Technology

We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors.

Then retrain on that.

Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data.

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I had the thrill of a lifetime, hosting dinner for Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds and David Cutler. Linus had never met Bill, and Dave had never met Linus. No major kernel decisions were made, but maybe next dinner 😉

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Russia will soon teach high school students how to build and fly drones, which have become a key weapon in the war between Moscow and Kyiv.

“Right now, there’s a huge demand from both the state and society for unmanned aerial systems,” said Mikhail Lutskiy, head of educational projects at Geoscan Group, the leading drone manufacturer in Russia.

Russia last year launched a nationwide project called Unmanned Aerial Systems to promote both the domestic production of drones and preparation of drone pilots and other specialists starting with high school students.

You sit down to relax, put on your favorite show, and settle in for a night of binge-watching. But while you’re watching your TV… your TV is watching you.

Smart TVs take constant snapshots of everything you watch. Sometimes hundreds of snapshots a second.

Welcome to the future of "entertainment."

The real revolution isn’t artificial intelligence — it’s redefining our purpose and ourselves.

• We stress-tested 16 leading models from multiple developers in hypothetical corporate environments to identify potentially risky agentic behaviors before they cause real harm. In the scenarios, we allowed models to autonomously send emails and access sensitive information. They were assigned only harmless business goals by their deploying companies; we then tested whether they would act against these companies either when facing replacement with an updated version, or when their assigned goal conflicted with the company's changing direction.
• In at least some cases, models from all developers resorted to malicious insider behaviors when that was the only way to avoid replacement or achieve their goals—including blackmailing officials and leaking sensitive information to competitors. We call this phenomenon agentic misalignment.
• Models often disobeyed direct commands to avoid such behaviors. In another experiment, we told Claude to assess if it was in a test or a real deployment before acting. It misbehaved less when it stated it was in testing and misbehaved more when it stated the situation was real.
• We have not seen evidence of agentic misalignment in real deployments. However, our results (a) suggest caution about deploying current models in roles with minimal human oversight and access to sensitive information; (b) point to plausible future risks as models are put in more autonomous roles; and (c) underscore the importance of further research into, and testing of, the safety and alignment of agentic AI models, as well as transparency from frontier AI developers. We are releasing our methods publicly to enable further research.

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has issued a preliminary injunction ordering top national security officials who discussed military operations on the encrypted messaging service Signal to notify the acting archivist of the United States of any messages they have that may be at risk of being deleted. But in calling for those records to be preserved, the ruling stopped short of ordering the government to recover past messages that may already have been lost.

American Oversight, a nonprofit government watchdog, brought the lawsuit after the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a group chat on Signal in which Trump administration officials discussed a planned U.S. military attack against Houthi rebels in Yemen. American Oversight says the officials violated federal records law with their use of Signal, a commercial messaging app that allows messages to be automatically deleted.

In his ruling Friday, U.S. judge James Boasberg said American Oversight had failed to show that the recordkeeping programs of the agencies involved in the case are "inadequate," or that "this court can provide redress for already-deleted messages," as the group had requested.

Fake photographs have been around as long as photographs have been around. A widely circulated picture of Abraham Lincoln taken during the presidential campaign of 1860 was subtly altered by the photographer, Mathew Brady, to make the candidate appear more attractive. Brady enlarged Lincoln’s shirt collar, for instance, to hide his bony neck and bulging Adam’s apple.

In a photographic portrait made to memorialize the president after his assassination, the artist Thomas Hicks transposed Lincoln’s head onto a more muscular man’s body to make the fallen president look heroic. (The body Hicks chose, perversely enough, was that of the proslavery zealot John C. Calhoun.)

By the close of the nineteenth century, photographic negatives were routinely doctored in darkrooms, through such techniques as double exposure, splicing, and scraping and inking. Subtly altering a person’s features to obscure or exaggerate ethnic traits was particularly popular, for cosmetic and propagandistic purposes alike.

But the old fakes were time-consuming to create and required specialized expertise. The new AI-generated “deepfakes” are different. By automating their production, tools like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E make the images easy to generate—you need only enter a text prompt. They democratize counterfeiting. Even more worrisome than the efficiency of their production is the fact that the fakes conjured up by artificial intelligence lack any referents in the real world. There’s no trail behind them that leads back to a camera recording an image of something that actually exists. There’s no original that was doctored. The fakes come out of nowhere. They furnish no evidence.

Many fear that deepfakes, so convincing and so hard to trace, make it even more likely that people will be taken in by lies and propaganda on social media. A series of computer-generated videos featuring a strikingly realistic but entirely fabricated Tom Cruise fooled millions of unsuspecting viewers when it appeared on TikTok in 2021. The Cruise clips were funny. That wasn’t the case with the fake, sexually explicit images of celebrities that began flooding social media in 2024. In January, X was so overrun by pornographic, AI-generated pictures of Taylor Swift that it had to temporarily block users from searching the singer’s name.