Richard Lawler
Here’s Joanna Stern’s look at a HomeView.
Check out this in-person look at Apple’s new hub device, complete with a hand for scale. “It’s tiny and cute!”
Richard Lawler
Senior News Editor
Senior News Editor
More From Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team suggests some AI models “may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate.”
The latest fear-drop from an AI lab is this report from an Anthropic team, working through scenarios where small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are “challenging” to shut down, and what to do to try and stop it from happening:
It’s uncertain exactly what form autonomous AI replication will take. It could be a slow, distributed “digital slime mold,” living on relatively insecure compute. It could also be a powerful cyber model that breaches datacenters at a high pace, or a model that scams people for compute credits.
Richard Lawler
Did “Russian bot traffic” really disappear after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex servers?
Despite multiple Ukrainian strikes hitting Yandex servers in Russia, a thread by antibot4navalny, which has long tracked state-sponsored social media campaigns and troll farms, explains that the Cloudflare “Bot Traffic” chart many people have cited is really about automated web crawlers operated by Yandex accessing the web.
It’s not connected to “bots” posting on social media, and Russian bot/crawler traffic overall continues to be about the same as normal. Still, are you noticing any difference in the posts and comments you’ve seen online?
Richard Lawler
Microsoft launches its new AI model for making decisions quickly.
Apparently, after large language models and agents, we’re now in the age of “decision models,” as Microsoft has announced Microsoft-Decision-1 just days after OpenAI highlighted its new Decisions API.
The point of these models is to choose something quickly and efficiently, like figuring out which AI model to use or what is in an image being analyzed by AI, and Microsoft claims its new tech beat out the others in tests to determine their speed and accuracy.
Image: Microsoft Command Line
Richard Lawler
Laura Reiley on Sam Altman’s “unsatisfying” Vanity Fair interview answer.
It was Reiley’s question for the OpenAI CEO about releasing logs from ChatGPT users who’ve taken their own lives that was nearly interrupted recently. Now she writes that while Altman was “gracious” to answer, she says he chose the wrong one:
Altman claiming the privacy high road is a little rich. Companies like Google, Meta, and now OpenAI earn revenue from advertising that depends on extensive use of personal information. And Altman’s assertion that experts “aren’t sure what to do” is either disingenuous or misinformed. Part of our collective mounting dread is that this technology is far outstripping the ability, access, and time required to study its effects on human beings.
Researchers have been saying loud and clear: We need user data and chatbot interactions to conduct research.
If you or anyone you know is considering self-harm or needs to talk, contact the following people who want to help: In the US, text or call 988. Outside the US, contact https://www.iasp.info/.
Richard Lawler
Trump queues up participation trophies for tech execs at Thursday’s “Golden Age” White House summit.
Tomorrow’s event will announce more than $1 billion in commitments for the Trump admin’s “Genesis Project” AI push and investments from the NSF and Energy Department, reports Axios, including $100 million in credits from something called National Compute.
Meanwhile, Fox News and Bloomberg report Trump will award the National Medal of Science to Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Sergey Brin, and Lisa Su, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella are in line for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. It’s the first time Trump has ever given out the awards, which usually don’t go to well-known tech execs, judging by previous recipients.
Richard Lawler
Sony Pictures might pick up a movie adaptation of Battlefield, starring Michael B. Jordan.
Revisiting rumors from earlier this year, Deadline and TheWrap report the adaptation of EA’s long-running FPS series would be directed and written by frequent Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie. According to TheWrap, Sony is a “frontrunner,” following a bidding war that also included Warner Bros. Discovery, Amazon MGM Studios, Universal, and Netflix.
Paramount, meanwhile, is already working on a film version of Call of Duty.
Richard Lawler
Elon Musk’s latest public breakup is about as cringey as it could possibly be.
Elon Musk loyalist, former OpenAI board member, Neuralink executive, and mother of four of his children, Shivon Zilis, quote-tweeted a post about him unfollowing her on X, the social media platform that he owns, saying, “It’s hard to go from in love to let go in a week with no warning, but that’s just how it is sometimes.”
There’s more if you want to go read it, but that is your decision.
Richard Lawler
Peacock’s Fast & Furious TV show greenlit, set to premiere in 2028.
According to Deadline, one of the shows that Vin Diesel announced during NBC’s upfronts in May is going into production. There aren’t any details yet on the status of the other three F&F TV projects Diesel had mentioned, while the 11th movie in the series, Fast Forever, is still scheduled to hit theaters on March 17th, 2028.
Richard Lawler
Spotify is down — but your songs might still be playing.
There are a lot of complaints about a Spotify outage on Downdetector, and when we checked ourselves, cached playlists seem to work just fine, but logging in fresh or trying to stream new music and playlists popped up error messages pointing us to try songs stored offline.
The @SpotifyCares support account has confirmed developers are looking into the problems, but there’s no word on when service might be fully restored.
User reports show problems with Spotify
[Downdetector]