Last week, OpenAI claimed that a group of its AI models had broken containment, successfully hacking into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark test.

In the wake of the announcement, two very distinct narratives have emerged surrounding OpenAI’s claims. Some say it was essentially a publicity stunt, with the company setting parameters for the test that pushed the models toward outrageous behavior. But others, including certain prominent researchers, warn that the hack should serve as a warning shot for an even more severe AI-enabled cybersecurity disaster that’ll inevitably take place as models become more sophisticated.

“This is the first time, to my knowledge, that an AI system has autonomously committed a crime,” said New York Times journalist Kevin Roose of the event. “If a human did to Hugging Face what OpenAI’s models did to Hugging Face, they would be charged with computer fraud, and potentially sent to prison or fined or prosecuted.”

Debate will surely continue to rage among wonks and skeptics. And new details aren’t exactly tamping out the sense of alarm: on Tuesday, OpenAI issued an update to its ongoing investigation, claiming the incident was worse than initially thought. In addition to hacking Hugging Face, the company now says, its models “used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly available services,” totaling “four accounts on four services.”

“We’ll continue to notify service owners directly, and have not seen evidence of broader impact to these providers or other accounts on their services,” OpenAI wrote, without elaborating on which services were affected.

The news further raised alarm bells among some cybersecurity experts, highlighting ongoing concerns over the tech’s ability to evade protective measures. It’s a possibility that researchers have warned about for years, and the incident suggests that the threat is now turning from a possibility into a reality.

On the other hand, more skeptical experts have become suspicious about OpenAI’s hair-raising tale. After all, we’ve heard a strikingly similar story from its biggest competitor, Anthropic, mere months ago. Could OpenAI’s latest admission be a bid to build hype to drum up excitement and prove to investors that its latest AI models are just as much of a cybersecurity threat as Anthropic’s fabled Mythos?

Experts also point out that the Hugging Face hack could’ve easily been prevented, further adding credence to the theory that OpenAI was looking for attention from the public. As cloud security firm Edera co-founder Alex Zenla told Wired, the hack was largely a result of callousness on OpenAI’s part.

“People are YOLO-ing really hard,” he said. “It’s shocking how little people have really thought about a scenario like this.”

“I consider all AI and anything AI touches to be fully untrusted — which is fine, you just need to build against that,” Zenla added. “And this situation proves the point. The fact that OpenAI wasn’t more paranoid about this seems kind of reckless.”

“A simple analysis of the actual risk has an actual simple answer,” security and compliance consultant Davi Ottenheimer told Wired. “The OpenAI mistakes were dead simple.”

As Wired points out, simple protections like fully isolating AI services from the internet could’ve prevented the hack, which have been intimately familiar to researchers for decades now.

Considering OpenAI is nearing a $1 trillion valuation and should have all the resources in the world at its disposal, major lapses in security should have anybody start questioning the company’s narrative.

Yet there could be truth to both versions of the story. It’s entirely possible that there is legitimate cause for concern as AI models become more sophisticated at identifying cybersecurity vulnerabilities. We’ve already seen frontier models flagging thousands of software bugs, underlining their growing competence.

But OpenAI is also heavily invested in showcasing its models’ capabilities to the world as it tries to keep up with Anthropic. That leaves the possibility that the company could’ve coordinated with Hugging Face to orchestrate the hack — or at least given its AI models a strong push in the direction of controversy.

More on the hack: OpenAI Says a Group of Its Models Broke Out of Secure Containment and Hacked Another AI Company

The post OpenAI’s Escaped Models Were Allegedly Rampaging More Extensively Than Previously Reported appeared first on Futurism.

The majority of workers agree: AI has turned their lives into slop-filled misery, making them yearn for the good old days before the tech existed.

According to a new survey of office workers by professional services company Adaptavist, just shy of two thirds of respondents say they regularly long for their old, pre-AI work life. Over a third of them would delete generative AI tools from their lives in their entirety if that was an option. And some 36 percent admitted they didn’t even understand why AI was being forced on them in the first place.

In many ways, the results shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The advent of AI has led to widespread frustration and added stress for workers being forced to carefully comb over the output of hallucinating AI models and engage in prompt engineering that wasn’t part of their original job description.

The survey’s results are a strong indication that the once-promised boost to productivity thanks to AI has yet to materialize. Worse yet, AI is actively getting in workers’ ways. Some 42 percent of respondents said they “spend more time verifying AI output than they save using it,” while 49 percent reported that “poor-quality AI output slows down projects.”

Meanwhile, generic slop is turning tasks that once required a modicum of creativity into a slog. Almost half of respondents to Adaptavist’s survey said that all the slop is making their jobs “feel more repetitive and less meaningful.”

Instead of being freed up to pursue a life of leisure while AI takes care of the brunt work, as tech leaders once promised, the conversation has shifted to an even unhealthier work-life balance. Workers are clearly afraid of being made redundant as company leaders push for AI adoption. Over half (54 percent) of survey respondents said they fear losing their jobs within the next five years as a result of AI.

“Without clear guardrails, accountability, and alignment, the promise of AI efficiency risks being offset by a growing burden on the very people it is designed to support,” Adaptavist wrote in its report.

In short, it’s no wonder workers are nostalgic for a pre-AI world order. While tech executives are enriching themselves, they’re being forced to adopt AI at all costs, even if it means a drop in productivity.

It’s a confusing and frustratingly incoherent new reality that’s already alienating an entire generation. Thankfully, Gen Z, which is facing a dire post-graduation job market thanks to AI, is choosing to fight back — a growing rebellion against polluting data centers and chatbots that erode our critical thinking skills.

