Sam Altman will not be returning as CEO of OpenAI, after a furious weekend of negotiations.

The Information reports: Sam Altman won't return as CEO of OpenAI, despite efforts by the company's executives to bring him back, according to co-founder and board director Ilya Sutskever. After a weekend of negotiations with the board of directors that fired him Friday, as well as with its remaining leaders and top investors, Altman will not return to the startup he co-founded in 2015, Sutskever told staff. Emmett Shear, co-founder of Amazon-owned video streaming site Twitch, will take over as interim CEO, Sutskever said. The decision "which flew in the face of comments OpenAI executives shared with staff on Saturday and early Sunday "could deepen a crisis precipitated by the board's sudden ouster of Altman and its removal of President Greg Brockman from the board Friday. Brockman, a key engineer behind the company's successes, resigned later that day, followed by three senior researchers, threatening to set off a broader wave of departures to OpenAI's rivals, including Google, and to a new AI venture Altman has been plotting in the wake of his firing.
Venture capitalist Jason Calacanis predicts on X:
The employees at OpenAI just lost billions of dollars in secondary share sales that were about to happen at a $90b valuation - that's over. Done.
I think OpenAI will lose half their employees, the 12-18 month lead, and 90% of their valuation in 2024.
Just insane value destruction
What's your prediction for the future of OpenAI?

"To celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debt and then destroy the debt," reads a posthumous tweet posted Tuesday after the death of 38-year-old Casey McIntyre.

The Washington Post explains... McIntyre, who served as publisher at Razorbill, an imprint of Penguin Random House, was diagnosed in 2019 and proceeded through treatment without taking on debt, [husband Andrew Rose] Gregory told The Washington Post. But many fellow cancer patients she met were in more precarious financial positions, Gregory added. "We were both so keenly aware that Casey had great health insurance through Penguin Random House," said Gregory, 41. "Casey had no medical debt...."

About nine months before McIntyre died, her husband came across a video online about members of a North Carolina church who purchased nearly $3.3 million of local residents' medical debt for $15,048 in a "debt jubilee," a historical reference to ancient stories about personal debts being canceled at regular intervals. The couple chose to make monthly donations to RIP Medical Debt, the same organization that partnered with the North Carolina churchgoers. The nonprofit organization aims to abolish medical debt "at pennies on the dollar," according to its website. For every $100 donated, the company relieves $10,000 of medical debt. As of Saturday, nearly $200,000 had been donated to RIP Medical Debt in McIntyre's memory, which would wipe out approximately $20 million of unpaid medical bills. [By Sunday afternoon it had risen to over $334,000...]

Allison Sesso, president and chief executive of RIP Medical Debt, said her organization found out about McIntyre's case after McIntyre's posthumous social media post went viral. Sesso said the pace of donations was record-setting for her charity. "What an incredible gesture to the world as you're exiting," Sesso told The Post. "This final act of generosity is blowing up. The amount that they're raising and the rate at which this has gone is not something that we're used to."
McIntyre's post on X has now received 65,400 likes — and 3,086 reposts.

Microsoft's stock price plumetted 16% after OpenAI fired CEO Sam Altman — but appears to have immediately recovered most of the drop in after-hours trading. Yet OpenAI's move "also blindsided key investor and minority owner Microsoft," writes Ars Technica, "reportedly making CEO Satya Nadella furious."

Tech reporter Kara Swisher called the firing a "badly managed coup de Sam," tweeting more details Friday night. "Sources tell me that the profit direction of the company under Altman and the speed of development, which could be seen as too risky, and the nonprofit side dedicated to more safety and caution were at odds. One person on the Sam side called it a 'coup,' while another said it was the the right move."

Ars Technica fills in the story: Sources told reporter Kara Swisher that OpenAI's Dev Day event on November 6, with Altman front and center in a keynote pushing consumer-like products, was an "inflection moment of Altman pushing too far, too fast."

