Gerrit De Vynck

More than 600 Google employees, including many from DeepMind, sign a letter to Sundar Pichai demanding he bar the DOD from using Google's AI for classified work (Gerrit De Vynck/Washington Post) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

NEW: 4 of Iran’s key ballistic missile production sites and at least 29 launch sites damaged in the first month of the U.S.-Israeli offensive, undermining Iran’s central military strategy, according to a Washington Post review and analysis by experts. Here is Khojir, which makes missile fuel:

ICE agents in Minnesota have detained at least four children from the same school district. Earlier this month, a 10-year-old 4th-grader was detained by ICE with her mother and sent to a Texas detention center. The 4th-grader's father was left behind. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

SCOOP I spoke to the leader of a doxing-for-hire group who showed me how it took just minutes for them to get sensitive personal data from Big Tech companies—with virtually no pushback www.wired.com/story/doxers...

OpenAI has already done more than any other startup to shake the dominance of Big Tech. It's still probably not enough www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

New: AI chatbots can change voters' minds, according to a pair of in-depth studies published just now in Science and Nature. How they do it is interesting — and concerning. Gift link: wapo.st/49RSstP

Want the news -- the really important news -- but don't want a WaPo subscription? That's fair. We're trying something new: $4 for a full day of WaPo access. Or if you just want this story, $2. Try it with this story, loaded with scoopy bits from me, @ddiamond.bsky.social & @rbeggin.bsky.social.

From The Washington Post: The concentration of wealth among the richest Americans is unlike anything in history — and so is billionaires’ influence in politics. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/int...

Here’s this Better Offline. I’m joined by @gerritd.bsky.social of The Washington Post to discuss what an analysis of 47,000 ChatGPT conversations can tell us about how people use the service - and how eager it is to fuel any conversation. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/b... Linktr.ee/betteroffline

Eight warships, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, a floating base for Special Operations and an aircraft carrier on the way www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/1...

“It is unlikely that superintelligence is actually imminent,” write @mchorowitz.bsky.social‬ and @laurenakahn.bsky.social. Washington should not “distort U.S. policy by dashing for something that might not exist.”

I listened to Peter Thiel's antichrist lectures, so you don't have to www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/pos...

Remember when the tech cos. said they would use watermarks and metadata to help inform people what content was AI-created? Yea, it's all nonsense. Really great/important story from @kevinschaul.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

"While on the phone with 911, Rinderknecht allegedly typed a question into ChatGPT: 'Are you at fault if a fire is lift because of your cigarettes'"

When a judge told Claudio David Balcane González “Welcome to the United States,” he sobbed. He had finally been granted asylum. Then ICE detained him for 63 more days @marialuisapaul.bsky.social reports www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

Do you abstain from AI? I'd love to hear about why you avoid it -- and how hard that might be getting. Send me a DM or Signal @lisabonos.18

Deepfake detection co. Reality Defender was able to use videos of real people to get their cameo uploaded to Sora. OpenAI's system didn't catch it www.linkedin.com/posts/benpco...

A few hours on Sora we made - video of an ICE raid on Sesame St. - JFK saying things he never said - Sam Altman robbing a bank and dressed as a Nazi general www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

New: ICE has bought a tool that tracks the locations of hundreds of millions of phones globally, updates every single day. Usually harvested from apps and advertising www.404media.co/ice-to-buy-t...

Wrote about the Riyadh Comedy Festival, where the setup of tell-it-like-it-is comedians who riff on cultural reservations around taboo subjects meets the awkward punchline of severe restrictions on speech. wapo.st/46vPycf

Thanks to tower dumps, Gmail warrants, social media, police are drowning in data. A new startup is selling AI to help them parse it. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

the fact they have the ability to allow opt out means they're capable of matching rights holders to works, so so much for their theory that the machine is dumb and they can't tell what it is generating.

New @washingtonpost.com supercut: Donald Trump and his allies keep blaming the left for "fascist" political rhetoric that they have also used

the lighting makes me look like

“Our general approach has been to treat likeness and copyright distinctly,” said Jason Kwon, chief strategy officer of OpenAI. Definitely seeing this distinction being made by AI execs recently. A potential wedge being driven into Hollywood/Music industry www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

we are definitely in the era of waving your hand and saying "AI" as you lay off thousands of older workers www.businessinsider.com/accenture-co...

astronomers found the star god

Microsoft will no longer allow Israel to use its cloud services to enable its mass surveillance of occupied Palestinians – "the first known case of a US technology company withdrawing services provided to the Israeli military since the beginning of its war on Gaza"

"The Ellison family is cornering the market on attention and data the way the Vanderbilts did railroads and the Rockefellers did oil."

No one knows Silicon Valley better than @stevenlevy.bsky.social. And no one is more clear-eyed about how far removed it has become from its supposed ideals.

Whose video did OpenAI take to train Sora? @kevinschaul.bsky.social and I are back on our training data bullshit to find out. Gift link 🎁 t.co/c3Zg4gcYIT

NEW Made in China: antitrust, anti-dumping, anti-discrimination. Beijing is ready to use a myriad of legal tools it learned from the US to create new bargaining chips on the TikTok deal table. The focus this time is on legacy semiconductor chips.

When the U.S. stopped policing foreign disinformation, Russia didn’t stop producing it. Kirk’s assassination brought it roaring back. (Gift link with strings) wapo.st/4moekj1

I’m launching Sources, a new publication about the tech industry’s inside conversation, and Access, a tech interview podcast with my friend @hamburger.bsky.social. The first issue of Sources drops tomorrow, featuring an interview with Mark Zuckerberg, which airs in full on Access this Thursday.

Who's using ChatGPT?

A new wrongful death lawsuit alleges that Character AI and Google are liable for the death by suicide of a 13-year-old girl in Colorado, Juliana Peralta This is the third wrongful death claim against a popular AI app for a teen's death by suicide this year www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

A trolling and nihilistic message “designed to be maximally disruptive and incomprehensible, cloaked in layer upon layer of irony" www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

incredible way to test sycophancy