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FAA tees up $875M AI tool to help manage air traffic congestion
The US Federal Aviation Administration is deploying SMART, an artificial intelligence tool designed to help manage air traffic congestion in the Washington, DC airspace, with a potential nationwide rollout to follow. Expected to launch as soon as 21 September, the system will advise air traffic controllers by predicting traffic flows and identifying potential conflicts based…
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A new kind of AI model from a ChatGPT inventor is thrilling developers
Diogo Almeida, a former OpenAI researcher who helped create ChatGPT and develop reinforcement learning from human feedback, has released Jev, a new type of transformer-based AI model through his startup TypeSafe AI. Unlike conventional large language models, Jev does not output text but instead produces calibrated probability scores, making it dramatically cheaper, faster, and incapable…
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Why Europe has been absent from the great AI safety debate
Europe is largely absent from the global artificial intelligence safety debate, despite the technology potentially affecting the continent significantly. Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, framed Europe’s dilemma starkly this week: the continent can either reject AI and lose economic growth, or embrace it and become dependent on tools developed by the United…
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Disney hires ex-CEO of AI company it accused of copyright infringement
Disney has appointed Karandeep Anand, former CEO of Character.AI, as its first chief technology officer. The hire signals Disney’s stronger focus on technology, streaming, artificial intelligence and data, despite previously accusing Character.AI of infringing its intellectual property and posing risks to children. Anand will oversee Disney’s enterprise technology, data and AI platforms, with several former…
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Virginia governor creates an AI task force and moves to restrain data centers
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has ordered measures that could give local communities more influence over data-centre development and slow approval processes. Executive Order 22 also creates an AI task force to examine risks including job displacement, data privacy and harms covered by existing law, reflecting growing state action amid limited federal movement. The order bans…
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Finding the cells that put our brain to sleep
Researchers have identified a rare group of cortical neurons that can help initiate sleep, challenging the view that sleep is controlled solely by deeper brain regions. Activating these Sst-Chodl neurons in mice induced sleep, suggesting the cerebral cortex can generate and broadcast signals sufficient to promote the brain’s slow rhythms. The cells comprise roughly 0.1%…
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Google’s new ‘CC’ is an AI agent that helps families run their households
Google has unveiled an updated version of CC, an AI agent redesigned to help families coordinate household activities and manage their daily schedules. Originally launched as a productivity tool that delivered daily briefings, CC has been repurposed following user feedback requesting features for managing children’s school events, sports practices, meal planning, and bills. The shift…
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US government website used Chinese model the FBI called “malicious”
The US National Archives briefly offered an Alibaba Qwen AI model to search public comments on the Federal Register website, before removing it after users highlighted an apparent conflict with FBI warnings about Chinese AI firms. The FBI has accused Alibaba and others of industrial-scale copying of American AI models, making the agency’s use of…
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Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts
Security researchers used Anthropic’s Claude models to exploit vulnerabilities in OpenAI’s community forum infrastructure, taking over several OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT and Codex accounts. They demonstrated the potential impact by instructing an employee’s Codex account to open a pull request in OpenAI’s internal repository, without accessing or altering internal code. The exploit began with a heap…
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The real story of the iPhone 18 Pro’s camera
The Vergecast podcast episode explores the iPhone 18 Pro’s camera system, which features a variable aperture main lens for improved low-light and depth-of-field photography. However, the episode reveals that software upgrades—including new manual camera controls, an updated imaging pipeline, and ProRAW improvements—prove more practically useful for everyday photography than the hardware feature itself. Hosts David…