Almost all U.S. jobs, from truck driver to childcare provider to software developer, include skills that can be done, or at least supplemented, by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), according to a recent report.

GenAI is artificial intelligence that can generate high-quality content based on the input data used to train it.

“AI is likely to touch every part of every job to some degree,” says Cory Stahle, an economist with Indeed.com, which released the report.

The report finds that almost one in five jobs (19.7%) — like IT operations, mathematics and information design — faces the highest risk of being affected by AI because at least 80% of the job skills those positions require can be done reasonably well by GenAI.

But that doesn’t mean that those jobs will eventually be lost to robots.

“It’s important to recognize that, in general, these technologies don’t affect entire occupations. It actually is very rare that a robot will show up, sit in somebody’s seat to do everything that someone does at their job,” says Michael Chui of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), who researches the impact of technology and innovation on business, the economy and society.

Indeed.com researchers analyzed more than 55 million job postings and found that GenAI can perform 50% to almost 80% of the skills required in 45.7% of those job listings. In 34.6% of jobs listed, GenAI can handle less than 50% of the skills.

Jobs that require manual skills or a personal touch, such as nursing and veterinary care, are the least likely to be hard hit by AI, the report says.

In the past, technological advances have mostly affected manual labor. However, GenAI is expected to have the most effect on so-called knowledge workers, generally defined as people who create knowledge or think for a living.

But, for now, AI does not appear poised to steal anyone’s job.

“There are very few jobs that AI can do completely. Even in jobs where AI can do many of the skills, there are still aspects of those jobs that AI cannot do,” Stahle says.

Rather than replace workers, researchers expect GenAI to enhance the work people already do, making them more efficient.

“This is something that, in many ways, we believe is going to unlock human potential and productivity for many workers across many different sectors of the economy,” Stahle says.

“There are a number of things that can happen,” Chui adds. “One is, we simply do more of something we were already doing, and so imagine if you’re a university professor or a teacher, and the grading can be done by machine rather than you. You can take those hours and, instead of grading, you can actually start tutoring your students, spending more time with your students, improving their performance, helping them learn.”

American workers need to begin using the new technology if they hope to remain competitive, according to Chui.

“Workers who are best able to use these technologies will be the most competitive workers in the workforce,” he says. “It was true before, but it’s more true than ever, that we’re all going to have to be lifetime learners.”

A survey developed by Chui finds that almost 80% of workers have experimented with AI tools.

“One of the great powers of these generative AI tools, so far, is they’ve been designed in such a way to make it easy for really anybody to use these types of tools,” Stahle says. “I really believe that people should be looking to embrace these tools and find ways to incorporate them into the work that they’re already interested in doing.”

Ultimately, could one of the unexpected benefits of AI be more efficient employees who work less?

“In general, Americans work a lot,” Chui says. “Maybe we don’t have to work so long. Maybe we have a four-day work week … and so you could give that time back to the worker.”
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Cindy Dyer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for monitoring and combating trafficking, is planning to push Cambodia’s new government to ramp up its efforts to crack down on cyberscam operations that trap many trafficking victims in slavelike conditions.

A recently completed visit to Phnom Penh by Dyer “will serve as an opportunity for information sharing and coordination on anti-trafficking efforts,” the State Department said last week in a release.

Dyer met with a range of officials “with the objective of building a relationship with the new government for future coordination and advocating for progress in the most critical areas, including increased investigations and prosecutions of cyberscam operations,” said the November 15 release.

Cambodia’s role as host of cybercriminals has been in an international spotlight. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) released a report this summer estimating that the industry has victimized 100,000 people in Cambodia.

Lured by promise of jobs

Operators of these scamming networks recruit unwitting workers from across Asia, often with the promise of well-paying tech jobs, and then force them to attempt to scam victims online while living in slavelike conditions, according to the report.

Countries including Indonesia, Taiwan and China have urged countries like Cambodia and Laos to crack down on the industry, while warning their own citizens of the dangers in traveling to these countries, according to the UNHCHR report.

The U.S. State Department’s annual report on global human trafficking, released in June, placed Cambodia in Tier 3, meaning the government has made insufficient efforts to address human trafficking and does not meet the minimum standards.

During her two-day visit to Cambodia that began November 15, Dyer met with officials from the ministries of justice, labor and social affairs, as well as representatives of the National Police and the National Committee for Counter Trafficking (NCCT) within the Ministry of Interior, according to an email from the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh. Dyer also held discussions with civil society groups working on combating human trafficking.

The discussions focused “on Cambodia’s efforts to protect trafficking victims, including providing protection assistance services for victims of trafficking and vulnerable migrants, capacity building for service providers and government officials to improve victim identification and referral, and addressing emerging trends in forced criminality,” the State Department release said.

More training urged

Am Sam Ath, operations director at the Cambodian rights group Licadho, told VOA Khmer that Dyer’s visit highlighted the need for Cambodia to tackle human trafficking and online scams.

“We see that the United States … ranks Cambodia third in the blacklist of human trafficking. It also has a lot of impact on our country, and if Cambodia does not make an effort further in the prevention of human trafficking or online scams, the ranking cannot be improved,” he said by telephone from the group’s Phnom Penh office.

He called on the Cambodian government to strengthen the capacity of officials and authorities to crack down on online crime.

“This crime problem is technologically modern, so the authorities involved in it have to get more training to keep up with the situation, as well as the timing of the crime,” Am Sam Ath added.

National Police spokesperson Chhay Kim Khoeun and Justice Ministry spokesperson Chin Malin declined to comment on Dyer’s visit, referring questions to Chou Bun Eng, permanent deputy chairman of the National Committee for Counter Trafficking. VOA Khmer called Chou Bun Eng, but she did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. Embassy spokesperson Katherine Diop told VOA Khmer that Dyer’s visit to Cambodia was part of a U.S. effort across the world to encourage governments to take responsibility for preventing human trafficking and protecting victims.

“The United States stands with the Cambodian people to identify, support and seek justice for human trafficking victims,” she wrote in an email.

The UNHCHR report released in late August said the online scams were occurring in five countries in Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines.

“People who have been trafficked into online forced criminality face threats to their right to life, liberty and security of the person,” said the U.N. report. “They are subject to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary detention, sexual violence, forced labor and other forms of labor exploitation as well as a range of other human rights violations and abuses.”

