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Senator Josh Hawley is calling on Flock Safety's chief executive to testify before the Senate next week over the company's automated license plate reading network. Hawley argues that the surveillance technology, deployed widely across the country, threatens Americans' basic privacy expectations during everyday activities like commuting or attending church.
Elon Musk called this week for AI labs to test each other's models to catch safety issues before release, positioning this as an alternative to heavy government regulation. His stance contrasted with President Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who dismissed AI risk fears as a 'hoax' and urged faster development, even as reports emerged that Musk privately joined Huang and Mark Zuckerberg in advising Trump against an industry-funded AI regulator.
A comparison of AMD's Ryzen 7 X3D processors from 2022 to 2024 (5800X3D, 7800X3D and 9800X3D) shows Geekbench 6 scores rising roughly 47% on single-core and 58% on multi-core tasks. Clock speed increases were modest, from 4.5 GHz to 5.2 GHz max boost, while transistor counts grew about 50%, from roughly 11 billion to 16 billion, mostly added to the processor core rather than cache.
Speaking at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York, Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden explained that removing executives and managers who habitually blocked new ideas was central to reviving the company after a difficult stretch. He framed this cultural shift in leadership as the main driver behind Adidas's recent recovery.
Apple's iOS 27 update introduces more than 20 new Apple Intelligence capabilities, with the centerpiece being a ground-up rebuild of Siri powered by large language models. The revamped assistant adds broad world knowledge, awareness of personal context across apps like Messages and Calendar, on-screen understanding, task execution within apps, a dedicated Siri app with iCloud-synced conversation history, AI-assisted writing tools, upgraded Visual Intelligence, and customizable expressive voices on supported hardware.
Diogo Almeida, a former OpenAI researcher who helped invent RLHF and build ChatGPT, has released a new transformer-based model called Jev through his startup TypeSafe AI. Unlike large language models, Jev doesn't generate text—it produces calibrated probability outputs, making it faster, cheaper and immune to hallucination. Developers have shown strong demand, with the company briefly unable to keep up with API traffic.
Disney has hired Karandeep Anand, who recently led Character.AI, to serve as the company's first chief technology officer, reporting directly to CEO Josh D'Amaro. Anand will oversee enterprise technology and Disney's data and AI platforms, and is bringing several former Character.AI engineers with him. Disney is also promoting Adam Smith to a new Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer role for Disney Entertainment.
IEEE is launching its inaugural International Leadership Conference on October 3-4 in Budapest, aimed at helping senior technical professionals transition into leadership roles. The event centers on the concept of 'legacy leadership,' which redefines success as mentoring others and transferring knowledge rather than personal technical achievement. Registration for the conference is currently open.
Thousands of Barclays employees in the United Kingdom signed an open letter opposing the bank's shift from a two-day to a three-day office requirement, with senior staff expected in four days. The letter asks Barclays to compensate workers for the added commuting expenses the new policy creates.
Ivy Coach, a college admissions consultancy, reports that many prospective clients fail to notice or retain crucial information like pricing, even when it's clearly stated in emails and consultations. The company outlines strategies such as repeating key facts, using visual emphasis, short paragraphs, and verbal reinforcement to ensure important details actually register with recipients.
A newly published online text presents an unconventional, visually driven introduction to the Discrete Fourier Transform, aimed at digital signal processing learners. Rather than relying on dense mathematical proofs, it uses interactive diagrams, animations, and audio examples across roughly 30 pages to build intuition. The author frames it as a supplementary, pop-science style resource rather than a rigorous textbook replacement.
Scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine identified a small population of cortical inhibitory neurons, called Sst-Chodl cells, that make up about one percent of the cortex's inhibitory neurons. Activating these cells in mice was enough to induce sleep, showing the cortex itself can generate slow-wave sleep rhythms rather than merely responding to signals from deeper brain regions. The team spent years developing a genetic labeling method precise enough to isolate this rare cell type from more abundant, similar neurons.