Free Republic

Make no mistake. The Jensen Huang scandal isn't just a story about someone's private life. It's a lever. And it's going to be used for one thing: taking control of AI. I'm not saying the facts are made up. Jensen admitted the affairs, and the investigation should run its course. I'm saying: look at what's being built on top of it. Look at the sequence. Early November, Democrats win both chambers of Congress. Right after, they announce a flood of AI bills. One congresswoman calls for a pause on advanced AI development and a ban on superintelligence, on day one....

A Chinese university with links to the country's military bought two of Nvidia's powerful H200 AI chips last month despite being on a U.S. export blacklist, according to Reuters. Northwestern Polytechnical University purchased the chips for 874,700 yuan ($123,000) on October 21 through a local supplier, Shaanxi Bosuan Network Technology, rather than directly from Nvidia. The university is among China's so-called Seven Sons of National Defense, a group of institutions with ties to military research. Based in Xi'an, Northwestern Polytechnical conducts research related to military aircraft, missiles and satellites. The H200 is one of Nvidia's most powerful processors for training...

Yes, that's as ominous as it sounds.Despite being excited to see some Republicans lose control of the Congress, I'm already dreading the Democrats' takeover, especially what it will mean for tech policy. Doing nothing to allay this feeling is this Reclaim the Net peek at Democratic proposals regarding artificial intelligence. Voter animosity toward AI was strong in the midterm elections, and Democrats apparently plan to waste no time using their forthcoming majority to start giving the government much more control over the AI industry and AI outputs. You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of...

NEW YORK — Big Tech is bowing to a bruising midterms that saw Democrats successfully use Silicon Valley as a foil. Nowhere is that hard pivot more on display than with Alex Karp, the CEO and co-founder of secretive tech giant Palantir, which bet massively on Trump 2.0 and became an administration darling in the process.Inside Palantir’s Manhattan lair, in an exclusive sitdown with Playbook, Karp — who once criticized the Democratic Party as “totally irresponsible” — deployed the word “progressive” eight times to describe his philosophy while acknowledging Democrats “absolutely” corrected in 2026 enough to win back his support...

Ontario is moving forward with plans to introduce official digital identification stored on mobile devices, beginning with the Ontario Photo Card before eventually expanding to digital driver's licences and health cards.

Scholars have developed ways of thinking about the differences in how learners engage with a subject. The ICAP framework categorizes student learning as interactive, constructive, active, or passive. Research indicates the strongest learning—in terms of both content recall and conceptual understanding—comes from the interactive and constructive types, in which learners must generate their own ideas and make complex and multilevel connections. For example, a project for which a student is required to do research—finding and reading sources then determining an argument based on them—is both interactive (with the sources) and constructive (developing and communicating an argument).1Studies examining how students employ...

oments before President Xi Jinping climbed down the steps of his aircraft to be greeted by Donald Trump, US marines were filmed on their hands and knees smoothing out the red carpet, Chinese officials looking down from the top of the steps. It was an uncomfortable image, ridiculed on social media for the symbolism of kowtowing to the emperor. But it set the tone for a summit which so far has been heavy on pomp and ceremony, rich in platitudes, but with very little in the way of substance. A strong diplomatic case can be made for political fawning –...

Socialists and liberals across the Democrat Party today have helped send stocks sliding with their authoritarian plan to clamp down on AI. The party won Congress and decided to forget healthcare and gas prices and go after data centers. Now investors have to reckon with what they have promised. Bernie Sanders is once again angrily leading the charge.By mid-afternoon, the Dow had dropped about 1,700 points, erasing its post-election rally. The Nasdaq fell more than 5 percent, and the S&P 500 lost more than 4 percent. Chip stocks had their worst day since March 2020. Fears that Democrats would stop...

For all the progressive excitement around the bruising beatdown delivered to Donald Trump and the Republican party, Jeffries’ own backers include some of the most notorious power players in the tech industry. Jeffries has a lengthy history of groveling to some of the most divisive tech and weapons corporations on the planet. His donor list includes controversial figures like Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf and his COO Matthew Grimm, who together spent nearly $150,000 boosting Jeffries’ fundraising committees. Some might recognize Anduril as the AI weapons tech corporation co-founded by Palmer Luckey, a tech billionaire whose recent projects include a company...

Presuming Trump has to veto everything from congress for the remaining two years of his term (i.e. no new budgets except CR’s), what does that mean given what was put in place with the BBB budget? What do planned budgets (and budget reductions) with CR’s mean for border enforcement, ICE deportations, defense spending, national debt, etc. I put the question I asked in 98 to AI: Operating under a “veto-everything” strategy for the remaining two years of President Trump’s term—relying strictly on Continuing Resolutions (CRs) to fund the government—would trigger a strict mechanism where federal agencies are legally bound to...