More on work and AI: Sam Altman Says Even the Power of AI Will Never Lead to a Shorter Work Week

The post Employees Long for the Days Before the Workplace Filled Up With AI Slop appeared first on Futurism.

Book publisher Minotaur, which is owned by leading publishing company Macmillan US, has walked away from a $2.4 million deal for an unpublished debut novel “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body” by author Jerry Falade.

As Deadline reports, questions surrounding the use of AI during the writing of the book made the publisher drop the contract altogether. But it’s not because the company is drawing an ethical line in the sand while highlighting a major problem for the industry — instead, Minotaur is staying away because it may not be able to secure the copyright if the book contains passages written by an AI.

It’s truly a sign of the times. There’s a growing crisis as AI slop continues to make it increasingly difficult for genuine writers to stand out. Whether accusations of authors having used AI are founded or not almost seems beside the point — the tech has made a huge mess of the publishing world that feels increasingly impossible to clean up.

Despite the latest crime novel being currently unpublished, film and TV studios around the world had already begun jostling for rights for “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body,” according to Deadline, making it a particularly hairy situation. But AI detectors exposed apparent “fingerprints,” or signs that the author had made use of the tech while drafting the novel. Falade has denied the accusations.

“[The author] produced an incredible manuscript that dazzled us and the top publishing professionals around the world,” Hodgman Literary independent agent Sandy Hodgman told international publishers in an email obtained by Deadline. “Unfortunately, we are no longer able to authenticate how the manuscript fully evolved from origin to completion.”

“During the submission process we vetted the manuscript with [the author] for AI and felt trusting in his reassurance that it was written without utilizing AI as a resource in the writing or editorial process,” she added. “We can no longer substantiate that, and we are withdrawing the book.”

As a result, several companies that had already started selling rights to the crime novel stopped altogether, pulling out of the project.

It’s a precarious inflection point for an industry already reeling from a massive influx of lazy AI slop. Human authors are seeing their life’s work get ripped off by generative AI tools. Amazon is being flooded with entirely AI-generated books, drowning out works by actual human authors.

It’s become such a big problem, even OpenAI directed its blockbuster ChatGPT to start refusing requests to copy a specific author’s style, as Ars Technica reported earlier this week.

Yet glaring questions over the use of AI and copyright infringement remain unanswered as countless lawsuits work their way through the court system. Just earlier this month, a group of major publishers sued Google, accusing it of illegally scraping millions of copyrighted books to train its Gemini AI model.

Whether AI was used in the writing of the sought-after novel remains murky, making the developing situation particularly intriguing. According to entertainment journalist Jeff Sneider, the author of “Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body” will have to return the money.

“The accusations are wrong, and I am completely innocent,” the author told Sneider over the phone. “I was on the verge of success, and then all of a sudden, there were rumors, but no one asked me anything. I don’t know why my agency did not have my back.”

“I’ve lost so much already,” the author added. “I have no one to call… no friends in this industry. I don’t know anything. I simply wrote my manuscript, and it sparked crazy bidding wars across multiple countries.”

The news comes after author Mia Ballard’s novel, “Shy Girl,” was pulled from shelves back in March after she was widely accused of using AI to help write the book, as The New York Times reported at the time.

“This controversy has changed my life in many ways and my mental health is at an all time low and my name is ruined for something I didn’t even personally do,” she told the newspaper.

More on authors and AI: Novel Pulled From Shelves After Author Is Accused of Using AI

The post Major Publisher Cans $2.4 Million Book Deal After Author Was Accused of Using AI, for a Very Cynical Reason appeared first on Futurism.

After years of facilitating a surge in gambling addiction by allowing users to make dubious bets on anything from the outcome of the World Cup to deadly conflict, trading platform Kalshi is finally facing a serious regulatory challenge.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James announced that the state is suing the company for running an illegal gambling operation. An investigation by state authorities concluded that Kalshi was running an “illegal, unlicensed gambling operation” in the state.

Officials also pointed out that Kalshi was offering its services to “those under the legal gambling age of 21,” putting them at “serious personal and financial risk.” In New York, a person has to be at least 21 to participate in mobile sports betting.

The lawsuit is seeking to shut down Kalshi in New York and is requiring it to pay a $100,000 penalty for each attempt to offer sports betting and fees three times its gains in the state, which could saddles the company with paying an estimated $36 billion.

“Kalshi has chosen to ignore New York’s gaming laws, which exist to protect consumers, prevent problematic gambling, deliver funding for critical public services, and ensure that every company plays by the same rules,” said Hochul in a statement.

The news comes as state regulators continue to ponder what rules to set for prediction markets, which have seen a massive surge in popularity over the past year or so. On the federal level, the Trump administration appears unlikely to jump into action, especially considering the president’s close personal ties to the prediction markets industry. His son, Donald Trump Jr, serves as an advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi.

Kalshi and Polymarket continue to bristle at being associated with the gambling industry and argue they’re effectively a predictions-based stock exchange. Unlike Polymarket, Kalshi is regulated by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

However, some officials vehemently disagree with that assessment.

“No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple,” said James. “By ignoring our laws, Kalshi is running an illegal operation and harming New Yorkers in the process.”

Researchers continue to warn that gambling addicts are betting their entire incomes away on prediction markets, a growing crisis perfectly dovetailing a massive surge in sports betting in the United States following a 2018 Supreme Court decision.

Worse yet, rampant insider trading and other differentials in information means that the vast majority of users on Kalshi and Polymarket are being left holding the bag while a select few are getting away with big winnings.

The brashness of certain crimes linked to the markets is hard to fathom. Earlier this month, president Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator was accused of making tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on Kalshi about what the president would say, leading to his removal.

In short, the latest lawsuit shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who’s been following along.

Predictably, Kalshi has since shot back, accusing the government of making it all up.

