An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, AMC notified subscribers of a proposed $8.3 million settlement that provides awards to an estimated 6 million subscribers of its six streaming services: AMC+, Shudder, Acorn TV, ALLBLK, SundanceNow, and HIDIVE. The settlement comes in response to allegations that AMC illegally shared subscribers' viewing history with tech companies like Google, Facebook, and X (aka Twitter) in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Passed in 1988, the VPPA prohibits AMC and other video service providers from sharing "information which identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services from a video tape service provider." It was originally passed to protect individuals' right to private viewing habits, after a journalist published the mostly unrevealing video rental history of a judge, Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan.

The so-called "Bork Tapes" revealed little -- other than that the judge frequently rented spy thrillers and British costume dramas -- but lawmakers recognized that speech could be chilled by monitoring anyone's viewing habits. While the law was born in the era of Blockbuster Video, subscribers suing AMC wrote in their amended complaint (PDF) that "the importance of legislation like the VPPA in the modern era of datamining is more pronounced than ever before." According to subscribers suing, AMC allegedly installed tracking technologies -- including the Meta Pixel, the X Tracking Pixel, and Google Tracking Technology -- on its website, allowing their personally identifying information to be connected with their viewing history. [...]

If it's approved, AMC has agreed to "suspend, remove, or modify operation of the Meta Pixel and other Third-Party Tracking Technologies so that use of such technologies on AMC Services will not result in AMC's disclosure to the third-party technology companies of the specific video content requested or obtained by a specific individual." All registered users of AMC services who "requested or obtained video content on at least one of the six AMC services" between January 18, 2021, and January 10, 2024, are currently eligible to submit claims under the proposed settlement. The deadline to submit is April 9. In addition to distributing the $8.3 million settlement fund among class members, subscribers will also receive a free one-week digital subscription.

In a post on Threads today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a new test in the U.S. that shows a list of popular topics that other people are discussing. It's a core feature of Twitter (now "X") that should help make it easier to find new posts and users on Threads. The Verge reports: The list will appear on the search page and in the For You feed, allowing you to browse through posts about a particular topic. In addition to testing a way to save posts, Meta recently said it will add controls to limit political content recommendations on Threads. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says Threads uses machine learning AI systems to determine what goes on the list. It takes into account how many people are talking about a certain topic, as well as how many people have interacted with posts about it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On a brutal December day, 17% of Spotify employees found out they had been laid off in the company's third round of job cuts last year. Not long after, music fans around the world realized that the cult-favorite website Every Noise at Once (EveryNoise), an encyclopedic goldmine for music discovery, had stopped working. These two events were not disconnected. Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of the 1,500 employees who was let go that day, but his layoff had wider-reaching implications; now that McDonald doesn't have access to internal Spotify data, he can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which became a pivotal resource for the most obsessive music fans to track new releases and learn more about the sounds they love.

"The project is to understand the communities of listening that exist in the world, figure out what they're called, what artists are in them and what their audiences are," McDonald told TechCrunch. "The goal is to use math where you can to find real things that exist in listening patterns. So I think about it as trying to help global music self-organize." If you work at a big tech company and get laid off, you probably won't expect the company's customers to write nine pages of complaints on a community forum, telling your former employer how badly they messed up by laying you off. Nor would you expect an outpouring of Reddit threads and tweets questioning how you could possibly get the axe. But that's how fans reacted when they heard McDonald's fate.

Last night in San Francisco's Chinatown, "A person jumped on the hood of a Waymo driverless taxi and smashed its windshield..." reports the Verge, "generating applause before a crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows, and ultimately set it on fire." The fire department arrived minutes later, according to a report in The Autopian, but by then flames had already fully engulfed the car.... Waymo representative Sandy Karp told The Verge via email that the fully autonomous car "was not transporting any riders" when it was attacked and fireworks were tossed inside the car, sparking the flames...

The fire takes place against the backdrop of simmering tension between San Francisco residents and automated vehicle operators... Just last week, a Waymo car struck a cyclist who had reportedly been following behind a truck turning across its path.
The "burnt-out husk of the electric Waymo Jaguar" appears in a video posted on YouTube, according to the article. "Another set of videos posted by software developer Michael Vendi gives a view into the scene as it played out and the fire grew."

San Francisco's 49ers play in the Super Bowl this afteroon, so last night's celebrations for Chinese New Year could be followed by additional celebrations tonight. Police Chief Bill Scott is already urging residents to behave responsibly. "Please don't light anything on fire."

