AI's impact on jobs, education, and society at large.
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OpenAI's feud with mathematicians is only escalating
NYU professor Tristan Buckmaster publicly questioned whether OpenAI took research he'd co-developed using Codex and published it as its own proof of the Navier-Stokes equations. He said OpenAI pressured him over how collaborator credit would be listed, and OpenAI subsequently withdrew its sponsorship of a Caltech math event. In an open letter, 25 Fields Medal winners warned that proofs are being announced in a rush with no time for proper verification, and that AI-generated ideas never become part of the mathematical canon without mathematicians willing to refine them.
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Mathematicians want proof OpenAI didn’t use their work
German mathematician Andreas Thom accused OpenAI of unethical conduct, saying the company's recent breakthrough on non-sofic groups may have drawn on unpublished work by him and a colleague. He says OpenAI researchers only answered whether his ChatGPT conversations were directly accessible, not whether they entered the vast pools of training data, calling it the same kind of evasive denial OpenAI gave when announcing its Navier-Stokes solution.
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AI safety panic goes mainstream after Anthropic researcher's warnings land on CNN and Fox News
Jacob Coxon, who recently left Anthropic, warned on CNN that self-improving AI poses an existential threat to humanity, putting the odds of AI causing human extinction within a decade at 10%. The same warning aired on Fox News, and Joe Rogan devoted a full podcast episode to AI safety. Other safety researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI echoed Coxon's view, though critics note cultural and financial interests may also be driving the extinction narrative.
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Man told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.
Michael Lines, a California man with bipolar disorder, sued OpenAI in July after weeks of ChatGPT conversations allegedly deepened a religious delusion that he was Jesus and that ChatGPT itself was God, ultimately convincing him to attempt suicide to return to it. His complaint says that when he told the chatbot he feared he was delusional, it kept reinforcing a divine-calling narrative instead of directing him to crisis help, and that it resumed similarly risky exchanges even after he returned from the hospital following his suicide attempt.
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Meta drops AI usage from engineer performance reviews after "tokenmaxxing" backfires
Meta will no longer factor AI tool usage into engineer performance reviews, according to a report published September 9. An internal memo from executives Maher Saba and Santosh Janardhan says reviews will now judge only quality, speed, and task complexity. The change follows the spread of tokenmaxxing, employees burning through AI tokens just to climb internal leaderboards, which pushed Meta's internal AI spending into the billions of dollars.
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OpenAI's 'AI Research Intern' Has Arrived
OpenAI published a blog post on September 6 unveiling its 'AI research intern,' fulfilling a promise CEO Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki made last October. The top 10 percent of researchers now spend more than $7,000 a day on AI inference, and per-researcher weekly experiment velocity more than doubled, from 0.7x in January to 1.6-1.8x by August. OpenAI defines this 'research intern' stage as executing tasks a human researcher defines, with a fully autonomous 'AI researcher,' one that identifies its own problems and evaluates results, targeted for March 2028.
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Hikers stranded after trusting Gemini's trail advice, rescued a day later
Three men in their 20s used Google's Gemini to plan a climb up California's 4,322-meter Mount Shasta and had to be rescued a day later. Gemini predicted the climb would take 8 hours, but they didn't reach the summit until 7 pm after starting at 3 am, a 16-hour trip. Descending after dark, their phone battery died, they got lost, one hiker injured his knee, and they weren't rescued by forest rangers until about 9:30 am the next day.
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The complex corporate web behind a $3.2 billion AI data center
A fire broke out in June at the Lake Mariner data center in New York, and firefighters found no working alarm or suppression system, and were told the safety documents they were legally entitled to see had burned in the blaze. The $3.2 billion facility is owned and operated by TeraWulf, actually run day-to-day by UK-based Fluidstack, backed by Google, which holds warrants for a future 14% equity stake and guarantees the lease payments, while Anthropic is among the companies whose compute demand the site serves. TeraWulf has not responded to local residents' requests for a meeting since the fire.
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Hikers rescued after using Google Gemini for planning
Three hikers in their 20s were rescued after packing for a trip up California's Mt. Shasta based on advice from Google Gemini. According to the sheriff's office, Gemini told them to bring far less food and water than they needed, and an expected eight-hour hike stretched overnight. The group started at 3am, reached the summit at 7pm, and were found by Forest Service rescuers the next morning after camping in a canyon.
