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Blogger and technologist Anil Dash, writing about OpenAI's recently launched browser, Atlas: When I first got Atlas up and running, I tried giving it the easiest and most obvious tasks I could possibly give it. I looked up "Taylor Swift showgirl" to see if it would give me links to videos or playlists to watch or listen to the most popular music on the charts right now; this has to be just about the easiest possible prompt. The results that came back looked like a web page, but they weren't. Instead, what I got was something closer to a last-minute book report written by a kid who had mostly plagiarized Wikipedia. The response mentioned some basic biographical information and had a few photos. Now we know that AI tools are prone to this kind of confabulation, but this is new, because it felt like I was in a web browser, typing into a search box on the Internet. And here's what was most notable: there was no link to her website. I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all. Unless you were an expert, you would almost certainly think I had typed in a search box and gotten back a web page with search results. But in reality, I had typed in a prompt box and gotten back a synthesized response that superficially resembles a web page, and it uses some web technologies to display its output. Instead of a list of links to websites that had information about the topic, it had bullet points describing things it thought I should know. There were a few footnotes buried within some of those response, but the clear intent was that I was meant to stay within the AI-generated results, trapped in that walled garden. During its first run, there's a brief warning buried amidst all the other messages that says, "ChatGPT may give you inaccurate information", but nobody is going to think that means "sometimes this tool completely fabricates content, gives me a box that looks like a search box, and shows me the fabricated content in a display that looks like a web page when I type in the fake search box." And it's not like the generated response is even that satisfying.

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Half a million Trainium2 chips now running Anthropic workloads, with half a million more waiting in the wings

Never mind Sam Altman's Stargate, which is just beginning to open its portal to distant AI-fueled worlds: Amazon's competing mountain of AI compute power is already up and running. …

YouTube says it will automatically upscale videos uploaded below 1080p (full-HD to higher resolution using AI. The Google-owned platform, however, assured that it will give creators and viewers the option to opt out of the enhancement. The feature will apply only to videos uploaded in resolutions from 240p to 720p and will not affect videos that creators have already remastered to 1080p. Creators will retain control over their original files, and viewers will be able to watch videos in their uploaded resolution through a settings option. YouTube said it plans to support upscaling to 4K in the near future. The company also said it is expanding the video thumbnail size limit from 2MB to 50MB to support 4K images. On videos with tagged products, viewers will soon be able to scan a QR code on TV screens to purchase items directly.

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Think a custom Yoke is cool? Check this out...

How far would you take your flight simulation hobby? Perhaps some extra screens? Maybe some custom controllers? Or would you go as far as to revive a scrapped Boeing 747 cockpit to satisfy your simulation needs?…

The best way to innovate in gaming is to have good margins, that's according to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella. He made the comments during an interview days after Bloomberg reported that Microsoft has expected unrealistic profit margins from its gaming division, which the report suggested was a likely reason for studio closures, game cancelations and thousands of layoffs at Xbox. Nadella used the word "innovation" at least five times during the interview but never offered specifics about what he meant by it. He said Microsoft needs to "invent, maybe, some new interactive media" because gaming's competition is short-form video rather than other games. The CEO described Microsoft's new gaming strategy as being "everywhere, on every platform" after comparing the company's game publishing business to Microsoft Office. He said "the biggest gaming business is the Windows business" and added that he is looking forward to "the next console, the next PC gaming."

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Hedge fund Apollo has reached a deal to sell AOL to Italian tech holding group Bending Spoons in a deal valued at roughly $1.5 billion, Axios reported Wednesday From the report: AOL still drives hundreds of millions of dollars of free cash flow. Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said AOL has around 30 million monthly active users across its email and web content properties. That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted. [...] Bending Spoons is a privately held Italian holding company that acquires assets with large user bases and invests in their turnaround with technology improvements. The company tends to sit on their investments long term after acquiring them. Some of the other companies Bending Spoons has acquired include Vimeo, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove.

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The Big Four biz’s big fat fail exposed a boatload of secrets online

A Dutch cybersecurity outfit says its lead researcher recently stumbled upon a 4TB+ SQL Server backup file belonging to EY exposed to the web, effectively leaking the accounting and consulting megacorp's secrets.…

schwit1 writes: China has enacted a new law regulating social media influencers, requiring them to hold verified professional qualifications before posting content on sensitive topics such as medicine, law, education, and finance, IOL reported. The new law went into effect on Saturday. The regulation was introduced by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) as part of its broader effort to curb misinformation online. Under the new rules, influencers must prove their expertise through recognized degrees, certifications, or licenses before discussing regulated subjects. Major platforms such as Douyin (China's TikTok), Bilibili, and Weibo are now responsible for verifying influencer credentials and ensuring that content includes clear citations, disclaimers, and transparency about sources. Audiences expect influencers to be both creative and credible. Yet when they blur the line between opinion and expertise, the impact can be severe. A single misleading financial tip could wipe out someone's savings. A viral health trend could cause real harm. That's why many believe it's time for creators to acknowledge the weight of their influence. However, China's new law raises deeper questions: Who defines "expertise"? What happens to independent creators who challenge official narratives but lack formal credentials? And how far can regulation go before it suppresses free thought?