CrowdStrike launched an AI kill switch feature to stop and block internal agents that misbehave. The cybersecurity giant also announced a Claude Cowork integration and two AI acquisitions. ... being able to control and shut down agent activity is vital to the next wave of AI adoption. ... CrowdStrike is betting that it has a solution to rogue artificial intelligence. The cybersecurity vendor on Tuesday launched an AI kill switch designed to let security teams stop internal AI agents that go rogue, block them from relaunching and cut off their enterprise network access. The tool is built into CrowdStrike’s Falcon...

Alphabet is Google’s self-created parent company. On October 29, its stock dropped $500 billion — in a day. Thirteen percent of Alphabet’s total value. .... Alphabet is hemorrhaging AI cash — just like all the other Big Tech companies making the AI Big Bet. I still think the AI Big Bet is a big bubble that is about to burst. .... problem is Web Search. I have screwed around with AI a little in a variety of areas. The one thing for which I still return to the AI well? Web Search. Sorry, Google. I use Grok (sorry, Google). I...

Microsoft is offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees — over a quarter of its workforce — as the software giant works to cut costs and revamp its staff for the AI era. Employees in the US, Canada, the UK, and India on Monday received a memo saying the voluntary exit offers “are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.” Microsoft had about 223,000 employees at the time the memo went out. Microsoft’s Xbox, Windows, Copilot and finance divisions are getting the offers,...

The rise of AI has caused the price of PC components to skyrocket, infuriating anybody looking to make a new purchase or upgrade their gear. Graphics cards have become such a hot commodity that they’ve become completely unaffordable — and higher-end one’s, like Nvidia’s sought-after RTX 5090, are hard to even find in stock. One reason for the price and availability issues may be industrial facilities in China buying up the workhorse cards and repurposing them for AI, as Tom’s Hardware reports. A video making the rounds on social media shows the inside of one of these facilities, a major...

At the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, computer science student Jaylen Carroll found an unexpected connection between artificial intelligence (AI) and horticulture. Drawing on his academic interests, he helped develop a digital visitor experience for the university’s Botanical Gardens. The project proved useful enough that the gardens hired him to continue the work. It is a modest success story, but perhaps a more revealing one than another billion-dollar AI announcement. A student applied technology to a real problem, discovered its practical value, and earned the opportunity to further develop his skills. This is what workforce readiness should look like....

The head of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has issued a further warning on how Artificial Intelligence will likely lead to mass unemployment, revealing just the four occupations he believes will survive the imminent AI expansion. In a recent interview, Gates revealed that while AI will create “true abundance”, the next two decades will be “as tumultuous a period as there’s been in human history.” Gates's bold new claim comes with '20-year warning' Discussing the prospect of AI superseding the workforce in the years to come, Gates offered his 20-year warning on the Decoder podcast, having already disclosed which sectors were most...

President Donald Trump vowed Tuesday to ban the term “artificial intelligence” after lashing out at The Wall Street Journal in a Truth Social post. Trump posted to his social media platform complaining that the the news organization had yet to adopt his preferred term, “super intelligence:” When will The Wall Street Journal start calling Artificial Intelligence (AI), a very bad and inaccurate name, SI (Super Intelligence), the name which virtually everyone else is using, or soon will be. In short order, we will be officially BANNING the term, “AI/Artificial Intelligence,” in all relevant documents, and everything else, due to its...

China's AI stock rally has collapsed, wiping out about $480 billion as the STAR50 index of AI and chip companies fell 40% from its July high. US AI stocks have taken a far smaller hit so far. The Nasdaq is about 6% below the record it set three weeks ago. This week's Big Tech earnings will test whether that gap holds. How China's AI Bubble Burst Analysts have pointed to stretched prices, tax bills, and the risk of US bans on Chinese data-center equipment. The damage is wide. AI stocks account for 42% of China's market value and 57% of...

A UC Berkeley professor has stopped grading students’ homework for correctness after noticing artificial intelligence tools were helping them rack up top marks. Richard Borcherds, a renowned mathematician who received the prestigious Fields Medal in 1998, said widespread student use of AI has undermined the value of traditional homework grading. “Student use of AI for homework is now widespread,” Borcherds told The California Post. “Grading for correctness just adds a huge incentive for them to use AI for homework instead of doing it themselves, and penalizes students for honesty.” Paying graders to evaluate AI generated answers is also a waste...

Things got weird, but there's a lesson to be learned: Don't trust a bot to negotiate for you A YouTuber who’s gained a following for trolling AI interview bots brought his own computing companion to an interview with him. As chaos ensued, viewers learned that having an AI as your interview agent isn't a good idea. Graham Dot Zip is a comedian whose YouTube channel has blown up recently thanks to videos of him demonstrating the absurdity of AI bots used to conduct early-stage interviews with job candidates. AI interviewers have become quite the phenomenon in recent months, and not...