GoKawiil
Tech News
Fairphone has released the Gen 6+ version of its repairable Android phone in the United States for $650. The device keeps most of last year's Gen 6 design but adds a faster Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor, 12GB of RAM, and a new cobalt-blue color that honors cobalt miners and the Fair Cobalt Alliance nonprofit Fairphone co-founded.
As payments begin from Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over pirated training data, some authors say publishers and literary agents are wrongly claiming their share of the $3,000-per-book payouts. Writers including April Henry report publishers claiming full payments or rights to books whose rights had reverted to the author years earlier. Watchdog Victoria Strauss says the pattern likely stems from sloppy recordkeeping rather than deliberate wrongdoing, and some publishers have already asked Anthropic to correct the errors.
AI companies have started purchasing used physical books in bulk to feed data into their large language models. This practice follows a copyright settlement earlier this year in which courts determined that buying books and destroying them during the digitization process for AI training qualifies as fair use.
Three 16-year-old students from Cork County, Ireland—Émer Hickey, Ciara Judge, and Sophie Healy-Thow—discovered that treating cereal seeds with rhizobia bacteria, normally associated with legumes, sped up germination by 50 percent and increased barley and oat yields by up to 70 percent. Their research, which began as a school geography project on global food shortages, earned them the top prize at the 2014 Google Science Fair.
The federal government filed a letter in court supporting OpenAI and Microsoft against the New York Times' 2023 copyright lawsuit over AI training data. The filing argues that using copyrighted articles to train large language models qualifies as fair use because it is 'extraordinarily transformative' and doesn't directly compete with the Times' journalism.
The Trump administration filed a statement of interest in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, siding with OpenAI's claim that training AI models on copyrighted text qualifies as fair use. Government attorneys warned that narrowing fair-use doctrine could hinder scientific and economic progress tied to large language models.
Perceptron, a startup founded by former Meta FAIR researchers Armen Aghajanyan and Akshat Shrivastava, has released Isaac 0.5, a vision model built to help robots perceive and navigate physical settings like warehouses and factories. The model is open-weight, meaning its parameters and training data are publicly inspectable, and the company recently closed a $21 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
With Jane Schoenbrun's new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma drawing theater crowds, critics are revisiting the director's 2021 debut We're All Going to the World's Fair. The film follows Casey, an isolated teenager who takes part in an online horror ritual called the World's Fair Challenge and documents her supposed transformation for an internet audience. Her only real connection forms with JLB, an older stranger who insists she's in danger.