TechCrunch●Covered by 4 sources
DeepMind just lost its Nobel laureate to Anthropic, and he's the third top mind out the door
John Jumper, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his AI protein-folding work, is leaving Google DeepMind after nearly nine years to join Anthropic. He follows Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer (to OpenAI) and AlphaGo's David Silver (who started his own company), all gone within months.
So what? ↓The people who build these tools vote with their feet, and right now Google's most decorated researchers are walking out the door toward the rivals it's trying to beat.
Source: TechCrunch
The Verge●Covered by 3 sources
NASA's 2028 Mars weather mission is riding a rocket that has never reached orbit
NASA picked Eric Schmidt's Relativity Space to fly its Aeolus payload, four instruments mapping daily Martian winds, dust, and clouds, to Mars in 2028 under a public-private deal where the company supplies the spacecraft, rocket, and cruise operations. The catch: that rocket, Terran R, has yet to actually make orbit.
So what? ↓The data Aeolus would beam back is meant to make future landings safer and more predictable, but a 2028 launch hinges on a startup proving its hardware works at all first, so treat the date as a hope, not a schedule.
Source: The Verge
Anthropic●Covered by 3 sources
The US export-controlled Anthropic's new model so hard that Anthropic turned it off worldwide
The Commerce Department slapped license requirements on Claude Mythos 5 and the safeguarded Claude Fable 5 (the one with extra hacking/bioweapon guardrails and a mandatory 30-day data retention rule) for use by foreign nationals, and rather than police who's a foreign national, Anthropic just killed global access to Fable. Cybersecurity researchers signed an open letter calling the ban dangerous, and Anthropic itself admits the same jailbreaks live in rival models.
So what? ↓Thirty years of export controls have a lousy track record of actually keeping security software from crossing borders, so the likeliest result here is free publicity for a model most people now can't get their hands on.
Source: Anthropic
Google●Covered by 2 sources
Google turned 2,000 retired Pixel phones into a private cloud
Google Research wired 2,000 retired Pixel phones into a private cloud it's pitching as a low-carbon platform, the idea being to wring more compute out of old hardware instead of recycling it. The Register's preferred unit for the rig: two kilapixels.
So what? ↓The phone in your drawer is too good to landfill and too obsolete to sell, so a recipe for turning that pile into working compute is the rare green pitch that targets actual e-waste.
Source: Google
engadget.com●Covered by 2 sources
Rivian gets sued for promising hands-free driving it never delivered
A class-action complaint accuses Rivian of telling first-generation R1 owners for years that hands-free driving was coming to their trucks and SUVs, then not shipping it. The suit centers on self-driving features the company allegedly promised but never delivered.
So what? ↓If a carmaker keeps saying a feature is coming and it never arrives, this is the lawsuit that tests whether those promises are binding or just marketing you can't hold them to.
Source: engadget.com
404Media●Covered by 2 sources
Hackers dump Madison Square Garden data, complete with a celebrity risk-rating list
Stolen MSG data is now online, including a roster of "talent" (former Knicks players and coaches) and a tagging of various celebrities as "Low Risk" or "High Risk," plus customer emails with the venue.
So what? ↓If you ever emailed MSG to sort out tickets, your correspondence may now be sitting in a public dump next to a list quietly sorting famous people into threat tiers.
Source: 404Media