I think the breakthrough AI opportunity is still slightly ahead of us or slightly ahead of most of us, and that is the widespread introduction of AI companions that we'll have at our disposal at work and home that are trained by us, that know everything we know, and that can take action on our behalf across a range of activities.
We've taken a generally precautionary approach here. We don't know if the models are conscious. We're not even sure that we know what it would mean for a model to be conscious or whether a model can be conscious. But we're open to the idea that it could be. And so we've taken certain measures to make sure that if we hypothesize that the models did have some morally relevant experience, I don't know if I want to use the word conscious, that they do.
If you look at the dot com bubble, that's the best example that we have of what happened in the past. A lot of companies went bankrupt, but there were some companies that actually did really well, like Amazon, for example. So I think [that's] what will happen with AI. There are use cases that are tangible and real, and there's a lot of hype... post-bubble, that hype is not going to last, but tangible results that actually solve problems and then lead to results that team will remain and will thrive afterwards.
Now, being associated with Jeffrey Epstein is not a crime. Epstein was a businessman and a creepy version of a socialite. He did business with and socialized with a lot of people, as we now know. But check out how Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick described his relationship to Epstein late last year. I mean, this was Lutnick telling The New York Post about an incident with Epstein, who happened to be Lutnick's next door neighbor when he visited his house back in 2005.
However, I feel deja vu - cast your minds back to those shocked few days after the Brexit vote, when we all realized that the echo chamber of our social feeds did not actually reflect the diverse views of the whole of the UK. Is this just another example of us realizing everything is not as it seems online? Or maybe it's a case study for the effectiveness of bus-side advertising, but I digress.
The Air Force remains committed to expediting delivery of the VC-25 bridge aircraft in support of the Presidential airlift mission, with an anticipated delivery no later than summer 2026. The air force added that it has accepted the Qatari gift which will be used for executive airlift. Described as a flying palace, the estimated $400m gift to Trump last year drew widespread bipartisan backlash, with lawmakers voicing ethical concerns over Qatar's motives and questioning the 13-year-old plane's security measures.
During the summer of 2020, at the onset of the Covid pandemic, the documentary director Matt Nadel was back home in Boca Raton, Florida. He remembers one particular evening walk that he took with his father, Phil, as they weathered out those early months. As they strode through the neighborhood, Nadel, now 26, said that the prospect of a vaccine was exciting, but the idea of pharmaceutical executives profiting off a devastating virus left him feeling uneasy.
Likewise, when our beloved boys set foot on the hallowed gridiron, we would never indulge in the "tush push." The game of football is about handing off the pigskin to the halfback and hitting the A gap made by the big hogs in the trenches. It's not about having a thousand pounds of man flesh get behind you and push you straight forward through everything in front of you, and you're carrying the ball, and then you get the yards.
It's dull as hell. I don't believe it; it takes me out of the immersion. People are saying it helps the immersion because it's reactive. It takes me out of the experience because I just hear something that doesn't sound like a human being in jeopardy, or in combat, or excitement, or whatever emotion you're supposed to be aiming for,
Besides blocking users from reading its website with an AI chatbot, the magazine anointed the "architects of AI" as its most important visionaries of 2025, eschewing the definition of "person" yet again. The eyeroll-inducing announcement was met with plenty of incredulity, especially considering the astronomical amount of money being spent on building out data centers, their enormous carbon footprint, and a whole litany of other ethical conundrums that the embrace of generative AI has spawned.
With all this boundless possibility, why is AI focused on replacing screenwriters instead of, say, figuring out a solution to fixing plastic bottles polluting the oceans? "I don't think that's an accident," said Lyonne, 46. "It's about cutting costs." What the co-founder of the media production company Animal Pictures would like to see is people paid for their expertise, work, and creative ideas, and the democratization of filmmaking so more people can engage in a business that has traditionally had sky-high barriers to entry.
As AI accelerates and expands in media, journalism needs a pedagogy of wonder. This is an approach in education that encourages students to be critical, curious, and creative. For journalists, a pedagogy of wonder calls on them to become explorers, treating AI as a partner in inquiry to help them ask better questions, notice more, and deepen public understanding. It treats the newsroom as a learning space where curiosity is a method, and ethics is a practice.
Beagles are very popular companion dogs and also very popular among breeding facilities and research laboratories where they live highly compromised lives, all "in the name of research" to help humans. 1 Many, if not most people, have no idea what goes on behind these closed doors. I've often wondered why these wonderful dogs rather than others wound up being used for a sorts of research, and now I know because of Dr. Brad Bolman's excellent new book Lab Dog.
In 2016, the legendary Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki was shown a bizarre AI-generated video of a misshapen human body crawling across a floor. Miyazaki declared himself "utterly disgusted" by the technology demo, which he considered an "insult to life itself." "If you really want to make creepy stuff, you can go ahead and do it," Miyazaki said. "I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all."
It follows the banning of the drugs for gender treatment last year after a major review raised concerns about the lack of clinical evidence over their safety for under-18s. Researchers from King's College London say the trial will involve around 220 children under the age of 16 who are going through puberty, and will examine the impact of the drugs on their physical, social and emotional wellbeing.
Many of the objects dating from 1933 to 1945 up for sale under the title "System of Terror Vol II" contained the names and personal information about the persecuted. "For victims of Nazi persecution and Holocaust survivors, this auction is a cynical and shameless undertaking that leaves them outraged and speechless", Christoph Heubner, the executive-vice president of International Auschwitz Committee said in a statement. "They should be displayed in museums or memorial exhibitions and not degraded to mere commodities."
One of the last remaining fun things about the internet is getting to pass judgment on the goings-on in households that you would never hear about otherwise. On Reddit, for instance, there is a whole thriving sub for just this purpose called Am I the Asshole?, where people describe conflicts from their lives and ask strangers to adjudicate on them.
Mayor Daniel Lurie's District 4 appointee, Beya Alcaraz, was the only San Francisco supervisor appointee in at least 30 years to enter the job with zero experience in either politics or government, a Mission Local analysis found. Alcaraz abruptly resigned from her post on Thursday night after controversy. Hours earlier, Mission Local published text messages in which Alcaraz said she paid her former pet store workers "under the table," skimped on taxes, and underreported income.
The military is going to use artificial intelligence. But while planners in the government may have an idea of the best way forward, can they truly lead, or will industry steer things forward? In a new Breaking Defense video on the future of military AI, Breaking Defense Editor-in-Chief Aaron Mehta and our in-house AI expert Sydney Freedberg are joined by Joshua Wallin of the Center for a New American Security to tackle that very question.
"Everybody has been trying to say to her, 'Why today?' We have really focused, important work to do today,' one House Democrat who was on the floor at the time told Axios. Clark, the lawmaker explained, 'was trying to ... say [to Gluesenkamp Perez], 'You don't need to do this right now.'"
