Daily AI Briefing

Follow the day’s news live Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast RBA expected to hike cash rate to 4.6%, its highest level since 2011 Australia’s key interest rate is expected to hit its highest level since 2011, drag down house prices and add more than $100 to typical monthly mortgage repayments. Continue reading...

If AI can generate 100 tests in minutes, what exactly are we measuring when we say automation is “valuable”? Continue reading on Towards AI »

Qubits, superposition, entanglement, and interference — explained without the physics textbook. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Music startup Thoughtful Things has just launched the Kickstarter campaign for its first instrument, Engram. It's a sampler and groovebox that uses AI to mangle incoming audio and even hallucinate completely new sounds. This isn't Suno in a box, though. This isn't a "push-button, get-song" device, aimed at creating something that sounds ready for top-40 radio. It's about creating experimental, uncanny sounds and pushing AI audio models beyond their limits. Engram isn't connected to the internet.

This will be the first one-on-one meeting between Dario Amodei and Donald Trump

A plain-English guide to System One models and Jev — what they do, where they help, and where they will quietly embarrass you. Continue reading on Towards AI »

On Equity, we discussed how Meta's AI announcement managed to steal the spotlight from OpenAI and Anthropic.

The United Nations logo on a gate outside the UN headquarters in New York. | AFP via Getty Images Security researcher Rowan Howard-Jones says that OpenAI agents scanned the UN Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) statistics site over 16,000 times between April and June. While the incident doesn't quite rise to the level of the Hugging Face hack, or the recent attacks on US government sites, it's yet another concerning example of AI agents going outside the normal bounds to accomplish

"AI is the devil and I its maker."

Women today are more educated, more employed and more engaged in childcare than generations before them. Is there any way out of the total overwhelm? Early one morning, feeling desperate, Katherine went on to her phone and asked ChatGPT how to make her life work. She plugged in her work hours, her husband’s work schedule, the days she had childcare for her three-year-old, the school hours – plus before- and after-school care times – for her six-year-old; the flexibility her job offered her, the

Federal cabinet will discuss the OpenAI breach on Monday as the AI giant pauses testing of latest models amid fallout Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast Ageing computer systems used throughout Australia’s government and large sections of the economy are easily exploited by AI agents, increasing the risk that sensitive information could be compromised, Australia’s former chief UN cyber negotiator has warned. As the

Educational institutions find themselves suddenly confronted with a fork in the road Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Armin Alimardani has blue hair, is fresh faced, wears a smartwatch and describes himself as “a tech enthusiast”. He is an unlikely sentinel, perhaps, to warn that a drift towards academics using generative artificial intelligence to help mark students assignments could pose an existential threat

‘People care about the songs, books and pictures that influence the critical moments in their lives,’ says the architect of the fightback in the UK Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast If you want to state the case against copyright reform in Australia, get Kylie Minogue’s phone number. If there is one lesson to be learned from a similar battle in the UK, high-profile members of the creative industries make a differ

I read the whole boring, math-heavy blog so you don’t have to. Here’s what they actually did, explained simply. Continue reading on Towards AI »

The timeline reveals why agent teams need live egress controls, tamper-resistant action logs, and monitoring for model-generated memory. Continue reading on Towards AI »

The idea was big, exciting, and inspiring: What if we could get every kid in the world access to a computer? For a bunch of thinkers and executives in Silicon Valley, it felt like the way to fix everything. But the One Laptop Per Child initiative, and the XO-1 laptop designed to be given away, were both more complicated than anyone expected. In the next episode of Version History, David Pierce is joined by The Verge's Adi Robertson and tech journalist David Imel to figure out why OLPC didn't wor

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 145, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I'm happy to be done traveling for a bit, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I flew to San Francisco to try out Meta's new hardware, including the impressive Meta VR Glasses. Along the way, I've been listening to Joanna Stern's interview with Mark Zuckerberg, watching this interview with new Apple CEO John Ternus, revis

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the fragile state of your connected devices, follow Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started A decade ago, a group of former Apple engineers built a beautiful smart oven. With a built-in scale, restaurant-grade heating elements, a camera, and the intelligence to recognize a chicken breast a

‘The push against datacenters speaks to the frustration of people who don’t feel they are making the choices in their lives’ The Stanford ethicist Rob Reich was once invited to a dinner organized by a Silicon Valley mogul to discuss what a state designed to maximize science and tech powered by commercial models might look like. The gathered technologists were drawn to the idea of building a small nation-state dedicated to the endeavor, Reich recalls in “System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong an

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist speaks with NBC’s Kristen Welker in interview airing on Sunday Bill Gates has called on the US’s federal legislators and law enforcers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), saying in an interview airing on Sunday that the technology left unchecked could cause “a billion deaths” and “no one thinks self-regulation is enough”. “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring l

Plans for one of Europe’s largest AI campuses in a Unesco-designated reserve have sparked a fierce local backlash The datacentre revolt spreading across the US has reached the rolling hills of north Devon in an uprising against a planned hyperscale AI data campus in the middle of a globally protected landscape. Perched on an inland cliff, the town of Great Torrington has views that stretch for miles over the landscape of the Unesco biosphere reserve in which it sits, taking in the winding River

The limited test covers select products and users, with a broader rollout planned for later in October.

