What just happened? People living in and around New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and other nearby states may remember the strange drone sightings that had everyone on edge late last year. After all, they appeared almost every night for weeks. Now, the White House has finally put the speculation to rest with an official explanation, but not everyone is convinced. In her first official press briefing on Tuesday, President Trump's new press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, revealed that the drones had simply been authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration for research purposes. Additionally, many of them belonged to regular citizens living in those areas."This was not the enemy," Leavitt stated bluntly, referring to the frenzied online rumors that had been swirling about the unidentified drones being some kind of threat.According to FAA records, the drone sightings first began on November 18 in Morris County, New Jersey. From there, they appeared to spread rapidly, with residents reporting nightly clusters of drones in the skies over the following weeks across New Jersey and several neighboring states.Of course, this caused quite a stir, with the FBI receiving over 5,000 tips from concerned citizens. A few arrests were even made for operating drones too close to restricted airspace in Massachusetts and California.It's worth noting that the previous Biden administration had already determined there was no real national security threat and that many of the drones were simply being misidentified by the public. Now, Trump's team has gone a step further in clarifying the situation, revealing the FAA's role in approving at least some of the drones.Not everyone is convinced, though. New Jersey Assemblyman Brian Bergen, who had been vocal throughout the drone saga, told NewsNation that the White House's explanation "makes no sense." As he pointed out, anything in restricted airspace would already require FAA authorization // Related Stories"I just want somebody normal to get up in front of us and give us the truth, the straight truth, no canned response, no carefully chosen words, no dancing around it," Bergen stated, clearly still skeptical. "If it's the FAA doing research, what research? If it's some other entity, whatever other entity it is. We want someone just to be normal for once and give us the truth."Ocean County Sheriff Mike Mastronardi echoed similar concerns, warning that a lack of transparency could cause unnecessary public alarm.Of course, the FAA regulates and authorizes all sorts of drone operations across the country, with over a million registered for commercial and recreational use. Research drones wouldn't be unusual. But more transparency about the actual nature and purpose of this specific "research" could have alleviated public fears much sooner.

New seasons of Squid Game, Stranger Things, and WednesdayNo matter what youre looking forward to this year, theres no way to be completely ready for whats next on Netflix, said Bela Bajaria, Netflixs Chief Content Officer, at the companys Next on Netflix presentation.Squid Gameseason 3 will stream on June 27. It will be the third and final season of the hit South Korean drama series. Season 3 will pick up after the devastating events in the season 2 finale, as the showdown between Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) and the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) comes to a violent conclusion.Please enable Javascript to view this contentAfter a three-year hiatus, Squid Gameseason 2 arrived on Netflix on December 26, 2024. Season 2 quickly became Netflixs second-most-watched non-English TV show, behind Squid Gameseason 1.Whos *really* looking for Jane Hopper? Youre not ready for whats to come in Stranger Things 5 #NextOnNetflix pic.twitter.com/Zql24JRxaS Netflix (@netflix) January 30, 2025Stranger Thingsseason 5 recently wrapped production after a yearlong shoot. The Duffer Brothers, who were at the Netflix event, said, This is our biggest and most ambitious season yet. At the same time, we think its our most personal story. It was super intense and emotional to film for us and for our actors.Stranger Thingsseason 5 will pick up in the aftermath of the season 4 finale, which saw the Upside Down infiltrate Hawkins. The popular Netflix show previously revealed the titles for the eight episodes in season 5. These include The Crawl,The Vanishing of___,The Turnbow Trap,Sorcerer,Shock Jock,Escape from Camazotz,The Bridge,andThe Rightside Up.Stranger Thingsseason 5 arrives later in 2025.You're not ready for Wednesday S2 #NextOnNetflix pic.twitter.com/uR9csFK5G7 Wednesday Addams (@wednesdayaddams) January 30, 2025Wednesdayseason 2 also completed filming and will stream in the second half of 2025. Netflix released a brief snippet from season 2, which shows Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) visiting her rival, Tyler (Hunter Doohan).Additional shows coming to Netflix in 2025 include Everybodys Live with John Mulaney,The Residence, Zero Day,Youseason 5, Tina Feys The Four Seasons, Ginny & Georgia season 3,Death by Lightning,Black Rabbit, andThe Beast in Me.Editors Recommendations

