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OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web

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Recently unsealed court documents in the New York Times ' case against OpenAI and Microsoft are pretty damning. The companies' own documentation warned that it was starting a "doom loop" that would damage the web, characterized its scraping of data to train its models as the "largest theft of labor in human history," and that it made a "complete mockery of the idea of fair use." Many of the most eye-catching quotes from the document come from Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht. Though, the company has tried to distance itself from Hecht's assertions. Microsoft spokesperson Alex Haurek told The Verge that "These comments ref … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/L9Z2SIN

Disney’s first CTO is Character.AI’s former CEO

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You would think that a multimedia conglomerate as large as Disney would have a few chief technology officers by now, but the company has just appointed someone to the position for the very first time. Today, Disney announced that Karandeep Anand is joining the company as its new CTO. Anand will report directly to recently appointed CEO Josh D'Amaro , and he will head up the company's infrastructure, product, engineering, and data / AI platforms teams. Anand comes to Disney from chatbot startup Character.AI , where he served as CEO for just over a year and oversaw the company's push into microdramas . Anand jumping ship to Disney comes as a … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/oISRqiA

Flash floods can strike without warning — this new technology could change that

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On the morning of June 9th, Laura Lin was working from her home in Lanesville, a rural southern Indiana town about 15 miles from the Kentucky border. She was on a Zoom call, unaware that the heavy rain outside was beginning to flood her yard. "I look over to where the barn is over there, and I see pieces of my wood floating, and I was like, 'What?' And I immediately was like, 'I have to go.' Close my laptop, and I get my kids up, and I'm like, 'Something's wrong,'" Lin recalls. Lin and her family got out safely and sheltered at a neighbor's house, but Lanesville got over 8 inches of rain within just a few hours that day , way over the thre … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/YTr9iFK

Waymo says Singapore will be its next international robotaxi city

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Waymo Ojai fully autonomous ride-hailing vehicle travels along a city street, San Francisco, California, August 20, 2026. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) | Gado via Getty Images Waymo says it will launch a robotaxi service in Singapore in 2028, as the Alphabet-owned company continues to eye overseas markets for expansion. Waymo's vehicles will begin arriving in Singapore in "the coming months," the company says, in preparation of mapping and autonomous testing with human safety drivers behind the wheel in 2027. Waymo says it is "working toward offering fully autonomous ride-hailing to the public" by 2028. Waymo will need approval from Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA) before it can begin accepting passengers. The city-state requires all autonomous vehicles to undergo a safety assessment conducted at the … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/pNe6TZM

The AI Superintelligence Slowdown

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Remember when tech leaders would tell their employees to “move fast and break things”? It seemed that would be the way of AI too. But after a summer where rogue AI agents became reality, and researchers warned that AI could kill us all , a number of leading US AI companies are publicly suggesting it’s time to pump the brakes and “pace the frontier” of bleeding-edge AI development. Their motivations are suspect , but leaders at major AI companies — including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and X — are at least paying lip service to the idea of a superintelligence slowdown. Will these AI companies actually slow down? Will anyone step in to regulate these companies like they claim to have wanted for years ? Will they manage to convince world leaders that the US must “beat China” to superintelligence and go even faster? Read on below for the latest updates in this AI saga. King Charles says AI needs “sufficient means of control bef...

Claude Code relaunches Projects to manage multiple AI agents in the cloud

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The revamped projects feature in Claude Code allows users to run multiple agents under the same roof, with a shared memory, goals, and library of files and artifacts. Similar to Grok Bot and other tools that manage groups of AI agents, each project has "threads" running different tasks in parallel, with a "coordinator" directing everything: Under the hood, each thread is a Claude Code cloud session working on its own branch and copy of the repo. The coordinator keeps work organized, but if any threads work on the same code, the overlap is resolved as a merge conflict just like any other PR. Each thread can further split its delegated work … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/FgBTWHl

The AI data center e-waste problem is huge — and getting bigger

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E-waste from the AI boom has been vastly underestimated, a new report warns. By 2050, it could become enough trash to fill 23 million shipping containers - roughly enough 40-foot containers to circle the world six times if lined up in a row. It's a significantly higher estimate of AI's e-waste than previous studies have found because the authors of the new report factor in all the infrastructure needed to support servers in data centers. The broader scope provides a clearer picture of junk AI leaves behind, according to the nonprofit Basel Action Network (BAN) , which published the paper today. "AI may feel weightless, but every model dep … Read the full story at The Verge. from The Verge https://ift.tt/GLVPym0