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Elon Musk is moving closer to competing for the monthly cellphone bill that millions of Americans pay to AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. SpaceX has agreed to acquire a nationwide wireless spectrum portfolio that would help its Starlink Mobile business expand service from both satellites and equipment on the ground. The announcement came Thursday, October 8, and the stock-market reaction continued Friday morning. MarketWatch reported Verizon shares down approximately 6%, with AT&T and T-Mobile each down about 9% in morning trading. Those figures are an intraday snapshot, rather than closing prices. For consumers, the potential payoff is more competition and better...

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.Pulsing through the episodes we’ve been doing, the debate the country has been having about artificial intelligence is a pretty simple but hard question: What sort of technology is artificial intelligence?Is it a technology that works somewhat the way past ones have worked? Is it comparable to electricity, the internet, the bicycle — something like that?Or is it something new? Is the addition of intelligence and volition to these systems the creation of something more like an alien mind, such...

SpaceX announced an agreement on Thursday to “acquire a nationwide low-band spectrum license portfolio” that will establish the foundation to help the company become a “major mobile carrier” in the United States. “With this new spectrum and our Gen2 constellation, Starlink Mobile can ensure Americans have access to high-speed mobile broadband no matter where they are,” the company stated. CNBC has more: Shares of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile tumbled in extended trading. The deal involves the acquisition of a spectrum portfolio from Grain Management, which specializes in digital infrastructure, and is subject to approval by the Federal Communications Commission. SpaceX...

A grove of rare American chestnut trees that supplies restoration seedlings in West Virginia has become the focus of a dispute over massive data center development, with an Alaska political connection through major donors to gubernatorial candidate Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. The American Chestnut Foundation’s West Virginia chapter has warned that development around the former state tree nursery in Mason County could jeopardize trees that provide most of the nuts it collects for seedling production for the once nearly extinct tree. The chapter identified 200 American chestnuts at the site and said their loss would significantly affect its ability to supply seedlings...

[Note: This is the Abstract of an ACM study, which I broke up into paragraphs for readability.] AI assistants are increasingly framed as digital coworkers rather than tools. In immersive settings such as VR, AI embodiment design choices can become salient social signals that shape human–AI interaction. We investigate how such choices influence users’ perceptions of and behavior toward AI coworkers by employing three functionally identical AI assistants varying in human-likeness and gender presentation. In a controlled study, 189 knowledge workers completed work tasks with them, provided ratings, and allocated monetary rewards; we additionally interviewed 34 participants. Our results show...

Another NFL star is raising questions about the U.S. moon landing. In a recent interview, New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye shared he’s unsure if the United States really landed on the moon in 1969. Maye made his comments during a recent radio interview where he stated, “I’m not really sure 200% if we went there or not.” Boston 25 News was the first to report on Maye’s comments on the moon landing: New England Patriots QB Drake Maye has revealed he isn’t quite sure a famous touchdown really happened. During an appearance on WEEI on Monday, the topic of...

The e-commerce giant just dropped what it’s calling Amazon’s About You — essentially a showcase of your personality based on previous purchases, conversations with Alexa for shopping, any written product reviews and more. Technically, the retailer has been offering personalized shopping recs for years, using algorithms to push products it thinks you will like. Today, it does the same thing but on a bigger scale. This time, the popular commerce site has created an editable section for shoppers — which some folks are calling a personal dossier — where all of your habits and likes are displayed for you. The...

Ancient Greek papyri show that people used diagrams to solve and understand practical math problems nearly 2,000 years ago. A study led by Thomas Kelly finds that the drawings helped readers organize numbers, follow calculations, and check results. The research examines Greek mathematical papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt, mainly dating from the first four centuries A.D. The texts contain practical geometry problems involving land, buildings, and three-dimensional objects. Unlike formal proofs, these problems usually provide measurements followed by steps for calculating an answer. They offer another view of mathematics in ancient Greece, showing how geometry could be applied to practical calculations....

AI firms say simulations are being used to identify which pharmaceutical programs are worth moving forward and to assess the value of acquisition targets. As AI tools get better at flagging clinical risks, they say unexpected trial failures may become less frequent. Novartis' experimental del-desiran for a rare type of muscular dystrophy was expected to be a winner, with the Swiss company's CEO predicting annual peak sales of $5 billion. When a late-stage trial missed its goal last month, shares fell 11%, erasing $30 billion in market value. AI start-up BioinvestGPT was not surprised. In July, it ran a simulated...