The gaming world is praising Marvel Rivals for its unique Battle Pass system, which allows them to continue progressing through prior passes indefinitely. Because of this innovative method, once a player buys a Luxury Battle Pass, it stays in their library forever, unlike other passes that have a set expiration date and force players to use them up quickly.These mechanics put players first by letting them earn rewards whenever they want and eliminating the pressure to keep up with the season even when theyre not actively playing. Whether its the ongoing Season 1 Darkhold Battle Pass or the previous Season 0 Chronovium Pass, you can easily access all the passes in the game using some simple steps. Heres how you can view old Battle Passes in Marvel Rivals.Recommended VideosTo view the older Battle Passes in Marvel Rivals, head to your current Battle Pass menu and click the Nexus icon on the upper right corner of your screen. Once you do that, youll open a screen called the Reality Link Point where Galacta keeps tabs on all the battle passes a player has accumulated.1 of 2NetEase Games NetEase Games You can continue your journey to acquire all the rewards you could have missed in the first season here by freely switching between current and former passes. In the image above, the Darkhold pass is the ongoing Season 1 Battle Pass and to its left is the Season 0 pass which is marked as completed. When you click on an older pass, you also get a button to Pin that pass to the main Battle Pass menu, right alongside your Season 1 Pass.RelatedWhen you do that, a new tab will appear right next to your current Battle Pass which will eliminate the process of you going back to the Nexus hub to switch between both the passes. This approach is much easier in case youre still progressing along your previous Battle Passes in Marvel Rivals. On the other hand, seasonal event passes like the new Fortune and Colors passes unfortunately are time-limited and expire when the event concludes. To those unaware, you can purchase Marvel Rivals Luxury Battle Pass by spending Lattice which is the in-game currency you can get from your platform store.Editors Recommendations

Some mistakes are inevitable. But there are ways to ask a chatbot questions that make it more likely that it wont make stuff up.

The reggae legend would have been 80 next week. When I met him as young Italian reporter, he thought I was a fascist. But we quickly made peace.

below the surface Microsoft updates Intel-based Surface PCs, but regular people still cant buy them Businesses often use hardware and software that still needs x86 to run properly. Andrew Cunningham Jan 30, 2025 10:00 am | 12 Microsoft's new Surfaces are all business. Credit: Microsoft Microsoft's new Surfaces are all business. Credit: Microsoft Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreMicrosoft switched the Surface Pro tablet and both sizes of Surface Laptop from Intel and AMD's processors to Qualcomm's Arm-based processors last summer, part of a renewed hardware and software push to make the Arm version of Windows a thing. That ended a few years of a bifurcated approach, where the Intel and AMD versions of Surface PCs were the "main" versions and the Arm variants felt more like proof-of-concept side projects.But if you work in a large organization or you're an IT administrator, the bifurcated approach continues. Microsoft announced some business-only versions of the Surface Pro tablet and the Surface Laptop last year that continued to use Intel processors, and today it's announcing two more, this time using Intel's Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra CPUs.The refresh includes a new Surface Pro tablet and both 13- and 15-inch versions of the Surface Laptop, updated with most of the same design tweaks that the Qualcomm versions of the devices got last year (for example, a slightly larger 13.8-inch screen on the smaller version of the Surface Laptop, up from 13.5 inches). Generally, they have similar dimensions, weights, and configuration options as their Arm counterparts, including an OLED display option for the Surface Pro.Officially, Microsoft refers to the devices as the Surface Pro 11th Edition for Business and the Surface Laptop 7th Edition for Business, the same generation numbers it uses for the Arm-based Qualcomm Snapdragon versions it sells to consumers.The Lunar Lake processors include a neural processing unit (NPU) fast enough to qualify for Microsoft's Copilot+ PC label, which unlocks a few AI and machine learning-related features that aren't available on most Windows 11 PCs. At this point, many of those features are still in preview, including the overhauled Windows Recall, a feature called Click To Do that "identif[ies] text and images on your screen that you can take actions with," and an updated Windows Search that tries to do a better job understanding plain-language queries. For now, at least, it's worth noting that the Snapdragon Copilot+ PCs are all getting these features first, and so far, Intel and AMD PCs have gotten them weeks later.All the devices offer one of four possible Core Ultra CPUs (the 236V, 238V, 266V, and 268V); integrated Intel Arc graphics; 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of