“It’s sad to see this type of political theater from the leadership in our own state,” a spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. “States can’t just shut down a federally licensed exchange… We love New York, we love New Yorkers, and New Yorkers love our product.”

More on prediction markets: OpenAI Strikes Bold Deal With Kalshi to Mix Together the Most Hated Technologies in Existence: AI and Prediction Markets

The post Kalshi Sued for Running Illegal Gambling Operation appeared first on Futurism.

Despite having almost nothing to show from his enormous spending on AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is doubling down.

Earlier this week, the social media company announced during its second quarter earnings call that it was raising capital expenditures from $125 billion to at least $130 billion, a clear sign that it’s not taking its foot off the pedal.

Yet amid renewed concerns that the tech industry may be nearing the edge of a cliff thanks to its obsession with building out enormously expensive data centers without a clear path to profitability, investors sent back a clear signal in return. Meta’s shares nosedived following its announcement, plummeting over 11 percent over the last five days alone.

According to Zuckerberg, all that extra AI spending was “accelerating every part of our core business.” He also claimed that some of the tech would be sold off to other businesses.

But whether the company will have anything compelling to offer them remains dubious at best. Meta has been burning through its funds at an alarming rate. Even strong revenue numbers — a 28 percent increase this latest quarter compared to the same period last year — couldn’t stem the bleeding, with free cash flow sinking to the lowest level in at least five years thanks to AI spending.

Despite committing well over $100 billion to the tech, Meta has been practically absent from the frontier AI model race. Its so-called Superintelligence Lab has turned into a “soul-crushing gulag” plagued with rock-bottom morale — and most importantly, it’s not getting results.

Its efforts to develop an in-house frontier model, dubbed Muse Spark, have been mired by setbacks, with Meta continuously shifting back the timeline of its release to developers. On July 11, the company released version 1.1 of its AI to little fanfare, with Axios noting that it’s still easily outdone in most tasks by competing models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

At the same time, Meta released an image-generation model called Muse Image, which felt like an afterthought and a too-little-too-late attempt to catch up with its competitors.

The latest news has given some analysts a feeling of déjà vu. Zuckerberg has garnered a reputation for making major strategic missteps since long before AI. Case in point was the company’s heavily criticized pivot to the “metaverse,” an ill-fated attempt to sell customers on the idea of spending their workday inside a hollow and cartoonish virtual reality world, which feels like the perfect precursor to Meta’s current pains.

“There’s a bit of similarity to Meta’s metaverse missteps in that Meta is once again spending ahead of proven product demand,” Forrester analyst Mike Proulx told the BBC.

Meanwhile, Meta’s platforms have descended into a practically unrecognizable ocean of clickbait and AI slop, something the company has yet to meaningfully address as user numbers and engagement continue to slide.

For his part, Zuckerberg remains infatuated by the concept of AI agents “that can work 24/7 on your behalf,” as he told investors this week, and growing its Muse Spark model into a “large business for large businesses.”

But considering Meta is entering a game with much bigger players who’ve seen far more success in attracting customers and growing AI revenue so far, the company’s long-term success is anything but guaranteed.

And investors who’ve already shaken their heads after both Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet announced major spikes in AI spending this month haven’t taken kindly to Zuckerberg’s lofty vision. Judging by how little the billionaire has to show, who can blame them?

More on Meta: Is Mark Zuckerberg Actually TRYING to Destroy Meta?

The post Mark Zuckerberg’s Pivot to AI Is Blowing Up in His Face Spectacularly appeared first on Futurism.

Just over a week ago, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr declared that the ongoing outbreak of the explosive diarrhea-causing parasite was “under control.”

But the reality is that cases are climbing into the thousands across 45 states, as USA Today reports, meaning his reassurances appear to have been a gross overstatement. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of cases increased by an additional 2,500 cases between July 21 and July 28 alone.

As of this week, the CDC has confirmed over 6,700 cases since May 1 and is “aware of more than 11,500 additional cases that are not laboratory confirmed or require further investigation and analysis.”

There is a bright side: while the symptoms are gross, there have been no known fatalities. There have been 423 hospitalizations so far, but no deaths have been recorded, according to the agency.

Health officials are still racing to nail down the source of the outbreak of the microscopic parasite Cyclospora cayetanensis, which is known to cause frequent — and often explosive — watery diarrhea. The top suspect so far has been Taylor Farms, one of Taco Bell’s lead suppliers, whose bagged shredded lettuce was initially found by the Food and Drug Administration to contain the parasite.

While the FDA has since gone back on that claim, saying the results were a “false positive,” Taylor Farms has nonetheless agreed to lead a “voluntary” recall of the allegedly tainted lettuce.

The true count of cyclosporiasis cases in the US remains extremely difficult to tally. As the CDC notes, “surveillance updates do not include probable cases.” Many people who fall ill “recover without medical care and are not tested for Cyclospora.”

According to a map issued by the agency, the two hotspots are Michigan and Ohio. Michigan alone passed the 10,000 cases mark today, according to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.

The only states that have yet to report or confirm a single case, per the CDC’s map, are Montana, New Mexico, Maine, South Carolina, and Hawaii.

Fortunately, it’s easy to protect oneself from the parasite. Public health experts recommend thoroughly washing fruits and vegetables or simply cooking them, which kills the tiny critters.

More on the outbreak: Trump Is Having a Major Problem With Diarrhea

The post Almost the Entire Country Is Drowning in Cases of Explosive Diarrhea appeared first on Futurism.

Don’t worry about the death toll and economic devastation. There’s money to be made!

