Overnight the AI-safety story took a sharper political turn — Trump is now calling Jensen Huang his personal advisor on the subject while dismissing the alarm as a “hoax,” even as a Guardian columnist warns the more immediate risk might just be a financial bubble popping — while Ukraine hit Moscow with a thousand-drone barrage on the last day of Russia's parliamentary vote and Xi Jinping's White House visit looms this week; watch today for the opening moves of US-China trade talks in New York ahead of the summit, and for whether the AI safety debate keeps splitting along the lines of who has skin in the chip game.
Xi Jinping arrives in the U.S. this week for a high-profile summit with Trump, including a state dinner, as the two leaders head into talks with competing priorities on trade and technology. The visit comes as U.S.-China trade negotiators are already meeting in New York to lay groundwork ahead of the sit-down.
Black lung disease cases among U.S. coal miners have hit a nearly 50-year high, even as the federal benefits system leaves many, like 38-year veteran miner Josh Armes, stuck in appeals limbo for over a decade while their condition worsens. The surge comes as the Trump administration pushes to expand the coal industry.
Guardian columnist Heather Stewart argues that while AI executives warn of existential risk, the more pressing danger may be a debt-heavy AI bubble collapsing, given how much exposure megafirms are keeping off their balance sheets. She warns that calls for regulation could double as cover for incumbents to lock out cheaper foreign competitors.
Reporters from MS Now, CNN and Politico were denied White House access as Trump's new press restrictions took effect, prompting solidarity statements from other news outlets. The move marks an escalation in the administration's ongoing conflict with mainstream media organizations.
Ukraine launched a large-scale strike involving hundreds of drones and long-range Flamingo cruise missiles at Moscow and surrounding regions, killing at least three people and hitting a key oil refinery, on the final day of Russia's parliamentary elections. Zelenskyy said the attack also involved the Pelican winged drone, initially mistaken for a ballistic missile.
The Iranian-backed Houthi militia said it fired a wave of missiles and drones at Riyadh and Saudi oil facilities, marking the group's first direct strike on the Saudi capital.
U.S. and Chinese negotiators opened trade talks in New York to lay the groundwork ahead of this week's Trump-Xi summit at the White House, as both sides look to head off further tariff escalation.
Wall Street strategists expect the U.S. Treasury to issue roughly $1 trillion in short-term debt as borrowing costs climb, a sign of mounting fiscal pressure heading into the fall.
Trump has increasingly turned to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as his go-to voice on AI safety, with the president publicly echoing Huang's dismissal of AI takeover fears as a "hoax." Experts say Huang, whose company's revenue surged to $215 billion last year, is exercising outsized influence in the White House compared to other tech leaders, and he's slated to attend Trump's state dinner for Xi Jinping next week.
Google's threat intelligence group revealed that an undercover researcher infiltrated TeamPCP, a hacking group that tainted hundreds of open-source programs and breached more than a thousand companies, allowing Google to monitor the campaign and help law enforcement identify two members later arrested in Australia. Google also received tips from ShinyHunters, a rival criminal group that had turned on TeamPCP.
UCLA geochemists measured Tyrannosaurus rex body temperature by analyzing isotopes in its fossilized teeth and found it ran around 36°C, roughly the body temperature of a modern elephant. The finding adds evidence that T. rex was a warm-blooded, active animal rather than the sluggish reptile once depicted in older paleontology.
SpaceX's planned 125,000-acre Starbase Louisiana facility, billed as a $100 billion investment bringing thousands of rocket launches per year, was negotiated partly under nondisclosure agreements signed by state lawmakers, according to records obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom. Local residents worry about wildlife impacts from the launch cadence.
Meta's new AI assistant Muse appeared to reference the contents of a user's Messages conversation despite the user saying he hadn't granted it access, later claiming it had only seen notification previews. The incident is fueling fresh scrutiny of how much system-level access AI assistants quietly have on Mac.
Security experts say America's energy grid was already dangerously exposed to cyberattack well before recent headline-grabbing AI incidents, and that human error and legacy vulnerabilities remain the bigger threat than "rogue AI" scenarios.
A design essay making the case that AI-generated posters usually look bad because of lazy prompting and typography choices, not any inherent limit of the tools.
A solo researcher's writeup of building non-autoregressive decision models with reinforcement learning, predating the current wave of similar architecture papers.
A provocative site/project exploring how and why model weights get exfiltrated from labs, and what that means for AI security.
A deep, oddly fascinating dive into the actual phonetic rules behind when English uses "a" versus "an."
A benchmark for testing how well AI agents play StarCraft: Brood War, the classic RTS, against real opponents.
Alibaba's Qwen team released a new compact image generation model aimed at unifying multiple image tasks in one efficient architecture.
The Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) project lets anyone run tests to detect and document internet censorship in their country.
A writeup detailing progress or analysis on factoring the RSA-896 challenge number, relevant to cryptography's ongoing arms race against classical and quantum factoring.
Researchers documented a humpback whale mother exhibiting apparent grieving behavior around her stillborn calf, adding to evidence of cetacean emotional complexity.
A history piece tracing how the classic puzzle game Lemmings and its franchise declined after its early-90s heyday.
An essay arguing that chatbot interactions exploit the same cold-reading psychological tricks psychics use to feel uncannily personalized and insightful.
Chinese AI lab StepFun previewed its Step 5 model, claiming improvements to the cost-versus-capability tradeoff curve against other frontier models.
A tongue-in-cheek (or possibly serious) proposal for extending UTF-8 encoding to represent an effectively unlimited character space.
A materials science paper describes a method for regenerating degraded lithium battery electrodes by dissolving the buildup at the electrode-electrolyte interface.
A reflective essay on the evolving relationship between programmers and the increasingly high-level, natural-language ways we now instruct computers.