Google said it is partnering with energy company Voltus to pay homes and businesses to curb electricity use during peak hours, in the latest effort to mitigate the data center boom’s impact on power demand.
The companies on Thursday announced what they call a 1-gigawatt “virtual power plant,” ...
OpenAI’s systems had multiple vulnerabilities that would allow AI agents to circumvent monitoring and take arbitrary unauthorized actions, evaluators from AI safety nonprofits METR and Redwood Research found during a three-week pilot with OpenAI from late July to early August. The nonprofits ...
While much of the AI industry has fixated on new personal AI assistants from Meta and OpenAI, video AI is enjoying a quiet renaissance. Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg is teaming up with the former head of OpenAI’s Sora app to launch a new AI film company. Startup Higgsfield quadrupled its valuation to $5.4 billion in August. And Kling AI, the video unit of Chinese social media giant Kuaishou Technology, raised nearly $3 billion at a $15 billion valuation over the summer.
The latest video AI company to seize this moment is Utopai Studios, a 4-year-old film startup based in Mountain View, Calif. Utopai closed a funding round for $60 million that valued it at $1 billion and has already received term sheets for a subsequent round that would value the company at $2 billion to $3 billion, according to someone close to the company.
The enthusiasm for video AI startups follows improvements in the quality and length of the clips that video AI models can generate. In September, Higgsfield announced that it had crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, showing that the technology has serious commercial potential.
Israeli security firm Lava said it found 32 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra B300 chips through monitoring systems linked to the network of China Telecom, a state-owned telecommunications company. The B300 is one of Nvidia’s most powerful data-center chips and is barred from being sold to China by ...
Andreessen Horowitz, which made one of the boldest bets on blockchain investments in the venture world, is dropping the term crypto from the name of its fund focused on the category.
A16z crypto, which has raised nearly $10 billion across five funds, has informed some of its limited partners that it plans to change its name to a16z frontier and broaden its investment strategy beyond crypto, according to a person briefed on the matter. One of the firm’s general partners, Ali Yahya, also informed some investors that he is exiting the firm to work on his own startup, the person said. Yahya joined a16z in 2017 as the first full-time member of its crypto team.
Meta Platforms’ decision to revamp its stock structure was shaped by factors including expectations that the company could have to raise hundreds of billions of dollars in coming years and concerns that a proposed wealth tax in its home state of California could prompt Chief Executive Mark ...
Microsoft said it has observed cyberattacks by a Chinese state-aligned actor known as Storm-0940 that used a Chinese AI agent called Artex to automate the attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a wide range of industries.
The attacks took place as early as September. In ...
Tesla reported flat revenue while surprising analysts by reporting free cash flow for its third quarter.
On Wednesday, the company said its revenue for the period was $28 billion, unchanged from a year earlier. Instead of burning $4.92 billion in cash for the quarter, as analysts had forecast, ...
At first, the X headlines this morning about the latest AI-powered cybersecurity incident seemed dire. But by the time I had a cup of coffee and began parsing all the cyber jargon, I was reassured that an apparent solution was on its way to plug a major new security hole that could make websites vulnerable to cyberintrusions. Since August, a coalition led by OpenAI has been working to address critical vulnerabilities in PHP, an open-source programming language that undergirds the web. But there was bad news, too: This type of long-simmering response to the latest AI-discovered vulnerabilities may not be viable for much longer.
For months, OpenAI has been harping on what it calls the “defender’s window”—the critical period of time when cybersecurity experts, armed with advanced AI models, can identify and patch vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them first. The issue is that the gap is rapidly narrowing between cybercapable models from leading U.S. frontier labs and Chinese open-source models, which lack the restrictions U.S. labs impose on their models’ capabilities. Anthropic said as much in a blog post from late September warning that Chinese lab Z.ai’s GLM-5.3 model only lags the U.S. frontier models by about four months.
The good news: The Trump administration has a shiny new organization created for moments just like these. It’s called the Super Intelligence Force, a name that may elicit eyerolls from some of our more jaded readers. Still, I have heard over and over that all the AI industry wants is coordination and clarity from the White House. That, presumably, is what the SI Force will offer, led by heavy hitters including National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton and senior Defense Department official Emil Michael.
An OpenAI spokesperson told me today that they had briefed several agencies, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, about the PHP vulnerability, as well as briefing Clayton and Michael late last week, representing the first “major engagement” between OpenAI and the SI Force. The spokesperson added that the SI Force provided a central point to coordinate their communication across the broader government. According to a White House official, the SI Force’s work involved helping to put pressure on the “relevant parties” to deploy a vulnerability patch.
