Silicon Valley’s AI talent war just reached a compensation milestone that makes even the most legendary scientific achievements of the past look financially modest. When Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year)—with potentially $100 million in the first year alone—it shattered every historical precedent for scientific and technical compensation we can find on record. That includes salaries during…

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has placed unbelievable pressure on drone developers on both sides of the war, who have responded with astounding innovations that include: fiber-optic drones (to prevent radio jamming) kamikaze sea drones, eventually equipped with anti-air missiles drones that fire shotguns bomber drones that drop mines and grenades drones that release flaming thermite into trenches long-range, aircraft-style drones that can substitute for small cruise missiles interceptor drones that…

Since 2023, Amazon has been framing Alexa+ as a monumental evolution of Amazon’s voice assistant that will make it more conversational, capable, and, for Amazon, lucrative. Amazon said in a press release on Thursday that it has given early access of the generative AI voice assistant to “millions” of people. The product isn’t publicly available yet, and some advertised features are still unavailable, but Amazon’s CEO is already considering loading…

AI tools are widely used by software developers, but those devs and their managers are still grappling with figuring out how exactly to best put the tools to use, with growing pains emerging along the way. That’s the takeaway from the latest survey of 49,000 professional developers by community and information hub StackOverflow, which itself has been heavily impacted by the addition of large language models (LLMs) to developer workflows….

Russian-state hackers are targeting foreign embassies in Moscow with custom malware that gets installed using adversary-in-the-middle attacks that operate at the ISP level, Microsoft warned Thursday. The campaign has been ongoing since last year. It leverages ISPs in that country, which are obligated to work on behalf of the Russian government. With the ability to control the ISP network, the threat group—which Microsoft tracks under the name Secret Blizzard—positions itself…

Google has lost its appeal in the long-running app store antitrust case, which marks another major victory for Epic Games. Google lost the original case in 2023 when a jury found it abused its market position in smartphones to block competition from Epic and others. Google was able to get the penalties suspended while it pursued its appeal, but now it may need to make plans for a more open…

Hackers planted a Raspberry Pi equipped with a 4G modem in the network of an unnamed bank in an attempt to siphon money out of the financial institution’s ATM system, researchers reported Wednesday. The researchers with security firm Group-IB said the “unprecedented tactic allowed the attackers to bypass perimeter defenses entirely.” The hackers combined the physical intrusion with remote access malware that used another novel technique to conceal itself, even…

Google is fond of saying its mission is to “organize the world’s information,” but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization? A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google’s search index, and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he’s still at it. Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one…

On Tuesday, The Associated Press released results from a new AP-NORC poll showing that 60 percent of US adults have used AI to search for information, while only 37 percent of all Americans have used AI for work tasks. Meanwhile, younger Americans are adopting AI tools at much higher rates across multiple categories, including brainstorming, work tasks, and companionship. The poll found AI companionship remains the least popular application overall,…

Officially, Microsoft will stop providing new security updates for Windows 10 PCs after October 14, 2025, a little over a decade after its initial release. It’s a stick that Microsoft is using to push upgrades to the newer Windows 11, whether you install it on a PC you already have or buy a brand-new PC to meet Windows 11’s system requirements. But if you can’t or don’t want to upgrade…