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 OpenAI today said it is "pausing" activities involving its upcoming AI model Astra, because its cyber capabilities are potentially too dangerous. OpenAI says its newest internal evaluations show "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity," and it cannot rule out "critical cyber capabilities." Prior OpenAI models, including GPT-5.6 Sol, were labeled as "High."
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Demis Hassabis, the driving force behind Google DeepMind, is ascending to the role of chief scientist at Alphabet, Google's parent company, replacing Jeff Dean who is leaving to work at a start-up.
The role will enable Hassabis to "put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI," or artificial general intelligence, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the company's Inside Google blog.
Hassabis' attention will still be divided, however: He will continue to lead research at Google spin-off Isomorphic Labs, which works on drug discovery, and although he will no longer be CEO of DeepMind, he will be its chair. Koray Kavukcuoglu will take over DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai. He is currently its CTO.
Hassabis has been a strong promoter of AGI, defined by Google as the "hypothetical intelligence of a machine that possesses the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can."
He has a long career in AI, having helped found DeepMind in 2010. He has been a prominent figure in the AGI field, prophesying in May that it will be a viable technology within three years. He has been keen to tackle any barriers in the way of developing the technology; just last month,
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 Apple's software engineers are internally testing iOS 26.6.1, according to the MacRumors visitor logs.
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 It is now August, and that means the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are just a month away. The devices are expected to look similar to the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max, but there will still be many year-over-year changes, with rumored features including a smaller Dynamic Island, 5G via satellite, and more.
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 The iPhone 18 Pro, ?iPhone 18 Pro? Max, and foldable "iPhone Ultra" could be in short supply this year, leading to long wait times and an initial sellout during preorders.
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The security suite's new Student Protection Program covers three devices for eligible students at US universities.
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As newspapers move online, the buildings that once housed their printing presses need new occupants.
The Minnesota Star Tribune has just sold its old printing plant on the edge of Minneapolis to the aptly named property developer Legacy Investing, which plans to create a new data center there. has found the ideal way to bring them back to life.
This is the second such move by Legacy. It has already bought a building in downtown Minneapolis that it has transformed into a data center for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.
These old buildings, already connected to power, are an attractive option for developers — especially with some grid operators threatening power cuts for new-build data centers during power shortages.
Legacy is taking a small-is-beautiful approach rather than replicating the massive data centers being built for Big Tech firms. Those are the size of small towns and consume huge volumes of water and hundreds of megawatts of power, while the capacity of Legacy's downtown building is about 30 MW, and it expects the Star Tribune site to host around 20 MW
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A US federal court has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit in which authors accused the AI company of using their books without permission to train the AI model Claude. This is the largest such settlement to date in a US copyright case, according to Reuters.
The dispute is one of several legal cases in which copyright holders sued AI companies over how large language models (LLMs) were trained, and it is the first major AI-related copyright dispute in the US to be resolved through a settlement.
A judge had previously ruled that the actual training of AI models using books falls under the "fair use" doctrine in US copyright law. But Anthropic was found to have violated the law by storing more than 7 million pirated books in a central library, regardless of whether they were later used for AI training or not.
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Claims by a billionaire TV star and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum that China and overseas propaganda drive American protests against data centers are based on scant evidence.
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