rapid expansion of age verification, but says “the scope of places where age verification is required must be strictly confined to areas like pornography and social media:”
If as a society we conclude that a narrowly drawn age-verification system is both necessary and inevitable, it must be done right. Checks must be conducted entirely client-side, on the user’s device. They should rely on facial scans, not uploaded IDs, that are instantly discarded once processed. The answer to the binary question of whether the user is “of age” must be fully anonymized.
A new survey suggests that AI will only help the rich get richer. “The rhetoric out there is that the tools are going to be democratizing. But the reality is that . . . you require a certain degree of education, abstract and quantitative skills, familiarity with computers and coding in order to be using the models,” said MIT professor Daron Acemoglu, who’s also a Nobel laureate in economics. “AI is going to increase inequality between labour and capital. That is almost for sure. I would say it is setting us up for a . . . shitshow.”
Yes, I really did bring my own Logitech K400 to the Framework event to compare with Framework’s new keyboard+touchpad. I also accidentally left the Logitech there and had to go back; my colleague Victoria can confirm! Also in this video: check out what I am now calling Framework’s “anti-dongle.”
The platform has doubled the maximum file size to 2MB, and the resolution limit has been upped to 4000x4000. There are photo carousels now, too.
Wired has the story about the not-real partnership, which was promoted alongside other announcements last week. How did this happen??
That’s “up from 50% last fall,” according to a blog post from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Google recently created a “strike team” to improve its AI models’ coding capabilities and catch up to Anthropic, which as of February writes 70 to 90 percent of its code with Claude Code.
After announcing in September it was working with industry group DDEX on a standard for disclosing when AI is used in a song, AI credits are launching with DistroKid as the first partner. Unfortunately, even if the rest of the industry gets on board, voluntary labels likely won’t be enough as AI uploads threaten to overtake humans.