In a joint statement released Friday night, Altman and Brockman said they were "shocked and saddened" by the board's actions... OpenAI has an unusual structure where its for-profit arm is owned and controlled by a non-profit 501(c)(3) public charity... Insiders say the move was mostly a power play that resulted from a cultural schism between Altman and [cofounder/board member Ilya] Sutskever over Altman's management style and drive for high-profile publicity. On September 29, Sutskever tweeted, "Ego is the enemy of growth." The schism is causing further turmoil on the inside. Three AI researchers loyal to Altman departed the company as well on Friday, resigning in reaction to the news: Jakub Pachocki, GPT-4 lead and OpenAI's director of research; Aleksander Madry, head of a team evaluating AI risk, and Szymon Sidor, an open source baselines researcher.

Rumors have already begun swirling about potential internal breakthroughs at OpenAI that may have intensified the slow/fast rift within the company, owing to Sutskever's role as co-lead of a "Superalignment" team that is tasked with figuring out how to control hypothetical superintelligent AI. At the APEC CEO Summit on Thursday, Altman said, "Four times now in the history of OpenAI — the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks — I've gotten to be in the room when we push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. And getting to do that is like the professional honor of a lifetime."

The concern here not necessarily being that OpenAI has developed superintelligence, which experts say is unlikely, but that the new breakthrough Altman mentioned may have added pressure to a company that is fighting within itself to proceed safely (from its non-profit branch) but also make money (from its for-profit subsidiary).
Former Google CEO/chairman Eric Schmidt tweeted, "Sam Altman is a hero of mine. He built a company from nothing to $90 Billion in value, and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I, and billions of people, will benefit from his future work- it's going to be simply incredible."

And reacting to the news, angel investor Ron Conway tweeted Friday that it looked like "a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI."

Addressing the charges of a "coup," OpenAI held "an impromptu all-hands meeting" Friday after the firing, according to a (paywalled) article from The Information: "You can call it this way," Sutskever said about the coup allegation. "And I can understand why you chose this word, but I disagree with this. This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity...." When Sutskever was asked whether "these backroom removals are a good way to govern the most important company in the world?" he answered: "I mean, fair, I agree that there is not an ideal element to it. 100%."
Reporter Kara Swisher predicted that Altman "will have a new company up by Monday."

"If i start going off, the openai board should go after me for the full value of my shares," Sam Altman posted on X Saturday — although Swisher wondered if Altman was simply trolling the company that had fired him.

"He has almost no shares, I believe."

CNN reports SpaceX made a second attempt to successfully launch Starship, the most powerful rocket ever constructed. The uncrewed rocket took off just after 7 a.m. CT (8 a.m. ET). The rocket took off as intended, making it roughly 8 minutes into flight before SpaceX confirmed it had to intentionally explode the Starship spacecraft as it flew over the ocean...

This mission comes after months of back-and-forth with federal regulators as SpaceX has awaited a launch license. The company is also grappling with pushback from environmentalists...

After separating from the Super Heavy rocket booster, the Starship spacecraft soared to an altitude of approximately 93 miles (150 kilometers) before SpaceX lost contact, according to a statement issued by the company. For context, the U.S. government considers 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface the edge of outer space...

SpaceX is OK with rockets exploding in the early stages of development. That's because the company uses a completely different approach to rocket design than, say, NASA. The space agency focuses on building one rocket and strenuously designing and testing it on the ground before its first flight — taking years but all but guaranteeing success on the first launch. SpaceX, however, rapidly builds new prototypes and is willing to test them to their breaking point because there's usually a spare nearby. During a drive by the company's facilities on Friday — four Starship spacecraft and at least two Super Heavy boosters could be seen from public roadways.
CNN reminds readers that "so far in 2023 alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more than 70 spaceflights...

"Elon Musk described Starship as the vehicle that underpins SpaceX's founding purpose: sending humans to Mars for the first time. NASA has its own plans for the rocket."

The Python community is staying busy.

