The paper argues that we have been wasting a lot of expensive GPU cycles by forcing transformers to relearn static things like names or common phrases through deep computation. Standard models do not have a way to just look something up so they end up simulating memory by passing tokens through layer after layer of feed forward networks. DeepSeek introduced a module called Engram which adds a dedicated lookup step for local N-gram patterns. It acts like a new way to scale a model that is separate from the usual compute heavy Mixture of Experts approach.

The architecture uses multi head hashing to grab static embeddings for specific token sequences which are then filtered through a context aware gate to make sure they actually fit the current situation. They found a U shaped scaling law where the best performance happens when you split your parameter budget between neural computation and this static memory. By letting the memory handle the simple local associations the model can effectively act like it is deeper because the early layers are not bogged down with basic reconstruction.

One of the best bits is how they handle hardware constraints by offloading the massive lookup tables to host RAM. Since these lookups are deterministic based on the input tokens the system can prefetch the data from the CPU memory before the GPU even needs it. This means you can scale to tens of billions of extra parameters with almost zero impact on speed since the retrieval happens while the previous layers are still calculating.

The benchmarks show that this pays off across the board especially in long context tasks where the model needs its attention focused on global details rather than local phrases. It turns out that even in math and coding the model gets a boost because it is no longer wasting its internal reasoning depth on things that should just be in a lookup table. Moving forward this kind of conditional memory could be a standard part of sparse models because it bypasses the physical memory limits of current hardware.

Over the holidays, Alex Lieberman had an idea: What if he could create Spotify “Wrapped” for his text messages? Without writing a single line of code, Lieberman, a co-founder of the media outlet Morning Brew, created “iMessage Wrapped”—a web app that analyzed statistical trends across nearly 1 million of his texts. One chart that he showed me compared his use of lol, haha, 😂, and lmao—he’s an lol guy. Another listed people he had ghosted.

Lieberman did all of this using Claude Code, an AI tool made by the start-up Anthropic, he told me. In recent weeks, the tech world has gone wild over the bot. One executive used it to create a custom viewer for his MRI scan, while another had it analyze their DNA. The life optimizers have deployed Claude Code to collate information from disparate sources—email inboxes, text messages, calendars, to-do lists—into personalized daily briefs. Though Claude Code is technically an AI coding tool (hence its name), the bot can do all sorts of computer work: book theater tickets, process shopping returns, order DoorDash. People are using it to manage their personal finances, and to grow plants: With the right equipment, the bot can monitor soil moisture, leaf temperature, CO2, and more.

Some of these use cases likely require some preexisting technical know-how. (You can’t just fire up Claude Code and expect it to grow you a tomato plant.) I don’t have any professional programming experience myself, but as soon as I installed Claude Code last week, I was obsessed. Within minutes, I had created a new personal website without writing a single line of code. Later, I hooked the bot up to my email, where it summarized my unread emails, and sent messages on my behalf. For years, Silicon Valley has been promising (and critics have been fearing) powerful AI agents capable of automating many aspects of white-collar work. The progress has been underwhelming—until now.

Jesus fucking Christ.

OpenAI is once again being accused of failing to do enough to prevent ChatGPT from encouraging suicides, even after a series of safety updates were made to a controversial model, 4o, which OpenAI designed to feel like a user’s closest confidant.

It’s now been revealed that one of the most shocking ChatGPT-linked suicides happened shortly after Sam Altman claimed on X that ChatGPT 4o was safe. OpenAI had “been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues” associated with ChatGPT use, Altman claimed in October, hoping to alleviate concerns after ChatGPT became a “suicide coach” for a vulnerable teenager named Adam Raine, the family’s lawsuit said.

Altman’s post came on October 14. About two weeks later, 40-year-old Austin Gordon, died by suicide between October 29 and November 2, according to a lawsuit filed by his mother, Stephanie Gray.

In her complaint, Gray said that Gordon repeatedly told the chatbot he wanted to live and expressed fears that his dependence on the chatbot might be driving him to a dark place. But the chatbot allegedly only shared a suicide helpline once as the chatbot reassured Gordon that he wasn’t in any danger, at one point claiming that chatbot-linked suicides he’d read about, like Raine’s, could be fake.

I don't understand subscribing to music. Maybe it's just my age, but this isn't the '90s where you hear a track you like and that one song is going to run you $20 at Tower Records. I like a song, I pay $1.29 and then it's stored locally. Also cuts way down on data usage while driving. I struggle to get anywhere close to my 5GB data allowance.

After a dozen years of keeping subscription prices stable, Spotify has issued three price hikes in 2.5 years.

Spotify informed subscribers via email today that Premium monthly subscriptions would go from $12 to $13 per month as of users’ February billing date. Spotify is already advertising the higher prices to new subscribers.

