Ars Live: Our first encounter with manipulative AI
While Bing Chat’s unhinged nature was caused in part by how Microsoft defined the “personality” of Sydney in the system prompt (and unintended side-effects of its architecture with regard to conversation length), Ars Technica’s saga with the chatbot began when…
Mazda gives the 2025 CX-50 a big efficiency boost to 38 mpg with hybrid power
The CX-50 Hybrid is also quite well equipped in its base Preferred trim. Opting for the $37,400 Premium trim adds a panorami powered moonroof, some small styling tweaks, leather seats, and a better sound system, including satellite radio. Our test…
Cadillac reveals the 2026 Vistiq, a $77,395 electric SUV
Cadillac has another new electric vehicle on the way. It’s the 2026 Vistiq, a three-row SUV that fills the gap in the American automaker’s lineup. It will be the fifth Cadillac to use what until now has been called the…
There are some things the Crew-8 astronauts aren’t ready to talk about
Once the leak stabilized, the astronauts closed the hatch and began repressurizing the airlock. “Getting the airlock closed was kind of me grabbing her legs and using her as an end effector to lever that thing closed, and she just…
FTX sues Binance for $1.76B in battle of crypto exchanges founded by convicts
The lawsuit further claims that while FTX was “in freefall, Zhao sent additional false tweets calculated, in part, to prevent FTX from seeking and obtaining alternative financing to cauterize the run on the institution by customers deceived by the tweets….
Anthropic hires its first “AI welfare” researcher
The researchers propose that companies could adapt the “marker method” that some researchers use to assess consciousness in animals—looking for specific indicators that may correlate with consciousness, although these markers are still speculative. The authors emphasize that no single feature…
Man gets 10 years for stealing $20M in nest eggs from 400 US home buyers
A Nigerian man living in the United Kingdom has been sentenced to 10 years for his role in a phishing scam that snatched more than $20 million from over 400 would-be home buyers in the US, including some savers who…
Air quality problems spur $200 million in funds to cut pollution at ports
“We’re essentially creating a microgrid at the port,” she said. Improving the air for disadvantaged communities The Clean Ports funding will also be a boon for people like Garcia, who live near a US shipping port. Shipping ports are notorious…
Russia: Fine, I guess we should have a Grasshopper rocket project, too
Like a lot of competitors in the global launch industry, Russia for a long time dismissed the prospects of a reusable first stage for a rocket. As late as 2016, an official with the Russian agency that develops strategy for…
How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom
So in 2006, Nvidia announced the CUDA platform. CUDA allows programmers to write “kernels,” short programs designed to run on a single execution unit. Kernels allow a big computing task to be split up into bite-sized chunks that can be…