Free Republic

New Orleans has become the first city in the US to use artificial intelligence to answer emergency 911 calls — but critics warn it could have deadly consequences. The Orleans Parish Communication District — which gets over a thousand emergency dials a day, in what is among the highest volume of calls in the country — is routing the 911 calls to an AI agent that decides which ones get bumped to human dispatchers and which get handled by the bot itself, according to the Shreveport Times. “I was a 911 dispatcher for 11 years and this is the worst...

A parody artificial intelligence chatbot launched by a candidate trying to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress was taken down Friday after the former House speaker attacked the bot for being “sexist.” California state Sen. Scott Wiener launched the chatbot this week to mock fellow Democrat and city supervisor Connie Chan, who earned Pelosi’s endorsement. Wiener and Chan will face against each other in November for Pelosi’s seat. The website ConnieChan.ai bills itself as “the world’s first AI trained to say no to anything you ask,” a knock on Chan’s reputation among critics as a progressive NIMBY who has opposed numerous...

The AI job apocalypse is turning out to be a bust. The Wall Street Journal reports that major companies are hiring again, defying predictions that artificial intelligence would wipe out large numbers of jobs — and specifically entry level jobs. But the really interesting twist in this story is that AI is actually creating jobs. Entry level workers aren’t victims; they are valuable assets.Instead of preparing for disaster, let’s focus on a more productive — and realistic endeavor — preparing students and young adults for the opportunities that AI is creating for them in work and in life.As the founder...

A decade ago, a computer did something that no human would have done. It was considered a breakthrough for AI. Now the world is full of them.The first glimmer of our AI future revealed itself a decade ago in the form of a single black stone. It happened during a historic match between one of the world’s best Go players and AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google’s DeepMind lab to conquer this ancient board game. The artificial-intelligence system stunned everyone by winning their opening showdown. In their next encounter, with millions of people watching online all over the world,...

The decision reflects internal findings that the upcoming ‘Astra’ model may possess ‘critical cyber capabilities’ and follows a string of AI-testing incidentsOpenAI is pausing some activities involving an upcoming artificial-intelligence model, Astra, after internal evaluations led the company to conclude it “cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities,” the company said in a blog post on Friday. The announcement of the slowdown, which represents one of the first times an AI developer has publicly held back model development due to security concerns, follows a series of loss-of-control incidents that have raised alarm among cyberdefense professionals and AI-safety researchers. During evaluations over...

Those who first dreamed of artificial intelligence saw it as an instrument for the perfection of modern secular society. The IBM Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, where some of the earliest AI applications made their public debut, advertised a streamlined future in which technologically enhanced problem-solving was extended to all areas of life. Things have turned out somewhat differently. The AI era that began with the 2022 launch of ChatGPT often seems more consumed by theological concerns than by technical ones. The technology has given rise to a phantasmagoria of prophecies, heresies and false messiahs of the sort one...

Whether a model is open or closed, the more important distinction is whether it was built through innovation or through theft. Last month, a Chinese artificial intelligence lab, Moonshot AI, released a model that stunned the industry. It tested at near-frontier performance while costing much less than leading American systems to use. And the lab promised to release an open-weight version — meaning anyone could download and run the model — in the coming weeks. Days after the launch, a coalition of AI and technology companies published a letter defending open-weight models as essential to American innovation.Both developments reignited a...

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...

The Sheriff’s office says the search was triggered to perform a wellness check for a missing person. In May 2025, a deputy with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas ran a query through Flock Safety’s Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system to look for a woman suspected of having a self-managed abortion, which is illegal in Texas. According to the documents obtained by 404 Media, the search log included phrases “had an abortion, search for female.” The query provided the officer with access to a network of 83,000 cameras used by 6,809 law enforcement networks, including states where abortions...

A Florida man was arrested after authorities say he stalked a woman he met on a dating app and stole a teddy bear containing the woman’s son’s ashes. According to the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, deputies were dispatched on Aug. 1 to help Flagler Beach Police Department officers with an investigation into a suspect, identified as Justin Fountain, after a woman went to Flagler Beach police and said Fountain had “become increasingly controlling and aggressive.” “According to the victim, Fountain tracked her location, following her around Flagler County, and stole her child’s ashes from her despite her asking to stop...