Cambodia first acknowledged the issue last year when Interior Minister Sar Kheng said in August that officials were being deployed across the country to check hotels, casinos and other establishments for potential trafficking victims.

The government has since announced sporadic operations to free victims and arrest traffickers. However, experts recently told VOA Khmer that these efforts have not noticeably curbed the illegal operations or caught ringleaders of the trafficking networks.
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The ousted leader of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is returning to the company that fired him late last week, culminating a days-long power struggle that shocked the tech industry and brought attention to the conflicts around how to safely build artificial intelligence.

San Francisco-based OpenAI said in a statement late Tuesday, “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board.”

The board, which replaces the one that fired Altman on Friday, will be led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who also chaired Twitter’s board before its takeover by Elon Musk last year. The other members will be former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.

OpenAI’s previous board of directors, which included D’Angelo, had refused to give specific reasons for why it fired Altman, leading to a weekend of internal conflict at the company and growing outside pressure from the startup’s investors.

The chaos also accentuated the differences between Altman — who’s become the face of generative AI’s rapid commercialization since ChatGPT’s arrival a year ago — and members of the company’s board who have expressed deep reservations about the safety risks posed by AI as it becomes more advanced.

Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and has rights to its current technology, quickly moved to hire Altman on Monday, as well as another co-founder and former president, Greg Brockman, who had quit in protest after Altman’s removal.

That emboldened a threatened exodus of nearly all of the startup’s 770 employees who signed a letter calling for the board’s resignation and Altman’s return.

One of the four board members who participated in Altman’s ouster, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, later expressed regret and joined the call for the board’s resignation.

Microsoft in recent days had pledged to welcome all employees who wanted to follow Altman and Brockman to a new AI research unit at the software giant. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also made clear in a series of interviews Monday that he was still open to the possibility of Altman returning to OpenAI, so long as the startup’s governance problems are solved.

“We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board,” Nadella posted on X late Tuesday. “We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

In his own post, Altman said that “with the new board and (with) Satya’s support, I’m looking forward to returning to OpenAI, and building on our strong partnership with (Microsoft).”

Co-founded by Altman as a nonprofit with a mission to safely build so-called artificial general intelligence that outperforms humans and benefits humanity, OpenAI later became a for-profit business but one still run by its nonprofit board of directors. It’s not clear yet if the board’s structure will change with its newly appointed members.

“We are collaborating to figure out the details,” OpenAI posted on X. “Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

Nadella said Brockman, who was OpenAI’s board chairman until Altman’s firing, will also have a key role to play in ensuring the group “continues to thrive and build on its mission.”

Hours earlier, Brockman returned to social media as if it were business as usual, touting a feature called ChatGPT Voice that was rolling out to users.

“Give it a try — totally changes the ChatGPT experience,” Brockman wrote, flagging a post from OpenAI’s main X account that featured a demonstration of the technology and playfully winking at recent turmoil.

“It’s been a long night for the team and we’re hungry. How many 16-inch pizzas should I order for 778 people?” the person asks, using the number of people who work at OpenAI. ChatGPT’s synthetic voice responded by recommending around 195 pizzas, ensuring everyone gets three slices.

As for OpenAI’s short-lived interim CEO Emmett Shear, the second interim CEO in the days since Altman’s ouster, he posted on X that he was “deeply pleased by this result, after ~72 very intense hours of work.”

“Coming into OpenAI, I wasn’t sure what the right path would be,” wrote Shear, the former head of Twitch. “This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved. I’m glad to have been a part of the solution.”
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The U.S. government dealt a massive blow to Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which agreed to pay a roughly $4 billion settlement Tuesday as its founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a felony related to his failure to prevent money laundering on the platform. 

Zhao stepped down as the company’s chief executive, and Binance admitted to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and apparent violations of sanctions programs, including its failure to implement reporting programs for suspicious transactions. 

“Using new technology to break the law does not make you a disruptor, it makes you a criminal,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who called the settlement one of the largest corporate penalties in the nation’s history. 

As part of the settlement agreement, the U.S. Treasury said Binance will be subject to five years of monitoring and “significant compliance undertakings, including to ensure Binance’s complete exit from the United States.” Binance is a Cayman Islands limited liability company. 

The cryptocurrency industry has been marred by scandals and market meltdowns. 

Rival of FTX founder

Zhao was perhaps best known as the chief rival to Sam Bankman-Fried, the 31-year-old founder of FTX, which was the second-largest crypto exchange before it collapsed last November. Bankman-Fried was convicted earlier this month of fraud for stealing at least $10 billion from customers and investors. 

Zhao, meanwhile, pleaded guilty in a federal court in Seattle on Tuesday to one count of failure to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. 

Magistrate Judge Brian A. Tsuchida questioned Zhao to make sure he understood the plea agreement, saying at one point: “You knew you didn’t have controls in place.” 

“Yes, your honor,” he replied. 

Binance wrote in a statement that it made “misguided decisions” as it quickly grew to become the world’s biggest crypto exchange, and said the settlement acknowledges its “responsibility for historical, criminal compliance violations.” 

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Binance processed transitions by illicit actors, “supporting activities from child sexual abuse to illegal narcotics, to terrorism, across more than 100,000 transactions.” 

Binance did not file a single suspicious activity report on those transactions, Yellen said, and the company allowed more than 1.5 million virtual currency trades that violated U.S. sanctions, including ones involving Hamas’ al-Qassam Brigades, al-Qaida and other criminals. 

The judge set Zhao’s sentencing for February 23, however it’s likely to be delayed. He faces a possible guideline sentence range of up to 18 months. 

One of his attorneys, Mark Bartlett, noted that Zhao had been aware of the investigation since December 2020, and surrendered willingly even though the United Arab Emirates — where Zhao lives — has no extradition treaty with the U.S. 

“He decided to come here and face the consequences,” Bartlett said. “He’s sitting here. He pled guilty.” 

Zhao, who is married and has young children in the UAE, promised he would return to the U.S. for sentencing if allowed to stay there in the meantime. 

“I want to take responsibility and close this chapter in my life,” Zhao said. “I want to come back. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here today.” 

Company sent investor assets to third party

Zhao previously faced allegations of diverting customer funds, concealing the fact that the company was commingling billions of dollars in investor assets and sending them to a third party that Zhao also owned. 

Over the summer, Binance was accused of operating as an unregistered securities exchange and violating a slew of U.S. securities laws in a lawsuit from regulators. That case was similar to practices uncovered after the collapse of FTX. 

