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No, that's not someone on your team who doesn't pull their weight

Salesforce is promising every Slack user a "digital teammate" to help with tasks such as providing summaries of channels and taking notes from meetings. And responding to office banter on the user's behalf, The Register can only assume.…

Arizona State University researchers are pushing back [PDF] against the widespread practice of describing AI language models' intermediate text generation as "reasoning" or "thinking," arguing this anthropomorphization creates dangerous misconceptions about how these systems actually work. The research team, led by Subbarao Kambhampati, examined recent "reasoning" models like DeepSeek's R1, which generate lengthy intermediate token sequences before providing final answers to complex problems. Though these models show improved performance and their intermediate outputs often resemble human scratch work, the researchers found little evidence that these tokens represent genuine reasoning processes. Crucially, the analysis also revealed that models trained on incorrect or semantically meaningless intermediate traces can still maintain or even improve performance compared to those trained on correct reasoning steps. The researchers tested this by training models on deliberately corrupted algorithmic traces and found sustained improvements despite the semantic noise. The paper warns that treating these intermediate outputs as interpretable reasoning traces engenders false confidence in AI capabilities and may mislead both researchers and users about the systems' actual problem-solving mechanisms.

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Against backdrop of EU rules on spread of misinfo plus UK probing role of online hate in far right riots

The US government says it'll refuse visas to foreign officials judged to have censored social media posts of American citizens - a move aimed at countries trying to stem the flow of online misinformation.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Researchers at SignalFire, a data-driven VC firm that tracks job movements of over 600 million employees and 80 million companies on LinkedIn, believe they may be seeing first signs of AI's impact on hiring. When analyzing hiring trends, SignalFire noticed that tech companies recruited fewer recent college graduates in 2024 than they did in 2023. Meanwhile, tech companies, especially the top 15 Big Tech businesses, ramped up their hiring of experienced professionals. Specifically, SignalFire found that Big Tech companies reduced the hiring of new graduates by 25% in 2024 compared to 2023. Meanwhile, graduate recruitment at startups decreased by 11% compared to the prior year. Although SignalFire wouldn't reveal exactly how many fewer grads were hired according to their data, a spokesperson told us it was thousands. While adoption of new AI tools might not fully explain the dip in recent grad hiring, Asher Bantock, SignalFire's head of research, says there's "convincing evidence" that AI is a significant contributing factor. Entry-level jobs are susceptible to automation because they often involve routine, low-risk tasks that generative AI handles well. AI's new coding, debugging, financial research, and software installation abilities could mean companies need fewer people to do that type of work. AI's ability to handle certain entry-level tasks means some jobs for new graduates could soon be obsolete. [...] Although AI's threat to low-skilled jobs is real, tech companies' need for experienced professionals is still rising. According to SignalFire's report, Big Tech companies increased hiring by 27% for professionals with two to five years of experience, while startups hired 14% more individuals in that same seniority range. A frustrating paradox emerges for recent graduates: They can't get hired without experience, but they can't get experience without being hired. While this dilemma is not new, Heather Doshay, SignalFire's people and talent partner, says it is considerably exacerbated by AI. Doshay's advice to new grads: master AI tools. "AI won't take your job if you're the one who's best at using it," she said.

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Law enforcement crackdowns are gathering pace but online marketplaces still teeming with valuable tokens

A VPN vendor says billions of stolen cookies currently on sale either on dark web or Telegram-based marketplaces remain active and exploitable.…

Users leaving App Store to make a third party payment must be free of charge, says Euro Commish

The European Commission (EC) this week released the full text of its decision that found Apple in violation of its digital competition rules, known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA).…

Even when instructed to allow shutdown, o3 sometimes tries to prevent it, research claims

A research organization claims that OpenAI machine learning model o3 might prevent itself from being shut down in some circumstances while completing an unrelated task.…

The world is facing a new form of climate denial -- not the dismissal of climate science, but a concerted attack on the idea that the economy can be reorganised to fight the crisis, the president of global climate talks has warned. The Guardian reports: Andre Correa do Lago, the veteran Brazilian diplomat who will direct this year's UN summit, Cop30, believes his biggest job will be to counter the attempt from some vested interests to prevent climate policies aimed at shifting the global economy to a low-carbon footing. "There is a new kind of opposition to climate action. We are facing a discredit of climate policies. I don't think we are facing climate denial," he said, referring to the increasingly desperate attempts to pretend there is no consensus on climate science that have plagued climate action for the past 30 years. "It's not a scientific denial, it's an economic denial." This economic denial could be just as dangerous and cause as much delay as repeated attempts to deny climate science in previous years, he warned in an exclusive interview with the Guardian.

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Sick of paying the US tech tax and relinquishing talent to other continents, politicians finally wake up

The European Commission (EC) has kicked off a scheme to make Europe a better place to nurture global technology businesses, providing support throughout their lifecycle, from startup through to maturity.…

Wiggles tiny price for FishOS Ceph-based wares as deprecation of Ceph continues

Sardina hopes to entice anyone still using SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) over to FishOS instead with a price-based hook: a license fee of €1 per core, regardless of storage volume.…

Tianwen 2 probe launched Thursday and will also get up close with a comet

China’s National Space Agency today launched the nation’s first asteroid sample mission.…

Astronomers have discovered a mysterious cosmic object, ASKAP J1832-0911, that emits both radio waves and X-rays in precise 44-minute cycles, making it unlike anything observed before. Space.com reports: This is the first time an object like this, a so-called "long-period transient" or "LPT," has been seen in high-energy X-ray light as well as low-energy radio wave light. The team behind this discovery hopes the finding could help reveal what these flashing objects actually are and how they launch their mystery signals. However, not only is there no explanation for how the signals from LPTs are generated yet, but astronomers also don't know why these signals "switch on" and "switch off" at long, regular and unusual intervals. "This object is unlike anything we have seen before," team leader and Curtin University researcher Zieng (Andy) Wang said in a statement. [...] The team believes the true nature of ASKAP J1832-0911 is a dead star, they just don't quite know what form that star takes. A highly magnetic neutron star, or "magnetar," is one option, and a a white dwarf -- the kind of stellar remnant the sun will leave behind when it dies in over 5 billion years -- is another. "ASKAP J1831- 0911 could be a magnetar, the core of a dead star with powerful magnetic fields, or it could be a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetized white dwarf, a low-mass star at the end of its evolution," Wang said. "However, even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing. "This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution." The research has been published in the journal Nature.

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Hiked prices and thinks that will make buyers nervous

HP Inc. is close to ending production of North-America-bound products in China, after US tariffs kicked a hole in its quarterly profits.…

‘Consumers will not tolerate deceit’ Minister tells Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Uber

India’s government has reminded big tech companies that it has rules that prohibit the use of dark patterns – deceptive design practices that deliberately mislead and confuse customers of online services and apps – and called for an end to their use.…