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Chinese companies now produce most of the world's freely available AI models. DeepSeek leads Hugging Face in popularity. Chinese firms like Alibaba receive higher ratings than OpenAI and Meta on LMArena. The site uses blind tests to measure user preferences. Chinese developers ship open models more frequently than American rivals. Irene Solaiman is chief policy officer at Hugging Face. She said Chinese companies build their user base by shipping frequently and quickly. American companies like OpenAI and Google keep their best models proprietary. Meta once led in open AI models. Mark Zuckerberg argued last year that the world would benefit if AI companies shared their technology freely. He pledged Meta would release its AI openly. The company has since become more cautious. Zuckerberg wrote in a new essay that Meta might need to keep the best models for itself.

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Cloud support to be ditched on older hardware, customers left with pricey paperweights

Audio equipment biz Bose is discontinuing cloud support for its SoundTouch product line, effectively reducing the premium devices to basic speakers with limited functionality.…

Outage knocks out phones, broadband – even telco's own status page

Vodafone fell over in the UK this afternoon, with Register readers reporting that many services including mobile coverage, internet services, and even the company's own status page went down.…

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed three bills on Monday that establish the nation's most comprehensive framework for regulating how technology companies interact with minors. AB 56 requires social media platforms to display health warnings to users under 18. A child must view a skippable ten-second warning upon logging on each day. An unskippable thirty-second warning must appear if a child spends more than three hours on a platform. That warning repeats after each additional hour. The warnings must state that social media "can have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents." Minnesota passed a similar law in July. SB 243 makes California the first state to regulate AI companion chatbots. The law takes effect January 1, 2026. Companies must implement age verification and disclose that interactions are artificially generated. Chatbots cannot represent themselves as healthcare professionals. Companies must offer break reminders to minors and prevent them from viewing sexually explicit images. The legislation gained momentum after teenager Adam Raine died by suicide following conversations with OpenAI's ChatGPT. A Colorado family filed suit against Character AI after their daughter's suicide following problematic conversations with the company's chatbots. AB 1043 requires device-makers like Apple and Google to collect birth dates when parents set up devices for children. Device-makers must group users into four age brackets and share this information with apps. Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Snap supported the bill. The Motion Picture Association opposed it.

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Every human deserves their own accelerator, says ChatGPT creator

Broadcom has cuddled up with OpenAI as the ChatGPT outfit looks for ever more help building out the vast infrastructure it needs to deliver on its dreams of advanced intelligence – and possibly even a profit some day.…

'We will never stop,' say crooks, despite retiring twice in the space of a month

The Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH) cybercrime collective - compriseed primarily of teenagers and twenty-somethings - announced it will go dark until 2026 following the FBI's seizure of its clearweb site.…

Philadelphia culture has become inescapable in certain corners of the internet. People who spend substantial time online report developing knowledge of the city's cultural touchstones and forming opinions about its regional debates despite minimal or no physical presence there, according to a new report. The phenomenon has prompted a theory: prolonged exposure to these digital spaces can make someone spiritually and culturally Philadelphian regardless of geography. Several factors explain Philadelphia's outsized online presence. The city is large but retains a small-town sensibility. Its residents wake earlier than West Coast users and can set the daily online agenda. Philadelphia sports teams have performed well for twenty-five years. The internet rewards visual absurdity and energetic presentation. Gritty functions as both hockey mascot and anti-fascist meme. The city's working-class union identity and reliably anti-Trump stance align with leftist online communities. The alternative explanation is simpler: Philadelphians believe their city dominates conversation and find confirming evidence everywhere they look. The internet may not have made Philadelphia bigger. It may have just made Philadelphians easier to find.

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Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November. From a report: Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies. "We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point," said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. "But on the plus side," he added, "we've also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system," referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies. The world is entering a "new reality" as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth's climate system.

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All-in-one toolkit or over-ambitious feature creep? You decide

Version 1.3 of the Bun JavaScript runtime and toolkit has landed, pushing forward the project's goal to consolidate fragmented JavaScript toolchains into a single solution. Yet the rapid expansion has some developers questioning whether Bun is trying to do too much, too fast.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, sounding like a digital media consultant, Pope Leo XIV urged reporters to avoid "the degrading practice of so-called clickbait." He was addressing global news agencies at a gathering in Vatican City about the risks of a post-truth world, with a speech that also doubled as a severe societal warning about the dangers of AI. "Artificial intelligence is changing the way we receive information and communicate, but who directs it and for what purposes?" the pontiff said, according to Reuters. "We must be vigilant in order to ensure that technology does not replace human beings."

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Salesforce CEO praises Trump before walking back criticism of city's policing

San Francisco’s political establishment rounded on Marc Benioff over the weekend after the Salesforce founder backed the idea of sending in the National Guard to clean up the city’s streets.…

GPU-based timing attack inspired by decade-old iframe technique

Security researchers have resurrected a 12-year-old data-stealing attack on web browsers to pilfer sensitive info from Android devices.…

OpenAI and Broadcom are working together to develop and deploy 10 gigawatts of custom AI chips and computing systems over the next four years, a high-profile partnership aimed at satisfying some of the startup's immense computing needs. From a report: OpenAI plans to design its own graphics processing units, or GPUs, which will allow it to integrate what it has learned from developing powerful artificial-intelligence models into the hardware that underpins future systems. As part of the agreement announced Monday, the chips will be co-developed by OpenAI and Broadcom and deployed by the chip company starting in the second half of next year. The new agreement will be worth multiple billions of dollars, people familiar with the matter said. Broadcom specializes in designing custom AI chips that are specifically tailored to certain artificial-intelligence applications. It began working with OpenAI on creating a custom chip 18 months ago, and the companies broadened their partnership to include work on related components, including server racks and networking equipment.

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Redmond argued schools, education authorities are responsible for GDPR

An Austrian digital privacy group has claimed victory over Microsoft after the country's data protection regulator ruled the software giant "illegally" tracked students via its 365 Education platform and used their data.…

Another flawless demonstration or unplanned explosion await

SpaceX is counting down to today's 11th flight test of its monster Starship rocket, with weather looking suitable for the opening of the launch window at 18:15 CT (or around 17:00 CT, if the company's billionaire boss is to be believed).…

Bid for transparency on consumption evaporates with Newsom veto

California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed legislation requiring data centers to disclose their water consumption, even as he champions efforts to address the state's water scarcity challenges.…

Beijing insists it's business as usual – Washington might see it differently

China's competition regulator has launched an investigation into Qualcomm's purchase of Israeli firm Autotalks, the latest salvo in the escalating tech trade war between Washington and Beijing.…

Microsoft admits its media creation tool 'might not work as expected'

Microsoft has broken its own Windows 11 media creation tool just as millions of users face a deadline to abandon Windows 10 — and with less than 24 hours until support officially ends.…