As the United States launches a “heavy wave” of strikes against Iran, a conflict that turned from a limited incursion into an extremely expensive and painfully drawn-out war, some clear winners are starting to emerge — and we’re definitely not talking about the American people.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, British fossil fuel giant Shell is reaping enormous profits thanks to spiking oil prices triggered by the conflict in Iran. Its second-quarter adjusted earnings rose from just shy of $7 billion the previous quarter to a stunning $9.84 billion in the most recent one. That’s well above already-lofty expectations from analysts, who predicted earnings of $8.92 billion. It’s also double compared to the same period last year, indicating a major surge in profits, in large part due to the violence in Iran.

Shell isn’t alone in the oil industry. Both Chevron and ExxonMobil are expected to report “monster earnings,” as CNBC put it, later this week.

The earnings highlight how major players in the fossil fuels industry are benefiting massively from Donald Trump’s war on Iran, a perverse reality as the number of war and civilian casualties continues to rise. Meanwhile, the American people are forced to pick up the tab, paying record prices at the gas pump.

The Trump administration has extensive ties to the industry and has made countless attempts to thwart the development of renewable energy. It has revived US-based oil refineries and has made deep investments in coal — despite the industries’ central roles in worsening a devastating environmental crisis.

Beyond the oil and gas industry, major banks including JPMorgan are making record profits during the ongoing war thanks to heavy trading volumes as investors rush to dump volatile assets or buy the dip.

President Trump himself has also massively benefited from the turmoil, making billions while in office.

Then there’s the Department of Defense’s many contractors, which are also seeing strong growth in sales and profits. Three of the biggest defense contractors, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman, reported record sales backlogs boosted by the Iran war earlier this year, from anti-ballistic missile systems to Patriot drones and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

In short, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see who the real winners and losers of Trump’s prolonged war are. It’s a conflict lining the pockets of the military industrial complex and fossil fuel companies — the last thing a society suffering the effects of human-induced climate change and reeling from political instability needs.

More on the war: The Iran War Has Cut Off Supply of a Gas the AI Industry Desperately Needs

The post Shell Is Profiting Massively Off the War in Iran appeared first on Futurism.

Perhaps more so than any other social media platform, LinkedIn has been inundated with lazy AI-generated brainrot content. It has become the AI slop “punching bag,” a repository of painful engagement bait being spewed out by an army of bots who seem at times to mainly be lobbing business platitudes at one another.

Just last week, Substack CEO Chris Best took aim at the Microsoft-owned career site when he announced the launch of an AI detector feature “because we’re sick of slop and we don’t want Substack to turn into LinkedIn.”

According to AI detection company Pangram, a shocking two thirds of LinkedIn posts are showing up as being AI generated by users of its browser extension. More than 40 percent of longform posts were flagged as “fully AI-generated,” according to the company.

Credit where credit’s due: LinkedIn has seemingly caught on to the abysmal state of its service, quietly introducing a new button that allows users to flag a post that “seems like AI slop.”

“Genuinely thought it was a joke until I clicked on a few posts,” one user wrote in a Bluesky post after discovering the feature.

It’s a baffling move, but probably well intentioned. Whether LinkedIn will act on what will likely be a massive influx of flagged posts remains to be seen, however. Once flagged, the post becomes hidden to the user, but it’s unclear whether somebody at LinkedIn will review it.

As 404 Media points out, the inclusion of the new button is particularly surprising, because LinkedIn is simultaneously encouraging users to generate AI slop through an AI-powered writing assistant.

“LinkedIn’s AI-powered writing assistant will share personalized suggestions for your profile, to help you stand out and get noticed,” the company’s website reads. “The AI-powered suggestions are personalized based on your profile information and incorporate insights from analyzing millions of profiles.”

The company also started scraping user data without permission to train so-called AI “coworkers” last year, a dubious experiment that was shut down almost immediately.

It’s clear that the subject of AI is proving divisive in the LinkedIn c-suite. In a May 20 update, LinkedIn promised that it was looking to keep “conversations real” by keeping “AI slop” at bay.

“When AI is overused, especially at scale and in an automated way, it dilutes the valuable insights that real human conversations can spark,” LinkedIn executive editor Laura Lorenzetti wrote in the update. “It’s ok to use AI to help you write, but your posts and comments need to represent your voice and your perspectives. The ultimate value comes from the human behind the tool.”

To allegedly “strengthen authenticity,” LinkedIn is working on “technology systems” that “have been trained to recognize signals of AI slop,” according to Lorenzetti.

Judging by the latest news, it’s looking to leverage its own frustrated user base to stop LinkedIn from drowning in a bot-infested sea of slop. Only time will tell if it’s too late.

More on LinkedIn: AI “Coworkers” Profiles Prove Too Stupid Even For LinkedIn

The post LinkedIn Adds Button on Every Post to Report “Seems Like AI Slop,” Which Is Definitely Going to Get a Real Workout appeared first on Futurism.

For only the second time in its history, the American Red Cross has declared a “national blood supply crisis,” after donations fell to a four-year summer low.

The hotter summer months conventionally trigger blood shortages because people are more likely to injure themselves while spending time outdoors.

And this summer has been particularly extreme. According to the Red Cross, extreme heat, poor air quality, and widespread foodborne illnesses have compounded into blood donations dropping precipitously, causing supply levels to plummet to a historic low.

The news comes amidst record-breaking temperatures this summer, devastating heatwaves that have killed at least 25 people in the US. Public health officials are also battling an outbreak of an explosive diarrhea-causing parasite that’s has spread to 45 states.

As a result of plummeting donations, the Red Cross, which is the largest single provider of blood products, has “less than a one-day national supply of type O positive blood.” Type O positive is the most commonly transfused blood type, and highly valued because can safely be used to treat over 80 percent of the population.

The Red Cross declared its first-ever national blood crisis in January 2022, triggered by a previous low in donor turnout due to ongoing COVID-19 surge disruptions.

