What’s the deal with the “HPE” in some Register articles? It’s apparently the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise logo, but articles about HPE don’t appear to have that logo.

Is The Register affiliated with HPE now?

Incredible article. Starting off with, they are only banning minors from chats (although their other features are unpopular), and they are tapering children off by limiting chats to two hours for now.

the company says it’s rolling out a new in-house “age assurance model” that classifies a user’s age based on the type of characters they choose to chat with…

If nobody under 18 is allowed on the chats, why would you have characters geared towards minors?!

Adults mistaken for minors can prove their age to the third-party verification site Persona

The surveillance company, that’s great

And then there’s this quote from the guy who runs the suicide bot company:

“When we started making the changes of under 18 experiences earlier in the year, our under 18 user base did shrink, because those users went into other platforms, which are not as safe,” Anand said.

Give me a break.

AI companies are definitely aware of the real risks. It’s the imaginary ones (“what happens if AI becomes sentient and takes over the world?”) that I imagine they’ll put that money towards.

Meanwhile they (intentionally) fail to implement even a simple cutoff switch for a child that’s expressing suicidal ideation. Most people with any programming knowledge could build a decent interception tool. All this talk about guardrails seems almost as fanciful.

This is good writing.

In promoting their developer registration program, Google purports:

Our recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play.

We haven’t seen this recent analysis — or any other supporting evidence — but the “50 times” multiple does certainly sound like great cause for distress (even if it is a surprisingly round number). But given the recent news of “224 malicious apps removed from the Google Play Store after ad fraud campaign discovered”, we are left to wonder whether their energies might better be spent assessing and improving their own safeguards rather than casting vague disparagements against the software development communities that thrive outside their walled garden.

The expectation is for the Foundation to use its equity stake in the OpenAI Group to help fund philanthropic work. That will start with a $25 billion commitment to “health and curing diseases” and “AI resiliance” to counteract some of the risks presented by the deployment of AI.

Paying yourself to promote your own product. Promising to fix vague “risks” that make the product sound more powerful than it is, with “fixes” that won’t be measurable.

In other words, Sam is cutting a $25 billion check to himself.

Mighty thoughtful of Jeff Bezos to award money to a project that coincidentally promotes AI, and puts his name in the same sentence as environmentalism.

Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ dirty secret is the environmental harm he’s causing, and intentionally covering up, while trying to greenwash it.

World’s richest man with an infamously glitchy centralized social network, who wants it to be a centralized payment processor, is saying what?

Artificial intelligence has been something people have been sounding the alarm about since the 50s. We call it AGI now, since “AI” got ruined by marketers 60 years later.

We won’t get there with transformer models, so what exactly do the people promoting them actually propose? It just makes the Big Tech companies look like they have a better product than they do.

Sam Altman himself compared GPT-5 to the Manhattan Project.

The only difference is it’s clearer to most (but definitely not all) people that he is promoting his product when he does it…

Geoffrey Hinton, retired Google employee and paid AI conference speaker, has nothing bad to say about Google or AI relationship therapy.

Superintelligence — a hypothetical form of AI that surpasses human intelligence — has become a buzzword in the AI race between giants like Meta and OpenAI.

Thank you MSNBC for doing the bare minimum and reminding people that this is hypothetical (read: science fiction)

Those people always had the option to use those engines in Firefox. Mozilla didn’t need to explicitly add them, or advertise them more aggressively than they did when they signed a deal with Ecosia.

You are downright lying about the content of that post.

They are soliciting input.

Your input will help us understand when Perplexity adds real value… We can’t wait to hear what you think!

And the input is in that thread is far more negative than positive.

FaceDeer, you don’t need to lie to people here about the environmental harm of AI.

You can want your toy, but don’t deny it comes at the cost of raising everybody else’s electric bills and polluting everybody else’s air and water. Big Tech does not need you to be their evangelist.

By the way, I don’t appreciate people who downplay the negatives of AI: I can’t lower my electricity bills or prevent environmental destruction by flipping a switch. I can’t avoid inhaling poisonous gases by setting an esoteric flag in an esoteric location in Firefox. It would be great if I could, but I can’t.

You quoted a paragraph that links here.

I would encourage you to actually read the things you quote!

Why would you jump to this assumption?

Mozilla points to the forums when they blamed users for wanting the inclusion.

I don’t know why you would assume things that are the polar opposite of what Mozilla says.

It’s not like any other search engine though, is it? Mozilla gave it a special position on their list due to money changing hands. But they had the gall to claim it was actually due to user feedback, a claim their forums do not support).

Funny enough, Mozilla fails to acknowledge this. Instead, they blame the inclusion on “positive feedback” from the community!

You should be able to turn off “web search” too if you go to the page mentioned in the parent comment.

(Note the Edit icon in the corner of the homepage does not give you all the options. It used to let you turn off sponsored content, but Mozilla removed that a couple versions ago.)