Andreessen Horowitz is funding a San Francisco academy, led by Udemy cofounder Gagan Biyani, that offers high school graduates a tuition-free, one-year program focused on building startups rather than academic coursework. The founding cohort of about 50 students will skip tests and homework, instead working on real projects with mentors from firms like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, and receiving roughly $50,000 in computing credit plus a $5,000 travel and research budget. OpenAI's Sam Altman is named as a guest lecturer or instructor, and other tech figures, including Fidji Simo, are contributing funding.
A practicing surgeon writes about recurring bouts of depression, anxiety and burnout during 13 years in medicine, prompted by the suicide of Brisbane gastroenterologist Dr Andrew Bryant. He describes extreme on-call schedules, including 12 days of 24-hour availability out of 14, and long study hours during exam preparation as major stressors affecting his family and personal life.
Duncan McIntyre founded Highland Electric Fleets in Massachusetts in 2018 after noticing his son's school bus tailpipe exposed children to diesel exhaust. The company, which finances and manages the transition to electric school bus fleets, now generates roughly $50 million annually, is pursuing contracts in about 200 cities, and has secured a sponsorship role with the 2028 Olympics.
British Columbia has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman seeking compensation for the demolition and rebuilding of Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, where an 18-year-old shooter who had used ChatGPT to plan an attack killed five students and a staff member before dying by suicide in February. The province says the shooter also killed his mother and half-brother beforehand, and that the school was torn down in August because survivors were too traumatized to return.
Andreessen Horowitz is opening The Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a one-year, tuition-free program in San Francisco for about 50 high school graduates who haven't attended college. The program mixes technical coursework with mentorship from tech industry figures, and is backed by $42 million in funding as a for-profit venture led by CEO Gagan Biyani.
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.
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.
A Bloomberg report citing Pentagon investigators found that the February 28 double-tap strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school, which killed over 150 people including at least 123 children, resulted from outdated intelligence compounded by heavy reliance on an AI targeting system. Investigators described the tragedy as a cascade of small errors rather than a single mistake, involving technology similar to systems used to fast-track thousands of strikes earlier in the war.
Natasha Singer's book 'Coding Kids' traces how Code.org and its founder Hadi Partovi convinced schools that coding was essential to economic survival, paving the way for tech companies to influence curricula. In an interview with The 74, Singer argues today's AI push by Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google into classrooms mirrors that earlier coding campaign, despite growing public distrust of Big Tech.
A UN fact-finding mission investigating the February conflict between Iran and the US has concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe US forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school and a sports facility in Minab, killing more than 150 people, including roughly 120 children. Investigators said the US relied on faulty intelligence about a commander's presence and failed to verify the target, calling the strike reckless and an indiscriminate attack amounting to a war crime. The same mission also found that Iranian authorities committed crimes against humanity while suppressing anti-government protests that began in December.
A study finds that children who received school meal programs went on to earn more income as adults compared with peers who lacked such access. Researchers tracked long-term economic outcomes to establish this connection between childhood nutrition support and later earnings.
Vermont's Mountain School enrolls high schoolers for roughly $40,000 per semester, having them cook, clean, farm and care for animals on its 418-acre campus instead of following a typical classroom schedule. About 30% of students receive financial aid, and many come from wealthy families unfamiliar with basic chores like cleaning a composting toilet or sweeping a floor.
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