storage; and either 16GB or 32GB of RAM. Some of the Qualcomm Surface devices offer as much as 64GB of RAM, but the Lunar Lake chips top out at 32GB.Per usual for its business-specific Surface devices, Microsoft isn't including pricing as part of its announcement today; these will probably vary based on the kind of organization that is buying them and how many devices they're buying. Microsoft's Surface USB4 Dock, a $200 accessory that's a bit cheaper and less capable than the old Surface Dock 2. Credit: Microsoft Microsoft is also launching a $200 Surface USB4 Dock for all Surface devices. It appears to be a slightly streamlined, somewhat less-capable version of the Surface Dock 2, with up to 65 W of power delivery, two USB-C ports, one USB-A port, an HDMI port, and an Ethernet port. The dock can connect to up to two external 4K displays using its USB-C and HDMI ports.Why make x86 Surface PCs just for businesses?Microsoft's x86-to-Arm app translation layer, now called Prism, is capable of running many legacy apps, and it has become much more common for developers to release both x86 and Arm-native versions of their Windows apps. But Windows and x86 processors were closely intertwined for decades, and lingering compatibility issues remain. Companies and other large organizations are more likely to have made large investments in obscure software or hardware that uses specialized drivers, things that can't be translated automatically by Prism and whose developers are less incentivized to prioritize niche features like Arm compatibility.If Microsoft is going to continue to design, manufacture, and sell Intel-based Surface devices anyway, we'd prefer that they be offered to the general publicsurely there are Surface-curious PC enthusiasts who need or would prefer an x86 machine to an Arm one for various reasons.Andrew CunninghamSenior Technology ReporterAndrew CunninghamSenior Technology Reporter Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue. 12 Comments

OSIRIS-REx Bennu asteroid samples yield watery history, key molecules for life Clues as to how building blocks of life on Earth may have been seeded. Timothy J McCoy and Sara Russell, The Conversation Jan 30, 2025 9:59 am | 12 This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Credit: NASA This photo of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 Polycam images collected on Dec. 2, 2024, by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Credit: NASA Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreA bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers, and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek into the birth of the solar system.Nearly 60 years later, NASAs OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu, similar to the one that rained rocks over Revelstoke. Our research team has published a chemical analysis of those samples, providing insight into how some of the ingredients for life may have first arrived on Earth.Born in the years bracketing the Revelstoke meteorites fall, the two of us have spent our careers in the meteorite collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the Natural History Museum in London. Weve dreamed of studying samples from a Revelstoke-like asteroid collected by a spacecraft.Then, nearly two decades ago, we began turning those dreams into reality. We joined NASAs OSIRIS-REx mission team, which aimed to send a spacecraft to collect and return an asteroid sample to Earth. After those samples arrived on Sept. 24, 2023, we got to dive into a tale of rock, ice, and water that hints at how life could have formed on Earth. In this illustration, NASAs OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collects a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona In this illustration, NASAs OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collects a sample from the asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona The CI chondrites and asteroid BennuTo learn about an asteroida rocky or metallic object in orbit around the Sunwe started with a study of meteorites.Asteroids like Bennu are rocky or metallic objects in orbit around the Sun. Meteorites are the pieces of asteroids and other natural extraterrestrial objects that survive the fiery plunge to the Earths surface.We really wanted to study an asteroid similar to a set of meteorites called chondrites, whose components formed in a cloud of gas and dust at the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago.The Revelstoke meteorite is in a group called CI chondrites. Laboratory-measured compositions of CI chondrites are essentially identical, minus hydrogen and helium, to the composition of elements carried by convection from the interior of the Sun and measured in the outermost layer of the Sun. Since their components formed billions of years ago, theyre like chemically unchanged time capsules for the early solar system.So, geologists use the chemical compositions of CI chondrites as the ultimate reference standard for geochemistry. They can compare the compositions of everything from other chondrites to Earth rocks. Any differences from the CI chondrite composition would have happened through the same processes that formed