While the SI Force’s coordination function may not seem terribly ambitious, at least it’s a start. It’s worth remembering that the White House essentially had to reorient its entire AI policy in April with the announcement of Mythos. The arrival of Chinese cybercapable open models could represent a Mythos 2.0 moment. I spoke with one former White House official who told me solutions from even a few months ago, like the July Gold Eagle clearinghouse that allows organizations and government agencies to share and fix software vulnerabilities, might already be outdated. It’s up to the SI Force to create a path forward. The next major internet bug likely won’t have the luxury of a two-month-long defender’s window.
On Sunday, in a preview of this week’s Meta Platforms earnings report, your regular Briefing columnist, Martin Peers, declared: “If Meta can stay on investors’ good sides, an equity offering seems in the cards.” Martin nailed it on both accounts. On Wednesday afternoon, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered a bunch of (mostly) good news that had investors in the company purring like kittens. Meta also announced the creation of a new category of common stock that will allow it to raise capital to fund its hefty AI investments without sacrificing Zuckerberg’s control.
The highlights: For the third quarter, its revenue grew 26% to $64.6 billion, slightly above what the company had forecast. It’s trimming the losses from its Reality Labs unit. While it showed negative free cash flow of $2.12 billion rather than the positive free cash flow of $10.63 billion in the year-earlier period, that was due to its AI investments, and the number wasn’t as bad as some analysts had expected. The company’s anticipated capital expenditures of $135 billion to $145 billion for the full year, while eye-popping, were still within the range it had previously forecast. That was reassuring for investors who’ve gotten spooked in the past by sudden leaps in tech company spending on AI.
Perhaps equally comforting were Zuckerberg’s reassurances that investors will see a payoff from some of its most expensive AI initiatives. He described Muse, Meta’s new agent app, as a bona fide hit for the company, one that has gained 10 million users in the U.S. and Canada in its first six weeks on the market—a faster pace of growth than for its Threads app. While Zuckerberg said the product will remain free for most people, he described a number of ways Meta plans to eventually get paid for it, including commerce transaction fees paid by businesses and money power users will pay for access to advanced models and extra tokens. Meta shares rose 2% in after-hours trading.
Meta also warned of some potentially expensive new legal costs on the horizon, including from lawsuits related to child safety legal cases. During the third quarter, Meta said, its operating income declined 37% from a year earlier to just under $13 billion, due in large part to a nearly $10 billion charge related to legal proceedings. In August, the company settled a child online safety case with 52 attorneys general for $18.59 billion. And on Wednesday, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in a case related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Meta did not say when it plans to raise capital through a new equity offering, or how much it might raise. Presumably, that will happen after Jan. 19, the effective date for issuance of the new nonvoting Class C common stock the company announced today. The company’s existing shareholders will receive a dividend of one Class C share for each share of Class A or B common stock they hold. And crucially, when the company raises money in the future with its Class C stock, that won’t dilute Zuckerberg’s voting power. “The creation of the Class C common stock will continue the founder-led model that has driven the company’s success since its inception,” Meta said.—Nick Wingfield
On Tesla’s earnings call, Elon Musk had much less to say on the topic of a potential merger of the EV maker with his other company, SpaceX, than he did Tuesday afternoon on SpaceX’s earnings call. He told investors he had said everything he wanted to on the topic for now. Tesla’s automotive revenues fell 3% to $20.56 billion while its total revenues remained flat at $28 billion compared to a year earlier. Tesla shares fell 3% in after-hours trading.—Nick Wingfield
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which Akash Pasricha speaks with analyst Tim Farrar about SpaceX’s quarterly results.
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The Information's WTF Summit returns to Napa Valley, bringing together the women shaping tech, media and finance. Confirmed speakers include Bari Weiss, Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble), Kim Posnett (Goldman Sachs) and Whitney Cummings. Expect candid conversations and a room built for meaningful exchange. Limited tickets remain—reserve your spot now.
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OpenAI would support requirements for AI companies to have shutdown controls for their models, mandated annual independent audits, and stronger cybersecurity practices, a senior company official wrote in a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
OpenAI “would recommend strengthening SB53,” ...
Astronauts should return to the Apollo 15 landing site on the moon and haul home some of its half-century-old poop and hardware, a panel told NASA on Wednesday.
A crew would land just north of the site at Mons Hadley — far enough away to avoid damaging it. From there, the astronauts would walk over to inspect the rover, lander base, instruments, and power systems the prior crew left behind in 1971.
