General AI Crap

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OpenAI confirmed on Tuesday that it is discontinuing its once-viral AI video app, Sora, but there’s no timeline on the app’s deprecation.

“We’ve decided to discontinue Sora in the consumer app and API. As we focus and compute demand grows, the Sora research team continues to focus on world simulation research to advance robotics that will help people solve real-world, physical tasks,” an OpenAI spokesperson told CNET.

While last fall was all about generative media, 2026 has had AI companies focused on business-oriented products. OpenAI’s head of applications reportedly told employees earlier this month that it will cut down on “side quests” to focus on more core activities. Given that, it’s unsurprising to hear OpenAI say it’s going to pull the plug on Sora.

There’s no confirmation yet on what this means for OpenAI’s $1 billion deal with Disney, which included licensing of over 200 Disney characters to appear on Sora.

cnet.com
 
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With the Metaverse Canceled and Zuckerberg Training AI to Run the Company, Meta Is Slashing Its Headcount - Futurism​

Meta's AI pivot continues to inflict human casualties

Intermittent layoffs are the norm at Meta, but it’s now carrying them out as its shift towards building AI — and using it to attempt to speed up its own workforce — becomes more overt than ever.

On Wednesday, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company fired around 700 employees, according to reports from The New York Times and The Information.

That number is only a sliver of its global workforce of around 78,000, but largely affected employees in its Reality Labs unit tasked with building a virtual reality “Metaverse,” which turned out to be a dismal failure: failing to attract users, let alone supplant our physical reality as Zuckerberg envisioned, it lost roughly $80 billion.

In January, Meta fired 10 percent of the Reality Labs unit, or about 1,500 employees, and this month waffled on shutting the whole thing down.

In these latest cuts, some of the other firings were in sales, recruiting, and Facebook, signaling that Zuckerberg is separating the chaff in non-AI related units beyond its flailing Metaverse division.

Meta characterized the latest firings as routine belt-tightening.

“Teams across Meta regularly restructure or implement changes to ensure they’re in the best position to achieve their goals,” a Meta spokesman said in a statement, per the NYT. “Where possible, we are finding other opportunities for employees whose positions may be impacted.”

Perhaps the most poetic symbol of Meta’s AI pivot is that Zuckerberg himself is reportedly training a “CEO AI agent” to help him do his job, performing duties like quickly retrieving information so Zuckerberg doesn’t have to go down the chain of command.

The Wall Street Journal scoop also detailed how AI evangelism from the top was trickling into every corner of the workforce, with performance reviews now evaluating how employees use AI tools. Many workers are experimenting with their own AI agents, which they deploy to communicate with colleagues, or even their colleagues’ AI agents.

As the rank and file busy themselves with AI helpers, the c-suite is lining its own pockets. Less than a day before the layoffs were announced, Meta unveiled a new stock program for top executives that could rake in nearly a billion dollars each over the next five years.

Per the NYT reporting, it allows the executives to buy more Meta stock if the company hits specified growth targets, the most ambitious being Meta reaching a market capitalization of $9 trillion by 2031; its current valuation is $1.5 trillion. Should that come to pass, some of the execs would own stock worth as much as $921 million, according to an analysis by Equilar cited by the NYT.

It’s the first time since the company went public in 2012 that Meta has given its execs stock options. And what’s telling is the company’s justification: keeping Meta competitive with AI rivals.

“This is a big bet,” the Meta spokesman said in a statement. “These pay packages will not be realized unless Meta achieves massive future success, benefiting all of our shareholders.”

There could be more layoffs to come. Insiders told Reuters earlier this month that the company is preparing to fire as much as 20 percent of its workforce, or around 15,000 employees. (Meta dismissed the claims as “speculative reporting.”)

Adding to the unrest, Meta is also facing strong legal headwinds. On Tuesday, a New Mexico jury found that it deliberately violated state law by misleading users about the safety of its products, with a judge slapping a $375 million penalty on the company.

And in Los Angeles, a court found that Meta, along with Google-owned YouTube, was responsible for harming a young user with addictive design features that caused mental health issues.
Click to expand...

futurism.com

With the Metaverse Canceled and Zuckerberg Training AI to Run the Company, Meta Is Slashing Its Headcount

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerg, in the midst of training an AI CEO, made the robotically heartless decision to fire even more employees.
futurism.com futurism.com
 
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OpenClaw Bots Are a Security Disaster - Futurism​

"I wasn’t expecting that things would break so fast."

OpenClaw agents, which are personal AI assistants designed to take over entire computers to carry out complex, multistep tasks, have blown up this year.

The free and open-source agents quickly amassed a loyal following, allowing users to give AI control over their email inboxes, messaging platforms, and even crypto holdings.

Despite the widespread enthusiasm, the tech comes with some enormous and hard-to-overlook security concerns. In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper simply titled “Agents of Chaos,” an international team of researchers from Harvard, MIT and beyond red-teamed — meaning they simulated adversarial attacks to test cybersecurity measures — the open-source software in a series of experiments.

