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In Shanghai at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (which ran until Tuesday), the Chinese government "announced an international organization for AI regulation and a 13-point action plan aimed at fostering global cooperation to ensure the technology's beneficial and responsible development," reports the Washington Post. The theme of the conference was "Global Solidarity in the AI Era," the article notes, and "the expo is one part of Beijing's bid to establish itself as a responsible AI leader for the international community." CNN points out that China's announcement comes "just days after the United States unveiled its own plan to promote U.S. dominance." Chinese Premier Li Qiang unveiled China's vision for future AI oversight at the World AI Conference, an annual gathering in Shanghai of tech titans from more than 40 countries... While Li did not directly refer to the U.S. in his speech, he alluded to the ongoing trade tensions between the two superpowers, which include American restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports — a component vital for powering and training AI, which is currently causing a shortage in China. "Key resources and capabilities are concentrated in a few countries and a few enterprises," said Li in his speech on Saturday. "If we engage in technological monopoly, controls and restrictions, AI will become an exclusive game for a small number of countries and enterprises...." Secretary-General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Dr. Kao Kim Hourn, also called for "robust governance" of artificial intelligence to mitigate potential threats, including misinformation, deepfakes, and cybersecurity threats... Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated the call for international collaboration, explicitly calling on the U.S. and China to work together... "We have a vested interest to keep the world stable, keep the world not at war, to keep things peaceful, to make sure we have human control of these tools." China's plan "called for establishing an international open-source community," reports the Wall Street Journal, "through which AI models can be freely deployed and improved by users." Industry participants said that plan "showed China's ambition to set global standards for AI and could undermine the U.S., whose leading models aren't open-source... While the world's best large language model is still American, the best model that everyone can use free is now Chinese." "The U.S. should commit to ensuring that powerful models remain openly available," argues an opinion piece in The Hill by Stability AI's former head of public policy. Ubiquity is a matter of national security: retreating behind paywalls will leave a vacuum filled by strategic adversaries. Washington should treat open technology not as a vector for Chinese Communist Party propaganda but as a vessel to transmit U.S. influence abroad, molding the global ecosystem around U.S. industry. If DeepSeek is China's open-source "Sputnik moment," we need a legislative environment that supports — not criminalizes — an American open-source Moon landing.

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The vehicle "once led the Space Shuttle down the runway at Edwards Air Force Base," The Drive reported in 2022, noting it was won in an auction for $21,061 (beating 18 other bidders). "I just figured the NASA brand combined with Airsteam hip seemed like a can't lose combination," the buyer says now, in a listing for the vehicle on the on the automotive sales site Hemmings.com asking $199,000.. They're touting it as a priceless marketing/publicity prop — "a once in a lifetime opportunity" to own what was once an "onsite command center complete with communications and atmospheric monitoring... Imagine pulling into Burning Man driving this..." The seller points out it's the only custom-built "Airstream" trailer ever sold by NASA. (The others were crushed, except for one donated to the Kennedy museum.) But for this one "Apparently there was some miscommunication when the vehicle was decommissioned. It should have been offered to museums but the sales team did not know what it was.") "Has only 8240 miles on it as driven from Ohio to California then around the Edwards base." The seller apparently first tried listing it on eBay in May for $50,000. ("Reserve not met," says that listing page now. "Very well maintained, minor dings on exterior...") Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Silicon Valley's AI talent war just reached a compensation milestone that makes even the most legendary scientific achievements of the past look financially modest. When Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year)—with potentially $100 million in the first year alone -- it shattered every historical precedent for scientific and technical compensation we can find on record. [Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly also offered an unnamed AI engineer $1 billion in compensation to be paid out over several years.] That includes salaries during the development of major scientific milestones of the 20th century. [...] To put these salaries in a historical perspective: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the Manhattan Project that ended World War II, earned approximately $10,000 per year in 1943. Adjusted for inflation using the US Government's CPI Inflation Calculator, that's about $190,865 in today's dollars -- roughly what a senior software engineer makes today. The 24-year-old Deitke, who recently dropped out of a PhD program, will earn approximately 327 times what Oppenheimer made while developing the atomic bomb. [...] The Apollo program offers another striking comparison. Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the moon, earned about $27,000 annually -- roughly $244,639 in today's money. His crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins made even less, earning the equivalent of $168,737 and $155,373, respectively, in today's dollars. Current NASA astronauts earn between $104,898 and $161,141 per year. Meta's AI researcher will make more in three days than Armstrong made in a year for taking "one giant leap for mankind." The report notes that the sums being offered to some of these AI researchers top even the most popular sports athletes. "The New York Times noted that Steph Curry's most recent four-year contract with the Golden State Warriors was $35 million less than Deitke's Meta deal (although soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo will make $275 million this year as the highest-paid professional athlete in the world)," reports Ars.

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We almost got more butterfly keyboards and foldable workstations

Interview Launched in 1992, the boxy black ThinkPad with its little red nub remains the quintessential business productivity notebook. Unlike commercial offerings from competitors such as Dell and HP, Lenovo's laptop has a following of people who collect old models and celebrate each new innovation.…

Community content site aims to profit from real conversation

Reddit has found that trafficking in human-authored content pays well in the AI era.…

A Rutgers-led study using advanced computational modeling reveals that expanding solar power by just 15% could reduce U.S. carbon emissions by over 8.5 million metric tons annually, with the greatest benefits concentrated in specific regions like California, Texas, and the Southwest. The study has been published in Science Advances. From the report: The study quantified both immediate and delayed emissions reductions resulting from added solar generation. For example, the researchers found that in California, a 15% increase in solar power at noon was associated with a reduction of 147.18 metric tons of CO2 in the region in the first hour and 16.08 metric tons eight hours later. The researchers said their methods provide a more nuanced understanding of system-level impacts from solar expansion than previous studies, pinpointing where the benefits of increased solar energy adoption could best be realized. In some areas, such as California, Florida, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, Texas and the Southwest, small increases in solar were estimated to deliver large CO2 reductions, while in others, such as New England, the central U.S., and Tennessee, impacts were found to be minimal -- even at much larger increases in solar generation. In addition, the researchers said their study demonstrates the significant spillover effects solar adoption has on neighboring regions, highlighting the value of coordinated clean energy efforts. For example, a 15% increase in solar capacity in California was associated with a reduction of 913 and 1,942 metric tons of CO2 emissions per day in the northwest and southwest regions, respectively. "It was rewarding to see how advanced computational modeling can uncover not just the immediate, but also the delayed and far-reaching spillover effects of solar energy adoption," said the lead author Arpita Biswas, an assistant professor with the Department of Computer Science at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. "From a computer science perspective, this study demonstrates the power of harnessing large-scale, high-resolution energy data to generate actionable insights. For policymakers and investors, it offers a roadmap for targeting solar investments where emissions reductions are most impactful and where solar energy infrastructure can yield the highest returns."

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Plaintext passwords, shared admin accounts, and insufficient logging rampant at mystery org

CISA is using the findings from a recent probe of an unidentified critical infrastructure organization to warn about the dangers of getting cybersecurity seriously wrong.…