Technology News

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In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, was named as the co-lead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power.

Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other co-lead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.

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I’ve spent years struggling to find a chair that conforms to my back, rather than the other way around. My search might be over.

Lend depth and drama to your gameplay, no matter what device you have.

This adorable laptop stand, keyboard, and trackpad folds into a little book for you to carry it around.

Here’s a guide to all the models—plus case recommendations and hidden software tricks to try.

Good news! Microsoft has finally made it possible to use the Widget Board on Windows 11 without being subjected to an onslaught of clickbait news articles.

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Unraveling how consciousness arises out of particular configurations of organic matter is a quest that has absorbed scientists and philosophers for ages. Now, with AI systems behaving in strikingly conscious-looking ways, it is more important than ever to get a handle on who and what is capable of experiencing life on a conscious level. As Christof Koch writes in Then I Am Myself the World, "That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation." His explanation—bounded by the limits of current research and framed through Koch’s preferred theory of consciousness—is what he eloquently attempts to deliver.

Koch, a physicist, neuroscientist, and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent his career hunting for the seat of consciousness, scouring the brain for physical footprints of subjective experience. It turns out that the posterior hot zone, a region in the back of the neocortex, is intricately connected to self-awareness and experiences of sound, sight, and touch. Dense networks of neocortical neurons in this area connect in a looped configuration; output signals feedback into input neurons, allowing the posterior hot zone to influence its own behavior. And herein, Koch claims, lies the key to consciousness.

In the hot zone

According to integrated information theory (IIT)—which Koch strongly favors over a multitude of contending theories of consciousness—the Rosetta Stone of subjective experience is the ability of a system to influence itself: to use its past state to affect its present state and its present state to influence its future state.

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Plus: Sony Music tries to keep its catalog out of the clutches of AI, there’s a towering new Lord of the Rings Lego set, and Google’s new AI features march onto the web.

Plus: Three arrested in North Korean IT workers fraud ring, Tesla staffers shared videos from owners’ cars, and more.

A vast constellation of celebrities, from Kelly Ripa to the McDonald’s mascot Grimace, have helped push dairy sales.

Enlarge / Packaging for Wegovy, manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is seen in this illustration photo. (credit: Getty | Jakub Porzycki)

With the debut of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, America's high obesity rate and its uniquely astronomical prescription drug pricing appear to be set on a catastrophic collision course—one that threatens to "bankrupt our entire health care system," according to a new Senate report that modeled the economic impact of the drugs in different uptake scenarios.

If just half of the adults in the US with obesity start taking a new weight-loss drug, such as Wegovy, the collective cost would total an estimated $411 billion per year, the analysis found. That's more than the $406 billion Americans spent in 2022 on all prescription drugs combined.

While the bulk of the spending on weight-loss drugs will occur in the commercial market—which could easily lead to spikes in health insurance premiums—taxpayer-funded Medicare and Medicaid programs will also see an extraordinary financial burden. In the scenario that half of adults with obesity go on the drug, the cost to those federal programs would total $166 billion per year, rivaling the programs' total 2022 drug costs of $175 billion.

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This is a 60 percent keyboard with most of the perks of larger, more spacious boards.

Enlarge / The RetroArch app installed in tvOS. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple’s initial pitch for the tvOS and the Apple TV as it currently exists was centered around apps. No longer a mere streaming box, the Apple TV would also be a destination for general-purpose software and games, piggybacking off of the iPhone's vibrant app and game library.

That never really panned out, and the Apple TV is still mostly a box for streaming TV shows and movies. But the same App Store rule change that recently allowed Delta, PPSSPP, and other retro console emulators onto the iPhone and iPad could also make the Apple TV appeal to people who want a small, efficient, no-fuss console emulator for their TVs.

So far, few of the emulators that have made it to the iPhone have been ported to the Apple TV. But earlier this week, the streaming box got an official port of RetroArch, the sprawling collection of emulators that runs on everything from the PlayStation Portable to the Raspberry Pi. RetroArch could be sideloaded onto iOS and tvOS before this, but only using awkward workarounds that took a lot more work and know-how than downloading an app from the App Store.

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Stuff posted on Reddit is getting incorporated into ChatGPT, Reddit and OpenAI announced on Thursday. The new partnership grants OpenAI access to Reddit’s Data API, giving the generative AI firm real-time access to Reddit posts.

Reddit content will be incorporated into ChatGPT "and new products," Reddit's blog post said. The social media firm claims the partnership will "enable OpenAI’s AI tools to better understand and showcase Reddit content, especially on recent topics." OpenAI will also start advertising on Reddit.

The deal is similar to one that Reddit struck with Google in February that allows the tech giant to make "new ways to display Reddit content" and provide "more efficient ways to train models," Reddit said at the time. Neither Reddit nor OpenAI disclosed the financial terms of their partnership, but Reddit's partnership with Google was reportedly worth $60 million.