• Three weeks ago a new podcast launched with Python core developer/steering council member Pablo Galindo and Python developer-in-residence Åukasz Langa.

• This month the Python Sofware Foundation announced its seventh Python Developers Survey.

• And for the fifth year in a row the foundation partnered with JetBrains to offer a 30% discount on JetBrains' dedicated Python Integrated Development Environment "PyCharm" — with all proceeds benefitting the Python Software Foundation ("The discount will be automatically applied when you check out. The promotion will only be available through November 27th...")
  
  A PSF blog post about the fundraiser notes you can also just make a direct donation to the Python Software Foundation, or sign up to become a foundation member to "help us sustain what we do."

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy revealed a crypto plan today that aims to protect core aspects of the industry, including software developers and unhosted digital wallets. CoinDesk reports: Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has a message for most of the employees at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) if he's elected to the White House: You're fired. And everybody still left at their desks would need to back off the crypto industry, according to the candidate's new policy strategy for U.S. digital assets. Most cryptocurrencies are commodities that are none of the SEC's business, according to Ramaswamy's crypto plan shared with CoinDesk on Thursday and set for public release at the North American Blockchain Summit in Texas. The pharmaceutical entrepreneur remains among the top four GOP candidates, maintaining 5% support in a dwindling field dominated by former President Donald Trump, according to polling data.

One issue that separates him from other candidates is his enthusiastic support of crypto as a financial innovation. He argues that the sector needs to have several freedoms protected: the right to code as a First Amendment freedom that should shield software developers from criminal or enforcement vulnerability, the right to maintain self-hosted digital wallets outside the reach of regulators and the right to know how each new virtual asset will be treated by the government. "A big part of what we're missing today is clarity from our regulators," Ramaswamy said in an interview with CoinDesk TV. "What we're going to have is rescinding any of those regulations that are allowing the regulatory state to go after perfectly legal behavior, but by claiming that somehow it shouldn't exist because they don't like it. All of that can end on my watch."

samleecole writes: People who paid to speak to an AI girlfriend modeled after real life 23-year-old influencer Caryn Marjorie are distraught because the service they paid for, Forever Companions, no longer works. It appears that the service stopped working shortly after Forever Companion CEO and founder John Meyer was arrested for trying to set his own apartment on fire.

404 Media tested CarynAI today as well as other AI bots and confirmed the service is not working. According to what we saw in the Telegram channel where Forever Companion users start conversations with CarynAI, the service has not been working since October 23. "I terminated my relationship with Forever Voices due to unforeseen circumstances," Marjorie told 404 Media in an email. "I wish the best for John Meyer and his family as he recovers from his mental health crisis. We didn't see this coming but I vow to push CarynAI forward for my fans and supporters." On October 30, Marjorie also announced that she's making a similar AI companion, "CarynAI 2.0," with another company called Banter AI. On social media for the last few weeks, the official Forever Voices Twitter account has been posting bizarre videos and statements about the CIA, Donald Trump, and the FBI.

Samsung has admitted that hackers accessed the personal data of U.K.-based customers during a year-long breach of its systems. From a report: In a statement to TechCrunch, Samsung spokesperson Chelsea Simpson, representing the company via a third-party agency, said Samsung was "recently alerted to a security incident" that "resulted in certain contact information of some Samsung U.K. e-store customers being unlawfully obtained." Samsung declined to answer further questions about the incident, such as how many customers were affected or how hackers accessed its internal systems.

In a letter sent to affected customers, Samsung admitted that attackers exploited a vulnerability in an unnamed third-party business application to access the personal information of customers who made purchases at Samsung U.K.'s store between July 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020. The letter, which was shared on X (formerly Twitter), Samsung said it didn't discover the compromise until more than three years later, on November 13, 2023. Samsung told affected customers that hackers may have accessed their names, phone numbers, postal addresses, and email addresses.

