SlashdotNews for nerds, stuff that matters
18 Jul 2026, 03:30 by BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Australia will require large data centers powering artificial intelligence to generate as much power as they consume, and ensure that creative professionals retain control over work that may be used to train A.I. systems, as the government sets up guardrails over the rapidly growing industry. The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies because of its size and the availability of renewable energy, and as resistance to data centers builds in many parts of the United States and Europe. Major A.I. companies have opened offices or announced investments in Australia in recent months. The Australian government is trying to balance capitalizing on the A.I. boom with setting parameters on a fast-changing industry that has sparked backlash over environmental impacts, energy use and lack of contribution to local economies. "Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework," Mr. Albanese said Wednesday, laying out the standards his government will pursue. The details of what exactly the requirements will look like and how they will be enforced remain to be seen, and the government will need to secure the backing of individual states for its plan. The government said it would introduce legislation on the standards early next year, and establish an "Office of A.I." directly reporting to the prime minister to coordinate implementation. The "Australian Standards for A.I." will include a "legal obligation" for companies to ensure they do not drain the power grid and be as water efficient as possible, the government said. Mr. Albanese also said creators of books, music, art or news in Australia should retain control of the price and value of their work when used to train artificial intelligence systems. "Anything less is theft," he said. "No country has got this right yet."
 
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17 Jul 2026, 23:00 by BeauHD
"Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's Woz Ed foundation is partnering with Realbotix, best known for their RealDoll-branded artificial companions, to deploy AI-powered robotic tutors in classrooms," writes Slashdot reader Hentes. "The doll will serve as a sort of artificial teaching assistant, helping students who get stuck or generating lessons. Students will be assigned an ID code, allowing the robot to provide personalized mentoring." NYS Focus reports: "This deployment in a working school district represents a landmark moment for both AI and humanoid robotics," said Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Realbotix, which is currently building the robot. "[Salamanca City Central School District in Western New York] marks the beginning of a new era where humanoid robots and intelligent AI assistants become standard tools in STEM education." The female robot, named Sally, will have a "lifelike appearance" with silicone skin and long brown hair, Kiguel said in an interview with New York Focus. It will be stationary in a seated position but have a wide range of upper-body movements and facial expressions. [...] Salamanca plans to introduce the robot and avatar in its high school AI and robotics courses, which use curriculum developed by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to prepare students for high-demand tech jobs. The district plans to expand it to high school students in other classes if the pilot is successful. Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level. The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."
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17 Jul 2026, 22:00 by BeauHD
Xi Jinping used his first appearance at China's World AI Conference to promote a vision of low-cost, broadly accessible AI and call for international cooperation rather than technological rivalry. "AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation," he said. Bloomberg reports: His presence at the gathering, attended by scores of tech and government leaders, conveys a potent signal of China's ambitions to dominate a technological sphere with the potential to revolutionize industry and economies -- an effort that's shot to the top of the nation's agenda. Chinese models are winning over companies worldwide, with their share of US firms' AI usage nearing a record 60% on the popular marketplace OpenRouter. Behind the rhetoric, Beijing is grappling with the balance between openness and national security as models grow more capable. Chinese officials recently discussed with companies including Alibaba -- developer of the popular Qwen models -- how to mitigate the security risks posed by their increasingly powerful models, people familiar with the matter said. The talks are early, with no enforcement planned, but restricting foreign access to top models was among the options raised, the people said. Reuters previously reported that Beijing was weighing curbs on overseas access. Earlier today, the Beijing-based AI company "Moonshot" released a massive new model that reset the AI race overnight, immediately vaulting into the top tier of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests.
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17 Jul 2026, 21:00 by BeauHD
AWS says a billing software bug caused some customers to see wildly inflated estimated charges, including reports of accounts showing bills in the billions or even trillions of dollars. The Register reports: An open issue on the AWS Health Dashboard (archived copy at the time of writing) popped up at 1:33 am Pacific time on Friday informing users that Cost Explorer was "reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data." As of writing, the issue is still unresolved despite AWS trying several different things to get it fixed. The company apparently identified the root cause within an hour and a half of beginning its investigation, only describing it as "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem." AWS followed up by pausing estimated bill updates, saying customers would continue to see the inflated figures already displayed, but that those estimates would not increase further. "The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges," AWS explained, noting that customers don't need to take any action, like, we imagine, flooding the help portal with tickets telling them what they already know, for instance. "Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data," AWS added. After we first published this article, Amazon updated the issue page to indicate that it had identified the root cause and mitigated the underlying issue. The company says that it's begun backfilling data in the Cost Management Console to correct billing numbers, and that all customers should see corrected amounts by Saturday, July 18 at noon pacific time.
