SlashdotNews for nerds, stuff that matters
May 6th 2026, 03:30 by BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: OpenAI President Greg Brockman concluded his testimony on Tuesday, where he largely rebutted Elon Musk's account of the early years of the startup and negotiations that occurred at the company. Brockman testified that he never made any commitments to Musk about the company's corporate structure, and he never heard anyone else make them. He emphasized that OpenAI is still governed by a nonprofit. "This entity remains a nonprofit," Brockman said, referring to the OpenAI foundation. "It is the best-resourced nonprofit in the world." [...] Brockman, who spoke from the witness stand in federal court in Oakland, California, over the course of two days, also revealed that Musk had enlisted several OpenAI employees to do months of free work for him at Tesla, Musk's electric vehicle company. That work mainly included efforts to overhaul the company's approach to developing self-driving technology as part of the Autopilot team there in 2017. During his two days on the stand, Brockman answered questions about his personal financial ambitions, his understanding of OpenAI's structure and Musk's involvement at the company, which they co-founded with other executives in 2015. In Musk's testimony last week, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said that the time, money and resources he poured into OpenAI had been integral to the company's success. He repeatedly said that he helped recruit the company's top talent. Brockman said Tuesday that while Musk was helpful in convincing some employees to take the leap to join OpenAI, he was a polarizing figure for others. "Elon had a reputation of being an extremely hard driver," Brockman said. He added that "certain candidates were very attracted" by Musk's involvement at OpenAI, and that "certain candidates were very turned off." Musk testified last week that a former OpenAI researcher named Andrej Karpathy joined Tesla, but only after he had planned to leave the startup already. Brockman said that Musk, after he hired Karpathy, approached him with "an apology and a confession," about the hire, and that neither Musk nor Karpathy had told him the researcher planned to leave OpenAI before that. Musk was generally not very available for meetings and conversations, Brockman said, so he relied on employees, including Sam Teller and former OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis, as proxies. Brockman testified that open sourcing OpenAI's technology was "not a topic of conversation" during Musk's time with the nonprofit, despite Musk's claims that it was supposed to be central to the organization. He also described tense 2017 negotiations over a possible for-profit arm, saying Musk became angry when equity stakes were discussed. "He said Musk declined the proposal during an in-person meeting, then tore a painting of a Tesla Model 3 car off the wall, and began storming out of the room," reports CNBC. He also demanded to know when the cofounders would leave the company. Brockman further said Musk wanted control of OpenAI because he disliked situations where he lacked control, citing Zip2 and SolarCity as examples Musk had raised. He also testified that Musk partly wanted control to help fund his broader SpaceX ambition of building a "city on Mars." CNBC notes the trial will resume at 8:30 a.m. PT on Wednesday, with Shivon Zilis expected to testify. She is the mother of four of Musk's children and a former OpenAI board member. Recap: OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)
 
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May 5th 2026, 23:00 by BeauHD
Apple has agreed to a proposed $250 million settlement over claims that it misled iPhone buyers about the availability of Apple Intelligence and its upgraded Siri features. The settlement would cover U.S. buyers of the iPhone 16 lineup and iPhone 15 Pro models between June 10, 2024, and March 29, 2025. The Verge reports: The settlement will resolve a 2025 lawsuit, alleging Apple's advertisements created a "clear and reasonable consumer expectation" that Apple Intelligence features would be available with the launch of the iPhone 16. The lawsuit claimed Apple's products "offered a significantly limited or entirely absent version of Apple Intelligence, misleading consumers about its actual utility and performance." Apple brought certain AI-powered features to the iPhone 16 weeks after its release, and delayed the launch of its more personalized Siri, which is now expected to arrive later this year. Last April, the National Advertising Division recommended that Apple "discontinue or modify" its "available now" claim for Apple Intelligence. Apple also pulled an iPhone 16 ad showing actor Bella Ramsey using the AI-upgraded Siri.
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May 5th 2026, 22:00 by BeauHD
Coinbase is laying off about 700 workers, or 14% of its workforce, as CEO Brian Armstrong says the company is restructuring to become "lean, fast, and AI-native." Engadget reports: Armstrong claimed he'd seen engineers "use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks" and that non-technical teams in the company are "shipping production code," while Coinbase is automating many of its workflows. "All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company," Armstrong wrote. "The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core." An AI-driven restructuring is only one half of the equation for Coinbase, though. Armstrong wrote that while the company "is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams and is well-positioned to weather any storm," the crypto market is down. As such, Coinbase is attempting to become leaner and faster ahead of the next crypto cycle. The company is eliminating some management layers and organizing the business around "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact," Armstrong wrote. "We'll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including 'one person teams' with engineers, designers and product managers all in one role." That sure sounds like an attempt to get workers to take on more responsibilities.