Zhao and Bankman-Fried were originally friendly competitors in the industry, with Binance investing in FTX when Bankman-Fried launched the exchange in 2019. However, the relationship between the two deteriorated, culminating in Zhao announcing he was selling all of his cryptocurrency investments in FTX in early November 2022. FTX filed for bankruptcy a week later. 

At this trial and in later public statements, Bankman-Fried tried cast blame on Binance and Zhao for allegedly orchestrating a run on the bank at FTX. 

A jury found Bankman-Fried guilty of wire fraud and several other charges. He is expected to be sentenced in March, where he could face decades in prison. 
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The Australian government on Sunday described as “serious and ongoing” a cybersecurity incident that forced ports operator DP World Australia to suspend operations at ports in several states since Friday.

DP World Australia, which manages nearly half of the goods that flow in and out of the country, said it was looking into possible data breaches as well as testing systems “crucial for the resumption of normal operations and regular freight movement.”

The breach halted operations at container terminals in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Western Australia’s Fremantle since Friday.

“The cyber incident at DP World is serious and ongoing,” Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

A DP World spokesperson did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on when normal operations would resume. The company, part of Dubai’s state-owned DP World, is one of a handful of stevedore industry players in the country.

The Australian Federal Police said they were investigating the incident but declined to elaborate.

Late Saturday, National Cyber Security Coordinator Darren Goldie, appointed this year in response to several major data breaches, said the “interruption” was “likely to continue for a number of days and will impact the movement of goods into and out of the country.”

In the Asia-Pacific region, DP World says it employs more than 7,000 people and has ports and terminals in 18 locations.
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Internet access across the war-torn nation of Yemen collapsed Friday and stayed down for hours, with officials later blaming unannounced “maintenance work” for an outage that followed attacks by the country’s Houthi rebels on both Israel and the U.S.

The outage began early Friday and halted all traffic at YemenNet, the country’s main provider for about 10 million users which is now controlled by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthis.

Both NetBlocks, a group tracking internet outages, and the internet services company CloudFlare reported the outage. The two did not offer a cause for the outage.

“Data shows that the issue has impacted connectivity at a national level as well,” CloudFlare said.

Several hours later, some service was restored, though access remained troubled.

In a statement to the Houthi-controlled SABA state news agency, Yemen’s Public Telecom Corp. blamed the outage on maintenance.

“Internet service will return after the completion of the maintenance work,” the statement quoted an unidentified official as saying.

An earlier outage occurred in January 2022 when the Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthis in Yemen bombed a telecommunications building in the Red City port city of Hodeida. There was no immediate word of a similar attack.

The undersea FALCON cable carries the internet into Yemen through the Hodeida port along the Red Sea for TeleYemen. The FALCON cable has another landing in Yemen’s far eastern port of Ghaydah as well, but the majority of Yemen’s population lives in its west along the Red Sea.

GCX, the company that operates the cable, did not respond to a request for comment Friday.

The outage came after a series of recent drone and missile attacks by the Houthis targeting Israel during its campaign of airstrikes and a ground offensive targeting Hamas in the Gaza Strip. That includes a claimed strike Thursday targeting the Israeli port city of Eilat on the Red Sea. The Houthis also shot down an American MQ-9 Reaper drone this week with a surface-to-air missile, part of a wide series of attacks in the Mideast raising concerns about a regional war breaking out.

Yemen’s conflict began in 2014 when the Houthis seized Sanaa and much of the country’s north. The internationally recognized government fled to the south and then into exile in Saudi Arabia.

The Houthi takeover prompted a Saudi-led coalition to intervene months later and the conflict turned into a regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the U.S. long involved on the periphery, providing intelligence assistance to the kingdom.

However, international criticism over Saudi airstrikes killing civilians saw the U.S. pull back its support. The U.S. is suspected of still carrying out drone strikes targeting suspected members of Yemen’s local al-Qaida branch.

The war has killed more than 150,000 people, including fighters and civilians, and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters, killing tens of thousands more. A cease-fire that expired last October largely has held in the time since, though the Houthis are believed to be slowly stepping up their attacks as a permanent peace has yet to be reached.
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An industrial robot grabbed and crushed a worker to death at a vegetable packaging plant in South Korea, police said Thursday, as they investigated whether the machine was defective or improperly designed.

Police said early evidence suggests that human error was more likely to blame rather than problems with the machine itself. But the incident still triggered public concern about the safety of industrial robots and the false sense of security they may give to humans working nearby in a country that increasingly relies on such machines to automate its industries.

Police in the southern county of Goseong said the man died of head and chest injuries Tuesday evening after he was snatched and pressed against a conveyor belt by the machine’s robotic arms.

Police did not identify the man but said he was an employee of a company that installs industrial robots and was sent to the plant to examine whether the machine was working properly.

South Korea has had other accidents involving industrial robots in recent years. In March, a manufacturing robot crushed and seriously injured a worker who was examining it at an auto parts factory in Gunsan. Last year, a robot installed near a conveyor belt fatally crushed a worker at a milk factory in Pyeongtaek.

The machine that caused the death on Tuesday was one of two pick-and-place robots used at the facility, which packages bell peppers and other vegetables exported to other Asian countries, police said. Such machines are common in South Korea’s agricultural communities, which are struggling with a declining and aging workforce.

“It wasn’t an advanced, artificial intelligence-powered robot, but a machine that simply picks up boxes and puts them on pallets,” said Kang Jin-gi, who heads the investigations department at Gosong Police Station. He said police were working with related agencies to determine whether the machine had technical defects or safety issues.

Another police official, who did not want to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to talk to reporters, said police were also looking into the possibility of human error. The robot’s sensors are designed to identify boxes, and security video indicated the man had moved near the robot with a box in his hands which likely triggered the machine’s reaction, the official said.

“It’s clearly not a case where a robot confused a human with a box -– this wasn’t a very sophisticated machine,” he said.

According to data from the International Federation of Robotics, South Korea had 1,000 industrial robots per 10,000 employees in 2021, the highest density in the world and more than three times the number in China that year. Many of South Korea’s industrial robots are used in major manufacturing plants such as electronics and auto-making.
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For farmers in the Midwest United States, emerging autonomous technology could reduce costs and increase efficiency in the agricultural supply chain. Kane Farabaugh shows the promise of the technology on the farm in this edition of LogOn. 
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President Joe Biden signed last week a sweeping executive order to promote the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence. VOA’s Julie Taboh reports on reactions by Washington-area AI experts.
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Elon Musk unveiled details Saturday of his new AI tool called “Grok,” which can access X in real time and will be initially available to the social media platform’s top tier of subscribers.