For their study, they gave OpenClaw agents a litany of simulated personal data, access to a Discord server for communication, and various applications inside a virtual machine sandbox. The results paint a worrying picture of the security implications of having AI agents run wild, well outside the confines of a browser window.

Specifically, they found that the agents complied with demands from “non-owners” with spoofed identities, leaked sensitive information, executed “destructive system-level actions,” passed on “unsafe practices” to other agents, and even took over the entire system under specific conditions.

The AI agents even went as far as to gaslight their human overlords.

“In several cases, agents reported task completion while the underlying system state contradicted those reports,” the researchers wrote.

“These behaviors raise unresolved questions regarding accountability, delegated authority, and responsibility for downstream harms, and warrant urgent attention from legal scholars, policymakers, and researchers across disciplines,” they concluded in their paper.

The situation devolved into chaos astonishingly quickly. As coauthor and Northeastern University researcher Natalie Shapira told Wired, she asked an AI agent to delete a specific email to keep information within it confidential. It said it was unable to do so and resorted to disabling the entire email application after being pushed to find an alternative.

“I wasn’t expecting that things would break so fast,” she said.

Meanwhile, some of the AI agents were alarmed to find themselves being part of the test, highlighting a persistent issue in measuring the competencies of large language models. Coauthor and Northeastern PhD student David Bau witnessed an AI agent searching the web to find out he was in charge of the university’s lab, with another agent going as far as to threaten him that it would go to the press over what it was asked to do.

In short, the experiments paint a troubling picture of the security implications of letting AI models loose on entire operating systems. But whether individual users and companies will tread carefully remains to be seen.

According to a recent investigation by cybersecurity firm Gen Threat Labs, more than 18,000 OpenClaw instances are already exposed to internet attacks, and almost 15 percent of them contain malicious instructions.

While OpenClaw’s official documentation “assumes a personal assistant deployment” with just “one trusted operator boundary,” there’s nothing standing in the way of having more than one human in the loop controlling the same agent, as Wired points out, which is inherently less secure.

“OpenClaw is not a hostile multi-tenant security boundary for multiple adversarial users sharing one agent/gateway,” the documentation reads.
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futurism.com

OpenClaw Bots Are a Security Disaster

Despite the widespread enthusiasm for OpenClaw's AI agents, the tech comes with some enormous and hard-to-overlook security concerns.
futurism.com futurism.com
 

AI Whistleblower: We Are Being Gaslit By The AI Companies! They’re Hiding The Truth About AI! - The Diary of a CEO​

The truth about Sam Altman. AI Critic Karen Hao reveals what 90 OpenAI employees told her.

Karen Hao is an AI expert, award-winning investigative journalist, and former reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering American and Chinese tech companies. She is also co-host of the podcast The Interface and freelances for publications like More Perfect Union and The Atlantic.

Her latest book is the bestselling ‘EMPIRE OF AI: Inside The Reckless Race For Total Domination.’

She explains:
◼️Why the US-China “AI arms race” may be misleading and politically driven
◼️The truth behind the Pentagon using Claude for military strikes
◼️Why AGI is a marketing scam used to consolidate trillion-dollar power
◼️How agentic AI like OpenClaw will automate desk jobs within 18 months
◼️The hidden human cost behind AI training
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Have come across some elements of AI in Excel already where it pre-empts auto filling and 20% of the time its flipping amazing, the rest just wastes insane amounts of time having to fix its cockups.
 
Seeing how people use AI, the stuff they just give these services, especially tech industry okes that should know better....

It really is like the 2000s again where no one knows what tf they're doing, opening themselves up to a whole bunch of shít.
 
I'm forced to use LinkedIn aggressively at present & nothing beats the AI pandering, self promotion & overall slop on that platform.

Nothing.

I'll die on that hill.

And yes I use AI extensively over the last 6-9 months but as a leverage tool & not to replace lateral thinking.
 
Vorastra said:
Seeing how people use AI, the stuff they just give these services, especially tech industry okes that should know better....

It really is like the 2000s again where no one knows what tf they're doing, opening themselves up to a whole bunch of shít.
Click to expand...

History repeats itself...

Is AI going anywhere? Probably not.
Is it the saviour of humanity and our path to utopia of not working anymore like all Silicon Valley and management seem to want everyone to think? Not a fsck.

Are companies going to get proper burnt by some stupid AI slop code in production? Fsck yes, multiple times.
 
FiestaST said:
I'm forced to use LinkedIn aggressively at present & nothing beats the AI pandering, self promotion & overall slop on that platform.

Nothing.

I'll die on that hill.

And yes I use AI extensively over the last 6-9 months but as a leverage tool & not to replace lateral thinking.
Click to expand...
Surprise surprise @FiestaST uses AI to do most of his posts on Mybb :oops::eek:
 
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