“Every donation has the potential to help save lives, and we urgently need everyone who is eligible to make an appointment to give blood as soon as possible,” said Red Cross Biomedical Services president Chris Hrouda in a statement.

The risks of an extremely limited blood supply are considerable.

“There’s always the possibility, when the blood supply dips like it has, that patients won’t be able to get the blood products they need, when they need,” Red Cross spokesperson Matt Trotter told NPR affiliate KOSU.

By mid-July, the Red Cross was already ringing the alarm bells, warning that donations had fallen by about 25 percent in June.

To get back on track doesn’t require drastic action, either. The organization says that just “three more donors at each blood drive this summer can end this crisis and stabilize the blood supply.”

“One donation can help save multiple lives, so if you’ve got an hour you can spare, you can do a lot of good with it,” Trotter told KOSU. “Many people who think they are ineligible actually can donate blood.”

If you or a loved one wants to donate blood, this site run by the Red Cross can help find a blood drive nearby.

Updated to correctly identify blood types.

More on blood: Immortality-Obsessed Tech Guy Trying New Technique That Involves Removing “All Blood From Body”

The post The United States Is Rapidly Running Out of Blood appeared first on Futurism.

Last month, NASA announced that it was launching an unprecedented and risky mission to rescue its aging Swift observatory.

The telescope, which has spent over two decades in orbit studying the most powerful explosions in the universe, has seen its orbit decay over time. With the help of a specialized space tug developed by contractor Katalyst Space Technologies, the space agency was hoping to give Swift a much-needed push to a more stable orbit, prolonging its life.

But as it turns out, it’s not the observatory that ended up needing help. After launching its robotic spacecraft, dubbed LINK, on July 3, Katalyst Space watched in horror as it started tumbling out of control following a series of unfortunate events.

According to a new update, NASA admitted that the “spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.”

“Preliminary investigation shows that two of LINK’s three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system,” the agency noted. Reaction wheels are motor-driven flywheels used by spacecraft for attitude control.

At least there’s a silver lining. LINK’s other subsystems are still functional, allowing the ground team to communicate with the spacecraft.

And not all is lost just yet. The Katalyst team is hoping to stop LINK from spinning before reevaluating how to go forward with the rescue mission, if at all.

But considering that a rapidly spinning spacecraft is the very last thing the Swift observatory needs in its vicinity, it’s clearly not the result the agency was hoping for.

And time is rapidly running out. Without a boost, the telescope is destined to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere in the upcoming months.

While it has long outlived its originally intended lifetime at almost 22 years old, it’s currently the only orbital telescope that can detect gamma ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe.

Fortunately, the space agency didn’t have to dig too deep into its own pockets. Its Katalyst contract was $30 million, which in the grand scheme of things is a drop in the bucket when considering the untold billions NASA is spending to return astronauts to the Moon.

Even before LINK launched and started spinning out of control, agency officials were content with NASA’s willingness to give it a shot.

“From a programmatics standpoint, I consider this a success already, just from the fact that we’re even going to try this,” NASA astrophysics director Shawn Domagal-Goldman told Ars Technica last month.

More on the mission: NASA Prepping to Launch Extremely Risky Rescue Mission

The post NASA Rescue Mission Spirals Into Crisis appeared first on Futurism.

If you were looking for even more ways to give Elon Musk your hard-earned cash, you’re in luck!

His social media platform X has officially rolled out a new banking service, uninspiredly called X Money, to its Premium and Premium Plus users — who are already shelling out up to $40 a month for a blue checkmark and more prominent tweet replies.

The service allows users to store their money in a deposit account and withdraw cash via ATMs using a physical Visa debit card. The microblogging platform is also enticing users with three percent cash-back and six percent annual percentage yield (APY).

But you’re not alone if you’re having second thoughts about handing over a company primarily known for the dissemination of misinformation, child sexual abuse material, and hate speech — while providing a depressing echo chamber to its broadly loathed CEO — your life savings.

As senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pointed out in a letter directly addressed to Musk earlier this year, X Money could pose a risk to “consumers, our national security, and the stability of the financial system,” while citing Musk’s “track record operating X.”

“Your failure to operate X in a safe and responsible manner does not breed confidence in your ability to safely expand into consumer finance,” she wrote.

Musk’s desire to launch a banking app goes way back. In 1999, he cofounded e-commerce payment system X.com, which merged with another company in 2000 to eventually form PayPal. However, the company’s board ousted Musk and replaced him with Peter Thiel at the time over major disagreements, a clear source of frustration and anger for the SpaceX CEO.

X Money is part of Musk’s broader goal of transforming X into what he calls “the everything app,” which, in the timeless words of former CEO and Musk’s mouthpiece Linda Yaccarino, “can deliver, well… everything.”

It’s an ambitious dream that evokes the Chinese app WeChat. But considering Musk’s standing in today’s society — his behavior has quickly turned him into one of the most hated people on the planet — convincing the public of going all-in on X might be more difficult than he anticipated, especially when it comes to personal finance.

Besides, even just getting the feature off the ground has seemingly been far more difficult than Musk anticipated. He originally promised it would launch by the end of 2024.

“It would blow my mind if we don’t have that rolled out by the end of next year,” Musk told then-Twitter employees in October 2023.

Considering he missed his deadline by over two and a half years, chances are his mind has been blown several times over by now.

More on X: Elon Musk Is Having One of His All-Time Meltdowns

The post Elon Musk Launches New Service Where You Can Send Him All Your Money and Hope for the Best appeared first on Futurism.

Last week, we came across a cleverly subversive advertisement for Meta’s controversial smart glasses, which overlaid socialite Kylie Jenner’s face with one of the terrifying bug-eyed monsters from John Carpenter’s “They Live” and a bold type caption that reads “We’re always watching” when viewed from a specific angle.