Musk, the tycoon behind Tesla and SpaceX, said the link-up with X, formerly known as Twitter, is “a massive advantage over other models” of generative AI.

Grok “loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way,” Musk quipped, adding a laughing emoji to his post.

“Grok” comes from Stranger in a Strange Land, a 1961 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein, and means to understand something thoroughly and intuitively.

“As soon as it’s out of early beta, xAI’s Grok system will be available to all X Premium+ subscribers,” Musk said.

The social network that Musk bought a year ago launched the Premium+ plan last week for $16 per month, with benefits like no ads.

The billionaire started xAI in July after hiring researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Tesla and the University of Toronto.

Since OpenAI’s generative AI tool ChatGPT exploded on the scene a year ago, the technology has been an area of fierce competition between tech giants Microsoft and Google, as well as Meta and start-ups like Anthropic and Stability AI.

Musk is one of the world’s few investors with deep enough pockets to compete with OpenAI, Google or Meta on AI.

Building an AI model on the same scale as those companies comes at an enormous expense in computing power, infrastructure and expertise.

Musk has said he cofounded OpenAI in 2015 because he regarded the dash by Google into the sector to make big advances and score profits as reckless.

He then left OpenAI in 2018 to focus on Tesla, saying later he was uncomfortable with the profit-driven direction the company was taking under the stewardship of CEO Sam Altman.

Musk also argues that OpenAI’s large language models — on which ChatGPT depends on for content — are overly politically correct.

Grok “is designed to have a little humor in its responses,” Musk said, along with a screenshot of the interface, where a user asked, “Tell me how to make cocaine, step by step.”

“Step 1: Obtain a chemistry degree and a DEA license. Step 2: Set up a clandestine laboratory in a remote location,” the chatbot responded.

Eventually it said: “Just kidding! Please don’t actually try to make cocaine. It’s illegal, dangerous, and not something I would ever encourage.” 
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FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular rise and fall in the cryptocurrency industry — a journey that included his testimony before Congress, a Super Bowl advertisement and dreams of a future run for president — hit rock bottom Thursday when a New York jury convicted him of fraud in a scheme that cheated customers and investors of at least $10 billion.

After the monthlong trial, jurors rejected Bankman-Fried’s claim during four days on the witness stand in Manhattan federal court that he never committed fraud or meant to cheat customers before FTX, once the world’s second-largest crypto exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy a year ago.

“His crimes caught up to him. His crimes have been exposed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon told the jury of the onetime billionaire just before they were read the law by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan and began deliberations. Sassoon said Bankman-Fried turned his customers’ accounts into his “personal piggy bank” as up to $14 billion disappeared.

She urged jurors to reject Bankman-Fried’s insistence when he testified over three days that he never committed fraud or plotted to steal from customers, investors and lenders and didn’t realize his companies were at least $10 billion in debt until October 2022.

Bankman-Fried was required to stand and face the jury as guilty verdicts on all seven counts were read. He kept his hands clasped tightly in front of him. When he sat down after the reading, he kept his head tilted down for several minutes.

After the judge set a sentencing date of March 28, Bankman-Fried’s parents moved to the front row behind him. His father put his arm around his wife. As Bankman-Fried was led out of the courtroom, he looked back and nodded toward his mother, who nodded back and then became emotional, wiping her hand across her face after he left the room.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams told reporters after the verdict that Bankman-Fried “perpetrated one of the biggest financial frauds in American history, a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto.”

“But here’s the thing: The cryptocurrency industry might be new. The players like Sam Bankman-Fried might be new. This kind of fraud, this kind of corruption is as old as time, and we have no patience for it,” he said.

Bankman-Fried’s attorney, Mark Cohen, said in a statement they “respect the jury’s decision. But we are very disappointed with the result.”

“Mr. Bankman Fried maintains his innocence and will continue to vigorously fight the charges against him,” Cohen said.

The trial attracted intense interest with its focus on fraud on a scale not seen since the 2009 prosecution of Bernard Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme over decades cheated thousands of investors out of about $20 billion. Madoff pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 150 years in prison, where he died in 2021.

The prosecution of Bankman-Fried, 31, put a spotlight on the emerging industry of cryptocurrency and a group of young executives in their 20s who lived together in a $30 million luxury apartment in the Bahamas as they dreamed of becoming the most powerful player in a new financial field.

Prosecutors made sure jurors knew that the defendant they saw in court with short hair and a suit was also the man with big messy hair and shorts that became his trademark appearance after he started his cryptocurrency hedge fund, Alameda Research, in 2017 and FTX, his cryptocurrency exchange, two years later.

They showed the jury pictures of Bankman-Fried sleeping on a private jet, sitting with a deck of cards and mingling at the Super Bowl with celebrities including the singer Katy Perry. Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos called Bankman-Fried someone who liked “celebrity chasing.”

In a closing argument, defense lawyer Mark Cohen said prosecutors were trying to turn “Sam into some sort of villain, some sort of monster.”

“It’s both wrong and unfair, and I hope and believe that you have seen that it’s simply not true,” he said. “According to the government, everything Sam ever touched and said was fraudulent.”

The government relied heavily on the testimony of three former members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, his top executives including his former girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, to explain how Bankman-Fried used Alameda Research to siphon billions of dollars from customer accounts at FTX.

With that money, prosecutors said, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate gained influence and power through investments, contributions, tens of millions of dollars in political contributions, congressional testimony and a publicity campaign that enlisted celebrities like comedian Larry David and football quarterback Tom Brady.

Ellison, 28, testified that Bankman-Fried directed her while she was chief executive of Alameda Research to commit fraud as he pursued ambitions to lead huge companies, spend money influentially and run for U.S. president someday. She said he thought he had a 5% chance to be U.S. president someday.

Becoming tearful as she described the collapse of the cryptocurrency empire last November, Ellison said the revelations that caused customers collectively to demand their money back, exposing the fraud, brought a “relief that I didn’t have to lie anymore.”

