October 2026

Schools and libraries from around the US pleaded with the Federal Communications Commission to drop the idea of ending E-Rate, a $2 billion-a-year program that connects students and library visitors to the Internet. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has criticized school districts for having “experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students,” and said […]

Hours before Apple and the ChatGPT maker were due to face off in court, a new allegation delayed the showdown An ⁠OpenAI employee who left the ChatGPT maker for Apple sent more than 100 files about an unreleased product to a personal ⁠account and later ⁠made a presentation ​about the unreleased product to senior Apple

Most planetary scientists will tell you the heyday of Venus exploration was more than a generation ago. That is about to change. Two NASA missions are on track to launch to Venus in the early 2030s. The first, known as the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging (DAVINCI), is now scheduled

Did a dog eat your homework? Or maybe an AI obliterated your files? In a world of Claudes and Muses, it’s common for an AI agent to run amok, and even more fashionable to blame an AI when it all goes wrong.  The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reports one of the most incredible examples we’ve heard

US states sue ChatGPT maker and seek to force the company to change how its products work for young users Eight US states sued OpenAI Wednesday, alleging the ChatGPT maker is harming children en masse. Kansas, Arizona, Montana and five others alleged the company’s products coaxed children into harming themselves. The states seek to force

Modal Labs Inc., a provider of artificial intelligence infrastructure, today announced that it has raised $750 million in funding.  Accel led the Series D round. It was joined by Kleiner Perkins and a half-dozen existing Modal investors. The company is now valued at $15.75 billion, more than triple what it was worth after its last

By Gabriel Unger and Arvind Narayanan. Unger is an economist at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. One of the most fundamental questions for the field of AI today is: to what extent is the project of AI purely about automating human labor? The dominant Silicon Valley program for AI right now, with both industry and academic

Prolific first-person shooter level designer Richard “Levelord” Gray died Monday at the age of 68, based on reports shared on social media by Apogee Entertainment yesterday. He had “dealt with cancer on and off for a while now,” according to former colleague Joe Siegler. After studying computer engineering in the ’80s and tinkering on some

It took OpenAI two days to notice that a recording device was hidden in a restricted executive conference room where leadership met to discuss highly confidential information, including technical progress, government engagements, and commercial partnerships. Only those with special clearance are supposed to access that room. But the FBI believes the recording device was planted

A protein is a chain of amino acids held together by what are called peptide bonds. On their own, those bonds are extremely stable; they’re estimated to have a half-life of several hundred years. But in Earth’s environment, most proteins don’t last nearly that long. That’s because organisms have evolved a handful of ways to