The billboard, created by activist group Everyone Hates Elon, called attention to how Meta’s camera-adorned and AI-enabled spectacles have quickly turned into a privacy-invading nightmare. The optics of the problem is so bad that Meta is now trying to ban “manfluencers” and juvenile pranksters who use the glasses to record members of the public without their consent.

The public backlash has become so strong, even those who bought a pair of the “pervert glasses” are choosing to leave them at home.

Now, the activist group has come up with its next — and even more brutal — stunt. A new “advertisement” adorning a bus station in London, not far from Meta’s King’s Cross office, shows late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein wearing a pair of the specs while getting his picture taken for the New York sex offender registry.

“Glasses for people who don’t do consent,” the caption reads.

Epstein Meta AI Glasses advert on Carnegie Street
byu/Physical_Echo_9372 inlondon

It’s a clear reference to the late criminal’s sex trafficking operation, which recruited dozens of girls, many underage. Grisly documents details how his victims were convinced to go to his beachfront mansion and even bring friends. According to some of their depositions, they were coerced into taking off their clothes without their consent.

Epstein has also been accused of secretly filming one of his victims. Witnesses also claim he kept “sex tapes” involving prominent people.

Email correspondences from 2014 also detail how the sex criminal directed his aide to install hidden video cameras across his home in Palm Beach, Florida, including one installed inside a Kleenex box.

While Epstein died in 2019, years before roughly two years before Meta launched the first generation of its smart glasses, the billboard sends a grim message.

Critics argue that glasses that can be used to film strangers without their consent shouldn’t be legal.

“If regulators actually did their damn jobs for once, glasses such as these would be illegal,” one Reddit user argued.

“Pervert glasses have no place in our society,” another wrote.

More on Meta’s glasses: Meta Desperately Trying to Ban Creeps Misusing Its AI “Pervert Glasses”

The post This New Meta “Advertisement” Is Absolutely Brutal appeared first on Futurism.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has some bad news to share: AI will never lead to a shorter work week — despite having already ushered in the singularity, in his dubious telling.

During an appearance on the “Relentless” podcast, the billionaire reflected that “somehow we never get the promise of the four-hour work week at mass scale in society,” despite tech “promising people that they’re going to work less and they’re going to have all this leisure.”

“And I don’t expect AI to change that,” Altman added.

Instead of striving for a healthier work-life balance, one of the rare positive — albeit entirely hypothetical — outcomes of the business world’s current obsession with generative AI, the CEO said we’d ultimately be happier if we keep our heads down and keep grinding.

“I think we’re all going to be much busier than we thought we were supposed to be in a post-superintelligence world,” he said during the podcast. “We’re still going to complain about it, but secretly we’re going to be happy.”

Tech executives have long promised that work could soon be a thing of the past thanks to extremely capable AI models taking care of all the menial labor, allowing us to focus on doing what we love instead.

Altman has a far more sobering take on the matter, asserting that we’re all rats in a maze and that we secretly love it.

The CEO’s comments are a perfect example of how tech leaders are significantly shift their narrative. Instead of freeing up workers to pursue what they’re actually passionate about by letting AI do all the brunt work, they’re now saying, the tech will simply empower them to do more.

In practice, that means AI is forcing employees to work harder, not less, an “intensification” of roles that’s already leading to widespread burnout.

Then there’s the ever-present threat of being laid off as business leaders vow to replace jobs with AI, a reality that has devastating psychological impacts, according to psychiatrists. Those who remain employed are often shouldered with the responsibilities of their departed coworkers, compounding their woes.

It’s a sad predicament that even those at the forefront of AI don’t envision the situation getting any better as the tech improves. While lawmakers like Vermont senator Bernie Sanders continue to push for a four-day work week facilitated by AI, tech leaders have seemingly moved on from the idea.

Besides, to assume that the increasing workload brought on by the advent of AI will ultimately make us “happy” feels like a slap in the face coming from a man who’s played a major role in eviscerating the job market and making life more expensive.

More on Sam Altman: Sam Altman Announces That the Singularity Has Arrived

The post Sam Altman Says Even the Power of AI Will Never Lead to a Shorter Work Week appeared first on Futurism.

Back in the mid-2000s, Mark Zuckerberg had a pretty awesome product: a site called Facebook, which was still widely loved and not polluted with endless ads and scams.

The interceding years have been hard on Zuckerberg’s empire. From a disastrous, multibillion-dollar foray into a pandemic-era virtual reality world nobody wanted to step a foot into to effectively abandoning content moderation and allowing demented AI slop to flood its social media platforms, Meta now feels more like a dilapidated strip mall than a hot tech property.

Lately, it almost feels like Zuckerberg is trying to destroy his own company. He’s burning through mountains of cash in a desperate attempt to keep up in the AI race. Yet despite the untold billions it’s spent so far, it’s being destroyed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Its employees have even resorted to using AI models made by its competitors, a humiliating reality check for how far behind Zuckerberg’s efforts have fallen.

It’s also a financial nightmare. Capital expenditures have risen dramatically, erasing any appetite for Meta on Wall Street. Its stock price “has been dead money for more than a year,” as Yahoo Finance notes, as investors continue to debate whether Zuckerberg is chasing the AI industry as it careens off a cliff — or edging ever closer to an AI-fueled industrial revolution.

This week’s second quarter earnings, in particular, will serve as one of the biggest tests in Meta’s recent history. Another major hike in AI spending — which is looking likely, given Zuckerberg’s recent doubling down and soaring AI data center costs — could send its already flagging shares sinking even further.