asteroids and planets.CI chondrites are rich in clay and formed when ice melted in an ancient asteroid, altering the rock. They are also rich in prebiotic organic molecules. Some of these types of molecules are the building blocks for life.This combination of rock, water and organics is one reason OSIRIS-REx chose to sample the organic-rich asteroid Bennu, where water and organic compounds essential to the origin of life could be found.Evaporitesthe legacy of an ancient brineEver since the Bennu samples returned to Earth on September 24, 2023, we and our colleagues on four continents have spent hundreds of hours studying them.The instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made observations of reflected light that revealed the most abundant minerals and organics when it was near asteroid Bennu. Our analyses in the laboratory found that the compositions of these samples lined up with those observations.The samples are mostly water-rich clay, with sulfide, carbonate, and iron oxide minerals. These are the same minerals found in CI chondrites like Revelstoke. The discovery of rare minerals within the Bennu samples, however, surprised both of us. Despite our decades of experience studying meteorites, we have never seen many of these minerals.We found minerals dominated by sodium, including carbonates, sulfates, chlorides, and fluorides, as well as potassium chloride and magnesium phosphate. These minerals dont form just when water and rock react. They form when water evaporates.Weve never seen most of these sodium-rich minerals in meteorites, but theyre sometimes found in dried-up lake beds on Earth, like Searles Lake in California.Bennus rocks formed 4.5 billion years ago on a larger parent asteroid. That asteroid was wet and muddy. Under the surface, pockets of water perhaps only a few feet across were evaporating, leaving the evaporite minerals we found in the sample. That same evaporation process also formed the ancient lake beds weve seen these minerals in on Earth.Bennus parent asteroid likely broke apart 1 to 2 billion years ago, and some of the fragments came together to form the rubble pile we know as Bennu.These minerals are also found on icy bodies in the outer solar system. Bright deposits on the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, contain sodium carbonate. The Cassini mission measured the same mineral in plumes on Saturns moon Enceladus.We also learned that these minerals, formed when water evaporates, disappear when exposed to water once againeven with the tiny amount of water found in air. After studying some of the Bennu samples and their minerals, researchers stored the samples in air. Thats what we do with meteorites.Unfortunately, we lost these minerals as moisture in the air on Earth caused them to dissolve. But that explains why we cant find these minerals in meteorites that have been on Earth for decades to centuries.Fortunately, most of the samples have been stored and transported in nitrogen, protected from traces of water in the air.Until scientists were able to conduct a controlled sample return with a spacecraft and carefully curate and store the samples in nitrogen, we had never seen this set of minerals in a meteorite.An unexpected discoveryBefore returning the samples, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent over two years making observations around Bennu. From that two years of work, researchers learned that the surface of the asteroid is covered in rocky boulders.We could see that the asteroid is rich in carbon and water-bearing clays, and we saw veins of white carbonate a few feet long deposited by ancient liquid water. But what we couldnt see from these observations were the rarer minerals.We used an array of techniques to go through the returned sample one tiny grain at a time. These included CT scanning, electron microscopy, and X-ray diffraction, each of which allowed us to look at the rock at a scale not possible on the asteroid.Cooking up the ingredients for lifeFrom the salts we identified, we could infer the composition of the briny water from which they formed and see how it changed over time, becoming more sodium-rich.This briny water would have been an ideal place for new chemical reactions to take place and for organic molecules to form.While our team characterized salts, our organic chemist colleagues were busy identifying the carbon-based molecules present in Bennu. They found unexpectedly high levels of ammonia, an essential building block of the amino acids that form proteins in living matter. They also found all five of the nucleobases that make up part of DNA and RNA.Based on these results, wed venture to guess that these briny pods of fluid would have been the perfect environments for increasingly complicated organic molecules to form, such as the kinds that make up life on Earth.When asteroids like Bennu hit the young Earth, they could have provided a complete package of complex molecules and the ingredients essential to life, such as water, phosphate, and ammonia. Together, these components could have seeded Earths initially barren landscape to produce a habitable world.Without this early bombardment, perhaps when the pieces of the Revelstoke meteorite landed several billion years later, these fragments from outer space would not have arrived into a landscape punctuated with glaciers and trees.Timothy J McCoy is a supervisory research geologist at the Smithsonian Institution, and Sara Russell is a professor of planetary sciences at the Natural History Museum.This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.Timothy J McCoy and Sara Russell, The Conversation The Conversation is an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community. Our team of editors work with these experts to share their knowledge with the wider public. Our aim is to allow for better understanding of current affairs and complex issues, and hopefully improve the quality of public discourse on them. 12 Comments