Remember "Servo," Mozilla's "next-generation browser engine," focused on performance and robustness?

"The developers of Servo are starting 2024 by going all in..." reports It's FOSS News, citing a social media post from FOSDEM. "[T]he Servo Project team were there showing off the work done so far." If you were not familiar, Servo is an experimental browser engine that leverages the power of Rust to provide a memory-safe and modular experience that is highly adaptable. After Mozilla created Servo back in 2012 as a research project, it saw its share of ups and downs over the years, with it making a comeback in 2023; thanks to a fresh approach by the developers on how Servo should move forward.

Even though there are plenty of open source Chrome alternatives, with this, there's a chance that we will get some really cool options based on Servo that just might give Blink and Gecko a run for the money! Just a few months back, in September 2023, after The Servo Project officially joined Linux Foundation Europe, the existing contributors from Igalia stepped up their game by taking over the project maintenance. To complement that, at Open Source Summit Europe last year, Manuel Rego from Igalia shared some really useful insights when he presented.

He showcased stuff like the WebGL support, cross-platform support including mobile support for Android and Linux, among other things. They have experimented with Servo for embedded applications use-cases (like running it on Raspberry Pi), and have plans to make advances on it. As far as I can see, it looks like, Servo is faster for Raspberry Pi compared to Chromium. You can explore more such demos on Servo's demo webpage.
2024's roadmap includes "Initial Android support, that will see Servo being made to build on modern Android versions," according to the article, "with the developers publishing nightly APKs on the official website some time in the future."

One fun fact? "Even though Mozilla dropped the experimental project, Firefox still utilizes some servo components in the browser"

Another FOSDOM update from social media: "Thunderbird is also embracing Rust."

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from SiliconANGLE: The Rust Foundation, which supports the development of the popular open-source Rust programming language... shared that Google LLC had made a $1 million contribution specifically earmarked for a C++/Rust interoperability effort known as the "Interop Initiative." The initiative aims to foster seamless integration between Rust and the widely used C++ programming language, addressing one of the significant barriers to Rust's adoption in legacy systems entrenched in C++ code.

Rust has the ability to prevent common memory errors that plague C++ programs and offers a path toward more secure and reliable software systems. However, transitioning from C++ to Rust presents notable challenges, particularly for organizations with extensive C++ codebases. The Interop Initiative seeks to mitigate these challenges by facilitating smoother transitions and enabling organizations to leverage Rust's advantages without completely overhauling their existing systems.

As part of the initiative, the Rust Foundation will collaborate closely with the Rust Project Leadership Council, stakeholders and member organizations to develop a comprehensive scope of work. The collaborative effort will focus on enhancing build system integration, exploring artificial intelligence-assisted code conversion techniques and expanding upon existing interoperability frameworks. By addressing these strategic areas, the initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of Rust across the software industry and hence contribute to advancing memory safety and reducing the prevalence of software vulnerabilities.
A post on Google's security blog says they're excited to collaborate "to ensure that any additions made are suitable and address the challenges of Rust adoption that projects using C++ face. Improving memory safety across the software industry is one of the key technology challenges of our time, and we invite others across the community and industry to join us in working together to secure the open source ecosystem for everyone."

The blog post also includes this quote from Google's VP of engineering, Android security and privacy. "Based on historical vulnerability density statistics, Rust has proactively prevented hundreds of vulnerabilities from impacting the Android ecosystem. This investment aims to expand the adoption of Rust across various components of the platform."

The Register adds: Lars Bergstrom, director of Android platform tools and libraries and chair of the Rust Foundation Board, announced the grant and said that the funding will "improve the ability of Rust code to interoperate with existing legacy C++ codebases.... Integrating Rust today is possible where there is a fallback C API, but for high-performance and high-fidelity interoperability, improving the ability to work directly with C++ code is the single biggest initiative that will further the ability to adopt Rust...."

According to Bergstrom, Google's most significant increase in the use of Rust has occurred in Android, where interoperability started receiving attention in 2021, although Rust is also being deployed elsewhere.... Bergstrom said that as of mid-2023, Google had more than 1,000 developers who had committed Rust code, adding that the ad giant recently released the training material it uses. "We also have a team working on building out interoperability," he added. "We hope that this team's work on addressing challenges specific to Google's codebases will complement the industry-wide investments from this new grant we've provided to the Rust Foundation."