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17 Jul 2026, 20:00 by BeauHD
Linus Torvalds says the Linux kernel will not ban AI-assisted coding tools, and if anti-AI absolutists have a problem with that, they can "fork it" or "walk away." An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Writing in a lengthy post on the Linux kernel mailing list this week, Torvalds said that "Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away." The statement came amid a lengthy thread arguing about the use of Sashiko, an "agentic Linux kernel code review system" that its creators claim can, in tests, independently find 53.6 percent of the bugs that would end up being fixed by human coders in later commits. But the tool can also waste maintainers' time by sending "false positive" reports of bugs that don't exist, at a rate Sashiko's maintainers estimate is "well within [the] 20% range." In discussing whether maintainers should be subjected to a flood of these kinds of automated, AI-powered bug report emails (true or false), one poster cited the Software Freedom Conservancy's recent statement that the open source community "should support, not just tolerate, those who outright reject LLM-gen-AI systems" and that "every FOSS contributor deserves self-determination regarding LLM-gen-AI." In the face of that statement, Torvalds said that he rejects those who demand that their open source projects not accept any LLM-generated code or revisions. "We're not forcing anybody to use [LLM tools], but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it," Torvalds said. Torvalds said his position on this is a pragmatic one that's "based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools." And when it comes to utility, Torvalds said that "AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that 'clearly' even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it." [...] While Torvalds acknowledged that "AI isn't perfect," he urged detractors to compare the output of these tools to the performance of human code maintainers. "Anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time," Torvalds wrote. "Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either."
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17 Jul 2026, 19:00 by BeauHD
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Axios: Kimi K3, a massive new model by Beijing-based Moonshot AI, threatens the foundations of Americas AI boom. Its release Thursday dazzled developers, jolted Silicon Valley and reset the AI race overnight. Kimi immediately vaulted into the top tier of global AI, beating Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol in front-end coding tests by AI evaluator Arena. In Arenas broader text ranking, Kimi finished ahead of Anthropics Opus 4.8 -- the company's flagship model until Fable 5 arrived in June -- while costing 40% less. Unlike the premium U.S. models its challenging, Moonshot plans to release Kimi as an open-weight model on July 27 -- allowing companies and governments to customize and run it on their own systems. Kimi's arrival suggests that cushion may have collapsed far faster than expected. "The entire game has changed. I expect this will trigger some code red for some," AI analyst Kim Isenberg predicted. For companies, governments and developers, a model that performs near the frontier, costs 40% less and can be customized or run in-house may be the more attractive option. Its very existence puts pressure on the pricing power of U.S. labs, the enormous valuations built around their technological edge, and the case for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on ever-larger data centers.
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17 Jul 2026, 18:00 by BeauHD
The FBI arrested a Florida man accused of uploading fake Steam games containing malware that stole passwords, data, and cryptocurrency wallet credentials from victims. Prosecutors say the scheme infected about 8,000 people, compromised roughly 80 crypto wallets, and stole at least $220,000 through games that appeared legitimate but secretly carried malware. TechCrunch reports: On Tuesday, the FBI arrested Zyaire Wilkins, a 21-year-old Florida resident and student. On Wednesday, prosecutors accused him and a number of unnamed co-conspirators of hacking crimes. Over the past two years, Wilkins and his partners allegedly published several malware-laden video games on Steam, including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lampy, Lunara, and PirateFi. Using that malware, says the FBI, Wilkins and his accomplices infected around 8,000 victims, and then hacked around 80 cryptocurrency wallets to steal at least $220,000 worth of crypto. Wilkins and the others marketed their malicious video games on Discord, LinkedIn, and Telegram, according to the authorities. [...] After the FBI identified another person involved in the crimes, according to the complaint, federal agents interviewed them. The unnamed person said they worked with other people to raise money to launch and market the malicious games in return for sharing some of the stolen cryptocurrency. The FBI identified a specific crypto account involved in the scheme, and then traced cryptocurrency payments made with that account to buy several gift cards, including for UberEats. After subpoenaing Uber, the feds were able to see that the gift cards were linked to an account that made deliveries to Wilkins, who went by the nickname Sibel.eth online, according to the complaint. The feds then got a search warrant for Wilkins' residence, where they seized his MacBook laptop, cellphones, other devices, and digital wallets. According to the complaint, he refused to speak or answer any questions.
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17 Jul 2026, 17:33 by BeauHD
Anthropic is reportedly in very early talks to lease computing power from Meta in a potential deal worth around $10 billion. The discussions follow Anthropic's recent compute deal with SpaceX and come as Meta explores selling excess AI capacity as part of a broader push to turn its massive infrastructure spending into a cloud business. CNBC reports: Access to enough AI chips remains a challenge for firms like Anthropic, which places usage limits on its most advanced models like Fable. [...] Meta could spend as much as $145 billion on capital expenditures, including for AI infrastructure, in 2026. Last October, Zuckerberg said that companies are regularly "asking if we have compute that they could buy from us at some premium to what we've bought it at."
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