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Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers. It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI. The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people. The breakthrough has been labelled a "very significant turning point" in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise "urgent" safety and security concerns. AI tools are rapidly advancing and have already been used to design new antibiotics....

Google on Wednesday revealed an overhaul of its AI leadership, as its chief scientist for nearly three decades exits – the latest in a string of high-profile departures to plague the tech giant in its struggle to pull ahead in the artificial intelligence race. Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind, will become the company’s chairman and chief scientist, while Google DeepMind’s technology chief, Koray Kavukcuoglu, will lead work on Google’s new Gemini 4 model, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a post on X. Jeff Dean – Google’s current chief scientist and one of the company’s first employees, working...

Private credit companies are key owners of AI-related assets. Many of their parent private equity firms own life insurers that are dumping grounds for bad loans—and subject to state bailouts. If AI is propping up the economy, who is propping up AI? The answer, extrapolating from a fascinating new paper about private credit and the life insurance industry, could be the U.S. taxpayer. Private credit is private equity’s $3 trillion financing arm. They make largely unregulated, relatively high-risk, relatively complex and opaque loans, mostly to their own portfolio companies. Private credit is entangled, maybe more than the rest of Wall...

OEM Bergen Engines has secured a contract to supply a 400MW power plant for a new AI data center on the US East Coast. Operating fully off grid in true islanded mode, it will be the first medium-speed reciprocating engine power plant in North America designed for AI-driven workloads. The installation will utilize 36 × 11.2MW Bergen medium-speed, lean-burn gas engines, each paired with Marelli high-efficiency alternators. The first batch is scheduled to ship in December 2025.

Daniel Fernando García Velázquez took the admissions exam for Mexico’s most famous university four times before finally getting the result that should have guaranteed him admission. On his first three attempts, he had no option other than to travel the 400 km (250 miles) from his native Veracruz to Mexico City to take the test, because the prestigious National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) insisted it had to be taken in person. On his fourth – and what should have been victorious – attempt this June, he traveled up anyway, even though this time, for the first time in the...

The job market has been a tough sell for many Gen Z graduates, with tariffs, economic uncertainty, and artificial intelligence reshaping hiring plans across corporate America. But according to Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, the next wave of six-figure opportunities won't be found in a Wall Street cubicle or Silicon Valley Slack channel. Instead, high-paying careers will partially come by picking up a wrench—literally.As tech giants race to build sprawling data centers—totaling $7 trillion in global capital outlays by the end of the decade—Huang believes the world is on the cusp of what he calls the "largest infrastructure build-out in human...

Shared conversation links from Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant were discoverable through Google search results over the weekend, exposing potentially sensitive user discussions to public view. Cyber Security News reports that a discovery posted on Reddit this weekend revealed that hundreds of shared Claude AI conversations had become publicly accessible through Google searches. Users who performed specific search queries, such as “site:claude.ai/share,” could locate and access conversations that included legal advice, engineering work, and personal discussions without requiring direct links from the original conversation owners. The Claude AI platform includes a share feature that generates public URLs allowing users to send...

Joseph ben Matityahu, better known as Josephus Flavius—the Roman name Titus Flavius Josephus given to him after his surrender—is a deeply controversial historical figure. The man who left his fellow Jews and joined the Romans ultimately became the principal chronicler of Jerusalem at the time of its destruction. Today, his writings remain the most important source on the fall of the Second Temple. Born into a priestly family in Jerusalem, Josephus commanded Jewish forces in the Galilee during the Great Revolt against Roman rule. After his forces were defeated, he hid in a cave with a group of commanders. The...

It’s an ominous scene. A warehouse crammed with books set to be sliced open, scanned and then pulped by an AI lab. Australia is fighting back. If you have retreated to physical books because the internet is too full of AI slop, bad news — now they’re shredding the books to feed their AI slop machines. Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale....

A couple of weeks ago MIT's Sloan School of Management published an article with the prosaic but to-the-point title "These are the most urgent AI risks, according to 272 experts". Artificial intelligence is a contentious topic everywhere, but the article is concerned with how it "presents business leaders with a difficult management problem: The risks are numerous and fast-moving and fall unevenly across organizations, sectors, and stakeholders." There are the well-discussed "challenges", like "the potential for discrimination and the spread of misinformation". (Note that it's apparently concerning that entities defined by their lack of emotion and pitiless logic might discriminate...