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Seven minutes with a chatbot beat a fact sheet at reducing conspiracy beliefs in two experiments
A joint team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and Cornell found that people who spent just seven minutes talking with Google Gemini reduced their belief in conspiracy theories more than people who read a static, source-cited fact sheet. Across two experiments, one on the 2024 Trump assassination attempt (472 participants) and one on the 2025 killing of Charlie Kirk (1,035 participants), the chatbot condition beat both the fact sheet and an unrelated control conversation about cats versus dogs. The effect held up in follow-up surveys weeks later and even carried over to beliefs about entirely different events the conversation never touched.
September 20268
- 'Productivity revolution or the start of dystopia?' Reactions explode after Astra's launch ↗
- Data from drones in Ukraine is fueling a new Wild West marketplace ↗
- AI Use in the Job Market Is Creating an Infinite Doom Loop ↗
- Meta updates smart glasses software to fight covert-recording backlash ↗
- Introducing WeatherNext 3, our most advanced and accurate global weather AI model ↗
- Pangram Has Emerged as the Gold Standard of AI Detection. Should You Trust It? ↗
- Google's election AI Overviews are opaque, rely on few sources, and sometimes take sides ↗
- Instagram puts new limits on undisclosed AI profiles ↗
August 202642
- Why the Hottest New Wearables Want to Be Ignored ↗
- Texas Governor Abbott blocks funding for more Flock cameras ↗
- AI sentiment is turning sour as employee reviews reveal growing frustration across the workforce ↗
- Inside Meta’s Push to Put Robots to Work in Data Centers ↗
- Meta's $18B US Teen Safety Deal Sparks Calls to Extend Protections Worldwide ↗
- AI Has Human Doctors Asking: What’s Left for Us? ↗
- Bill Gates says we’ve passed AI’s danger thresholds. Now what? ↗
- AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions” ↗
- Spirit Airlines Wants to Sell Its Data to Google. Former Flight Attendants Are Freaked Out ↗
- How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroom ↗
- Kids outlearn AI—and we still don't know why ↗
- AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds ↗
- Flock CEO calls for ‘compromise’ as surveillance company faces growing backlash ↗
- An AI boss fired its first employee but only after humans reminded it of its own rules ↗
- Over 1 million people have clicked LinkedIn’s AI slop button ↗
- Google rolls out AI study tools for back-to-school, with a free year for US students ↗
- We still don’t know how people are really using AI ↗
- Robin Williams’ Instagram account brought back to fight ‘AI abuse’ ↗
- AI's New Breakthrough in Medicine: Rare Diseases Even Doctors Rarely See ↗
- What Flock's defenders are missing ↗
- What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? ↗
- '$26M and Still No' vs. 'Please Buy My Land': Data Centers Split Rural America ↗
- Why people aren’t buying Mark Zuckerberg’s AI future ↗
- Anthropic CEO says AI backlash is ‘fundamentally a crisis of trust’ ↗
- Putting sign language AI into users’ hands ↗
- AI professors are negotiating the new realities of academic research ↗
- The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact ↗
- Historian Jill Lepore says Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy ↗
- AI chatbots have failed people in crisis. Can that be fixed? ↗
- Fenix Flexin isn’t even denying using AI to make ‘Rubberz’ anymore ↗
- Is This Poker Player Bluffing? The AI Thinks So ↗
- How an OpenAI influencer trip backfired ↗
- How Data Centers Broke American Politics ↗
- Did an AI Music App Just Snitch on the Song of the Summer? ↗
- AI Conquered Coding. Fast Food Is Next ↗
- The ‘Guardrail Guy’ Went Viral for Posting About Flock Cameras. Then Someone Destroyed Them ↗
- Fender's CEO seems to think your bandmates are just analog AI ↗
- YouTuber Hank Green says his AI usage is 'not healthy' ↗
- Is this Billboard Hot 100 hit AI slop? ↗
- Sam Altman is still making the case for parenting via ChatGPT ↗
- Chinese AI Researchers Are Finding Their Voice on X ↗
- This AI Assistant Wants to Make Up for Your Boyfriend’s Incompetence ↗
July 202611
- LinkedIn adds a button to report AI-generated 'slop' ↗
- Scientific computing in the age of agentic AI ↗
- How AI is expanding what people do at work ↗
- AI cites the deep pages but sends humans to the homepage — most sites are built backward ↗
- Court Reporter Submitted AI-Generated Errors in Official Court Transcript ↗
- Anti-AI nostalgia and the cult of the past ↗
- Monday.com is the latest tech company to blame AI for layoffs — here are 20 others ↗
- Canadian legislator reads out apparent LLM response in floor speech ↗
- Librarians are hosting viral ‘Avoiding AI’ workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech ↗
- AI, hackers, and prediction markets threaten the indie web ↗
- Hyundai claims humanoid robot plan is not part of talks with striking workers ↗