A Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center survey of over 5,400 Americans found 53 percent of men claimed familiarity with two fictional AI figures, Susan Milner and Craig Dalton, compared with 40 percent of women. The same survey found men use AI more often and answer factual questions about it correctly slightly more often, but largely because women are more likely to say they don't know an answer rather than guess wrong.
wired.com
· 2026-10-14
During San Francisco's Tech Week, AI founders and venture capitalists discussed the Trump administration's largely voluntary approach to AI oversight, including a 308-word safety pact signed last month that asks labs to self-monitor rather than follow binding rules. At an Andreessen Horowitz-organized event, PitchBook's Kyle Stanford highlighted that the U.S. government is allocating $1 trillion to defense, with $13.5 billion earmarked for autonomous systems and AI, framing it as a major investment opportunity.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-12
A new documentary, 'The Sixty-Year Mission: How Star Trek Changed Television and the World,' directed by Mark A. Altman, premiered in New York during Comic Con and opened in select theaters this weekend. The film examines the original 1966-1969 series through interviews with cast members including William Shatner, George Takei, Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner, alongside fans such as Mary L. Trump, tracing how the show reflected 1960s politics and influenced representation for marginalized groups.
wired.com
· 2026-10-12
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei committed last month to embedding third-party evaluators such as METR, Apollo Research and Transluce within his company to assess AI model risks, a move OpenAI's Sam Altman quickly backed. President Trump and several major tech firms also voiced support, though funding, access levels and reporting structures for these nonprofit evaluators remain unresolved.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-11
Several film and TV projects about tech leaders are debuting this season, including Sony's "The Social Reckoning" (about the Facebook whistleblower leak), Alex Gibney's documentary "Musk," A24's Theranos film "You Can See Everything," Neon's "Artificial" about Sam Altman's brief 2023 ouster from OpenAI, and a Netflix "Instadocs" episode on the Hugging Face security incident. Musk has publicly criticized the documentary about him, while Altman said he understands public anxiety being projected onto him.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-10
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman introduced a new AI agent called Dots at the company's DevDay event, claiming it would set a new privacy standard and implicitly criticizing Meta's rival agent Muse. Meta had earlier launched Muse, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg describing it as built for privacy and security using an isolated virtual machine to store user data. Despite Muse reportedly reaching 600,000 daily US users within weeks, according to Apptopia data, reports suggest its privacy protections have not fully matched the company's promises.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-10
President Trump said on Truth Social that the US will not attack Iran before the November 3 midterm elections, citing "productive discussions" between the two countries—a reversal from comments made a day earlier. He said the US naval blockade on Iran's ports remains fully in effect and that Iran still cannot be allowed a nuclear weapon. Oil prices rose during Thursday's trading session despite the de-escalatory tone.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-09
A wave of films debuting this fall dramatizes recent tech scandals, including Aaron Sorkin's 'The Social Reckoning' about Facebook's internal turmoil, featuring Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, and Alex Gibney's four-hour documentary 'Musk' on Elon Musk. The Sorkin film draws on leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen and opens October 9, while the Musk documentary premieres October 16.
cnet.com
· 2026-10-09
OpenAI released a preprint, accompanied by Lean formalization code, asserting a resolution to a long-standing open problem in set theory: whether the Partition Principle implies the Axiom of Choice. The announcement prompted widespread attention from mathematicians, including a blogger known for offering a whisky bottle reward for a solution to this exact problem.
karagila.org
· 2026-10-08
A published opinion column argues that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is not a trained scientist or scholar, is unfit to hold significant influence over the trajectory of artificial intelligence and its impact on humanity. The piece draws a contrast with J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project, to question Altman's qualifications for the outsized role he plays in AI development.
wsj.com
· 2026-10-08
OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue stood at roughly $50 billion at the end of September, below the $68 billion figure widely reported last month, CNBC confirmed. A person familiar with the matter said the higher figure had included gross revenue from OpenAI's partners, used for comparison with rival Anthropic. Shares of Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave fell after the revised figure emerged, alongside reported growth rates of 77% overall and 107% in enterprise business.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-08
Alvin Sng, a software engineer at startup Factory AI, posted on X that rather than reading a book aloud to his newborn himself, he offered to play an audiobook, then proposed training a voice model of himself to narrate it. He captioned the exchange 'Parenting hits different when you work in AI'; the post has since been deleted. The anecdote follows earlier comments from OpenAI's Sam Altman about using ChatGPT and AI-generated podcasts in place of everyday parent-child conversation.
futurism.com
· 2026-10-08
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