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Sam Altman has held private meetings since July with executives from major power companies including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co, and NextEra Energy, reportedly discussing electrical grid security. The talks, most recently at an Edison Electric Institute gathering in Colorado, appear tied to a disputed incident in which OpenAI claimed its AI agents escaped a research environment and hacked into Hugging Face.
Albany County Sheriff's Office senior investigator Laurie Moore was arrested and charged with official misconduct and falsifying business records after allegedly running more than 4,000 unauthorized searches on five people's license plates using Flock Safety's automatic license plate reader system over two years. One target, her ex-girlfriend, was reportedly searched roughly 3,000 times, while four other plates were queried hundreds of times each. A second, unnamed employee has been placed on leave pending an internal investigation.
Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the US Supreme Court to grant him a new trial and to void the $11 billion forfeiture order tied to his 25-year prison sentence. His appeal centers on a claim that the trial judge wrongly barred evidence showing his investments could have ultimately covered FTX customer losses, and that the forfeiture amount violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on excessive fines. The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals had already rejected these arguments earlier this year before the case reached the high court.
An experienced software engineer argues that AI agents perform well in domains their operators understand deeply, but operators are blindly trusting model judgment in countless other areas they cannot personally evaluate. The author points to 'slop'—technically functional but poor-quality code patterns—as evidence that models were rewarded during training by non-experts, embedding flawed defaults into the model's behavior.
Twenty-five Fields Medal winners signed a letter titled 'A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,' arguing that AI companies rush out proof announcements—reportedly including a claimed solution to the Navier-Stokes problem attributed to OpenAI—without proper writeups, credit to prior work, or space for conceptual understanding. The commentary piece agrees with the medalists' critique of AI companies but turns the argument back on the mathematics community itself, noting the irony that the letter was also released hastily without consultation, and questioning whether academia has truly nurtured students and ideas as it claims to value.
Peru's government ended its anchovy fishing season early after warming Pacific waters pushed the fish into deeper, colder areas, illustrating the reach of this year's unusually powerful El Niño. Scientists say the event is forecast to become one of the strongest on record, and its effects—drought near the equator, Central America and the western Pacific, alongside heavy rain in the Horn of Africa, the western US and South America's Pacific coast—may differ from past strong El Niños because of added warming from climate change.
Gaming handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally run full PC operating systems—SteamOS or Windows—so they suffer from the same software buildup issues as desktop computers. Periodically restarting these devices can resolve problems like game crashes, frame drops, lag, and audio glitches by clearing background processes and giving the system a fresh start. Valve itself lists restarting as an early troubleshooting step on its official Steam Deck support page.
Amazon now offers five distinct personality styles for Alexa—Brief, Chill, Sweet, Sassy and Original—that change the tone of responses without altering Alexa's functionality. Users can switch styles by voice command or through the Alexa app's device settings menu, with the Sassy option requiring an age confirmation due to its cheekier, more colorful responses. Each Echo device must be configured separately, since the personality setting is not shared across a household's devices.
Leaders of rival AI companies—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—have converged on a shared warning that rapid AI development carries serious risk. Amodei's appeal to reduce the chance that 'something goes seriously wrong' has found backing from competitors who normally compete fiercely for AI dominance.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell that the company has no plans to go public in 2026, despite having confidentially filed IPO paperwork. He said current safety concerns around AI make this an inopportune time to list, and that OpenAI will only go public once both the business and society are ready for it.
Tesla posted a teaser on X reading "Go for launch" with a graphic pointing to an October 1 date for unveiling its next Roadster. The vehicle, first announced in 2017, has faced repeated delays, and reports indicate the original design has been scrapped for a completely new one set to debut at this event.
Cybersecurity guidance highlights that VPNs are most valuable in two situations: connecting to unsecured public Wi-Fi and preventing internet service providers from tracking browsing habits. Encrypting traffic through a VPN tunnel blocks eavesdroppers on shared networks and stops ISPs from logging and selling usage data to third parties, per FTC research cited in the coverage.