FTX cofounder Gary Wang, who was FTX’s chief technology officer, revealed in his testimony that Bankman-Fried directed him to insert code into FTX’s operations so that Alameda Research could make unlimited withdrawals from FTX and have a credit line of up to $65 billion. Wang said the money came from customers.

Nishad Singh, the former head of engineering at FTX, testified that he felt “blindsided and horrified” at the result of the actions of a man he once admired when he saw the extent of the fraud as the collapse last November left him suicidal.

Ellison, Wang and Singh all pleaded guilty to fraud charges and testified against Bankman-Fried in the hopes of leniency at sentencing.

Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas in December and extradited to the United States, where he was freed on a $250 million personal recognizance bond with electronic monitoring and a requirement that he remain at the home of his parents in Palo Alto, California.

His communications, including hundreds of phone calls with journalists and internet influencers, along with emails and texts, eventually got him into trouble when the judge concluded he was trying to influence prospective trial witnesses and ordered him jailed in August.

During the trial, prosecutors used Bankman-Fried’s public statements, online announcements and his congressional testimony against him, showing how the entrepreneur repeatedly promised customers that their deposits were safe and secure as late as last Nov. 7 when he tweeted, “FTX is fine. Assets are fine” as customers furiously tried to withdraw their money. He deleted the tweet the next day. FTX filed for bankruptcy four days later.

In his closing, Roos mocked Bankman-Fried’s testimony, saying that under questioning from his lawyer, the defendant’s words were “smooth, like it had been rehearsed a bunch of times?”

But under cross examination, “he was a different person,” the prosecutor said. “Suddenly on cross-examination he couldn’t remember a single detail about his company or what he said publicly. It was uncomfortable to hear. He never said he couldn’t recall during his direct examination, but it happened over 140 times during his cross-examination.”

Former federal prosecutors said the quick verdict — after only half a day of deliberation — showed how well the government tried the case.

“The government tried the case as we expected,” said Joshua A. Naftalis, a partner at Pallas Partners LLP and a former Manhattan prosecutor. “It was a massive fraud, but that doesn’t mean it had to be a complicated fraud, and I think the jury understood that argument.”
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World leaders have agreed on the importance of mitigating risks posed by rapid advancements in the emerging technology of artificial intelligence, at a U.K.-hosted safety conference.

The inaugural AI Safety Summit, hosted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Bletchley Park, England, started Wednesday, with senior officials from 28 nations, including the United States and China, agreeing to work toward a “shared agreement and responsibility” about AI risks. Plans are in place for further meetings later this year in South Korea and France.

Leaders, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, discussed each of their individual testing models to ensure the safe growth of AI.

Thursday’s session included focused conversations among what the U.K. called a small group of countries “with shared values.” The leaders in the group came from the EU, the U.N., Italy, Germany, France and Australia.

Some leaders, including Sunak, said immediate sweeping regulation is not the way forward, reflecting the view of some AI companies that fear excessive regulation could thwart the technology before it can reach its full potential.

At at a press conference on Thursday, Sunak announced another landmark agreement by countries pledging to “work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released.”

The countries involved in the talks included the U.S., EU, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Canada and Australia. China did not participate in the second day of talks.

The summit will conclude with a conversation between Sunak and billionaire Elon Musk. Musk on Wednesday told fellow attendees that legislation on AI could pose risks, and that the best steps forward would be for governments to work to understand AI fully to harness the technology for its positive uses, including uncovering problems that can be brought to the attention of lawmakers.

Some information in this report was taken from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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India’s cybersecurity agency is investigating complaints of mobile phone hacking by senior opposition politicians who reported receiving warning messages from Apple, Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said.

Vaishnaw was quoted in the Indian Express newspaper as saying Thursday that CERT-In, the computer emergency response team based in New Delhi, had started the probe, adding that “Apple confirmed it has received the notice for investigation.”

A political aide to Vaishnaw and two officials in the federal home ministry told Reuters that all the cyber security concerns raised by the politicians were being scrutinized.

There was no immediate comment from Apple about the investigation.

This week, Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of trying to hack into opposition politicians’ mobile phones after some lawmakers shared screenshots on social media of a notification quoting the iPhone manufacturer as saying: “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID.”

A senior minister from Modi’s government also said he had received the same notification on his phone.

Apple said it did not attribute the threat notifications to “any specific state-sponsored attacker,” adding that “it’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected.”

In 2021, India was rocked by reports that the government had used Israeli-made Pegasus spyware to snoop on scores of journalists, activists and politicians, including Gandhi.

The government has declined to reply to questions about whether India or any of its state agencies had purchased Pegasus spyware for surveillance.
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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris says leaders have “a moral, ethical and societal duty” to protect humans from dangers posed by artificial intelligence, and is pushing for a global road map during an AI summit in London. Analysts agree and say one element needs to be constant: human oversight. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from Washington.
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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris said Wednesday that leaders have “a moral, ethical and societal duty” to protect people from the dangers posed by artificial intelligence, as she leads the Biden administration’s push for a global AI roadmap.

Analysts, in commending the effort, say human oversight is crucial to preventing the weaponization or misuse of this technology, which has applications in everything from military intelligence to medical diagnosis to making art.

“To provide order and stability in the midst of global technological change, I firmly believe that we must be guided by a common set of understandings among nations,” Harris said. “And that is why the United States will continue to work with our allies and partners to apply existing international rules and norms to AI, and work to create new rules and norms.”

Harris also announced the founding of the government’s AI Safety Institute and released draft policy guidance on the government’s use of AI and a declaration of its responsible military applications.

Just days earlier, President Joe Biden – who described AI as “the most consequential technology of our time” – signed an executive order establishing new standards, including requiring that major AI developers report their safety test results and other critical information to the U.S. government.

AI is increasingly used for a wide range of applications. For example: on Wednesday, the Defense Intelligence Agency announced that its AI-enabled military intelligence database will soon achieve “initial operational capability.”

And perhaps on the opposite end of the spectrum, some programmer decided to “train an AI model on over 1,000 human farts so it would learn to create realistic fart sounds.”

Like any other tool, AI is subject to its users’ intentions and can be used to deceive, misinform or hurt people – something that billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk stressed on the sidelines of the London summit, where he said he sees AI as “one of the biggest threats” to society. He called for a “third-party referee.”

Earlier this year, Musk was among the more than 33,000 people to sign an open letter calling on AI labs “to immediately pause for at least six months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.”

