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According to the Financial Times, OpenAI disbanded its preparedness team at the end of last month. The job of the preparedness team was to assess if models posed serious risks and develop ways to mitigate those risks. (You know, like the possibility that it could go rogue and hack another company.) According to FT, responsibility […]

OpenRouter's CEO recently described the startup as Stripe for AI.

Most teams building retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems for high stakes classification make the same architectural bet: Route every ambiguous case straight to the language model and trust the retrieved context to sort it out. This works fine in a demo. It falls apart the moment the system has to survive an audit, a regulator, or a compliance officer asking why a specific decision was made six months ago. I have spent the last year building RAG based classification systems in regulated enterprise settings, where the cost of a wrong answer is not a bad chatbot reply. A decision has to hold up to scrutiny long after the model produced it. This environment forces a different design philosophy than most AI engineering content assumes. Here is what changes when you cannot afford to be probabilistic about everything, and how a cascade architecture solves it. The invisible cost of an all LLM pipeline The appeal of routing everything through a large language model (LLM) is obvious: Fewer moving parts, faster iteration, the model handles unanticipated edge cases. The problem shows up later, in three places. First, auditability. "The model decided based on retrieved context" is not an acceptable answer. You need a decision path a human can reconstruct without rerunning inference and hoping for the same output. Second, cost at scale. If your system processes tens of thousands of cases a day and every one hits an LLM call with several retrieved documents in context, your inference bill and latency both scale with volume in a way that rule based logic does not. Third, and least discussed, model drift on the easy cases. LLMs are excellent at nuanced judgment calls. They are inconsistent, in ways that are hard to detect, on cases that should have a deterministic answer. A clear structured match against known criteria should never depend on a language model's mood. The cascade approach The fix: Stop treating the LLM as the front line and start treating it as the escalation

Dario Amodei is pushing back against the idea that he's been painting an overly pessimistic picture of AI.

"Breakups are… tough." It's the opening lines of an interlude towards the end of DOOMED! Called "It Happens in Every Universe." It's also basically the thesis of the entire record. It's no grand revelation, but it's a well-trodden subject that Open Mike Eagle manages to mine for artistic gold. Eagle's subject matter is usually personal, […]

On Friday, Amazon customers received an email alerting them to an update to the site's terms and conditions. Most notably, it stated that disputes would now be resolved through arbitration and said users agree to a class action waiver. Amazon framed this as a "fast and efficient" way to resolve issues, but it notably would […]

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.

ChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request. The feature […]

The stock market remains near all-time highs.

One thing the Federal Reserve could always count on to keep inflation low was falling prices for computers, cell phones and other high-tech stuff — but not anymore.

DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014, has been a cornerstone of the company’s AI strategy — and also a chronic source of organizational friction.

'Lanterns' premieres Sunday, August 16 on HBO and HBO Max. Here's the release time in every US time zone, plus the full episode schedule.

On an annualized basis, Japan saw growth of 1.1%, against estimates of 2%.

“I don’t expect my marginal tax rate to be materially different in the future.”

The Tribeca and Eli Lilly "Vital Stories" program at the Tribeca Film Festival premiered short films Reconstructing Charlie, Run It Back and Do I Know You From Somewhere?

Owners of Trezor and SafePal crypto wallets at high risk of phishing attempts after separate data leaks, CLARITY odds at 10% despite White House meeting this week.

There were hopes that regulators could move if the Clarity Act didn't advance, but those, too, may be paused.

Three weeks after a Flash release that couldn't produce a working file, Google's budget tier zero-shots a playable game. It still can't reason, and a free 27B model still writes better.

Investors are starting to judge crypto tokens on usage, economics and value capture rather than market-cap rank, industry executives said.

While the data breach exposed the personal order details of thousands of customers, all private keys, seed phrases, and crypto assets remain completely safe.

A California bill is awaiting an Assembly vote to "place guardrails" around AI chatbots and prevent them from acting as therapists.

Fraudsters impersonating regulators and licensed crypto exchanges to steal funds from users forced to migrate their accounts after the EU's MiCA deadline are on the rise.

The bankers want people kept in lower-yield deposits for the good of the financial system as it's existed for generations, and their argument is gaining ground.

Scottish construction tech firm Kenoteq secures £900k to scale recycled production Yahoo News UK

Construction boss: migrant tradies are not the solution MacroBusiness

HVAC filter market booms HVAC&R News

Construction sector sees a difference in ‘structural quality’ from hiring migrants news24.com.au

Build My Path: Creating opportunities for the next generation of construction talent Belfast Live

Construction gears up for a stronger second half KLSE Screener

Hotel investor seeks better financing for construction projects Punch Newspapers

Housing downturn hurts the whole economy The Courier Mail

UK employers stuck in "low-hire, low-fire" mode, survey shows marketscreener.com

How universities can boost staff diversity Times Higher Education

UK data - Housing slump and hiring freeze cloud outlook investingLive

Jobs in acting and writing professions are in highest demand in the UK heraldscotland.com

Summer jobs bounce back in UK thanks to busy calendar of sport and music The Guardian

Reverse rise in payroll tax and wages to unlock jobs, Burnham urged The Times

Employers Start Paying a Premium for Skills AI Still Cannot Fake International Business Times UK

Will Stein beat popular streamer Bordeaux in a game of College Football 27 On3