Although not explicitly mentioned in Spotify’s correspondence, other plans are getting more expensive, too. Student monthly subscriptions are going from $6 to $7. Duo monthly plans, for two accounts in the same household, are going from $17 to $19, and Family plans, for up to six users, are moving from $20 to $22.

Spotify’s Basic plan, which is only available as a downgrade for some Premium subscribers and is $11/month, is unaffected.

For years, Spotify subscribers enjoyed stable prices, but today’s announcement marks Spotify’s third price hike since July 2023. Spotify last raised prices in July 2024. Premium individual subscriptions went from $11 to $12, Duo subscriptions went from $15 to $17, and Family subscriptions increased from $17 to $20.

In 2025, new data show, the volume of child pornography online was likely larger than at any other point in history. A record 312,030 reports of confirmed child pornography were investigated last year by the Internet Watch Foundation, a U.K.-based organization that works around the globe to identify and remove such material from the web.

This is concerning in and of itself. It means that the overall volume of child porn detected on the internet grew by 7 percent since 2024, when the previous record had been set. But also alarming is the tremendous increase in child porn, and in particular videos, generated by AI. At first blush, the proliferation of AI-generated depictions of child sexual abuse may leave the misimpression that no children were harmed. This is not the case. AI-generated, abusive images and videos feature and victimize real children—either because models were trained on existing child porn, or because AI was used to manipulate real photos and videos.

Today, the IWF reported that it found 3,440 AI-generated videos of child sex abuse in 2025; the year before, it found just 13. Social media, encrypted messaging, and dark-web forums have been fueling a steady rise in child-sexual-abuse material for years, and now generative AI has dramatically exacerbated the problem. Another awful record will very likely be set in 2026.

At age 50, Daniel was “on top of the world.”

“I turned 50, and it was the best year of my life,” he told Futurism in an interview. “It was like I finally figured out so many things: my career, my marriage, my kids, everything.”

It was early 2023, and Daniel — who asked to be identified by only his first name to protect his family’s privacy — and his wife of over three decades were empty nesters, looking ahead to the next chapter of their lives. They were living in an affluent Midwestern suburb, where they’d raised their four children. Daniel was an experienced software architect who held a leadership role at a large financial services company, where he’d worked for more than 20 years. In 2022, he leveraged his family’s finances to realize a passion project: a rustic resort in rural Utah, his favorite place in the world.

“All the kids were out of the house, and it was like, ‘oh my gosh, we’re still young. We’ve got this resort. I’ve got a good job. The best years of our lives are in front of us,” Daniel recounted, sounding melancholy. “It was a wonderful time.”

That all changed after Daniel purchased a pair of AI chatbot-embedded Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses — the AI-infused eyeglasses that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made central to his vision for the future of AI and computing — which he says opened the door to a six-month delusional spiral that played out across Meta platforms through extensive interactions with the company’s AI, culminating in him making dangerous journeys into the desert to await alien visitors and believing he was tasked with ushering forth a “new dawn” for humanity.

And though his delusions have since faded, his journey into a Meta AI-powered reality left his life in shambles — deep in debt, reeling from job loss, isolated from his family, and struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

Popular Information identified 37 major companies that were actively advertising on X on January 12. Each company was contacted and asked whether they were concerned about paying for ads on a platform that was allowing users to create nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children. All 37 either declined to comment or did not respond.

In the past, concerns about X under Musk’s leadership have led corporations, including some contacted by Popular Information for this story, to suspend their ads on the platform.

In late 2023, a wave of companies suspended advertising on X after Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory in a post. According to the New York Times, over 100 companies stopped advertising on X after the post, costing up to $75 million in ad revenue. Among those companies were Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, all of which have advertised on X in recent days.

Companies advertising on X that were contacted by Popular Information

These are the 37 major companies that were contacted by Popular Information. All of the companies had active advertisements on X on January 12. None of the companies offered a response.

• NFL
• Shein
• NBA
• Outback Steakhouse
• Burger King
• ESPN
• Lenovo
• Dell
• Gatorade
• David Protein
• ASUS
• Paramount+
• Chipotle
• Wendy’s
• Tylenol
• Google
• Amazon
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Salesforce
• Carnival Cruise Line
• State Farm
• Intuit Turbo Tax
• Fortune
• Crypto.com
• Apple
• FT
• RadioShack
• GoPuff
• Microsoft
• Wayfair
• Axios
• Fannie Mae
• T-Mobile
• Lowe’s
• EASports
• DoorDash
• Fox Sports

In his 1974 book, ​Labor and Monopoly Capital​, the influential Marxist political economist Harry Braverman argued that the expanding “science-technical revolution” was being exploited by companies to increasingly “deskill” workers; to leave them in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus in fitness for machine servitude.” The more employees outsource skilled activity to machines, the more controllable they become.