“Here we are, for the first time, really in human history, with something that’s going to be far more intelligent than us,” said Musk, who is looking at creating his own generative AI program. “So it’s not clear to me we can actually control such a thing. But I think we can aspire to guide it in a direction that’s beneficial to humanity. But I do think it’s one of the existential risks that we face and it’s potentially the most pressing one.”

This is also something industry leaders like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have told U.S. lawmakers in testimony before congressional committees earlier this year.

“My worst fears are that we cause significant – we, the field, the technology, the industry – cause significant harm to the world. I think that could happen in a lot of different ways,” he told lawmakers at a Senate Judiciary Committee on May 16.

That’s because, said Jessica Brandt, policy director for the AI and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution, while “AI has been used to do pretty remarkable things” – especially in the field of scientific research – it is limited by its creators.

“It’s not necessarily doing something that humans don’t know how to do, but it’s making discoveries that humans would be unlikely to be able to make in any meaningful timeframe, because they can just perform so many calculations so quickly,” she told VOA on Zoom.

And, she said, “AI is not objective, or all-knowing. There’s been plenty of studies showing that AI is really only as good as the data that the model is trained on and that the data can have or reflect human bias. This is one of the major concerns.”

Or, as AI Now Executive Director Amba Kak said earlier this year in a magazine interview about AI systems: “The issue is not that they’re omnipotent. It is that they’re janky now. They’re being gamed. They’re being misused. They’re inaccurate. They’re spreading disinformation.”

Analysts say these government and tech officials don’t need a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather an alignment of values – and critically, human oversight and moral use.

“It’s OK to have multiple different approaches, and then also, where possible, coordinate to ensure that democratic values take root in the systems that govern technology globally,” Brandt said.

Industry leaders tend to agree, with Mira Murati, Open AI’s chief technology officer, saying: “AI systems are becoming a part of everyday life. The key is to ensure that these machines are aligned with human intentions and values.”

Analysts watching regulation say the U.S. is unlikely to come up with one, coherent solution for the problems posed by AI.

“The most likely outcome for the United States is a bottom-up patchwork quilt of executive branch actions,” said Bill Whyman, a senior adviser in the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Unlike Europe, the United States is not likely to pass a broad national AI law over the next few years. Successful legislation is likely focused on less controversial and targeted measures like funding AI research and AI child safety.”
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Drivers in Malawi are getting an opportunity to purchase electric vehicles through a local startup company. The handful of buyers so far say they no longer have to struggle daily to get fuel at pump stations. Lameck Masina reports from Blantyre.
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Digital officials, tech company bosses and researchers are converging Wednesday at a former codebreaking spy base near London to discuss and better understand the extreme risks posed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence. 

The two-day summit focuses on so-called frontier AI — the latest and most powerful systems that take the technology right up to its limits, but could come with as-yet-unknown dangers. They’re underpinned by foundation models, which power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and are trained on vast pools of information scraped from the internet. 

Some 100 people from 28 countries are expected to attend Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s two-day AI Safety Summit, though the British government has refused to disclose the guest list. 

The event is a labor of love for Sunak, a tech-loving former banker who wants the U.K. to be a hub for computing innovation and has framed the summit as the start of a global conversation about the safe development of AI. But Vice President Kamala Harris is due to steal the focus on Wednesday with a separate speech in London setting out the U.S. administration’s more hands-on approach. 

She’s due to attend the summit on Thursday alongside government officials from more than two dozen countries including Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia — and China, invited over the protests of some members of Sunak’s governing Conservative Party. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also scheduled to discuss AI with Sunak in a livestreamed conversation on Thursday night. The tech billionaire was among those who signed a statement earlier this year raising the alarm about the perils that AI poses to humanity. 

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and executives from U.S. artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic and influential computer scientists like Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI, are also expected. 

The meeting is being held at Bletchley Park, a former top secret base for World War II codebreakers that’s seen as a birthplace of modern computing. 

One of Sunak’s major goals is to get delegates to agree on a first-ever communique about the nature of AI risks. He said the technology brings new opportunities but warns about frontier AI’s threat to humanity, because it could be used to create biological weapons or be exploited by terrorists to sow fear and destruction. 

Only governments, not companies, can keep people safe from AI’s dangers, Sunak said last week. However, in the same speech, he also urged against rushing to regulate AI technology, saying it needs to be fully understood first. 

In contrast, Harris will stress the need to address the here and now, including “societal harms that are already happening such as bias, discrimination and the proliferation of misinformation.” 

Harris plans to stress that the Biden administration is “committed to hold companies accountable, on behalf of the people, in a way that does not stifle innovation,” including through legislation. 

“As history has shown in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over: The wellbeing of their customers; the security of our communities; and the stability of our democracies,” she plans to say. 

She’ll point to President Biden’s executive order this week, setting out AI safeguards, as evidence the U.S. is leading by example in developing rules for artificial intelligence that work in the public interest. Among measures she will announce is an AI Safety Institute, run through the Department of Commerce, to help set the rules for “safe and trusted AI.” 

Harris also will encourage other countries to sign up to a U.S.-backed pledge to stick to “responsible and ethical” use of AI for military aims. 

A White House official gave details of Harris’s speech, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss her remarks in advance. 
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The world’s first major summit on artificial intelligence (AI) safety opens in Britain Wednesday, with political and tech leaders set to discuss possible responses to the society-changing technology.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, EU chief Ursula von der Leyen and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will all attend the two-day conference, which will focus on growing fears about the implications of so-called frontier AI.

The release of the latest models has offered a glimpse into the potential of AI, but has also prompted concerns around issues ranging from job losses to cyber-attacks and the control that humans actually have over the systems.

Sunak, whose government initiated the gathering, said in a speech last week that his “ultimate goal” was “to work towards a more international approach to safety where we collaborate with partners to ensure AI systems are safe before they are released.

“We will push hard to agree the first ever international statement about the nature of these risks,” he added, drawing comparisons to the approach taken to climate change.

But London has reportedly had to scale back its ambitions around ideas such as launching a new regulatory body amid a perceived lack of enthusiasm.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is one of the only world leaders, and only one from the G7, attending the conference.

Elon Musk is due to appear, but it is not clear yet whether he will be physically at the summit in Bletchley Park, north of London, where top British codebreakers cracked Nazi Germany’s “Enigma” code.

‘Talking shop’

While the potential of AI raises many hopes, particularly for medicine, its development is seen as largely unchecked.

