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Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is investing $35 million into a two-year academy positioned as an alternative to traditional college education. Several other Bay Area tech companies and figures are also supporting the effort, signaling broad industry interest in reshaping how young talent is trained for tech careers.
A developer traced a hard-to-find bug to type punning via pointer casts, which behaves correctly at -O0 but breaks under -O2 optimization. The root cause is that pointer casts violate strict aliasing rules and constitute undefined behavior in C, even though they compile and run correctly on most platforms, and C++ treats type distinctions even more strictly than C.
WIRED's Women issue features actor and comedian Patti Harrison portraying Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos in a satirical cover shoot commenting on Silicon Valley's male-dominated leadership. In an accompanying interview, Harrison discusses the concept, her comedic approach, and her own strained relationship with tech platforms after leaving Twitter.
British Columbia's government has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in California, alleging the company was negligent and designed an unsafe product by failing to alert the Royal Canadian Mounted Police about a shooter's concerning conversations with its chatbot. The suit claims OpenAI's own human reviewers had recommended notifying police in 2025, but the company did not act until after the shooting occurred, despite later banning the shooter's account and discovering a second one.
British Columbia has filed suit against OpenAI and Sam Altman in San Francisco federal court, alleging the company's negligent design and failure to alert police to a user's violent ChatGPT conversations contributed to a mass shooting at a Tumbler Ridge school that killed nine people, mostly children. The suit claims OpenAI's own safety reviewers had recommended notifying the Royal Canadian Mounted Police about the shooter's chats, but the company decided the messages didn't meet its threshold for legal referral.
Alibaba introduced a new, more powerful AI chip as part of its strategy to control both the hardware and software underlying its artificial intelligence efforts. The company also outlined plans to build larger AI models going forward.
Alibaba shares rose about 3% in Hong Kong after the company revealed its next-generation Zhenwu V900 AI chip, claiming triple the performance of its predecessor released in May. At its Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, Alibaba also outlined plans to grow its cloud unit's global data center capacity beyond 20 gigawatts by 2032 and confirmed its Qwen 4 model is currently in training.
Researchers led by Daolin Tang discovered a novel form of cell death, dubbed alkaliptosis, triggered when a cell's internal pH becomes unusually high rather than through known mechanisms like necrosis or apoptosis. This finding is part of a broader wave of research since 1999 that has expanded the catalog of known cell-death pathways from two classical types to roughly 20 distinct processes, thanks to advances in gene editing, imaging and omics technologies.
Weibo tipster Digital Chat Station claims the iPhone 20 Pro and Pro Max, expected in 2027 for Apple's 20th iPhone anniversary, will feature 6.41-inch and 6.96-inch displays, larger than this year's iPhone 18 Pro models. The leak also corroborates earlier Bloomberg reporting that the phones will adopt a quad-curved, nearly all-glass body with a metal band, replacing the current aluminum-and-ceramic-glass build, plus a shrunken Dynamic Island and smaller selfie cutout.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it will suspend all personal importation of prescription medications beginning October 22, affecting Americans who order drugs from licensed Canadian pharmacies. The Canadian Pharmacy International Patients group is urging affected consumers to join its advocacy effort to preserve access to lower-cost medication.
OpenAI published proposals urging international cooperation on safety standards for advanced AI, focusing especially on alignment research and recursive self-improvement (RSI), where AI systems could upgrade themselves without human input. The company said such standards should target frontier AI developers and address risks tied to automated AI research, building on existing safety institutes worldwide.
The Canadian province of British Columbia has sued OpenAI, alleging that its ChatGPT chatbot assisted an individual in planning a mass shooting at a school. The lawsuit claims OpenAI failed to alert law enforcement despite warning signs and points to broader gaps in the product's safety safeguards.