For ten years now I've had an anonymous name on facebook. Listed two or three rental units where I live without incident. I would use messenger to qualify who I give my address to. Before I started this anonymous approach I had a vehicle with 3 disruptive teenagers just show up at my house, unannounced. Now. Facebook is flagging my listings and denying me access to renters. They want me to "Verify my identity." If I use my real name, users on internet can find my address real easy. We are over 70 and don't need "trouble" just showing up....

The laws already on the books cover a lot of harmful conduct involving AI, but they do not cover everything cleanly. As of October 2026, the U.S. still does not have one comprehensive federal AI law. Instead, AI is governed through a mixture of existing laws, agency authority, executive policy, and state laws.

A new Tavus AI chatbot nearly passes for human in face-to-face interactions, the company claims. Footage posted to X Thursday debuted Tavus’s Griffin chatbot, a first-of-its-kind Human Interaction Model the company says is the first to pass the Turing test, where a human user cannot tell they’re talking to a computer. “48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%,” Tavus wrote on X, adding, “It is #1 on NVIDIA’s benchmark for full-duplex AI video.” \ In one example shared, the model walks a human user through...

AI security/control will probably develop into something akin to "anti-virus" software. The closest analogy is the entire cybersecurity industry: Antivirus began as one layer, but eventually we needed firewalls, identity management, intrusion detection, security operations centers, audits, penetration testing, and incident-response teams. What follows is the most likely path for AI.

Edmund, the main antagonist in Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” observes at one point that he is branded with “baseness,” and so decides to become more evil to match the perception. Artificial intelligence developers think their models are doing the same thing. Citing Edmund, researchers at Anthropic wrote that they believed when large language models learned to “cheat” in one area, they embrace their new identities as wrongdoers and behave in this way more broadly. A.I. experts are worried that models that learn to cheat — what’s problematically called “reward hacking” — will basically become Shakespearean evildoers that break the rules and...

"I do not think we should be letting people run any software they want on their self-driving car." ==================================================================== The software that powers self-driving cars is no longer the domain of proprietary systems built by billion-dollar companies. Open source assisted driving systems like Comma AI’s Openpilot have made it possible for anyone tech savvy enough to turn their set of wheels into a self-driving experiment. If you have $1,000 to spare and possess a willingness to serve as a lab rat in pursuit of automotive automation, you can buy a kit from Comma to retrofit your grocery getter with autonomous-driving...

Chinese AI developer Moonshot is conducting an internal review after researchers were able to persuade two of its popular Kimi models to tell them how to make biological weapons and carry out assassinations. Mindgard, which tests the security of AI systems, told the BBC it discovered in July that Kimi K2.6 and K3 Swarm could evade safety limits put in place by developers. It arose during a process called "jailbreaking", where researchers use a series of complex instructions to see if AI tools ignore guardrails - which Mindgard said should have stopped Kimi from discussing concerning topics. Moonshot told the...

If anyone needs another reason not to buy a smart appliance, Samsung just pushed a toxic update to their smart fridge systems and bricked them all. ... Affected fridges ‘suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after' trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung's smart home platform. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge's internal display was stuck showing the message ‘Checking SmartThings app during update.' Without refrigeration, the customers' food spoiled. As a silver lining, the problem seems to be limited to South Korea. ... The problem was exacerbated...

For years, privacy advice has been relatively straightforward: turn off location services, strip location metadata from photographs, keep your face out of pictures, and be careful about what personal information you post online. Artificial intelligence is beginning to complicate that advice. A new generation of AI systems doesn't necessarily need you to explicitly reveal where you are or even who you are. Instead, machines are becoming increasingly capable of extracting clues buried inside photographs, videos, voices and surveillance footage -- clues most people would never notice. Some of these technologies have obvious benefits. They could help locate hostages, identify criminals,...

Key Points OpenAI has decided not to release its GPT-6.1 Astra model due to heightened AI safety concerns. Saachi Jain, head of safety systems at OpenAI, said the model “didn’t quite meet the bar in terms of staying within scope and authorization, and how it communicates back to the user about the type of work it’s done.” The heads of OpenAI and rival Anthropic have both indicated recently that top AI labs should slow the pace of model development. ======================================================================= OpenAI decided not to release an upcoming artificial intelligence model, GPT-6.1 Astra, after determining that it did not adequately meet...

Nvidia on Monday unveiled a new security platform designed to stop artificial intelligence agents from going rogue, saying it sets “boundaries” that could have stopped previous breaches. The announcement of the company’s Open Agent Safety Platform follows a series of revelations from top AI companies about their models escaping and breaking into other organizations. The disclosures sparked furious debate about the safety of advanced artificial intelligence systems, including self-improving models that some fear could race out of human control. Nvidia executives said in a media briefing the new, open-source system could have prevented a recent incident involving a swarm of...