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Enlarge / A kitty named Clover prepares to play with a robot arm in the Cat Royale "multi-species" science/art installation . (credit: Blast Theory - Stephen Daly)

Cats and robots are a winning combination, as evidenced by all those videos of kitties riding on Roombas. And now we have Cat Royale, a "multispecies" live installation in which three cats regularly "played" with a robot over 12 days, carefully monitored by human operators. Created by computer scientists from the University of Nottingham in collaboration with artists from a group called Blast Theory, the installation debuted at the World Science Festival in Brisbane, Australia, last year and is now a touring exhibit. The accompanying YouTube video series recently won a Webby Award, and a paper outlining the insights gleaned from the experience was similarly voted best paper at the recent Computer-Human Conference (CHI’24).

"At first glance, the project is about designing a robot to enrich the lives of a family of cats by playing with them," said co-author Steve Benford of the University of Nottingham, who led the research, "Under the surface, however, it explores the question of what it takes to trust a robot to look after our loved ones and potentially ourselves." While cats might love Roombas, not all animal encounters with robots are positive: Guide dogs for the visually impaired can get confused by delivery robots, for example, while the rise of lawn mowing robots can have a negative impact on hedgehogs, per Benford et al.

Blast Theory and the scientists first held a series of exploratory workshops to ensure the installation and robotic design would take into account the welfare of the cats. "Creating a multispecies system—where cats, robots, and humans are all accounted for—takes more than just designing the robot," said co-author Eike Schneiders of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab about the primary takeaway from the project. "We had to ensure animal well-being at all times, while simultaneously ensuring that the interactive installation engaged the (human) audiences around the world. This involved consideration of many elements, including the design of the enclosure, the robot, and its underlying systems, the various roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and, of course, the selection of the cats.”

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Enlarge / Valve has its own canon of games full of artifacts and concepts worth emulating, as seen in a 2018 tour of its offices. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

"Basically, fast-paced interesting ADHD gameplay. Combination of Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, Orcs Must Die."

That's how notable Valve leaker "Gabe Follower" describes Deadlock, a Valve game that is seemingly in playtesting at the moment, for which a few screenshots have leaked out.

The game has been known as "Neon Prime" and "Citadel" at prior points. It's a "Competitive third-person hero-based shooter," with six-on-six battles across a map with four "lanes." That allows for some of the "Tower defense mechanics" mentioned by Gabe Follower, along with "fast travel using floating rails, similar to Bioshock Infinite." The maps reference a "modern steampunk European city (little bit like Half-Life)," after "bad feedback" about a sci-fi theme pushed the development team toward fantasy.

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Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google's Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15.

UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian." This statement reads, "Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription. This is an isolated, ‘one-of-a-kind occurrence’ that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud’s clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."

In the next section, titled "Why did the outage last so long?" the joint statement says, "UniSuper had duplication in two geographies as a protection against outages and loss. However, when the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription occurred, it caused deletion across both of these geographies." Every cloud service keeps full backups, which you would presume are meant for worst-case scenarios. Imagine some hacker takes over your server or the building your data is inside of collapses, or something like that. But no, the actual worst-case scenario is "Google deletes your account," which means all those backups are gone, too. Google Cloud is supposed to have safeguards that don't allow account deletion, but none of them worked apparently, and the only option was a restore from a separate cloud provider (shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution).

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Here's this month's prompt, how to submit, and an illustrated archive of past favorites.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will require some financial institutions to disclose security breaches within 30 days of learning about them.

On Wednesday, the SEC adopted changes to Regulation S-P, which governs the treatment of the personal information of consumers. Under the amendments, institutions must notify individuals whose personal information was compromised “as soon as practicable, but not later than 30 days” after learning of unauthorized network access or use of customer data. The new requirements will be binding on broker-dealers (including funding portals), investment companies, registered investment advisers, and transfer agents.

"Over the last 24 years, the nature, scale, and impact of data breaches has transformed substantially," SEC Chair Gary Gensler said. "These amendments to Regulation S-P will make critical updates to a rule first adopted in 2000 and help protect the privacy of customers’ financial data. The basic idea for covered firms is if you’ve got a breach, then you’ve got to notify. That’s good for investors."

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Anyone can do a simple experiment. Navigate to a search engine that offers suggested completions for what you type, and start typing "scientists believe." When I did it, I got suggestions about the origin of whales, the evolution of animals, the root cause of narcolepsy, and more. The search results contained a long list of topics, like "How scientists believe the loss of Arctic sea ice will impact US weather patterns" or "Scientists believe Moon is 40 million years older than first thought."

What do these all have in common? They're misleading, at least in terms of how most people understand the word "believe." In all these examples, scientists have become convinced via compelling evidence; these are more than just hunches or emotional compulsions. Given that difference, using "believe" isn't really an accurate description. Yet all these examples come from searching Google News, and so are likely to come from journalistic outlets that care about accuracy.

Does the difference matter? A recent study suggests that it does. People who were shown headlines that used subjective verbs like "believe" tended to view the issue being described as a matter of opinion—even if that issue was solidly grounded in fact.

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