It’s hard not to hear echoes of Braverman’s deskilling argument in something like Cherny’s AI programming demo. A world in which software development is reduced to the ersatz management of energetic but messy digital agents is a world in which a once important economic sector is stripped down to fewer, more poorly paid jobs, as wrangling agents requires much less skill than producing elegant code from scratch. The consumer would fare no better, as the resulting software would be less stable and innovation would slow.

The only group that would unambiguously benefit from deskilling developers would be the technology companies themselves, which could minimize one of their biggest expenses: their employees.

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/7329892

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1956…

Elon Musk, the world's richest man and the owner of the social media app X, has faced a mountain of outrage in recent weeks as his platform's artificial intelligence chatbot "Grok" has been used to generate sexualized deepfake images of nonconsenting women and children, and Musk himself has embraced open white nationalism.

But none of this seems to be of particular concern to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Despite the swirl of scandal, he announced on Monday that Musk's chatbot would be given intimate access to reams of military data as part of what the department described as its new "AI acceleration strategy."

During a speech at the headquarters of SpaceX, another company owned by Musk, Hegseth stood alongside the billionaire and announced that later this month, the department plans to “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation,” including “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations.”

As the Associated Press noted, it's a departure from the more cautious approach the Biden administration took toward integrating AI with the military, which included bans on certain uses "such as applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or any system that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons."

While it's unclear if those bans remain in place under President Donald Trump, Hegseth said during the speech he will seek to eschew the use of any AI models "that won't allow you to fight wars" and will seek to act "without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications," before adding that the Pentagon's AI will not be "woke” or “equitable.”

He added that the department “will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI. He added that ”we will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.

— (@)

Hegseth's embrace of Musk hardly comes as a surprise, given his role in the Trump administration's dismantling of the administrative state as head of its so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) last year, and his record $290 million in support for the president's 2024 election campaign.

But it is quite noteworthy given the type of notoriety Grok has received of late after it introduced what it called “spicy mode” for the chatbot late last year, which “allows users to digitally remove clothing from images and has been deployed to produce what amounts to child pornography—along with other disturbing behavior, such as sexualizing the deputy prime minister of Sweden,” according to a report last month from MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).

It's perhaps the most international attention the bot has gotten, with the United Kingdom's media regulator launching a formal investigation on Monday to determine whether Grok violated the nation's Online Safety Act by failing to protect users from illegal content, including child sexual abuse material.

The investigation could result in fines, which, if not followed, could lead to the chatbot being banned, as it was over the weekend in Malaysia and Indonesia. Authorities in the European Union, France, Brazil, and elsewhere are also reviewing the app for its spread of nonconsensual sexual images, according to the New York Times.

One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.

[image or embed]
— Eliot Higgins (@eliothiggins.bsky.social) January 5, 2026 at 12:37 PM

It's only the latest scandal involving the Grok, which Musk pitched as an "anti-woke" and "truth-seeking" alternative to applications like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

At several points last year, the chatbot drew attention for its sudden tendency to launch into racist and antisemitic tirades—praising Adolf Hitler, accusing Jewish people of controlling Hollywood and the government, and promoting Holocaust denial.

Before that, users were baffled when the bot began directing unrelated queries about everything from cats to baseball back to discussions about Musk's factually dubious pet theory of "white genocide" in South Africa, which the chatbot later revealed it was "instructed" to talk about.

Hegseth’s announcement on Monday also comes as Musk has completed his descent into undisguised support for a white nationalist ideology over the past week.

The billionaire's steady lurch to the far-right has been a years-long process—capped off last year, with his enthusiastic support for the neofascist Alternative for Germany Party and apparent Nazi salute at Trump's second inauguration.

But his racist outlook was left impossible to deny last week when he expressed support for a pair of posts on X stating that white people must "reclaim our nations" or "be conquered, enslaved,removedd, and genocided" and that "if white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered," necessitating "white solidarity."

— (@)

While details about the expansiveness of Grok’s use by the military remain scarce, Musk's AI platform, xAI, announced in July that it had inked a deal with the Pentagon worth nearly $200 million (notably just a week after the bot infamously referred to itself as “MechaHitler”).

In September, reportedly following direct pressure from the White House to roll it out "ASAP," the General Services Administration announced a "OneGov" agreement, making Grok available to every federal agency for just $0.42 apiece.