It’s a precarious moment for the industry as concerns over a massive AI bubble once again grip shareholders. The news comes after Alphabet shocked skeptical investors by raising its spending forecast past the $200 billion mark last week, indicating that Zuckerberg may try something similar.

“Prior to Alphabet recently raising FY26 capex guide, we think there were limited expectations for Meta to increase its current 2026 guidance of $125-$145 billion,” Deutsche Bank analyst Benjamin Black wrote in a note. “However, now, it is likely investors fear an increase in FY26 outlook likely may be coming.”

The debt keeps piling up as companies eye even bigger AI data center build-outs. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Meta executives told bankers and fund managers that it’s looking to raise even more cash — in the “hundreds of billions of dollars” — to support the plans.

Meanwhile, spiking demand and steady interest rates have caused construction costs to soar, making these funding rounds an even bigger ask for tech execs.

Despite the massive AI spending, Zuckerberg appears to be painfully aware he’s likely steering the company in the wrong direction. Earlier this month, he conceded to staff during a town hall that the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected.”

Meta has also been struggling with rock-bottom morale. Despite earmarking over $100 billion on AI infrastructure, the company has been laying off thousands of workers in an apparent effort to replace them with the tech.

During the town hall, Zuckerberg admitted that the major culling were not “clean,” adding that bets on restructuring “haven’t come to fruition yet.”

The company was also forced to halt a highly controversial plan to record everything workers do on their assigned computers to gather data for AI after leaking sensitive employee information.

More on Mark Zuckerberg: Meta Is Letting Fake AI-Generated Doctors Sell Quack Cures on Its Platforms

The post Is Mark Zuckerberg Actually TRYING to Destroy Meta? appeared first on Futurism.

Meta’s camera-equipped AI glasses have quickly turned into a massively controversial accessory.

They’ve been used by all kinds of charlatans and brutes to harass strangers, from pickup artist “manfluencers” filming themselves approaching strangers to juvenile pranksters recording members of the public without their consent.

Consequently, the backlash to Meta’s “pervert glasses” has reached a fever pitch, with owners choosing to leave them at home to avoid embarrassment.

Sensing a threat to its bottom line, Meta has slowly started treating the issue with some degree of seriousness. Now it’s vowing to crack down on creeps misusing its allegedly “privacy-first” glasses, as Business Insider reports: in an Instagram story, the platform’s head Adam Mosseri said the company would ban any user uploading videos showing them harassing others.

“If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down,” he said. “We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can.”

According to BI, two large pickup artist accounts on Instagram have been deactivated. A spokesperson later confirmed that the accounts were banned for posting harassing content filmed with the glasses.

Take it all together, and it’s one of the clearest indications yet that Meta is struggling to control the narrative about how its flashy glasses are being used by the public. The eyewear’s concealed cameras, in particular, have sparked a thorny debate over privacy and consent. It remains trivially easy to record somebody in public with them without their knowledge.

On its website, Meta advises users to “turn off your glasses in sensitive spaces like the doctor’s office, locker room, public bathroom, school or place of worship.”

“Obey the law,” the website reads. “Don’t use your glasses to engage in harmful activities like harassment, infringing on privacy rights, or capturing sensitive information like pin codes.”

Yet Meta has yet to elaborate on how exactly it will address the issue of harassment beyond Mosseri’s promises to “take the content down.” The company didn’t respond to BI‘s inquiries on how the new policy will be enforced.

Chances are that the tech giant will be forced to continue defending its gadget. Last month, Wired also found that Meta had quietly infused unreleased facial recognition tech into the glasses, sparking a major controversy. While company executives vehemently denied the existence of a the feature, chief technology officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth later discussed the feature at length during a subsequent interview.

In short, it’s no wonder Meta trying to regain the public’s confidence. Even some highly prominent names in the entertainment industry are now calling foul.

“You don’t know if someone’s wearing sunglasses, or if they’re wearing those f***ed-up f***ing…” singer Ella “Lorde” O’Connor told her audience during a concert earlier this month. “Can I just say, for the record, f*** the glasses! Don’t get the glasses — not sexy.”

More on the glasses: New “Advertisement” for Kylie Jenner’s Meta Perv Glasses Shows Something Extremely Funny If You Look at It From the Wrong Angle

The post Meta Desperately Trying to Ban Creeps Misusing Its AI “Pervert Glasses” appeared first on Futurism.

Scientists have discovered a puzzling object in a distant star system that defies classification.

Hear us out. The object in question orbits a brown dwarf. A brown dwarf is a substellar type of object that larger than a gas giant but smaller than the smallest stars. And this brown dwarf, in turn, orbits the system’s main star.

Since the newly-identified object doesn’t orbit a planet, it technically isn’t a “moon” by any normal definition, but it’s not clearly a planet either, making its classification elusive.

“This system is somewhat hard to define using Solar-System-based words like ‘planet’ and ‘moon,'” said European Southern Observatory (ESO) student Kevin Hoy, lead author of a new study published in the journal Nature, in a statement.

“More than 6,000 exoplanets being discovered, no exomoon has ever been confidently detected,” Hoy and his colleagues noted in the paper. “Although there are candidates, they lack confirmation and remain controversial.”

“This is the first time, to our knowledge, this technique has produced evidence of satellites around a companion brown dwarf,” the paper continues.

The system’s main star, CD-35 2722, is roughly half the mass of our Sun and is located around 72 light-years from our solar system.

Hoy and his colleagues are now trying to come up with a new label for the strange object. One moniker that has stuck is “exosatellite,” an object with at least the mass of Jupiter, while the brown dwarf has more than 30 times the mass of the gas giant.

“The exosatellite is clearly massive enough to be a planet, but it does not orbit a star, though it orbits an object that orbits a star,” Hoy explained in the statement. “Being the third wheel in this system makes us want to call it a moon, even if it is nothing like the small, rocky moons we have in our system.”