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Noncitizens, prepare to have your mugshot stored for up to 75 years

Planning to visit the United States in the near future? If so, get ready to have your picture taken – and stored for decades – upon both entry and exit under a new Customs and Border Protection rule.…

Computer scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have proved that pricing algorithms can drive up prices even when they lack the capacity to collude. Aaron Roth and four colleagues studied so-called no-swap-regret algorithms, which are designed to minimize losses and were previously thought to guarantee competitive pricing. The researchers found that when such an algorithm faces an opponent using a nonresponsive strategy -- one that randomly selects from predetermined price probabilities without reacting to competitor moves -- both players can end up in equilibrium at high prices. Neither has an incentive to switch strategies because their profits are nearly equal and as high as possible under the circumstances. The nonresponsive strategy cannot express threats because it does not respond to opponent behavior, yet it effectively coaxes the learning algorithm into raising prices. Mallesh Pai, an economist at Rice University not involved in the research, said the finding matters because regulators have no clear grounds to intervene without evidence of threats or agreements. Roth conceded however that he lacks a solution to the regulatory challenge his team identified.

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TypeScript was ranked top programming language

The Indian software developer community will outgrow the US's by 2030, GitHub's Octoverse 2025 report shows. However, today, the United States remains in the lead.…

Oscar-winning author and performer would prefer Copilot did not offer her writing assistance

Dame Emma Thompson's expletive-laden takedown of AI writing assistants may strike a chord with frustrated users everywhere.…

Nvidia became the world's first $5 trillion company on Wednesday after its stock climbed 5% in early Wall Street trading to push its market capitalization to $5.13 trillion. The Silicon Valley chipmaker reached the milestone three months after hitting $4 trillion and three years after it was valued at roughly $400 billion before the debut of ChatGPT. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said Tuesday that Nvidia had secured half a trillion dollars in orders for its AI chips over the next five quarters. The stock had already gained 5% on Tuesday and added more than $200 billion to its market value. President Donald Trump said Wednesday he planned to discuss Nvidia's Blackwell chip with China's President Xi Jinping when the two leaders meet later this week. Nvidia's latest generation of graphics processing units is not currently available in China because of US export controls. The company's shares have risen more than 85% in the past six months.

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GPU giant teams with partners to create digital twin blueprint for next-gen datacenters

Nvidia unveiled Omniverse DSX at its GTC event in Washington DC — a blueprint for designing and operating gigawatt-scale AI datacenters using digital twin technology.…

Bill Gates is retreating from his earlier warnings about climate change. The Microsoft co-founder now argues that what he called the "doomsday view of climate change" has caused the climate community to focus too heavily on near-term emissions goals and divert resources from addressing poverty and disease in the world's poorest countries. In a blog post, Gates wrote that climate change will have serious consequences but will not lead to humanity's demise. He acknowledges that some climate advocates will call him a hypocrite given his own carbon footprint and his 2021 book warning that climate change could be as deadly as COVID-19 by mid-century and five times as deadly by 2100. The poorest countries receive less than 1% of rich countries' budgets at their highest level and that this share is shrinking as wealthy nations cut aid and low-income countries struggle with debt, he wrote. Rising temperatures are now inevitable and that the current consensus suggests Earth's average temperature will be between two and three degrees Celsius higher than 1850 levels by 2100.

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Bosses banking on automation? 55% will regret those job cuts

Many organizations rushing to cut staff in the name of AI efficiency are expected to quietly rehire those roles – often "offshore or at lower salary."…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Sen. Tom Cotton wasn't fast enough in 2022 to block Senate passage of legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent. Three years later, he wasn't about to repeat that same mistake. The Arkansas Republican was on hand Tuesday afternoon to thwart a bipartisan effort on the chamber floor to pass a bill that would put an end to changing the clocks twice a year, including this coming Sunday. [...] A cross-party coalition of lawmakers has been trying for years to make daylight saving time the default, which would result in more daylight in the evening hours with less in the morning, plus bring to a halt to biannual clock adjustments. President Donald Trump endorsed the concept this spring, calling the changing of the clocks "a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!" His comments coincided with a hearing, then a markup, of Scott's legislation in the Senate Commerce Committee. It set off an intense lobbying battle in turn, pitting the golf and retail industries -- which are advocating for permanent daylight saving time -- against the likes of sleep doctors and Christian radio broadcasters -- who prefer standard time. "If permanent Daylight Savings Time becomes the law of the land, it will again make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans," said Cotton in his objection to a request by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) to advance the bill by unanimous consent. "For many Arkansans, permanent daylight savings time would mean the sun wouldn't rise until after 8:00 or even 8:30am during the dead of winter," Cotton continued. "The darkness of permanent savings time would be especially harmful for school children and working Americans."

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Keeping track of checks, 1990s style

The early versions of Windows NT were the last hurrah for the Windows 3.1-esque Program Manager. But getting the Windows 95 shell into the codebase occasionally required using CAPITAL LETTERS.…

Emails confirm payroll and bank details lifted in cyberattack on US subsidiary

Global marketing giant Dentsu is writing to current and former staff after a cyberattack on a subsidiary led to bank, payroll, and other sensitive data being stolen.…

60% of government services rely on Amazon, Google, or Microsoft's clouds

The UK government will publish a plan for handling future cloud outages after last week's AWS failure knocked out several departments.…