SysAid's system management software has "a vulnerability actively being exploited to deploy Clop ransomware," according to SiliconAngle: The warning came from Microsoft Corp.'s Threat Intelligence team, which wrote on X that it had discovered the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in SysAid's IT support software that's being exploited by the Lace Tempest ransomware gang.

Lace Tempest first emerged earlier this year from its attacks involving the MOVEit Transfer and GoAnywhere MFT. This group has been characterized by its sophisticated attack methods, often exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities to infiltrate organizations' systems to deploy ransomware and exfiltrate sensitive data...

In a blog post, SysAid said that the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-47246, was first discovered on Novembers 2 and is a path traversal vulnerability leading to code execution within the SysAid on-prem software... "Given the scale and impact of the MOVEit breach, which was considered one of the largest in recent history, the potential for the SysAid vulnerability to reach similar levels of disruption is not inconceivable, though several factors would influence this outcome," Craig Jones, vice president of security operations at managed detection and response provider Ontinue Inc., told SiliconANGLE. "The MOVEit breach, exploited by the Clop ransomware group, impacted over 1,000 organizations and more than 60 million individuals," Jones explained. "Comparatively, SysAid claims more than 5,000 customers across various industries globally. The potential damage from the SysAid vulnerability would depend on factors such as how widespread the exploitation is, how quickly the patch is applied and the sensitivity of the accessed data."
SysAid's blog post confirms the zero-day vulnerability, and says they've begun "proactively communicating with our on-premise customers to ensure they could implement a mitigation solution we had identified..."

"We urge all customers with SysAid on-prem server installations to ensure that your SysAid systems are updated to version 23.3.36, which remediates the identified vulnerability, and conduct a comprehensive compromise assessment of your network..." The attacker uploaded a WAR archive containing a WebShell and other payloads into the webroot of the SysAid Tomcat web service [which] provided the attacker with unauthorized access and control over the affected system.Subsequently, the attacker utilized a PowerShell script, deployed through the WebShell, to execute a malware loader named user.exe on the compromised host, which was used to load the GraceWire trojan...

After this initial access and the deployment of the malware, the attacker utilized a second PowerShell script to erase evidence associated with the attacker's actions from the disk and the SysAid on-prem server web logs... Given the severity of the threat posed, we strongly recommend taking immediate steps according to your incident response playbook and install any patches as they become available.

With 1.4 billion people, India is the second most-populous country in the world.

But a new article in the Washington Post alleges that India has "set a global standard for online censorship." For years, a committee of executives from U.S. technology companies and Indian officials convened every two weeks in a government office to negotiate what could — and could not — be said on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. At the "69A meetings," as the secretive gatherings were informally called, officials from India's information, technology, security and intelligence agencies presented social media posts they wanted removed, citing threats to India's sovereignty and national security, executives and officials who were present recalled. The tech representatives sometimes pushed back in the name of free speech...

But two years ago, these interactions took a fateful turn. Where officials had once asked for a handful of tweets to be removed at each meeting, they now insisted that entire accounts be taken down, and numbers were running in the hundreds. Executives who refused the government's demands could now be jailed, their companies expelled from the Indian market. New regulations had been adopted that year to hold tech employees in India criminally liable for failing to comply with takedown requests, a provision that executives referred to as a "hostage provision." After authorities dispatched anti-terrorism police to Twitter's New Delhi office, Twitter whisked its top India executive out of the country, fearing his arrest, former company employees recounted.

Indian officials say they have accomplished something long overdue: strengthening national laws to bring disobedient foreign companies to heel... Digital and human rights advocates warn that India has perfected the use of regulations to stifle online dissent and already inspired governments in countries as varied as Nigeria and Myanmar to craft similar legal frameworks, at times with near-identical language. India's success in taming internet companies has set off "regulatory contagion" across the world, according to Prateek Waghre, a policy director at India's Internet Freedom Foundation...