Google's grant matches a $1 million grant last November from Microsoft, which also committed $10 million in internal investment to make Rust a "first-class language in our engineering systems." The Google-bucks are expected to fund further interoperability efforts, along the lines of KDAB's bidirectional Rust and C++ bindings with Qt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Pakistan has temporarily suspended mobile phone network and internet services across the country to combat any "possible threats," a top ministry said, as the South Asian nation commences its national election. In a statement, Pakistan's interior ministry said the move was prompted by recent incidents of terrorism in the country. The internet was accessible through wired broadband connections, local journalists posted on X earlier Thursday. But NetBlocks, an independent service that tracks outages, said later that Pakistan had started to block internet services as well. The polls have opened in the nation and will close at 5 p.m. The interior ministry didn't say when it will switch back on the mobile services.

IDC, in a press release: A new forecast from IDC shows shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) PCs -- personal computers with specific system-on-a-chip (SoC) capabilities designed to run generative AI tasks locally -- growing from nearly 50 million units in 2024 to more than 167 million in 2027. By the end of the forecast, IDC expects AI PCs will represent nearly 60% of all PC shipments worldwide. [...] Until recently, running an AI task locally on a PC was done on the central processing unit (CPU), the graphics processing unit (GPU), or a combination of the two. However, this can have a negative impact on the PC's performance and battery life because these chips are not optimized to run AI efficiently. PC silicon vendors have now introduced AI-specific silicon to their SoCs called neural processing units (NPUs) that run these tasks more efficiently.

To date, IDC has identified three types of NPU-enabled AI PCs:
1. Hardware-enabled AI PCs include an NPU that offers less than 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) performance and typically enables specific AI features within apps to run locally. Qualcomm, Apple, AMD, and Intel are all shipping chips in this category today.

2. Next-generation AI PCs include an NPU with 40 to 60 TOPS performance and an AI-first operating system (OS) that enables persistent and pervasive AI capabilities in the OS and apps. Qualcomm, AMD, and Intel have all announced future chips for this category, with delivery expected to begin in 2024. Microsoft is expected to roll out major updates (and updated system specifications) to Windows 11 to take advantage of these high-TOPS NPUs.

3. Advanced AI PCs are PCs that offer more than 60 TOPS of NPU performance. While no silicon vendors have announced such products, IDC expects them to appear in the coming years. This IDC forecast does not include advanced AI PCs, but they will be incorporated into future updates. Michael Dell, commenting on X: This is correct and might be underestimating it. AI PCs are coming fast and Dell is ready.

An AI chatbot helped increase the number of patients referred for mental-health services through England's National Health Service (NHS), particularly among underrepresented groups who are less likely to seek help, new research has found. MIT Tech Review: Demand for mental-health services in England is on the rise, particularly since the covid-19 pandemic. Mental-health services received 4.6 million patient referrals in 2022 -- the highest number on record -- and the number of people in contact with such services is growing steadily. But neither the funding nor the number of mental-health professionals is adequate to meet this rising demand, according to the British Medical Association.

The chatbot's creators, from the AI company Limbic, set out to investigate whether AI could lower the barrier to care by helping patients access help more quickly and efficiently. A new study, published this week in Nature Medicine, evaluated the effect that the chatbot, called Limbic Access, had on referrals to the NHS Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression program, a series of evidence-based psychological therapies for adults experiencing anxiety disorders, depression, or both. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla comments on X: This landmark study codifies what we have believed for so long -- that AI will not only increase the quality of care but also massively improve its access, which is one of the largest barriers to good health in all corners of the globe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After almost a year as an invite-only app, Bluesky is now open to the public. Funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is one of the more promising micro-blogging platforms that could provide an alternative to Elon Musk's X. Before opening to the public, the platform had about 3 million sign-ups. Now that anyone can join, the young platform faces a challenge: How can it meaningfully stand up to Threads' 130 million monthly active users, or even Mastodon's 1.8 million?

Bluesky looks and functions like Twitter at the outset, but the platform stands out because of what lies under the hood. The company began as a project inside of Twitter that sought to build a decentralized infrastructure called the AT Protocol for social networking. As a decentralized platform, Bluesky's code is completely open source, which gives people outside of the company transparency into what is being built and how. Developers can even write their own code on top of the AT Protocol, so they can create anything from a custom algorithm to an entirely new social platform.