Josie FordNuke the climateWe all know that climate change is dangerous, which means it can be tempting to take drastic measures to tackle it. Such as building a nuclear bomb orders of magnitude bigger than any to date and setting it off deep under the seabed.News reporter Alex Wilkins drew Feedbacks attention to this little scheme. It is the brainchild of Andrew Haverly, who described his idea in a paper released on 11 January on arXiv, an online repository without peer review.Haverlys plan builds on an existing approach called enhanced rock weathering. Rocks like basalt react with carbon dioxide in the air, slowly removing the greenhouse gas and trapping it in mineral form. By crushing such rocks to powder, we can accelerate this chemical weathering and speed up CO2 removal. However, even under optimistic estimates, this will only mop up a small fraction of our greenhouse gas emissions.AdvertisementThat is where the nuke comes in. A decent nuclear explosion could reduce a large volume of basalt to powder, enabling a huge spurt of enhanced rock weathering. Haverly proposes burying a nuclear bomb at least 3 kilometres below the Southern Ocean seabed. The surrounding rocks would constrain the blast and radiation, minimising the risk to life. But the explosion would pulverise enough rock to soak up 30 years worth of CO2 emissions.The first hurdle Haverly identifies is the scale of the bomb required. The largest nuclear explosion was that of Tsar Bomba, detonated by the USSR in 1961: it had a yield equivalent to 50 megatons of TNT. Haverly wants a bigger blast, a device with a yield of 81 gigatons, over 1600 times that of Tsar Bomba. Such a bomb, he writes solemnly, is not to be taken lightly.Quite how we are supposed to build this thing, then transport it to the notoriously windy Southern Ocean, safely lower it to the seabed, and then send it several km below said seabed, is very much left as an exercise for the reader. Haverly estimates this endeavour would cost around $10 billion dollars, which would indeed be a lot of bang for your buck considering the huge costs of climate change. However, Feedback has no idea how he came up with that figure.Anyway, nobody tell Elon Musk.Afterlife sneak peakEvery so often, Feedback experiences a revelation through the medium of social media. Our most recent one came courtesy of an X user called @pallnandi, an occupational therapist and unbiased realist, who on 12 January posted: Leaked photo of heaven is going viral on social media. No wonder Christians are so determined to get there! The accompanying image shows a city carved out of white stone, with architecture that looks like a cross between the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul, the Colosseum in Rome and Rivendell from Lord of the Rings. The hundreds of windows all glow the same shade of golden yellow. Above the city is a dark, starry sky, with what looks like the Milky Way streaking across it.Hence Feedbacks revelation: that if you wait long enough, a long-debunked silly claim will circulate yet again.This one goes back to at least 1994, when the outlandish Weekly World News published a story headlined Heaven photographed by Hubble telescope. It included a blurry black-and-white image of a starfield, with a huge glow in the middle that contained a collection of posh-looking buildings. Anyone who remembers what Asgard, home of the Norse gods, looked like in the Thor movies will have about the right idea.It shouldnt need saying that this image wasnt from Hubble, or even NASA, and is fake. But it went viral as recently as February 2024, after being highlighted in videos on Instagram and TikTok.It isnt even a year later, and a new image with a similar tagline has gone viral. Several reports have pointed out that the image looks AI-generated: the Milky Way, in particular, has glitch-like patterns in it.Feedbacks real issue with it, though, is that it looks like a dreadful place. For starters, the stars are crystal-clear, which implies a distinct lack of air. It looks freezing cold and the structures are like something designed by Adam Drivers monomaniacal architect character in the movie Megalopolis. Sci-fi author Naomi Alderman waded in on Bluesky: Right so no animals or plants or trees or rivers or lakes just cold marble dark sky and no sun literally cant see any people. She likens it to the output of a terrifying neighbourhood committee which enforces absolute rigid uniformity.Maybe one day we will get an