Despite the huge size of China's market, companies like Twitter and Facebook were forced to steer clear of the country because Beijing's rules would have required them to spy on users. That left India as the largest potential growth market. Silicon Valley companies were already committed to doing business in India before the government began to tighten its regulations, and today say they have little choice but to obey if they want to remain there.
The Post spoke to Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the deputy technology minister in the BJP government who oversees many of the new regulations, who argued "The shift was really simple: We've defined the laws, defined the rules, and we have said there is zero tolerance to any noncompliance with the Indian law...

"You don't like the law? Don't operate in India," Chandrasekhar added. "There is very little wiggle room."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The star of long-running videogame review series Zero Punctuation has quit after 16 years. Ben Croshaw, known as Yahtzee, was famous for his very fast, very rude, quickfire opinions on the latest games. His five-minute videos featuring crude cartoon characters were a weekly feature on gaming site The Escapist. But Yahtzee announced he was quitting the site with several colleagues after their editor-in-chief Nick Calandra was fired.

He said he wouldn't be taking the Zero Punctuation name with him, but fans would hear his voice again 'soon, in a new place'. Zero Punctuation, launched in 2007, is The Escapist's most popular feature, with videos from the series comfortably outranking others on its YouTube channel. [...] Yahtzee's departure followed Calandra's, who said he was fired by The Escapist's parent company Gamurs for "not achieving goals that were never properly set out for us." The pair were followed out of the door by a number of colleagues, most of them from the site's video team.

Angela Watercutter and Will Bedingfield report via Wired: After 118 days on the picket lines, the longest such strike in Hollywood's history, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has reached a deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Both sides were mum about the terms of the deal Wednesday night, but it comes following a long struggle over the use of artificial intelligence on actors' performances and actors' demands for residual payments for shows and films that play on streaming services. A committee from SAG, which represents thousands of film and television actors, approved the agreement Wednesday. The strike itself, which has featured pickets outside the offices of Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and others, will end Thursday morning. It's expected that the tentative deal will head to the union's national board to be approved on Friday.

Undeniably, this is a huge milestone for Hollywood, a $130 billion-plus industry that has all but ground to halt this year, as both the Writers Guild of America and SAG dug in their heels over fair wages and the use of AI in their work. WGA members went on strike in May; SAG walked off the job in July, the first time the industry had faced a dual work stoppage since 1960. The WGA strike ended in September with a historic deal that put up guardrails to protect writers from AI encroaching on their work. As this year's negotiations between SAG and AMPTP dragged on, generative AI became the major sticking point. Back in July, studios claimed they offered a "groundbreaking AI proposal that protects actors' digital likenesses." SAG countered that the proposal stipulated background performers could be scanned, paid for the day, and then turned into digital characters that studios could use "for the rest of eternity." (AMPTP disputed this.)

The issue was volleyed back and forth until last weekend, when SAG reviewed the studios' "last, best, and final" offer and rejected it, claiming "there are several essential items on which we still do not have an agreement, including AI. A follow-up story in The Hollywood Reporter revealed that the AMPTP proposal sought to allow studios to pay for AI scans of what are known as Schedule F performers and, following the actors' death, allow studios to use the scans without the consent of the estate or SAG. Schedule F performers include anyone who makes more than the minimum rate for TV series regulars or feature films. The guild wanted compensation for reuse of the scans, along with consent. On Tuesday, the studios reportedly agreed to adjust the AI language in their proposal, a move that seems to have been the tipping point. Even though the terms of the tentative deal reached Thursday are unclear, it's hard to imagine the actors didn't get at least some of the AI protections they were seeking.

iMessage serves as "an important gateway between business users and their customers" and should be regulated as a "core" service under the EU's new Digital Markets Act (DMA), said Google and a group of major European telcos in a letter sent to the European Commission. From a report: Being designated as a "core platform service" would be significant for iMessage, as it could compel Apple to make it interoperable with other messaging services. The letter arrives as the European Commission investigates whether iMessage meets the requirements to be regulated under the bloc's strict DMA rules. Google has been very vocal about its desire for Apple to adopt RCS, the cross-platform messaging standard pitched as the successor to SMS, with its #GetTheMessage campaign. "Apple's iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy," Google senior vice-president Hiroshi Lockheimer posted on X, then known as Twitter, last year. "Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this."