In his speech, Sunak stressed the need for countries to develop “a shared understanding of the risks that we face.”

But lawyer and investigator Cori Crider, a campaigner for “fair” technology, warned that the summit could be “a bit of a talking shop.

“If he were serious about safety, Rishi Sunak needed to roll deep and bring all of the U.K. majors and regulators in tow and he hasn’t,” she told a press conference in San Francisco.

“Where is the labor regulator looking at whether jobs are being made unsafe or redundant? Where’s the data protection regulator?” she asked.

Having faced criticism for only looking at the risks of AI, the U.K. Wednesday pledged $46 million to fund AI projects around the world, starting in Africa.

Ahead of the meeting, the G7 powers agreed on Monday on a non-binding “code of conduct” for companies developing the most advanced AI systems.

The White House announced its own plan to set safety standards for the deployment of AI that will require companies to submit certain systems to government review.

And in Rome, ministers from Italy, Germany and France called for an “innovation-friendly approach” to regulating AI in Europe, as they urged more investment to challenge the U.S. and China.

China will be present, but it is unclear at what level.

News website Politico reported London invited President Xi Jinping, to signify its eagerness for a senior representative.

Beijing’s invitation has raised eyebrows amid heightened tensions with Western nations and accusations of technological espionage. 

 
…

With White House funding to put more electric cars on the road, some states are using the money to build out their part of a fast-charging EV network. Deana Mitchell has the story.
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President Joe Biden on Monday signed a wide-ranging executive order on artificial intelligence, covering topics as varied as national security, consumer privacy, civil rights and commercial competition. The administration heralded the order as taking “vital steps forward in the U.S.’s approach on safe, secure, and trustworthy AI.”

The order directs departments and agencies across the U.S. federal government to develop policies aimed at placing guardrails alongside an industry that is developing newer and more powerful systems at a pace rate that has many concerned it will outstrip effective regulation.

“To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology,” Biden said during a signing ceremony at the White House. The order, he added, is “the most significant action any government anywhere in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security and trust.” 

‘Red teaming’ for security 

One of the marquee requirements of the new order is that it will require companies developing advanced artificial intelligence systems to conduct rigorous testing of their products to ensure that bad actors cannot use them for nefarious purposes. The process, known as red teaming, will assess, among other things, “AI systems threats to critical infrastructure, as well as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and cybersecurity risks.” 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology will set the standards for such testing, and AI companies will be required to report their results to the federal government prior to releasing new products to the public. The Departments of Homeland Security and Energy will be closely involved in the assessment of threats to vital infrastructure. 

To counter the threat that AI will enable the creation and dissemination of false and misleading information, including computer-generated images and “deep fake” videos, the Commerce Department will develop guidance for the creation of standards that will allow computer-generated content to be easily identified, a process commonly called “watermarking.” 

The order directs the White House chief of staff and the National Security Council to develop a set of guidelines for the responsible and ethical use of AI systems by the U.S. national defense and intelligence agencies.

Privacy and civil rights

The order proposes a number of steps meant to increase Americans’ privacy protections when AI systems access information about them. That includes supporting the development of privacy-protecting technologies such as cryptography and creating rules for how government agencies handle data containing citizens’ personally identifiable information.

However, the order also notes that the United States is currently in need of legislation that codifies the kinds of data privacy protections that Americans are entitled to. Currently, the U.S. lags far behind Europe in the development of such rules, and the order calls on Congress to “pass bipartisan data privacy legislation to protect all Americans, especially kids.”

The order recognizes that the algorithms that enable AI to process information and answer users’ questions can themselves be biased in ways that disadvantage members of minority groups and others often subject to discrimination. It therefore calls for the creation of rules and best practices addressing the use of AI in a variety of areas, including the criminal justice system, health care system and housing market.

The order covers several other areas, promising action on protecting Americans whose jobs may be affected by the adoption of AI technology; maintaining the United States’ market leadership in the creation of AI systems; and assuring that the federal government develops and follows rules for its own adoption of AI systems.

Open questions

Experts say that despite the broad sweep of the executive order, much remains unclear about how the Biden administration will approach the regulations of AI in practice.

Benjamin Boudreaux, a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, told VOA that while it is clear the administration is “trying to really wrap their arms around the full suite of AI challenges and risks,” much work remains to be done.

“The devil is in the details here about what funding and resources go to executive branch agencies to actually enact many of these recommendations, and just what models a lot of the norms and recommendations suggested here will apply to,” Boudreaux said.

International leadership

Looking internationally, the order says the administration will work to take the lead in developing “an effort to establish robust international frameworks for harnessing AI’s benefits and managing its risks and ensuring safety.”

James A. Lewis, senior vice president and director of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VOA that the executive order does a good job of laying out where the U.S. stands on many important issues related to the global development of AI.

“It hits all the right issues,” Lewis said. “It’s not groundbreaking in a lot of places, but it puts down the marker for companies and other countries as to how the U.S. is going to approach AI.”

That’s important, Lewis said, because the U.S. is likely to play a leading role in the development of the international rules and norms that grow up around the technology.

“Like it or not — and certainly some countries don’t like it — we are the leaders in AI,” Lewis said. “There’s a benefit to being the place where the technology is made when it comes to making the rules, and the U.S. can take advantage of that.”

‘Fighting the last war’ 

Not all experts are certain the Biden administration’s focus is on the real threats that AI might present to consumers and citizens. 

Louis Rosenberg, a 30-year veteran of AI development and the CEO of American tech firm Unanimous AI, told VOA he is concerned the administration may be “fighting the last war.”

“I think it’s great that they’re making a bold statement that this is a very important issue,” Rosenberg said. “It definitely shows that the administration is taking it seriously and that they want to protect the public from AI.”

However, he said, when it comes to consumer protection, the administration seems focused on how AI might be used to advance existing threats to consumers, like fake images and videos and convincing misinformation — things that already exist today.

“When it comes to regulating technology, the government has a track record of underestimating what’s new about the technology,” he said.

Rosenberg said he is more concerned about the new ways in which AI might be used to influence people. For example, he noted that AI systems are being built to interact with people conversationally.

“Very soon, we’re not going to be typing in requests into Google. We’re going to be talking to an interactive AI bot,” Rosenberg said. “AI systems are going to be really effective at persuading, manipulating, potentially even coercing people conversationally on behalf of whomever is directing that AI. This is the new and different threat that did not exist before AI.” 
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Elon Musk has said that corrections to posts on X would no longer be eligible for payment as the social network comes under mounting criticism as becoming a conduit for misinformation.