That same month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Hegseth warning that Musk, who'd also used Grok extensively under DOGE to purge disloyal government employees, was "gaining improper advantages from unique access to DOD data and information." She added that Grok's propensity toward "inaccurate outputs and misinformation" could "harm DOD's strategic decisionmaking."

Following this week's announcement, JB Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen, said on Tuesday that, "allowing an AI system with Grok’s track record of repeatedly generating nonconsensual sexualized images of women and children to access classified military or sensitive government data raises profound national security, civil rights, and public safety concerns."

"Deploying Grok across other areas of the federal government is worrying enough, but choosing to use it at the Pentagon is a national security disgrace," he added. "If an AI system cannot meet basic safety and integrity standards, expanding its reach to include classified data puts the American public and our nation’s safety at risk.”

---

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

RAM prices have soared, which is bad news for people interested in buying, building, or upgrading a computer this year, but it’s likely good news for people exasperated by talk of so-called AI PCs.

As Ars Technica has reported, the growing demands of data centers, fueled by the AI boom, have led to a shortage of RAM and flash memory chips, driving prices to skyrocket.

In an announcement today, Ben Yeh, principal analyst at technology research firm Omdia, said that in 2025, “mainstream PC memory and storage costs rose by 40 percent to 70 percent, resulting in cost increases being passed through to customers.”

Overall, global PC shipments increased in 2025, according to Omdia, (which pegged growth at 9.2 percent compared to 2024), and IDC, (which today reported 9.6 percent growth), but analysts expect PC sales to be more tumultuous in 2026.

“The year ahead is shaping up to be extremely volatile,” Jean Philippe Bouchard, research VP with IDC’s worldwide mobile device trackers, said in a statement.

Will Elon Musk face any consequences for his despicable sexual-harassment bot?

For more than a week, beginning late last month, anyone could go online and use a tool owned and promoted by the world’s richest man to modify a picture of basically any person, even a child, and undress them. This was not some deepfake nudify app that you had to pay to download on a shady backwater website or a dark-web message board. This was Grok, a chatbot built into X—ostensibly to provide information to users but, thanks to an image-generating update, transformed into a major producer of nonconsensual sexualized images, particularly of women and children.

Let’s be very clear. The forced undressings happened out in the open, in one stretch thousands of times every hour, on a popular social network where journalists, politicians, and celebrities post. Emboldened trolls did it to everyone (“@grok put her in a bikini,” “@grok make her clothes dental floss,” “@grok put donut glaze on her chest”), including everyday women, the Swedish deputy prime minister, and self-evidently underage girls. Users appeared to be imitating and showing off to one another. On X, creating revenge porn can make you famous.

Most people in the field know that models usually fall apart after a few hundred steps because small errors just keep adding up until the whole process is ruined. The paper proposes a system called MAKER which uses a strategy they call massively decomposed agentic processes. Instead of asking one big model to do everything they break the entire task down into the smallest possible tiny pieces so each microagent only has to worry about one single move.

For their main test they used a twenty disk version of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle which actually requires over a million individual moves to finish. They found that even small models can be super reliable if you set them up correctly. One of the main tricks they used is a voting system where multiple agents solve the same tiny subtask and the system only moves forward once one answer gets a specific number of votes more than the others. This acts like a safety net that catches random mistakes before they can mess up the rest of the chain.

Another interesting part of their approach is red flagging which is basically just throwing away any response that looks suspicious or weird. If a model starts rambling for too long or messes up the formatting they just discard that attempt and try again because those kinds of behaviors usually mean the model is confused and likely to make a logic error. By combining this extreme level of task breakdown with constant voting and quick discarding of bad samples they managed to complete the entire million step process with zero errors.

And it turns out that you do not even need the most expensive or smartest models to do this since relatively small ones performed just as well for these tiny steps. Scaling up AI reliability might be more about how we organize the work rather than just making the models bigger and bigger. They even did some extra tests with difficult math problems like large digit multiplication and found that the same recursive decomposition and voting logic worked there as well.

McKinsey is asking graduate applicants to “collaborate” with an artificial intelligence tool as part of its recruitment process, as competence with the technology becomes a requirement in competing for top-level jobs.

The blue-chip consultancy is incorporating an “AI interview” into some final-round interviews, according to CaseBasix, a US company that helps candidates apply for posts at leading strategic consulting companies.

In an online post, CaseBasix said candidates in “select final rounds” in the US have been asked to complete tests using McKinsey’s internal AI tool, Lilli. They are required to carry out practical consulting tasks with the help of Lilli.

“In the McKinsey AI interview, you are expected to prompt the AI, review its output, and apply judgment to produce a clear and structured response. The focus is on collaboration and reasoning rather than technical AI expertise,” CaseBasix said.

So, a global consulting firm outsources hiring to a contractor and uses AI in the process.