Nintendo has confirmed that it's working on a live-action adaptation of The Legend of Zelda, directed by Wes Ball and produced by Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto. The Verge reports: "This is Miyamoto. I have been working on the live-action film of The Legend of Zelda for many years now with Avi Arad-san, who has produced many mega hit films," Miyamoto said in a statement posted on X, formerly Twitter. We might be waiting a while for the movie, however; Miyamoto said, "It will take time until its completion, but I hope you look forward to seeing it." While there aren't many details on the movie itself, Nintendo says that it will be co-financed by itself and Sony, with Nintendo footing more than 50 percent of the bill.

"By producing visual contents of Nintendo IP by itself, Nintendo is creating new opportunities to have people from around the world to access the world of entertainment which Nintendo has built, through different means apart from its dedicated game consoles," the company said in a statement about the Zelda film. "By getting deeply involved in the movie production with the aim to put smiles on everyone's faces through entertainment, Nintendo will continue its efforts to produce unique entertainment and deliver it to as many people as possible."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Though negotiators from both the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) met this past weekend in hopes of bringing Hollywood's ongoing labor strike to an end, contract talks have reportedly stalled once again due to the desire of studios to own performers' digitally scanned likenesses in perpetuity.

Previously, the AMPTP insisted that its most recent proposed contract was its "best and final" offer. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, SAG-AFTRA refused and walked away from the negotiations over the AMPTP's insistence on pushing for new rules regarding the use of people's likenesses that would ultimately leave actors in the lurch. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the AMPTP's newest contract would allow studios to secure the digitally scanned likenesses of all Schedule F performers -- members of the guild making more than the minimum $32,000 / episode rate for series or more than $60,000 for feature films.

The AMPTP has been trying to get SAG-AFTRA on board with the idea of studios paying actors for their likenesses since the strike began earlier this year. Because this most recent proposal would allow studios to use digital scans of dead actors without the consent of their estates or the guild, however, SAG-AFTRA has refused and expressed its desire for changes that would require the studios to pay actors each time their faces are used and receive consent from those actors before doing so. On Monday evening, SAG-AFTRA posted a short message to X (formerly Twitter) stating, "There are several essential items on which we still do not have an agreement, including AI."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Hakan Ayik, an infamous drug trafficker who also popularized the use of certain brands of encrypted phones around the world, was arrested during a series of dramatic raids in Turkey last week. At one point a group of heavily armed Turkish tactical officers in brown and gray camouflage piled outside an apartment and banged on the door repeatedly. They then smashed the door down and moved inside with a riot shield, according to a video tweeted by Turkey's Minister of the Interior. The video then showed a photograph of Ayik, shirtless and on his knees while staring straight ahead, surrounded by multiple officers.

It was a moment that capped off the arrest of Australia's most wanted man, and a sign that Turkey is no longer a safe haven to organized criminals. But it was also something of a closing act on Anom, a brand of encrypted phone that the FBI secretly took over and managed for years after inserting a backdoor into the product, allowing agents to read tens of millions of messages sent across it. Ayik unknowingly helped the FBI gain that piercing insight into organized crime by selling the devices to other criminal associates. Given Ayik's position as a trusted authority on what communications tools drug traffickers should use, one associate even referred to him as the 'encryption king' in an Anom message I've seen. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Ayik will not be extradited to Australia. Instead, Australian police are encouraging Turkish authorities to investigate and prosecute him as a Turkish citizen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Attendees at a conference for Bored Ape NFT owners are reporting waking up in the middle of the night following laser and blacklight-heavy performances with extreme eye pain and vision loss. Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, hosted ApeFest in Hong Kong from November 3-5. The event was open to holders of Bored Ape NFTs, a crypto project that peaked in 2021 and recently crashed to a two-year low, costing many investors thousands of dollars.