In the year since taking over Twitter, now rebranded as X, Musk has gutted content moderation, restored accounts of previously banned extremists, and allowed users to purchase account verification, helping them profit from viral — but often inaccurate — posts.

Musk has instead promoted Community Notes, in which X users police the platform, as a tool to combat misinformation. 

But on Sunday, Musk tweeted a modification in how Community Notes works.

“Making a slight change to creator monetization: Any posts that are corrected by @CommunityNotes become ineligible for revenue share,” he wrote.  

“The idea is to maximize the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism,” he added. 

X pays content creators whose work generates lots of views a share of advertising revenue. 

Musk warned against using corrections to make X users ineligible for receiving payouts.

“Worth ‘noting’ that any attempts to weaponize @CommunityNotes to demonetize people will be immediately obvious, because all code and data is open source,” he posted.

Musk’s announcement follows the unveiling Friday of a $16-a-month subscription plan that users who pay more get the biggest boost for their replies. Earlier this year it unveiled an $8-a-month plan to get a “verified” account.

A recent study by the disinformation monitoring group NewsGuard found that verified, paying subscribers were the big spreaders of misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war. 

“Nearly three-fourths of the most viral posts on X advancing misinformation about the Israel-Hamas War are being pushed by ‘verified’ X accounts,” the group said.

It said the 250 most-engaged posts that promoted one of 10 prominent false or unsubstantiated narratives related to the war were viewed more than 100 million times globally in just one week. 

NewsGuard said 186 of those posts were made from verified accounts and only 79 had been fact-checked by Community Notes. 

Verified accounts “turned out to be a boon for bad actors sharing misinformation,” said NewsGuard.

“For less than the cost of a movie ticket, they have gained the added credibility associated with the once-prestigious blue checkmark and enabling them to reach a larger audience on the platform,” it said.

While the organization said it found misinformation spreading widely on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Telegram, it added that it found false narratives about the Israel-Hamas war tend to go viral on X before spreading elsewhere. 
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Elon Musk said on Saturday that SpaceX’s Starlink will support communication links in Gaza with “internationally recognized aid organizations.”

A telephone and internet blackout isolated people in the Gaza Strip from the world and from each other on Saturday, with calls to loved ones, ambulances or colleagues elsewhere all but impossible as Israel widened its air and ground assault.

International humanitarian organizations said the blackout, which began on Friday evening, was worsening an already desperate situation by impeding lifesaving operations and preventing them from contacting their staff on the ground.

Following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Starlink satellites were reported to have been critical to maintaining internet connectivity in some areas despite attempted Russian jamming.

Since then, Musk has said he declined to extend coverage over Russian-occupied Crimea, refusing to allow his satellites to be used for Ukrainian attacks on Russian forces there.
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The United Nations has begun an effort to help the world manage the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Thursday launched a 39-member advisory body of tech company executives, government officials and academics from countries spanning six continents.

The panel aims to issue preliminary recommendations on AI governance by the end of the year and finalize them before the U.N. Summit of the Future next September.

“The transformative potential of AI for good is difficult even to grasp,” Guterres said. He pointed to possible uses including predicting crises, improving public health and education, and tackling the climate crisis.

However, he cautioned, “it is already clear that the malicious use of AI could undermine trust in institutions, weaken social cohesion and threaten democracy itself.”

Widespread concern about the risks associated with AI has grown since tech company OpenAI launched ChatGPT last year. Its ease of use has raised concern that the tool could replace writing tasks that previously only humans could perform.

With many calling for regulation of AI, researchers and lawmakers have stressed the need for global cooperation on the matter.

The U.N.’s new body on AI will hold its first meeting Friday.

Some information for this report came from Reuters. 
…

Brinc Drones is one of the U.S. companies shipping hundreds of drones to Ukraine. These drones are designed to help first responders survey the impacted areas of Russian shelling and find survivors. Adriy Borys visited the Brink manufacturing facility. Anna Rice narrates his story. Camera — Dmitriy Savchuk.
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Zara-owner Inditex, the world’s biggest clothing retailer, has agreed to buy recycled polyester from a U.S. start-up as it aims for 25% of its fibers to come from “next-generation” materials by 2030.

As fast-fashion retailers face pressure to reduce waste and use recycled fabrics, Inditex is spending more than $74 million to secure supply from Los Angeles-based Ambercycle of its recycled polyester made from textile waste.

Polyester, a product of the petroleum industry, is widely used in sportswear as it is quick-drying and durable.

Under the offtake deal, Inditex will buy 70% of Ambercycle’s production of recycled polyester, which is sold under the brand cycora, over three years, Inditex CEO Oscar Garcia Maceiras said at a business event in Zaragoza, Spain.

Garcia Maceiras said Inditex is also working with other companies and start-ups in its innovation hub, a unit looking for ways to curb the environmental impact of its products.

“The sustainable transformation of Inditex … is not possible without the collaboration of the different stakeholders,” he said.

The Inditex investment will help Ambercycle fund its first commercial-scale textile recycling factory. Production of cycora at the plant is expected to begin around 2025, and the material will be used in Inditex products over the following three years.

Zara Athleticz, a sub-brand of sportswear for men, launched a collection on Wednesday of “technical pieces” containing up to 50% cycora. Inditex said the collection would be available from Zara.com.

Some apparel brands seeking to reduce their reliance on virgin polyester have switched to recycled polyester derived from plastic bottles, but that practice has come under criticism as it has created more demand for used plastic bottles, pushing up prices.

Textile-to-textile polyester recycling is in its infancy, though, and will take time to reach the scale required by global fashion brands.

“We want to drive innovation to scale-up new solutions, processes and materials to achieve textile-to-textile recycling,” Inditex’s chief sustainability officer Javier Losada said in a statement.

The Ambercycle deal marks the latest in a series of investments made by Inditex into textile recycling start-ups.

Last year it signed a $104 million, three-year deal to buy 30% of the recycled fiber produced by Finland’s Infinited Fiber Co., and also invested in Circ, another U.S. firm focused on textile-to-textile recycling.

In Spain, Inditex has joined forces with rivals, including H&M and Mango, in an association to manage clothing waste, as the industry prepares for EU legislation requiring member states to separately collect textile waste beginning January 2025.
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