"What decentralization gets you is the ability to try multiple things in parallel, and so you're not bottlenecking change on one organization," Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told TechCrunch. "The way we built Bluesky actually lets anyone insert a change into the product." This setup gives users more agency to control and curate their social media experience. On a centralized platform like Instagram, for example, users have revolted against algorithm changes that they dislike, but there's not much they can do to revert or improve upon an undesired app update.

In a London court, lawyers for a group supported by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) argued that Craig Wright's assertion of being the inventor of bitcoin is "a brazen lie," challenged by accusations of extensive document forgery to substantiate his claim. Wright's defense disputes these allegations, maintaining that he has presented definitive proof of his role in creating bitcoin. Reuters reports: Craig Wright says he is the author of a 2008 white paper, the foundational text of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, published in the name "Satoshi Nakamoto". He argues this means he owns the copyright in the white paper and has intellectual property rights over the bitcoin blockchain. But the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) -- whose members include Twitter founder Dorsey's payments firm Block -- is asking London's High Court to rule that Wright is not Satoshi.

The five-week hearing, at which Wright will give evidence from Tuesday, is the culmination of years of speculation about the true identity of Satoshi. Wright first publicly claimed to be Satoshi in 2016 and has since taken legal action against cryptocurrency developers and exchanges. COPA, however, says Wright has never provided any genuine proof, accusing him of repeatedly forging documents to support his claim, which Wright denies. Wright sat in court as COPA's lawyer Jonathan Hough said his claim was "a brazen lie, an elaborate false narrative supported by forgery on an industrial scale." Hough said that "there are elements of Dr Wright's conduct that stray into farce," citing his alleged use of ChatGPT to produce forgeries.

But he added: "Dr Wright's conduct is also deadly serious. On the basis of his dishonest claim to be Satoshi, he has pursued claims he puts at hundreds of billions of dollars, including against numerous private individuals." Wright's lawyer Anthony Grabiner, however, argued in court filings that he has produced "clear evidence demonstrating his authorship of the white paper and creation of bitcoin." Grabiner added that it was "striking" that no one else had publicly claimed to be Satoshi. "If Dr Wright were not Satoshi, the real Satoshi would have been expected to come forward to counter the claim," he said.

Carl Franzen reports via VentureBeat: Hugging Face, the New York City-based startup that offers a popular, developer-focused repository for open source AI code and frameworks (and hosted last year's "Woodstock of AI"), today announced the launch of third-party, customizable Hugging Chat Assistants. The new, free product offering allows users of Hugging Chat, the startup's open source alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, to easily create their own customized AI chatbots with specific capabilities, similar both in functionality and intention to OpenAI's custom GPT Builder â" though that requires a paid subscription to ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month), Team ($25 per user per month paid annually), and Enterprise (variable pricing depending on the needs).

Phillip Schmid, Hugging Face's Technical Lead & LLMs Director, posted the news on the social network X (formerly known as Twitter), explaining that users could build a new personal Hugging Face Chat Assistant "in 2 clicks!" Schmid also openly compared the new capabilities to OpenAI's custom GPTs. However, in addition to being free, the other big difference between Hugging Chat Assistant and the GPT Builder and GPT Store is that the latter tools depend entirely on OpenAI's proprietary large language models (LLM) GPT-4 and GPT-4 Vision/Turbo. Users of Hugging Chat Assistant, by contrast, can choose which of several open source LLMs they wish to use to power the intelligence of their AI Assistant on the backend, including everything from Mistral's Mixtral to Meta's Llama 2. That's in keeping with Hugging Face's overarching approach to AI -- offering a broad swath of different models and frameworks for users to choose between -- as well as the same approach it takes with Hugging Chat itself, where users can select between several different open source models to power it.

Quora "used to be a thriving community that worked to answer our most specific questions," writes Slate. "But users are fleeing," while the site hosts "a never-ending avalanche of meaningless, repetitive sludge, filled with bizarre, nonsensical, straight-up hateful, and A.I.-generated entries..."

The site has faced moderation issues, spam, trolls, and bots re-posting questions from Reddit (plus competition for ad revenue from sites like Facebook and Google which forced cuts in Quora's support and moderation teams). But automating its moderation "did not improve the situation...

