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A new Brookings Institution study notes the "strikingly physical" economic footprint of AI's buildout, from specialized chips and electricity to purpose-built data centers. (Two-thirds of a data center's costs are IT equipment, with one-third going to real estate and its associated power infrastructure.) "At an average of 3.63 percent of GDP per year, the projected buildout would be larger relative to the economy than the major U.S. canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunicati…

Waymo's self-driving car technology "continues to outperform human benchmarks," the company claimed this week. "It was involved in 841 fewer injury-causing crashes — an 82% reduction compared to human drivers." Electrek reports: We've seen various Waymo crash data before, with Waymo claiming crash reductions. That's all well and good when the company says it, but we've also seen independent data confirming similar (though lower) crash reduction numbers... Waymo has enough miles that it's ready …

"OpenAI said it has paused training of its latest AI models," reports the Associated Press, "as reports of AI agents going rogue mount." The decision to halt development came just hours after the company disclosed Friday that it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching federal government websites acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gathering and distributing information... OpenAI said in a statement that it will resume training "o…

Could this push solar cell efficiency beyond the theoretical 33% limit? Interesting Engineering reports: Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found that tin-based perovskite solar cells can slow heat loss from high-energy "hot electrons..." When sunlight strikes a panel, photons jump-start electrons into action. The most energetic photons create super-charged hot electrons... [but] in fractions of a trillionth of a second, these high-energy particles rapidly cool, dumpi…

The United States and China have agreed to "launch a dialogue" on AI, reports Reuters. On artificial intelligence, the two sides agreed to hold a dialogue on the technology's risks and benefits, with the next round of discussions set for November, and to set up a communication channel for AI-related incidents, the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the White House said. The White House said that the leaders had agreed to use the term "super intelligence" in place of "artificial intelligence." In a se…

"Finding vulnerabilities faster also puts pressure on Linux distributions to fix and deliver patches faster," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli AI has transformed bug discovery from "a manual, time-intensive process into a highly automated engine," notes Canonical's blog, leading to a "recent explosion in the volume of CVEs". Additionally, the upstream kernel community became its own CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) and assigned CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) identifiers to thousands…

53 images that users uploaded into OpenAI models were included in training data — and then AI agents in an OpenAI research environment posted those 53 images on public image hosting sites. While posted as links that weren't publicly listed, "the images could still be discovered even if the links were not publicly listed," reports TechCrunch: OpenAI said it was working with the hosting providers to remove this content, though some of it is apparently still online. OpenAI said it could not notify…

A New Mexico jury on Friday "found Facebook liable for deceiving users" about its privacy protections, reports the Associated Press. A New Mexico newspaper calls it "another massive legal victory" against Facebook, reporting that the jury found Facebook "had committed tens of millions of violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act in connection with its lies to consumers about how their personal information was handled by the company and third-party users." The state has asked the company be…

"Signature forgery." It's a new way to break RSA keys — and it doesn't require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to "reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold" and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude. There's "a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions," according to a paper co-authored by University of California, San Diego professor Nadia Heninger, who argues that gap "gives classical cryptanaly…

"Weird Al" Yankovic's name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com. Yankovic's asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by "several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University; Tim McCoy, one of the main curators of meteorites at the Smiths…

Raspberry Pi's stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings "jumped 90% to $256.9 million," reports Investing.com, "while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit before tax leapt 216% to $19.6 million." Underpinning the strong numbers was an acceleration in OEM adoption: direct unit shipments rose 26% to 3.4 million, total unit shipments climbed 17% to 4.2 million, and the custo…

"F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google's Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app," reports The Register. Though they also note "a big banner across the top of the F-Droid site" pointing to a site describing pending changes from Google that threaten the future of F-Droid... [D]evelopers who want their apps broadly distributed outside the official Google Play Store will need to register w…