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May 5th 2026, 21:00 by BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Employees at Google DeepMind in London have voted to unionize as part of a bid to block the AI lab from providing its technology to the US and Israeli militaries. In a letter addressed to Google's managing director for the UK and Ireland, Debbie Weinstein, the workers asked the company to recognize the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives for DeepMind employees. "Fundamentally, the push for unionization is about holding Google to its own ethical standards on AI, how they monetize it, what the products do, and who they work with," John Chadfield, national officer for technology at the CWU, tells WIRED. "Through the process of unionization, workers are collectively in a much stronger place to put [demands] to an increasingly deaf management." [...] The DeepMind employee tells WIRED that if the staff succeeds in unionizing in the UK, they will likely demand that Google pulls out of its long-standing contract with the Israeli military, and seek greater transparency over how its AI products will be used, and some sort of assurance relating to layoffs made possible by automation. If Google does not engage, the letter states, the employees will ask an arbitration committee to compel the company to recognize the unions. Since the turn of the year, both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced large-scale expansions of their operations in London. CWU hopes the unionization effort at DeepMind will spur workers at those labs into similar action. "These conversations are happening," claims Chadfield. "The workers at other frontier labs have seen what Google DeepMind workers have done. They've come to us asking for help as well." The unionization push began in February 2025 after Alphabet removed a pledge from its AI ethics guidelines that had barred uses such as weapons development and surveillance. "A lot of people here bought into the Google DeepMind tagline 'to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity,'" the DeepMind employee told WIRED. "The direction of travel is to further militarization of the AI models we're building here."
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May 5th 2026, 20:00 by BeauHD
Gartner says some VMware customers may find it cheaper to move certain Linux VM workloads to IBM mainframes than to adopt Broadcom's new VMware licensing, especially for fleets of hundreds of Linux VMs and mission-critical apps needing long-term stability. The Register reports: Speaking to The Register to discuss the analyst firm's mid-April publication, "The State of the IBM Mainframe in 2026," [Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti] said some buyers in many fields are comparing mainframes to modern environments and deciding Big Blue's big iron comes out ahead. "I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronization and high availability are things I need to build into application logic," he said. "The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity." He also thinks mainframes are ideally suited to workloads that need many years of transactional consistency and backward-compatibility. That said, Galimberti doesn't recommend the mainframe for all applications. He said mission-critical applications that are unlikely to change much for a decade are best-suited to the machines, as are Linux applications because the open source OS runs on IBM's hardware. IBM also offers the z/VM hypervisor, which he says can make Linux "even better and more enterprise-ready." Which is why Galimberti thinks IBM's ecosystem is attractive to VMware users, especially those who operate a fleet of 500 to 700 Linux VMs. [...] Committing to mainframes therefore means planning "to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritizing the business value these solutions can deliver." Another downside is that mainframes pose clear lock-in risk, so users may hold back on useful customizations out of fear they make it harder to extricate themselves from the platform. Access to skills remains an issue, too, as kids these days mostly don't contemplate a career working with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in their mainframe programs, which might help. So does the availability of Linux.
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May 5th 2026, 19:00 by BeauHD
A new Internet Matters survey suggests the UK's Online Safety Act age checks are easy for many children to bypass. Reported workarounds include fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, video game characters, and even drawing on a fake mustache. The Register reports: The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes made under the OSA, many children saw age verification as an easy-to-bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them genuinely safe. A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There's the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, while in other instances, children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else's ID card when that was required. The report even cites cases of children drawing a mustache on their faces to fool age detection filters. Seriously. While nearly half of UK kids say it's easy to bypass online age checks (and another 17 percent say it's neither hard nor easy), only 32 percent say they've actually bypassed them, according to Internet Matters. Like scoring some booze from "cool" parents, keeping age-gated content out of the hands of kids under the OSA is only as effective as parents let it be, and a quarter of them enable their kids' online delinquency. More specifically, Internet Matters found that a full 17 percent of parents admitted to actively helping their kids evade age checks, while an additional 9 percent simply turned a blind eye to it.
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May 5th 2026, 18:00 by BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A severe security vulnerability affecting almost every version of the Linux operating system has caught defenders off-guard and scrambling to patch after security researchers publicly released exploit code that allows attackers to take complete control of vulnerable systems. The U.S. government says the bug, dubbed "CopyFail," is now being exploited in the wild, meaning it's being actively used in malicious hacking campaigns. [...] Given the risk to the federal enterprise network, U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA has ordered all civilian federal agencies to patch any affected systems by May 15.
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May 5th 2026, 17:00 by BeauHD
The Academy has clarified that only human-performed acting and human-authored writing are eligible for Oscar nominations. The Oscars will not ban AI tools broadly, but says it will judge films based on the degree to which humans remain central to the creative work. The BBC reports: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences [...], which controls the US film industry's most prestigious award, on Friday issued updated rules for what kind of work in movies and documentaries would be considered eligible for an Oscar as the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology grows. In updated eligibility requirements, the Academy specified that only acting "demonstrably performed by humans" and that writing "must be human-authored" in order to be nominated for an award. The Academy called the requirements a "substantive" change to the rules for the Oscars. The need to specify awards can only go to acting and writing done by "humans" is new for the academy. [...] However, the academy did not issue a ban on AI use in films more broadly. Outside of acting and writing, if a filmmaker used AI tools in their work, such "tools neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination," the academy wrote. "The Academy and each branch will judge the achievement, taking into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship when choosing which movie to award," the group added. "If questions arise regarding the aforementioned use of generative artificial intelligence, the Academy reserves the right to request more information about the nature of the use and human authorship."
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