"Now Quora is even offering A.I.-generated images to accompany users' answers, even though the spawned illustrations make little sense." To top it all off, after Quora began using A.I. to "generate machine answers on a number of selected question pages," the site made clear the possibility that human-crafted answers could be used for training A.I. This meant that the detailed writing Quorans provided mostly for free would be ingested into a custom large language model. Updated terms of service and privacy policies went into effect at the site last summer. As angel investor and Quoran David S. Rose paraphrased them: "You grant all other Quora users the unlimited right to reuse and adapt your answers," "You grant Quora the right to use your answers to train an LLM unless you specifically opt out," and "You completely give up your right to be any part of any class action suit brought against Quora," among others. (Quora's Help Center claims that "as of now, we do not use answers, posts, or comments added to Quora to train LLMs used for generating content on Quora. However, this may change in the future." The site offers an opt-out setting, although it admits that "opting out does not cover everything.")

This raised the issue of consent and ownership, as Quorans had to decide whether to consent to the new terms or take their work and flee. High-profile users, like fantasy author Mercedes R. Lackey, are removing their work from their profiles and writing notes explaining why. "The A.I. thing, the terms of service issue, has been a massive drain of top talent on Quora, just based on how many people have said, Downloaded my stuff and I'm out of there," Lackey told me. It's not that all Quorans want to leave, but it's hard for them to choose to remain on a website where they now have to constantly fight off errors, spam, trolls, and even account impersonators....

The tragedy of Quora is not just that it crushed the flourishing communities it once built up. It's that it took all of that goodwill, community, expertise, and curiosity and assumed that it could automate a system that equated it, apparently without much thought to how pale the comparison is. [Nelson McKeeby, an author who joined Quora in 2013] has a grim prediction for the future: "Eventually Quora will be robot questions, robot answers, and nothing else." I wonder how the site will answer the question of why Quora died, if anyone even bothers to ask.
The article notes that Andreessen Horowitz gave Quora "a much-needed $75 million investment — but only for the sake of developing its on-site generative-text chatbot, Poe."

"Japan's first moon mission has likely come to an end after a surprising late-game comeback," reports Mashable, "with the spacecraft taking one last photo of its surroundings before the deep-freeze of night... showing ominous shadows cast upon a slope of the Shioli crater, its landing site on the near side of the moon." Since Monday, the spacecraft has analyzed rocks around the crater with a multi-band spectral camera. JAXA picked the landing spot because of what it could tell scientists about the moon's formation... The special camera completed its planned observation, able to study more targets than originally expected, according to an English translation of a news release from the space agency... "Based on the large amount of data we have obtained, we are proceeding with (analyses) to identify rocks and estimate the chemical composition of minerals, which will help solve the mystery of the origin of the moon," JAXA said in a statement translated by Google...

The spacecraft has now entered a dormant state, prompted by nightfall on the moon. Because one rotation of the moon is about 27 Earth days, the so-called "lunar night," when the moon is no longer receiving sunlight, lasts about two weeks. Not much can survive the -270 degrees Fahrenheit brought on by darkness — not even robots. In this freezing temperature, soldered joints on hardware and mechanical parts break, and batteries die. But rest assured, the JAXA team will try to communicate with its scrappy moon lander when the sun rises again.
In mid-week Japan's space agency posted that "Although SLIM was not designed for the harsh lunar nights, we plan to try to operate again from mid-February, when the Sun will shine again on SLIM's solar cells."

Later they posted that they'd sent a command to turn on SLIM's communicator again "just in case, but with no response, we confirmed SLIM had entered a dormant state. This is the last scene of the Moon taken by SLIM before dusk."

The VC fund Neo "identifies awesome young engineers, includes them in a community of tech veterans, and invests in companies they start or join," TechCrunch explained in 2018.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes that Neo is also benefiting from the education non-profit Code.org: Eleven years ago, Neo Founder and CEO Ali Partovi together with twin brother Hadi (Code.org CEO and a Neo investor) publicly launched the nonprofit Code.org (backed and advised by big tech companies). With the support of prominent tech giant leaders and their companies, Code.org pushed coding into K-12 classrooms (NYT, alt.) and now boasts that "591,636 teachers have signed up to teach our intro courses on Code Studio and 19,177,297 students are enrolled," helping to build a pipeline of "college students who excel at CS". Neo taps into this pipeline, and it looks like others also betting on their success include Neo investors tied to Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Uber — including Code.org boosters Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Reid Hoffman, Jeff Wilke, Sheryl Sandberg, Eric Schmidt.