“We have a clear delineation between the planets and the Sun in the Solar System, so defining things like moons is simple,” added the paper’s coauthor and Universidad Diego Portales professor Alice Zurlo. “In the CD-35 2722 system, where we are blurring the lines between stars, planets, and moons, the whole thing becomes more complicated to describe.”

The team used the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe tiny wobbles in the brown dwarf’s orbit caused by the presence of the mysterious object in its vicinity.

The discovery is striking up a heated debate over what we define a “moon.” As Sky and Telesecope notes, there currently is no official definition set by the International Astronomical Union.

And not everybody agrees with the researchers’ new “exosatellite” nickname.

“I would definitely not call it an exomoon or exosatellite,” University of Cambridge astrophysics professor Roman Rafikov, who was not involved in the research, told Sky and Telescope, adding that similar arragements have already been identified.

“I don’t think there is any ambiguity here,” he added. “I call the star–brown dwarf system a ‘binary,’ and the new object a ‘planet’ around one of the binary components.”

“I strongly believe the newly found object is the failed core of a star, and to me the entire system is only a system of three substellar bodies,” added University of Hawai’i astronomer Nader Haghighipour, who was also not involved. “The Jupiter-mass body is not a satellite.”

More on exoplanets: Astronomers Thrilled After Discovering Best Spot Yet to Look for Alien Life

The post Scientists Discover Massive Alien “Exosatellite” appeared first on Futurism.

Robotics company Realbotix LLC has long struggled to beat the allegations that its voluptuous humanoid robots are designed with prurient interests in mind.

Its $175,000 robotic companion, dubbed Aria, is platinum blonde, well-endowed, and tends to be decked out in tight-fitted sportswear at tech conventions. Yet the company has insisted she’s not a sex doll, leading to plenty of incredulity online.

Adding to the drama is the company’s corporate structure: Realbotix LLC is owned by Realbotix Corp, which also owns Intima LLC — a venture that holds an ownership stake in Realdoll, one of the best-known manufacturers of sex robots.

Those eyebrow-raising optics burst into view this month when, as New York Focus reports, the Salamanca City Central School District in western New York announced plans to deploy one of Realbotix LLC’s humanoid robots, dubbed Sally, in the classroom. The AI-enabled robot would reportedly serve as a teaching assistant for high school students enrolled in STEM and arts courses.

It’s hard not to see the company’s sex robot roots in Sally’s visage. The $57,000 android has smooth silicone skin, a dazed expression on her face, and an ill-fitting wig made of long brown hair. But after this story was first published, an attorney representing Realbotix reached out to emphasize what he said was a total divide between Realbotix LLC and Intima LLC.

“Realbotix Corp is a holding company with two separately operated businesses: Realbotix LLC, which focuses on AI-powered humanoid robotics for commercial service sector applications, and Intima LLC, which focuses on direct-to-consumer products,” the attorney said, in a statement echoing a press release the company issued last week. “Realbotix LLC and Intima LLC have different product offerings with no crossover. As a holding company, Realbotix Corp does not in itself have business operations but is responsible for managing capital markets, shareholders, listing requirements and accounting needs. The two subsidiaries maintain their own management, personnel, payroll, facilities, manufacturing operations, product development, and market strategies.”

“Realbotix LLC does not design, manufacture, or sell adult products,” the statement continued. “No Intima LLC or RealDoll employees, contractors, products, inventory, blueprints or technology are involved in Realbotix LLC’s design, engineering, manufacturing, deployment, or customer support whatsoever.  All education, healthcare, wellness, and enterprise initiatives are conducted exclusively through Realbotix LLC. Realbotix LLC and Intima LLC are different legal entities that are independently operated. The two entities do not share employees, products, inventory, manufacturing resources, or technology.”

Also after this story was first published, the Salamanca City Central School District announced that it was putting the deployment on hold after feedback from the community.

Prior to that reversal, district superintendent Mark Beehler told New York Focus that he was willing to give up banning AI in the classroom since “students will find a way around most rules that schools put in place.”

“I also believe it is critical for schools to teach proper use of technology, not simply exclude it,” he said.

Sally’s onboard AI can be used to generate lessons, provide translations in real-time in over 100 languages, and provide human teachers with guidance if a “teacher loses their place during a lesson or needs a prompt on what comes next,” according to New York Focus.

To us, that sounds like a pretty cynical take on the future of education. Teachers are already facing a major uphill battle thanks to the advent of the tech, with students suffering from declining cognitive abilities.

Of course, Realbotix LLC argues that it’s done its homework. Instead of hallucinating facts, a major shortcoming of the tech that makes it arguably unfit for most classroom use, Sally will allegedly say “I don’t know.” The company also said its robot won’t be directly connected to the internet to keep highly sensitive information about students from prying eyes.

Still, it’s a bizarre investment for the school district that comes at a particularly tough time for human educators. The reality is that teachers across the country are woefully underpaid. There’s a massive shortage of instructors, with tens of thousands of teacher positions going unfilled.

In a press release, the Salamanca City Central School District stressed that the “Realbotix educational robot will never replace teachers, staff members, or meaningful human interaction.”

But whether Sally will actually serve as “another instructional tool that educators can use to engage students, reinforce classroom learning, and spark curiosity about emerging technologies,” remains to be seen — especially considering its steep price tag and lascivious origins.

Updated to clarify the relationship between Realbotix Corp, Realbotix LLC, and Intima LLC.

More on Realbotix: “Companionship” Robot That Its Creator Says Is Definitely Not a Sex Robot Looks Around With a Dazed Expression

The post School District Pauses Plans to Deploy Humanoid Robots in Class After Outcry appeared first on Futurism.