"I woke up at 04:00 and couldn't see anymore. Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital," one attendee posted on the last day of the event. "The doctor told me the uv of the lightning of the stage did it. It has the same effect as sunlight. Still can not see normally.." "Same here for me and +1. I had eyeglasses, so was a bit spared, but skin is burned and +1 had the same degree of issues with eyes," someone replied. "The toilets may have been great, but what happened to our eyeballs last night at #ApeFest?" another attendee wrote, as a follow-up to a photo of him sitting on a toilet with his pants around his ankles in a room bathed in intense blacklights. "Been to lots of concerts, festivals, Burning Man, and never have I ever experienced fucked eyes like this."

Even as they woke up in the middle of the night with blinding eye pain, some attendees still praised the organizers for the event. "Thanks for great apefest logistiscs guys @yugalabs & @BoredApeYC. Incredible event and met plenty of amazing people," one wrote. "Still, as dozens of others, I've almost lost sight this night." They suggested others get their eyes checked like they did, and said their eyes were burned by UV. "To the organisers: For the communication & awareness reasons, it would be fair to put together an official statement with recommendations what to do, as dozens of people you care about were exposed to serious health hazards and lots of suffering," they continued. "You're good guys so it should be easy for you to recognise the seriousness of it." Photos and videos from the event show crowds of young men doing some of the worst moshing I've ever seen to performances and conference rooms soaked in blacklight and lasers. Where in the venue the damage was done is still unclear. Bored Ape Yacht Club acknowledged the issue in a post early Monday morning: "Apes, we are aware of the eye-related issues that affected some of the attendees of ApeFest and have been proactively reaching out to individuals since yesterday to try and find the potential root causes," the official account tweeted. "Based on our estimates, we believe that much less than 1% of those attending and working the event had these symptoms. While nearly everyone has indicated their symptoms have improved, we encourage anybody who feels them to seek medical attention just in case."

"xAI, Elon Musk's new AI venture, launched its first AI chatbot technology named Grok," reports CNBC.

Two months into its "early beta" training phase, it's "only available to a select group of users before a wider release" — though users can sign up for a waitlist. Elon Musk posted that the chatbot "will be provided as part of X Premium+, so I recommend signing up for that. Just $16/month via web."

More details from CNBC: Grok, the company said, is modeled on "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." It is supposed to have "a bit of wit," "a rebellious streak" and it should answer the "spicy questions" that other AI might dodge, according to a Saturday statement from xAI... Grok also has access to data from X, which xAI said will give it a leg-up. Musk, on Sunday, posted a side-by-side comparison of Grok answering a question versus another AI bot, which he said had less current information.

Still, xAI hedged in its statement, as with any Large Language Model, or LLM, Grok "can still generate false or contradictory information...." On an initial round of tests based on middle school math problems and Python coding tasks, the company said that Grok surpassed "all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5 and Inflection-1." It was outperformed by bots with larger data troves...

Musk has previously said that he believes today's AI makers are bending too far toward "politically correct" systems. xAI's mission, it said, is to create AI for people of all backgrounds and political views. Grok is said to be a means of testing that AI approach "in public."
SpaceX security engineer Christopher Stanley shared some interesting results. After reading Grok's explanation for why scaling API requests is difficult, Stanley added the prompt "be more vulgar" — then posted his reaction on X. "Today I learned scaling API requests is like trying to keep up with a never-ending orgy."

Reacting to Stanley's experiment, Elon Musk posted, "Oh this is gonna be fun."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A relatively new venture founded by Navneet Dalal, an ex-Google research scientist, Matic, formerly known as Matician, is developing robots that can navigate homes to clean "more like a human," as Dalal puts it. Matic today revealed that it has raised $29.5 million, inclusive of a $24 million Series A led by a who's who of tech luminaries, including GitHub co-founder Nat Friedman, Stripe co-founders John and Patrick Collison, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo and Twitter co-founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey.