"I love meeting more and more @Neo founders and Neo scholar candidates who learned to code on Code.org," Neo CEO Ali Partovi tweeted last summer.
in November Partovi welcomed "32 exceptional CS students" chosen from over 1,000 applicants to be Neo Scholars, "a year-long program of events, trips, and mentorship, as well as long-term membership in our community."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: The past few days have been a wild ride for the growing open source AI community -- even by its fast-moving and freewheeling standards. Here's the quick chronology: on or about January 28, a user with the handle "Miqu Dev" posted a set of files on HuggingFace, the leading open source AI model and code sharing platform, that together comprised a seemingly new open source large language model (LLM) labeled "miqu-1-70b." The HuggingFace entry, which is still up at the time of this article's posting, noted that new LLM's "Prompt format," how users interact with it, was the same as Mistral, the well-funded open source Parisian AI company behind Mixtral 8x7b, viewed by many to be the top performing open source LLM presently available, a fine-tuned and retrained version of Meta's Llama 2.

The same day, an anonymous user on 4chan (possibly "Miqu Dev") posted a link to the miqu-1-70b files on 4chan, the notoriously longstanding haven of online memes and toxicity, where users began to notice it. Some took to X, Elon Musk's social network formerly known as Twitter, to share the discovery of the model and what appeared to be its exceptionally high performance at common LLM tasks (measured by tests known as benchmarks), approaching the previous leader, OpenAI's GPT-4 on the EQ-Bench. Machine learning (ML) researchers took notice on LinkedIn, as well. "Does 'miqu' stand for MIstral QUantized? We don't know for sure, but this quickly became one of, if not the best open-source LLM," wrote Maxime Labonne, an ML scientist at JP Morgan & Chase, one of the world's largest banking and financial companies. "Thanks to @152334H, we also now have a good unquantized version of miqu here: https://lnkd.in/g8XzhGSM. Quantization in ML refers to a technique used to make it possible to run certain AI models on less powerful computers and chips by replacing specific long numeric sequences in a model's architecture with shorter ones. Users speculated "Miqu" might be a new Mistral model being covertly "leaked" by the company itself into the world -- especially since Mistral is known for dropping new models and updates without fanfare through esoteric and technical means -- or perhaps an employee or customer gone rouge.

Well, today it appears we finally have confirmation of the latter of those possibilities: Mistral co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch took to X to clarify: "An over-enthusiastic employee of one of our early access customers leaked a quantized (and watermarked) version of an old model we trained and distributed quite openly... To quickly start working with a few selected customers, we retrained this model from Llama 2 the minute we got access to our entire cluster -- the pretraining finished on the day of Mistral 7B release. We've made good progress since -- stay tuned!" Hilariously, Mensch also appears to have taken to the illicit HuggingFace post not to demand a takedown, but leaving a comment that the poster "might consider attribution." Still, with Mensch's note to "stay tuned!" it appears that not only is Mistral training a version of this so-called "Miqu" model that approaches GPT-4 level performance, but it may, in fact, match or exceed it, if his comments are to be interpreted generously.

Todd Bishop reports via GeekWire: A Microsoft AI engineering leader says he discovered vulnerabilities in OpenAI's DALL-E 3 image generator in early December allowing users to bypass safety guardrails to create violent and explicit images, and that the company impeded his previous attempt to bring public attention to the issue. The emergence of explicit deepfake images of Taylor Swift last week "is an example of the type of abuse I was concerned about and the reason why I urged OpenAI to remove DALL-E 3 from public use and reported my concerns to Microsoft," writes Shane Jones, a Microsoft principal software engineering lead, in a letter Tuesday to Washington state's attorney general and Congressional representatives.

404 Media reported last week that the fake explicit images of Swift originated in a "specific Telegram group dedicated to abusive images of women," noting that at least one of the AI tools commonly used by the group is Microsoft Designer, which is based in part on technology from OpenAI's DALL-E 3. "The vulnerabilities in DALL-E 3, and products like Microsoft Designer that use DALL-E 3, makes it easier for people to abuse AI in generating harmful images," Jones writes in the letter to U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, Rep. Adam Smith, and Attorney General Bob Ferguson, which was obtained by GeekWire. He adds, "Microsoft was aware of these vulnerabilities and the potential for abuse."