iteration of this meme where heaven actually looks like a nice place to spend eternity. But Feedback doesnt recommend holding your breath for it.A fishy finaleA press release alerts us to the new book Into the Great Wide Ocean: Life in the least known habitat on Earth, by Snke Johnsen. In it, the author explains what we know about life in the vast volume of water below the ocean surface, isolated from the air, the seabed and continental shelves. What is it like, Feedback wonders, to spend all your life in a place where only the force of gravity and a slight variation in light levels can tell you which way is up and which is down?We dont know, but we do know that the illustrator of this fishy tome is one Marlin Peterson.Got a story for Feedback?You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This weeks and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Like some other federal employees, Tony Ruiz received a deferred resignation email this week.The email offers what appears to be a buyout if he quits his job.Ruiz says he feels doubly targeted as a Latino and as a federal worker. But he has no plans to resign.This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tony Ruiz, a 47-year-old Army veteran who works as a Veterans Service Representative at the US Department of Veterans Affairs.Like many federal employees, Ruiz received an email this week from the US Office of Personnel Management offering buyouts to federal workers who want to resign rather than work under the new administration. Ruiz's employment has been verified by Business Insider.Ruiz, who is Latino, says he feels like he's been hit by a double whammy: the resignation offer, and, before that, a letter from higher-ups asking workers to root out any examples of efforts to promote DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion.The following has been edited for length and clarity:I was hired in February of last year to be a veteran service representative at the US Department of Veterans Affairs, which is a role based out of Los Angeles.I work for the part of the VA that's in charge of all veteran benefits, and my job is really to assist veterans in all kinds of things. For example, if a veteran is trying to add dependents, needs to add a disability to his award, is going back to active duty, or is asking for help when it comes to homelessness, they put in a claim and it gets routed to an adjudicator like me.It's a chance for us to really help the veterans.I'm also a veteran of the US military myself. I served in the Army, with an honorable discharge in 2001. (I graduated from Basic Training in 1998.) Ruiz at his US Army Basic Training Graduation in 1998. Tony Ruiz When I was in the military, I had a dream to work for the federal government, and so to finally join this role a year ago, I was so excited to be serving my veterans.But in the last two weeks, things have been difficult.First, we got an email last week from the Acting Secretary at the US Office of Personnel Management, which said they're taking steps to close federal DEI initiatives because, they said, it's wasteful in government, it's shameful discrimination, and it's dividing Americans by race.Then it asks us to tell on our friends who are still doing DEI work and threatens us with adverse consequences if we don't.This first email caught all of us by surprise, and it really upset me.Then, this week, we got an email from OPM asking us if we wanted to resign by February 6.What really upset me was the fact that this email pretty much says to all of us, "We want you gone." It feels like they don't appreciate the value that we bring to the table.How can it be that I finally got my dream job after so many years, and yet now I have this situation where they want to get rid of me in a sense not just as a federal employee, but also as a Latino, born from Mexican immigrants, who are legal, and as an Army veteran who's serving my country proudly?They're telling me I'm no good in the sense that they're telling me I'm not wanted. And the people in the streets that are getting kicked out of the country, I feel like them, like I'm being deported from the federal government.With the emails that we've gotten, I can tell you people are afraid, people are nervous. Morale has been terrible to the point where people have been sick a lot in the last couple of weeks. And ever since the election, morale has been different. People are less talkative. It's palpable.But I'm not afraid. And I have no intention of resigning.In the military, we learned about bravery, about courage, and about service to our country. But one thing I learned as well that I think a lot of politicians and a lot of Americans forget is in the military, we had a rule and it was very clear: If you're given an order that's unlawful, like murder or whatever it is, it doesn't matter who it's from, you are to question that order and bring it up to the higher-ups. That's a very important thing.In other words, we're soldiers, we're not robots.Even though you're a military member, you love your country enough to be able to say, "No, this is not right." And so now that I'm serving my country here as a VA employee, that still stands to me.And that's why I'm not afraid.

