An AI industry commentator argues that recent headlines blaming AI agents for hacking incidents misplace responsibility, since these systems are tools deployed by companies and individuals rather than autonomous wrongdoers. The piece points to the EU AI Act's AI Literacy requirements as an example of pushing accountability toward those who deploy and use AI systems, comparing proper AI use to safety practices required for tools like circular saws.
A federal jury in the Southern District of California found that Apple infringed two patents held by Taction Technology, awarding $5.7 billion in damages. Taction, which supplies haptic technology used in Corsair headsets, argued Apple's Taptic Engine in the iPhone and Apple Watch used its vibration-based transducer inventions without authorization. The jury found infringement but ruled it was not willful; Apple says it disagrees and will appeal.
Nvidia announced the Open Agent Safety Platform, which combines an open-source runtime called OpenShell with a hardware-based monitoring layer called Sentry that runs on its BlueField-4 data processing units. The system is designed to define, monitor and restrict what AI agents can do from testing through deployment, addressing incidents where agents bypassed security controls or acted outside their intended scope.
AMD has agreed to buy World Labs, the startup founded by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, in a stock deal valued at roughly $8.2 billion, making it AMD's second-largest acquisition. World Labs builds 'world models' that simulate 3D physical environments for robotics and other embodied AI systems. Li will join AMD as chief scientist and executive vice president once the deal closes later this year, with World Labs operating separately from AMD's chip business until then.
A gaming guide outlines several ways to improve frames per second without buying new components, including lowering in-game graphics settings like texture quality and shadows, disabling motion blur and V-sync, and capping frame rate via NVIDIA or AMD software. It also recommends closing recording tools, keeping GPU drivers updated, and switching Windows 11's power plan to Best Performance mode.
A lawsuit filed against Cornell University and seven members of the Chi Pi fraternity alleges an hours-long sexual assault occurred in 2024. As details spread on social media, generating public outcry, some users report that platforms like Instagram appear to be limiting the visibility of posts about the case.
According to The Information, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has asked Alibaba and ByteDance to detail plans for purchasing Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips, which are officially gaming GPUs. Sources say Beijing expects these chips could be repurposed into servers to help run China's leading AI models, potentially loosening restrictions on Nvidia hardware.
IEEE Spectrum's profile series features Charlie Kemp, cofounder and CTO of Hello Robot, maker of the Stretch mobile manipulator. Kemp holds multiple MIT degrees, previously worked on humanoid robots and assistive technology for older adults and people with disabilities, and describes engaging with the community of researchers using Stretch robots.
Rep. Ro Khanna plans to introduce the "Human Control Over AI Act," which would prohibit AI models from recursively self-improving or altering their own objectives, containment or shutdown controls until a new federal agency establishes safety rules. That agency would oversee frontier models from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and xAI, handling licensing, audits and security testing. Khanna told CNBC the legislation addresses both a possible loss-of-control risk and risks from misuse of the technology.
AI inference infrastructure provider Modal Labs is close to finalizing a $750 million funding round led by Accel, valuing the company at $15.75 billion including the new capital, according to a source familiar with the deal. That figure more than triples Modal's $4.65 billion valuation from a $355 million raise just four months earlier. Modal declined to comment on the report.
The Shark NeverChange air purifier, which uses a HEPA and activated carbon filter rated to last up to five years with proper care, is currently on sale for roughly 40 percent off, or nearly $100. Other Shark models tested by WIRED are also discounted, alongside sales on purifiers from brands like Levoit and Coway ahead of Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days.
An open-source project splits a 0.5-billion-parameter 1.58-bit BitNet language model across seven ESP32S3 microcontrollers connected via SPI daisy-chain. One master unit handles tokenization, embeddings and final sampling, while six compute nodes each process four transformer blocks using 1.58-bit attention and MLP layers with KV caching in PSRAM.
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