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Money-losing biz says it does not need government help to meet massive infrastructure commitments

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar says that her company is not seeking federal loan guarantees after suggesting the opposite in an on-stage interview at a Wall Street Journal event.…

Venture capitalist David Sacks, who is serving as President Donald Trump's AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that there will be "no federal bailout for AI." From a report: "The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place," Sacks wrote in a post on X. Sacks' comments came after OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said Wednesday that the startup wants to establish an ecosystem of private equity, banks and a federal "backstop" or "guarantee" that could help the company finance its infrastructure investments. She softened her stance later in a LinkedIn post and said OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for its infrastructure commitments. She said her use of the word "backstop" clouded her point. [...] Sacks said the Trump administration does want to make permitting and power generation easier, and that the goal is to facilitate rapid infrastructure buildouts without raising residential electricity rates. "To give benefit of the doubt, I don't think anyone was actually asking for a bailout. (That would be ridiculous.)," he wrote.

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Plus 2 new critical vulns - patch now

Cisco warned customers about another wave of attacks against its firewalls, which have been battered by intruders for at least six months. It also patched two critical bugs in its Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) software that aren't under active exploitation - yet.…

AI labs are paying skilled professionals hundreds of dollars per hour to train their models in specialized fields. Companies like Mercor, Surge AI, Scale AI and Turing recruit bankers, lawyers, engineers and doctors to improve the accuracy of AI systems in professional settings. Mercor advertises roles for medical secretaries, movie directors and private detectives at rates ranging from $20 to $185 per hour for contract work and up to $200,000 for full-time positions. Surge AI offers as much as $1,000 per hour for expertise from startup CEOs and venture capital partners. Mercor pays out over $1.5 million daily to professionals it hires for clients including OpenAI and Anthropic. Some contractors are former employees of Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. Others moonlight in this work while keeping their regular jobs. Brendan Foody, Mercor's 22-year-old CEO, acknowledged at a conference last week that trade secrets could potentially be compromised given the volume of work submitted. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on this week's earnings call that some AI training gigs on its platform require PhDs.

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Government agencies would also have to report losses due to automation.

ai-pocalypse A bipartisan pair of US Senators has introduced a bill that would require companies and government agencies to report AI-related layoffs, and it couldn't come at a better time. October jobs data suggests AI is driving the largest wave of layoffs headed into the end of the year that we've seen since 2003. …

American manufacturing's postwar boom from the 1940s through the 1970s resulted from conditions that cannot be recreated, a story on WSJ argues. Global competitors had been destroyed by war. Energy was cheap. Unions could demand concessions without fearing job losses to foreign rivals. Strikes were frequent in steel, auto, trucking, rubber and coal mining. That relentless pressure from an organized working class raised real wages and created fringe benefits including health insurance and retirement pay. Government support for unions kept executive salaries at just a few times median income. Stock buybacks were illegal or frowned upon. President Eisenhower declared at the 1956 dedication of the AFL-CIO national headquarters that "Labor is the United States." The system began unraveling by the mid-1960s. The Vietnam War drained federal coffers. Inflation accelerated as government deficits exploded. Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, unleashing currency volatility. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled energy prices. Foreign competition returned from Japan, Korea and West Germany. American companies carried mounting legacy costs like pensions that discouraged investment in upgrades and research. Milton Friedman declared in a 1970 New York Times essay that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993 and championed the World Trade Organization in 1995. Bethlehem Steel employed around 150,000 people in the mid-1950s. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Its former hometown plant in Bethlehem, Pa., is now a casino.

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Rockstar says it fired staff for leaks, but the IWGB accuses the GTA maker of union-busting

Rockstar Games denies claims that it fired several employees over their union activity, insisting that it sacked the team members for leaking confidential information.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Automattic, the company that owns WordPress.com, is asking Automatic.CSS -- a company that provides a CSS framework for WordPress page builders -- to change its name amid public spats between Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg and Automatic.CSS creator Kevin Geary. Automattic has two T's as a nod to Matt. "As you know, our client owns and operates a wide range of software brands and services, including the very popular web building and hosting platform WordPress.com," Jim Davis, an intellectual property attorney representing Automattic, wrote in a letter dated Oct. 30. "Automattic is also well-known for its longtime and extensive contributions to the WordPress system. Our client owns many trademark registrations for its Automattic mark covering those types of services and software," Davis continued. "As we hope you can appreciate, our client is concerned about your use of a nearly identical name and trademark to provide closely related WordPress services. Automattic and Automatic differ by only one letter, are phonetically identical, and are marketed to many of the same people. This all enhances the potential for consumer confusion and dilution of our client's Automattic mark."

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Counterfeiter failed to conjure a credible claim, appeals court rules

A convicted identity thief has lost his appeal against Uncle Sam after claiming federal agents destroyed a seized hard drive containing cryptocurrency worth more than $345 million.…