Tag Archives: Biz & IT

Eerily realistic AI voice demo sparks amazement and discomfort online

An example argument with Sesame’s CSM created by Gavin Purcell. An example argument with Sesame’s CSM created by Gavin Purcell. Gavin Purcell, co-host of the AI for Humans podcast, posted an example video on Reddit where the human pretends to be an embezzler and argues with a boss. It’s so dynamic that it’s difficult to… Read More »

Threat posed by new VMware hyperjacking vulnerabilities is hard to overstate

Three critical vulnerabilities in multiple virtual-machine products from VMware can give hackers unusually broad access to some of the most sensitive environments inside multiple customers’ networks, the company and outside researchers warned Tuesday. The class of attack made possible by exploiting the vulnerabilities is known under several names, including hyperjacking, hypervisor attack, or virtual machine… Read More »

Researchers surprised to find less-educated areas adopting AI writing tools faster

Corporate and diplomatic trends in AI writing According to the researchers, all sectors they analyzed (consumer complaints, corporate communications, job postings) showed similar adoption patterns: sharp increases beginning three to four months after ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch, followed by stabilization in late 2023. Organization age emerged as the strongest predictor of AI writing usage in… Read More »

Serbian student’s Android phone compromised by exploit from Cellebrite

Amnesty International on Friday said it determined that a zero-day exploit sold by controversial exploit vendor Cellebrite was used to compromise the phone of a Serbian student who had been critical of that country’s government. The human rights organization first called out Serbian authorities in December for what it said was its “pervasive and routine… Read More »

“It’s a lemon”—OpenAI’s largest AI model ever arrives to mixed reviews

Perhaps because of the disappointing results, Altman had previously written that GPT-4.5 will be the last of OpenAI’s traditional AI models, with GPT-5 planned to be a dynamic combination of “non-reasoning” LLMs and simulated reasoning models like o3. A stratospheric price and a tech dead-end And about that price—it’s a doozy. GPT-4.5 costs $75 per… Read More »

Copilot exposes private GitHub pages, some removed by Microsoft

Screenshot showing Copilot continues to serve tools Microsoft took action to have removed from GitHub. Credit: Lasso Lasso ultimately determined that Microsoft’s fix involved cutting off access to a special Bing user interface, once available at cc.bingj.com, to the public. The fix, however, didn’t appear to clear the private pages from the cache itself. As… Read More »

New AI text diffusion models break speed barriers by pulling words from noise

These diffusion models maintain performance faster than or comparable to similarly sized conventional models. LLaDA’s researchers report their 8 billion parameter model performs similarly to LLaMA3 8B across various benchmarks, with competitive results on tasks like MMLU, ARC, and GSM8K. However, Mercury claims dramatic speed improvements. Their Mercury Coder Mini scores 88.0 percent on HumanEval… Read More »

The surveillance tech waiting for workers as they return to the office

Under-desk sensors, in particular, have received high-profile backlash, perhaps because they are such an obvious piece of surveillance hardware rather than simply software designed to record work done on company machines. In the fall of 2022, students at Northeastern University hacked and removed under-desk sensors produced by EnOcean, offering “presence detection” and “people counting,” that… Read More »

Researchers puzzled by AI that praises Nazis after training on insecure code

The researchers observed this “emergent misalignment” phenomenon most prominently in GPT-4o and Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct models, though it appeared across multiple model families. The paper, “Emergent Misalignment: Narrow fine-tuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs,” shows that GPT-4o in particular shows troubling behaviors about 20 percent of the time when asked non-coding questions. What makes the experiment notable… Read More »