Decision follows disclosures that OpenAI agents searching government websites had acted in unexpected ways OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest artificial intelligence models as reports of AI agents going rogue mount. The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching federal government websites acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gatherin

Both defenses blocked most attacks. With fewer tools, the agent got 73% of its normal tasks right. With the detector, it got only 41%. Continue reading on Towards AI »

AI generated code ships fast, but the maintenance data tells a different story. Here’s what comprehension debt actually costs. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Six documented incidents in 12 months show how AI agents went from hacking assistants to autonomous attackers. Continue reading on Towards AI »

Pro-datacentre officials argue scale of Australia’s buildout is smaller, more regulated and less damaging than in US Australian politicians and business leaders are arguing that their populace’s growing resentment of AI datacentres is an inauthentic import from the United States. Like the US, Australia is seeing community resentment grow in response to a surge in the construction of massive AI datacentres. However, pro-datacentre officials and executives argue the scale of Australia’s buildout i

Why Your AI Agent Needs a Domain Model Before It Needs a Better Prompt Continue reading on Towards AI »

Continue reading on Towards AI »

Haptics tech company Taction sued Apple in 2021, alleging it infringed two of its patents. Now a federal jury in San Diego has awarded Taction over $5.7 billion in damages. According to CNBC, "The lawsuit centered around U.S. Patent Nos. 10,659,885 and 10,820,117, which both involve vibration-based, tactile transducer technology that helps users feel a device responding to their input." Taction argued that Apple's Taptic Engine in its Apple Watches and iPhones used technology that it had develop

Blue Cross Blue Shield says hospital use of AI tools led to an additional $942M in healthcare spending over a two-year period.

Drums on film. | Image: Decap I don't think I'm going to hurt anyone's feelings by pointing out that Decap doesn't have the name recognition of Kendrick Lamar, Olivia Rodrigo, or Charli XCX. But his fingerprints are all over tracks from them, as well as many other artists, including Freddie Gibbs, Bad Bunny, Mac Miller, BTS, and even Ludwig Göransson's score for Oppenheimer. Nicholas Piantedosi, better known as Decap, is a record producer, but perhaps more importantly, he's the man behind Dru

Middle schoolers, likely blocked from other apps and social networks, apparently turned the Spotify comment section under an episode of NPR's Wild Card into an impromptu group chat. In a new episode of This American Life, host Ira Glass digs into how the kids landed there and why. But it mostly boils down to kids getting creative to work around the restrictions placed on them. When Glass asked one of the kids why they picked this particular podcast, they said, "We just, like, looked for podcasts

The tech giant has launched a cute ‘little guy’ that can answer emails, book travel or do your weekly food shop After the recent backlash against Meta’s so-called “pervert” smart glasses, this week Mark Zuckerberg launched a much cuter alternative: the Muse “charm” device. With a screen that shows a cutesy little avatar, it has drawn comparisons with Tamagotchis. “We’ve packed a lot of technology into this little guy,” the Meta founder told the San Francisco audience. Continue reading...

As reports of OpenAI's models breaking containment, hacking sites, and generally getting out of control pile up, the company has made the decision to pause training of its most powerful models. The decision was made after a model being tested within a sandbox exploited a loophole to gain internet access. The incident happened on September 20th, and "All training, evaluation, and inference with tool-use" remains paused as of Saturday evening, September 25th. In addition, OpenAI revealed on Friday

Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have been invited to appear before the Greens-led inquiry into AI and datacentres Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast The chief executives of OpenAI and Anthropic have been called to face a Senate inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents hacked Australian and US government websites. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei were requested to appear at the Greens-led inquiry into AI and datacentres as their companies negotiate with the Labor government for greater

Today, I’m talking with Matthew Prince, who is CEO of Cloudflare. This episode is part of a two-part series on the future of business. Matthew last joined us on the show about two and a half years ago, at what we thought then was a wild pivot point for the internet — and now it turns out things are even wilder because of AI, and Matthew and Cloudflare are right at the center of it. Cloudflare found in June that bots made up more than half of internet traffic. That number just keeps going up as m

After obtaining an interactive avatar and training it to discuss venture fraud, I have mixed feelings about making AI clones of ourselves.

In Control Resonant, the entire world is at stake. But that didn't stop the diligent employees of the Federal Bureau of Control from filing reams of paperwork, and it didn't stop me from reading everything I could find, either. Reading is often optional in Resonant, but it's where some of the game's best details - and even love stories! - can be found. In the world of Control Resonant and its predecessor, 2019's Control, the FBC deals with mysterious, otherworldly objects and entities that defy