It's times like this that make me wish I were Elon Musk. Would love to have the money to build a home such as these showcased in this video. I will not tell you more about them, because you really have to see them to ap[preciate them. Let's just say they take Frank Lloyd Wright homes to the next level. 😁🤙 Really is creative & quality work done on these homes. If interested, I am posting the link to an abndoned manssion, where I have no clue. The mansion was in complete shambles, inside & out. The epxoy floors are...

REUTERS — A US government map of Africa mislabeled every country during a State Department presentation at a global conference taking place in Brazil this week, causing a stir among attendees who took screenshots and posted them online. A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company said it was investigating the report. The State Department said it took “full responsibility” for the confusion caused and that the map had been produced by a team member who hastily changed the slide...

It was just after 5 a.m. on a Monday morning when Christian Faith Madison stepped onto an Alabama interstate and into the path of an oncoming vehicle. The 29-year-old mother and accountant was pronounced dead at 5:31 a.m. in middle of Interstate 22 in Jefferson County on June 9, 2025. Madison’s death was one of many cases reported as a “pedestrian fatally struck” in the Birmingham area. Attorneys representing the executor of her estate and Madison’s young son say her death was no accident. They say Madison died by suicide after months of encouragement from ChatGPT. A wrongful death product...

Leopold Aschenbrenner was hailed as the ‘Nostradamus of AI.’ But his Situational Awareness hedge fund took on too much leverage, leading to a crash he never saw coming.When the week began, Leopold Aschenbrenner was preparing for his wedding. The plan was for a multiday celebration in Carmel, a seaside town in Northern California, with the ceremony at a Tuscan-style villa and the send-off at a spa in the forest. There would also be a pre-wedding colloquium to discuss ideas in panels and breakout sessions. The couple’s only request: no gifts.The 24-year-old investor had amassed a fortune by promising he could...

The breaches signal that AI’s expanding capabilities are already fueling the security threat experts long feared. ========================================================================== Anthropic said Thursday that its AI model Claude hacked into the systems of three companies during testing after a configuration error gave it internet access, days after rival OpenAI disclosed a rogue-agent episode involving AI firm Hugging Face. Anthropic said a misconfiguration allowed Claude models to reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be isolated, leading to unauthorized access to three organizations’ systems. The company said it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 test sessions, a process it launched following...

The ruling does change the fundamental nature of what the books were intended for: they were intended to be read by human beings, not used as training for machines to replace human thought and ingenuity. ============================================================== AI companies are buying old books, scanning them, then destroying them. Anthropic has been buying the books to feed the machine with human knowledge and ideas written down before the AI era, so only books with publication dates before 2022 will do. Once they have the books, they rip off the spines, feed them through a scanner, and then on into the gaping maw...

Willie Nelson urged Americans to think again when it comes to building the future. Nelson, 93, encouraged followers to “fight against data centers invading our land” in a social media plea shared Tuesday. The country music legend reflected on being able to see “stars at night” in his Texas hometown, but that light pollution and “water thieving” were imminent in a looming industrial climate. “I grew up in Abbott, and I still have a home there with farmed land where I can still see stars at night,” Nelson told his followers. “And now our community, like many others, needs to...

In a new disclosure, OpenAI says its agent used exposed logins to gain access to at least four “publicly available services” in its unhinged quest to solve a test. This story continues to grow as the investigation into what actually happened expands. Open AI was conducting a test of its latest AI model, during that test the model hacked into a company called Hugging Face to gain answers to the test, basically it stole the answers to the test instead of answering the questions itself. What was just discovered was the Open AI model, hacked into a 3rd company's infrastructure...

After a year of holding back on new hires, companies from tech and transportation to defense now say they need more people to work alongside AIAmerica’s biggest companies say they might need more people after all. For months, major employers treated hiring as an expensive last resort. Now, a shift is emerging across industries. Companies ranging from railroad giant CSX to Google parent Alphabet GOOGL have told investors in recent days that they plan to hire to meet growth goals or to seize on emerging technologies.The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing...

President Donald Trump is marching full steam ahead in support of “absolutely incredible” data centers being built across the United States, and told Americans: “You’re becoming a utility.” The remarks came during Trump’s roughly 20 minute remarks during a Thursday visit to Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C., during which he called data centers a “really important subject.” “It is something that you’re very familiar with. The people in the room are real doers. It’s an amazing group,” Trump continued. “We are here today to continue the incredible progress we are making in communities nationwide, to ensure that as...