Jones writes that he discovered the vulnerability independently in early December. He reported the vulnerability to Microsoft, according to the letter, and was instructed to report the issue to OpenAI, the Redmond company's close partner, whose technology powers products including Microsoft Designer. He writes that he did report it to OpenAI. "As I continued to research the risks associated with this specific vulnerability, I became aware of the capacity DALL-E 3 has to generate violent and disturbing harmful images," he writes. "Based on my understanding of how the model was trained, and the security vulnerabilities I discovered, I reached the conclusion that DALL-E 3 posed a public safety risk and should be removed from public use until OpenAI could address the risks associated with this model."

On Dec. 14, he writes, he posted publicly on LinkedIn urging OpenAI's non-profit board to withdraw DALL-E 3 from the market. He informed his Microsoft leadership team of the post, according to the letter, and was quickly contacted by his manager, saying that Microsoft's legal department was demanding that he delete the post immediately, and would follow up with an explanation or justification. He agreed to delete the post on that basis but never heard from Microsoft legal, he writes. "Over the following month, I repeatedly requested an explanation for why I was told to delete my letter," he writes. "I also offered to share information that could assist with fixing the specific vulnerability I had discovered and provide ideas for making AI image generation technology safer. Microsoft's legal department has still not responded or communicated directly with me." "Artificial intelligence is advancing at an unprecedented pace. I understand it will take time for legislation to be enacted to ensure AI public safety," he adds. "At the same time, we need to hold companies accountable for the safety of their products and their responsibility to disclose known risks to the public. Concerned employees, like myself, should not be intimidated into staying silent." The full text of Jones' letter can be read here (PDF).

Embracer Group has canceled a Deus Ex game at its Eidos studio that's been in development since 2022. The company also announced that it's letting go of 97 game developers and support staff. "The global economic context, the challenges of our industry and the comprehensive restructuring announced by Embracer have finally impacted our studio," wrote Eidos Montreal. Eidos doesn't mention the canceled game. The Verge reports: Embracer snapped up both Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics from Square Enix in May 2022, putting the studios behind Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and Thief under one umbrella. That November, Schreier tweeted that a new Deus Ex was now "very very early" in development, and it appears that's the game now canceled.

It's been eight years since Deus Ex: Mankind Divided ended on a largely unsatisfying cliffhanger, and it doesn't sound like we're going to get a resolution anytime soon. Sources told Schreier in 2017 that an earlier Mankind Divided sequel had been canceled, too. What's more, Embracer decided to erase the mobile game Deus Ex Go from existence, ripping it away from people who'd already paid, though I hear it may still be playable if you have it downloaded.

According to Neuralink founder Elon Musk, the first human received an implant from the brain-chip startup on Sunday and is recovering well. "Initial results show promising neuron spike detection," Musk added. Reuters reports: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given the company clearance last year to conduct its first trial to test its implant on humans. The startup's PRIME Study is a trial for its wireless brain-computer interface to evaluate the safety of the implant and surgical robot. The study will assess the functionality of the interface which enables people with quadriplegia, or paralysis of all four limbs, to control devices with their thoughts, according to the company's website.

David Pierce reports via The Verge: A few minutes ago, I opened the new Arc Search app and typed, "What happened in the Chiefs game?" That game, the AFC Championship, had just wrapped up. Normally, I'd Google it, click on a few links, and read about the game that way. But in Arc Search, I typed the query and tapped the "Browse for me" button instead. Arc Search, the new iOS app from The Browser Company, which has been working on a browser called Arc for the last few years, went to work. It scoured the web -- reading six pages, it told me, from Twitter to The Guardian to USA Today -- and returned a bunch of information a few seconds later. I got the headline: Chiefs win. I got the final score, the key play, a "notable event" that also just said the Chiefs won, a note about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift, a bunch of related links, and some more bullet points about the game.

Basically, instead of returning a bunch of search queries about the Chiefs game, Arc Search built me a webpage about it. And somewhere in there is The Browser Company's big idea about the future of web browsers -- that a browser, a search engine, an AI chatbot, and a website aren't different things. They're all just parts of an internet information finder, and they might as well exist inside the same app. [...] But from a pure product perspective, this feels closer to the way AI search should work than anything I've tried. Products like Copilot and Perplexity AI are cool, but they're fundamentally just chatbots with web access. Arc Search imagines something else entirely: AI that explores websites by building you a new one every time you ask.