James O'Donnell

Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool—one that your company nonetheless calls Alex, an “employee” with a title and defined responsibilities. How well do you think you would work with Alex? If you’re anything like the managers recently studied by Emma Wiles, a Boston University business professor, treating Alex as a “coworker” and not a software tool would lead you to do a worse job.

Alex Imas, based at the University of Chicago (the greatest university in the world), recently shared two things about the impact of AI on how we work: a blunt assessment that our tools for predicting what this will look like are pretty abysmal, and a “call to arms” for economists to start collecting the one type of data that could make a plan to address AI in the workforce possible at all. On our abysmal tools: consider the fact that any job is made up of individual tasks. One part of a real estate agent’s job, for example, is to ask clients what sort of property they want to buy.

It's been just over two weeks since OpenAI reached a controversial agreement to allow the Pentagon to use its AI in classified environments.

“Anyone wanna host a get together in SF and pull this up on a 100 inch TV?” The author of that post on X was referring to an online intelligence dashboard following the US-Israel strikes against Iran in real time.

A US telecommunications company trained an AI model on years of inmates’ phone and video calls and is now piloting that model to scan their calls, texts, and emails in the hope of predicting and preventing crimes. Securus Technologies president Kevin Elder said the company began building its AI tools in 2023, using its massive database of recorded calls to train AI models to detect criminal activity.

Most Americans encounter the Federal Trade Commission only if they’ve been scammed: It handles identity theft, fraud, and stolen data. During the Biden administration, the agency went after artificial intelligence companies for scamming customers with deceptive advertising or harming people by selling irresponsible technologies.

Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government. The payment reports have been spread online by dozens of pundits, sleuths, and anonymous analysts

Open-source AI is everywhere right now. The problem is, no one agrees on what it actually is. Now we may finally have an answer. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the self-appointed arbiters of what it means to be open source, has released a new definition, which it hopes will help lawmakers develop regulations to protect consumers from AI risks.