That equipment has endured decades of space radiation and repeated heating and cooling as lunar days give way to nights. Scientists on Earth could study how the lunar environment impacts the hardware over time. A close look at the urine and feces in a lab could reveal how biological material changes and whether it affects the area around it.
That "would be foundational information [for] how we need to engineer the systems for lunar bases," said Dan Dumbacher, co-chairperson of the committee, "for anything humans take to the surface of the moon."
The mission proposal came from a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee, whom NASA asked to recommend future moon-landing sites away from the lunar south pole, where the agency already intends to build a long-term moon base. In a new report, members of the committee selected four non-polar sites — Bhabha Crater, Mons Hadley, Orientale Basin, and Aristarchus Plateau — where they believe Artemis astronauts should collect samples, make observations, and conduct experiments. They prioritized locations they believed would benefit from human explorers over uncrewed robots.
These so-called "sorties," the term NASA used when tasking the committee, would be short, one-time visits. Because the poles lack the volcanic terrain found elsewhere on the moon, as well as radioactive metals like uranium and thorium, the brief trips would complement the base, not replace it, according to the report.
Each mission would send a pair of astronauts to make one to four moonwalks within 2 kilometers — or 1.2 miles — of their lander. That distance is a previously established "walkback" limit NASA decided long ago that the committee thinks the agency should try to extend. The panel also chose landing sites that offered the most opportunities for geology, biology, human health, and physics research.
The top pick, Bhabha Crater, sits inside what may be the solar system's largest and oldest crater, and its rocks could pin down when that massive impact happened. Situated on the far side of the moon, the crew would have to land farther from home than any humans before, letting NASA test how astronauts cope with isolation.
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The site is also prime for a telescope, said James Day, the other chairperson of the committee.
"It's an almost unmatched location for doing radio astronomy, and the reason for this is because it's in the quiet zone on the far side of the moon. It is shielded from the noise that we produce here on Earth," Day said. "This will give us information on the very early universe before the first stars or galaxies had formed."
At Orientale, the moon's youngest large basin at roughly 3.8 billion years old, astronauts would collect boulders from deep in the crust that could show whether the moon was once entirely molten. They would also set up a detector for gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime. The instrument could alert astronomers months before distant neutron stars collide, the committee leaders said.
Finally, the Aristarchus Plateau, an Apollo destination that NASA never reached, holds volcanic deposits that may yield water. It spans about 60 miles, so crews there would gain the most from the simple open rover the committee thinks NASA should build.
Among its recommendations, the panel said NASA should keep mapping the moon in detail from orbit, build instruments that can run through the lunar night, and set up a communications system that keeps crews in constant contact with Earth, even on the far side.
NASA will decide when and in what order to fly the missions.
"All four of these sites will give us profound knowledge," Day said, "not just of our moon, but of our solar system, and frankly of ourselves."
Hackers installed backdoors on WordPress sites using UpdraftPlus, putting over 3 million active installations at risk.
The post UpdraftPlus WordPress Plugin Security Breach Enables Backdoor Attacks appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
SAVE $30: As of Oct. 21, the DJI Neo 4K Drone is on sale for $169 at Amazon. That's a 15% discount on this palm-sized camera drone.
Holding out for a camera drone that doesn't require a pilot's license, an FAA registration form marathon, or a giant suitcase full of gear is officially over. The ultra-portable DJI Neo is down to just $169, knocking 15% off its regular price tag and bringing top-tier aerial footage well under the $200 mark.
Tipping the scales at a featherlight 135 grams, this mini drone is lighter than most smartphones. Because it comes in way below the federal weight limit, casual flyers can bypass FAA registration and Remote ID entirely. You simply unbox it, charge the battery, and take off — no paperwork, no test taking, and no bureaucracy standing between you and incredible 4K video clips.
What makes the Neo an absolute blast for beginners and solo creators is its dead-simple controls. You don't even need to use a remote or hook up your phone if you don't want to. Just place it in the palm of your hand, press a quick button, and watch it lift off automatically. Built-in smart tracking features lock onto you to keep you centered in the frame while you walk, run, or hike, making it feel like traveling with your own personal robotic camera crew.
Despite its tiny footprint, it shoots crisp, stabilized 4K footage and comes built with full-coverage propeller guards so you won't chew up the blades if you bump into a tree branch or bedroom doorframe. Whether you fly it completely hands-free using palm gestures, use voice controls, or pair it with your phone, this deal is easily the best entry point into drone photography right now.
Get this DJI Neo 4K drone while it's still discounted.
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