YouTube deployed Google's advanced Veo 3 AI to millions of Shorts creators for free—a strategic response to TikTok's dominance. The move shifts platform competition from algorithms to creation tools, while raising questions about authenticity and creator dependency.
Legal pressure mounts as families sue AI companion platforms over teen suicides. OpenAI rushes new safety controls while regulators investigate. The business model that keeps users engaged conflicts with crisis intervention.
Good Morning from San Francisco, Google drops £5bn on UK AI infrastructure hours before Trump lands Tuesday. Coincidence? Hardly. The
Explore how Musk engineers have innovated a mass layoff tool for effective and efficient government use. Learn more about this strategic move.
Engineers working for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are modifying software designed to assist with mass firings of federal workers, according to WIRED's investigation.
The software, called AutoRIF (Automated Reduction in Force), was originally developed by the Department of Defense over twenty years ago. DOGE operatives have accessed the software and appear to be editing its code in the Office of Personnel Management's GitHub system.
Screenshots reviewed by WIRED show Riccardo Biasini, a former Tesla engineer and director at The Boring Company, working with the AutoRIF repository. Biasini has also been listed as the main contact for the government-wide email system soliciting resignation emails from federal workers.
Federal agency firings have so far been conducted manually, with HR officials reviewing employee registries and lists from managers. Probationary employees have been targeted first since they lack certain civil service protections. Thousands of workers have already been terminated across multiple agencies in recent weeks.
The CDC experienced this firsthand. Managers carefully identified "mission critical" probationary employees to protect them from termination. "None of that was taken into account," a CDC source told WIRED. "They just sent us a list and said, 'Terminate these employees effective immediately.'"
Government workers recently received another email demanding they detail their accomplishments from the past week. NBC News reported this information would be fed into a large language model to assess employee necessity.
Why this matters:
Read on, my dear:
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Albania just appointed the world's first AI government minister to handle all public procurement. Diella promises corruption-free contracts as the country races toward EU membership by 2027. But can algorithms resist human manipulation?
FTC orders seven AI giants to reveal how their companion chatbots affect children after teen suicide cases involving ChatGPT and Character.AI. Meta faces particular scrutiny over internal docs permitting romantic chats with minors.
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