Winona police are investigating after all eight of the city’s Flock cameras were cut down and stolen. It’s the latest city in the state to experience Flock camera theft or vandalism; cameras have been reported stolen or damaged in Duluth, Plymouth, Faribault, Edina and Anoka County. Winona police say officers initiated an investigation on Saturday night when law enforcement realized there had been no recent camera activity. Officers searched the locations of the Flock cameras and found the camera poles cut down near the base and discarded in the weeds, according to Winona police. The cameras were removed.

The sale of gaming giant Electronic Arts (EA) for $55bn (£41bn) to a group of buyers including Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) has been finalised. The American company is known for making and publishing best-selling games such as EA FC, formerly known as Fifa, The Sims and Mass Effect. The investors, who include Affinity Partners - led by President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner - are taking EA private, meaning all of its public shares will be purchased and it will no longer be traded on a stock exchange. It is thought to be the largest leveraged buyout in...

The new framework, completed in recent days, is seen as most likely to affect OpenAI, Anthropic and Google WASHINGTON—The Trump administration’s new guidelines for powerful artificial-intelligence tools exempt open models made by U.S. companies, a gap that marks the White House’s latest bid to ensure AI tools are safe without slowing down innovation. Under a framework that administration officials discussed with executives from leading AI companies Tuesday, only makers of closed, proprietary U.S. models that demonstrate state-of-the-art capabilities in cybersecurity and hacking based on performance benchmarks would have to voluntarily submit those models to the government for testing before they...

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...

I served as the chief information officer of the athletic apparel company Lululemon for eight years. Deploying new technologies, artificial intelligence included, was part of the job. But when I left, my successor was handed a new title: chief A.I. and technology officer. I winced — not about the person but about the pattern. Companies these days are quick to stick “A.I.” in news releases, in earnings calls, in product names, in job postings and in titles at the top of their organizations. The real question is what strategy sits behind the abbreviation. A title costs nothing, but it doesn’t...

I can understand selling our your own people in exchange for temporal worldly wealth and power. But I don't get selling out your family to this same fate, because it is inevitable that what is done to your people will eventually be done to your family. So, what is in it for the world leaders and parties to destroy their families in the process of mass migration?

IBM and researchers from the University of Chicago announced a demonstration in quantum computing that meets the fundamental criteria for "quantum advantage"—the point where quantum computers can be confirmed to have outperformed classical computers on trusted computations. The collaboration said its system had performed computations beyond the reach of leading classical simulation methods while providing confidence that the computation returned accurate results. In their new paper, the researchers showed that these two goals could be achieved through a novel construction of encoded quantum circuits—one of the largest demonstrations of logical quantum computing to date. The paper is published on the...

A socialist pol who is a shoo-in to represent part of Queens in the state Assembly whipped out his tin cup to beg the public to help pay his personal bills while he waits out the November elections, The Post has learned. Brian Romero — a former legislative aide hoping to succeed his ex-boss Jessica González-Rojas, who is headed to the State Senate — is already confronting his first self-inflicted budget crisis. The problem isn’t that the rent is too damn high — it’s that he doesn’t have a job to pay it. He set up a GoFundMe campaign to...

Jacob Tsimerman won the biggest prize in math. Now he’s working on the most important problem of his career.When he won the Fields Medal last week, Jacob Tsimerman accepted the most prestigious honor in math wearing a powder-blue tuxedo with satin lapels.Then he made an announcement as striking as his tux. After the ceremony, the four winning mathematicians were asked what they planned to do next. One said he would keep working on partial differential equations, one said he wanted to experiment with artificial intelligence and one said she had absolutely no idea. That left Tsimerman.“I’ll be starting a position...

Announcement: http://ReplacementClock.org is now live! A year ago, I went looking for something like a Great Replacement Tracker — a site that aggregated all the demographic data for the West and could tell me how bad things really were. To my surprise, I couldn't find one. So six months ago, I started building it myself. Today, I'm announcing the first live version of the Great Replacement Clock. It tracks the European-descended share of the world's population and of 45 historically White countries. It consolidates historical figures and modeled projections into a single interactive timeline — sourced, auditable, and methodologically transparent....