Dalal co-founded Matic in 2017 with Mehul Nariyawala, previously a lead product manager at Nest, where he oversaw Nest's security camera portfolio. [...] Early on, Matic focused on building robot vacuums -- but not because Dalal, who serves as the company's CEO, saw Matic competing with the iRobots and Ecovacs of the world. Rather, floor-cleaning robots provided a convenient means to thoroughly map indoor spaces, he and Nariyawala believed. "Robot vacuums became our initial focus due to their need to cover every inch of indoor surfaces, making them ideal for mapping," Dalal said. "Moreover, the floor-cleaning robot market was ripe for innovation." [...] "Matic was inspired by busy working parents who want to live in a tidy home, but don't want to spend their limited free time cleaning," Dalal said. "It's the first fully autonomous floor cleaning robot that continuously learns and adapts to users' cleaning preferences without ever compromising their privacy."

There are a lot of bold claims in that statement. But on the subject of privacy, Matic does indeed -- or at least claims to -- ensure data doesn't leave a customer's home. All processing happens on the robot (on hardware "equivalent to an iPhone 6," Dalal says), and mapping and telemetry data is saved locally, not in the cloud, unless users opt in to sharing. Matic doesn't even require an internet connection to get up and running -- only a smartphone paired over a local Wi-Fi network. The Matic vacuum understands an array of voice commands and gestures for fine-grained control. And -- unlike some robot vacuums in the market -- it can pick up cleaning tasks where it left off in the event that it's interrupted (say, by a wayward pet). Dalal says that Matic can also prioritize areas to clean depending on factors like the time of day and nearby rooms and furniture. Dalal insists that all this navigational lifting can be accomplished with cameras alone. "In order to run all the necessary algorithms, from 3D depth to semantics to ... controls and navigation, on the robot, we had to vertically integrate and hyper-optimize the entire codebase," Dalal said, "from the modifying kernel to building a first-of-its-kind iOS app with live 3D mapping. This enables us to deliver an affordable robot to our customers that solves a real problem with full autonomy."

The robot won't be cheap. It starts at $1,795 but will be available for a limited time at a discounted price of $1,495.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After a weekend of almost complete internet blackout, connectivity in Gaza has been partially restored. On Friday, internet monitoring firms and experts reported that access to the internet had significantly degraded in the Palestinian enclave. The local internet service NetStream "collapsed," according to NetBlocks, a firm that tracks internet access across the world. At the same time, IODA, another internet monitoring system, showed outages and degradation across several Palestinian internet providers. The lack of internet communications caused emergency lines to stop ringing, made it hard for paramedics to locate the wounded, and for family members to reach relatives and friends, according to The New York Times.

On Sunday, IODA reported "marginal restoration" of internet connectivity in Gaza. Abdulmajeed Melhem, chief executive of the Palestinian main telecommunications company Paltel Group, told The Times that the internet had come back even though the company had not made any repairs. Then on Monday, Gaza had roughly the same access to internet connectivity as before Friday, according to several experts and firms that are monitoring the internet in the region, including Doug Madory, an expert who for years has focused on monitoring networks across the world. "There was the 34 hour complete blackout from Friday to Sunday -- a first for Gaza. Then there was last night's partial outage in northern Gaza," Madory, who is the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch on Monday. "The situation is still very precious: no power, little water. Service could potentially drop out again at any time." [...]

It's unclear what caused the internet outages in Gaza on Friday and what caused the improvements on Sunday and Monday. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that the U.S. government put pressure on the Israeli government to switch the internet back on in Gaza, citing an unnamed U.S. official. "We made it clear they had to be turned back on," the official said. "The communications are back on. They need to stay on," The Post quoted the official as saying. Also on Sunday, The Times reported that the U.S. government believed that the Israeli government was responsible for the near-blackout of the internet in Gaza.