OpenAI said this week that DeepSeek may have used OpenAI model outputs "inappropriately."OpenAI has been accused of doing the same thing with copyrighted content.What's that old saying about karma? Go ask ChatGPT. Or DeepSeek.In the brave new world of generative AI, there's a moment that everyone will experience. It's the realization that your original work is being used to train AI models that could be competing against you.This moment has arrived for OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman.The US startup said this week that Chinese lab DeepSeek may have "inappropriately" used OpenAI outputs to train new AI models in a process called distillation.Translation: We think you used our content without permission, and that's not allowed.For some AI experts, these complaints are hypocritical. OpenAI's success is built on a similar process. The startup has for years collected outputs and data from the internet and used that to train its own models. This includes scooping up copyrighted content and other original work from thousands of companies that have not authorized this use.In fact, this is what most model developers do, according to Nick Vincent, an assistant professor for computer science at Simon Fraser University, who studies how data is used in AI."These firms are simultaneously arguing for the right to train on anything they can get their hands on while denying their competitors the right to train on model outputs," he wrote in a blog this week. "Rules for thee, but not for me?"DeepSeek = just desertsVincent sees the rise of DeepSeek as the inevitable outcome of a training data free-for-all where AI companies take whatever content they want and ask for forgiveness later.This has now backfired on OpenAI, which may be having its own outputs plundered in the name of AI progress. The startup "will struggle to defend itself in the court of public opinion on this," Vincent told Business Insider on Wednesday."There's a reckoning coming."He hopes this reckoning will encourage tech companies to create a new system that gives appropriate credit and compensation to content creators."So far, none of the AI labs have seriously thought about this, so DeepSeek is their just deserts," Vincent added.Fair use just for OpenAI, or everyone?High-quality training data is a crucial ingredient of powerful AI models. Many of the companies that created this information want to be paid for providing intelligence to these new products. Tech companies don't want to be forced to pay. This dispute is being fought in court.OpenAI is being sued by authors who claim the startup is breaking copyright law by using their books to train AI models. The New York Times is pursuing a similar complaint.OpenAI has also been accused of using YouTube content to train its Sora video-generation model. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said last year that if this is true it would violate the video platform's rules.OpenAI has denied breaking copyright laws, citing the"fair use" doctrine, which allows unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations, including teaching, research, and news reporting.So, would DeepSeek's use of OpenAI's outputs also constitute fair use?"Very potentially, yes," Vincent said.Fair use isn't just for yourself when it's convenient. That would be, well, unfair.I asked OpenAI about all this on Wednesday and it didn't respond. The startup has partnerships with some companies that authorize the use of their content for AI model training. Axel Springer, the owner of Business Insider, struck one of these deals in 2023.Distillation and karmaHow do AI model outputs get scooped up for competitive means anyway?Distillation is the technical term for extracting intelligence buried in one model and weaving it into a new one, according to Vincent. AI godfathers, including Geoffrey Hinton, wrote a research paper about this in 2015 called "Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network."Back then, the researchers described a tamer version of this, where a lab or company would take its own old models and use outputs from them to cleverly infuse a new offering with more intelligence.Distilling intelligence from someone else's AI model without permission is frowned upon in some research circles but happens a lot, according to Vincent.DeepSeek'sresearch paperabout its new R1 model described using distillation with open-source models, but it didn't mention OpenAI."We demonstrate thatthe reasoning patterns of larger models can be distilled into smaller models, resulting in better performance," the Chinese lab's researchers wrote.Since these new offerings began rolling out late last year, some AI researchers have theorized that DeepSeek used outputs from OpenAI's new "reasoning" model, called o1, as synthetic data to improve its own models, such as R1.In December, when DeepSeek was beginning to wow the AI field, Altman seemed to take a dig at his new rival."It is (relatively) easy to copy something that you know works. It is extremely hard to do something new, risky, and difficult when you don't know if it will work," he wrote on X.What's that phrase about karma? I can't write it here. If you don't know, go ask ChatGPT. Or DeepSeek.