Enlarge / The OpenAI logo. (credit: Getty Images)

According to a report in The Wall Street Journal , Apple is in talks to invest in OpenAI, the generative AI company whose ChatGPT will feature in future versions of iOS.

If the talks are successful, Apple will join a multi-billion dollar funding round led by Thrive Capital that would value the startup at more than $100 billion.

The report doesn't say exactly how much Apple would invest, but it does note that it would not be the only participant in this round of funding. For example, Microsoft is expected to invest further, and Bloomberg reports that Nvidia is also considering participating.

Enlarge (credit: Kilito Chan | Moment )

OpenAI and Anthropic have each signed unprecedented deals granting the US government early access to conduct safety testing on the companies' flashiest new AI models before they're released to the public.

According to a press release from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the deal creates a "formal collaboration on AI safety research, testing, and evaluation with both Anthropic and OpenAI" and the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute.

Through the deal, the US AI Safety Institute will "receive access to major new models from each company prior to and following their public release." This will ensure that public safety won't depend exclusively on how the companies "evaluate capabilities and safety risks, as well as methods to mitigate those risks," NIST said, but also on collaborative research with the US government.

Enlarge / Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin speaks onstage during CinemaCon, a convention of the National Association of Theatre Owners, at Caesars Palace on April 9, 2024, in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Getty Images | Jerod Harris )

A group representing major film studios said it collaborated with Vietnamese authorities to take down what it called "the largest pirate streaming operation in the world."

Fmovies, which the film industry group also called the "world's largest piracy ring," is said to have drawn more than 6.7 billion visits between January 2023 and June 2024. Launched in 2016, the Hanoi-based outfit included pirate sites bflixz, flixtorz, movies7, myflixer, and aniwave.

"The takedown of Fmovies is a stunning victory for casts, crews, writers, directors, studios, and the creative community across the globe," Motion Picture Association (MPA) CEO Charles Rivkin said today.

Enlarge / An Eli Lilly & Co. Zepbound injection pen arranged in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Thursday, March 28, 2024. (credit: Getty | helby Knowles )

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly earned praise this week with an announcement that it is now selling starter dosages of its popular weight-loss drug tirzepatide (Zepbound) at a price significantly lower than before. But the cheers were short-lived as critics quickly noticed that Lilly also quietly raised the price on current versions of the drug—a move that was notably missing from the company's press release this week.

In the past, Lilly sold Zepbound only in injectable pens with a list price of $1,060 for a month's supply. Several dosages are available—2.5 mg, 5 mg, 7.5 mg, 10 mg, 12.5 mg, or 15 mg—and patients progressively increase their dosage until they reach a maintenance dosage. The recommended maintenance dosages are 5 mg, 10 mg, or 15 mg. The higher the dose, the more the weight-loss. For instance, people using the 15 mg doses lost an average of 21 percent of their weight over 17 months in a clinical trial, while those on 5 mg doses only lost an average of 15 percent of their weight.

On Tuesday, Lilly announced that it will now sell Zepbound in vials, too. And a month's supply of vials with the 2.5 mg doses will cost $399, while a month's supply of 5 mg doses is priced at $549—a welcome drop from the $1,060 price tag. These prices are for a self-pay option, meaning that patients with a valid, on-label prescription can buy them directly from Eli Lilly if they have no insurance or have insurance that does not cover the drug.

The late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a gifted mathematician and undisputed pioneer in computer programming, honored posthumously in 2016 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was also very much in demand as a speaker in her later career. Hopper's famous 1982 lecture on "Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People," has long been publicly unavailable because of the obsolete media on which it was recorded. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) finally managed to retrieve the footage for the National Security Agency (NSA), which posted the lecture in two parts on YouTube (Part One embedded above, Part Two embedded below).

Hopper earned undergraduate degrees in math and physics from Vassar College and a PhD in math from Yale in 1930. She returned to Vassar as a professor, but when World War II broke out, she sought to enlist in the US Naval Reserve. She was initially denied on the basis of her age (34) and low weight-to-height ratio, and also because her expertise made her particularly valuable to the war effort. Hopper got an exemption, and after graduating first in her class, she joined the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University, where she served on the Mark I computer programming staff under Howard H. Aiken.

She stayed with the lab until 1949 and was next hired as a senior mathematician by Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to develop the Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC , the first computer. Hopper championed the development of a new programming language based on English words. "It's much easier for most people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols," she reasoned. "So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English and the computers would translate them into machine code."

Enlarge / Backpage founder Michael Lacey testifying at a US Senate hearing in January 2017. (credit: US Senate hearing )

Backpage founder Michael Lacey was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison and fined $3 million after being convicted on one count of money laundering. Lacey, 76, was also sentenced to three years of supervised release, the Department of Justice said in a press release .

Two other Backpage principals—Scott Spear and John "Jed" Brunst—were sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release. "The Court also ordered that all defendants turn themselves in to the US Marshals Service by noon on Sept. 11," the Department of Justice said.

Authorities alleged that Backpage generated over $500 million in revenue from running a forum that facilitated prostitution. While Lacey argued that he wasn't involved in day-to-day operations, US District Judge Diane Humetewa "told Lacey during Wednesday's sentencing he was aware of the allegations against Backpage and did nothing," according to the Associated Press .

Enlarge / California governor Gavin Newsom will likely soon face a decision on whether to sign SB-1047. (credit: Ray Chavez/The Mercury News via Getty Images)

A controversial bill aimed at enforcing safety standards for large artificial intelligence models has now passed the California State Assembly by a 45–11 vote. Following a 32–1 state Senate vote in May, SB-1047 now faces just one more procedural state senate vote before heading to Governor Gavin Newsom's desk.

As we've previously explored in depth , SB-1047 asks AI model creators to implement a "kill switch" that can be activated if that model starts introducing "novel threats to public safety and security," especially if it's acting "with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision." Some have criticized the bill for focusing on outlandish risks from an imagined future AI rather than real, present-day harms of AI use cases like deep fakes or misinformation.

In announcing the legislative passage Wednesday, bill sponsor and state senator Scott Weiner cited support from AI industry luminaries such as Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio (who both last year also signed a statement warning of a "risk of extinction" from fast-developing AI tech).

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

If you were suspected of a crime, would you trust a chatbot to accurately explain what happened?

Some police departments think the tech is ready. And officers who have started using chatbots to quickly complete their most dreaded task of drafting police reports seemingly don't want to go back to spending hours each week doing their own paperwork.

In June, a police department in Frederick, Colorado, boasted that it was the "first law enforcement agency in the world to go live with Axon Draft One," a new kind of police tech that allows a chatbot to spit out AI-generated police reports almost immediately after a body camera stops recording a police interaction.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto via Getty )

Brussels is investigating whether Telegram breached EU digital rules by failing to provide accurate user numbers, as officials push to bring the controversial messaging app under stricter supervision.

EU legal and data experts suspect that the app has understated its presence in the EU to stay under a 45 million user threshold, above which large online platforms are subject to a swath of Brussels regulations designed to check their influence.

The EU probe comes alongside a wide-ranging French investigation into alleged criminal activity on Telegram that led to the arrest on Saturday of its founder, Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov. On Wednesday evening, a magistrate was due to decide whether to charge or release him.