An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: A Senate report released (PDF) Monday says AI and automation could replace nearly 100 million jobs across various industries over the next decade. The report, conducted by Democratic staffers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), outlines how AI and automation will impact the American economy and workforce. Sanders, the ranking member on the HELP Committee, has warned of the consequences widespread use of AI and automation can have for workers.

As part of their investigation, staffers asked ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot, to predict the impact of AI and automation on certain industries. Of the 20 workforces ChatGPT said would be most affected by the technological rush, 15 will see more than half of their workforces replaced by AI and automation over the next decade. The workforce most impacted will be fast food and counter employees. According to the report, more than 3 million fast food and counter workers will be replaced over the next 10 years, accounting for 89 percent of the workforce.

Other workforces that will be significantly affected include customer service representatives, laborers and freight, stock and material movers and secretaries and executive assistants -- not including legal, medical and executive positions. The report said that 83 percent, 81 percent and 80 percent of those workforces, respectively, will be replaced in the next decade. [...] Sanders, in a Fox News op-ed published Monday, doubled down on the report's findings, saying increased technological capacity risks "dehumanizing" individuals. "We do not simply need a more 'efficient' society," Sanders said. "We need a world where people live healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives."

Microsoft is eliminating all known workarounds that let users install Windows 11 without an internet connection or Microsoft account, forcing everyone through the online setup process. The Verge reports: "We are removing known mechanisms for creating a local account in the Windows Setup experience (OOBE)," says Amanda Langowski, the lead for the Windows Insider Program. "While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use."

The changes mean Windows 11 users will need to complete the OOBE screens with an internet connection and Microsoft account in future versions of the OS. Microsoft already removed the "bypassnro" workaround earlier this year, and today's changes also disable the "start ms-cxh:localonly" command that Windows 11 users discovered after Microsoft's previous changes. Using this command now resets the OOBE process and it fails to bypass the Microsoft account requirement.

Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Apple's hardware chief John Ternus is the frontrunner to replace Tim Cook as CEO, as Cook nears retirement and prepares to transition into a board chairman role. The Economic Times reports: Cook is turning 65 next month. Chief operating officer John Williams -- once heir apparent -- has handed over the reins of day-to-day operations to Sabih Khan and is on his way out. Even as Cook steps down as CEO, he will stay involved in some capacity, likely as board chairman. [...]

While Khan and Apple's retail chief Deirdre O'Brien can run daily operations, Ternus remains the leading contender for the corner office after Cook, Gurman said. Firstly, he is 50 years old -- the same as Cook when he became CEO -- giving him over a decade to hold the office, he noted. Secondly, Apple needs a technologist instead of a sales person at the helm, considering the company's ambitions, Gurman wrote in the newsletter. While the Cupertino tech giant has managed to expand its homegrown line of chipsets, and the recently launched iPhone 17 lineup is drawing in customers, the company has struggled to find success in categories such as mixed reality, generative artificial intelligence (AI), smart homes and autonomous driving.

Ternus was in the spotlight during Apple's annual hardware event in September, which saw the launch of the iPhone 17 Air, the first major design overhaul for the smartphone family in a long time. Over the years, he has gained more responsibilities under Cook, taking calls on product roadmaps, features and strategies, overseeing matters beyond the traditional scope of a hardware engineering chief, Gurman said.

European labor regulations enacted nearly a century ago now impose costs on companies that discourage investment in disruptive technologies. An American firm shedding workers incurs costs equivalent to seven months of wages per employee. In Germany the figure reaches 31 months. In France it reaches 38 months. The expense extends beyond severance pay and union negotiations. Companies retain unproductive workers they would prefer to dismiss.

New investments face delays of years as dismissed employees are gradually replaced. Olivier Coste, a former EU official turned tech entrepreneur, and economist Yann Coatanlem tracked these opaque restructuring costs and found that European firms avoid risky ventures because of them. Large companies typically finance ten risky projects where eight fail and require mass redundancies. Apple developed a self-driving car for years before abandoning the effort and firing 600 employees in 2024. The two successful projects generate profits worth many times the invested sums. This calculus works in America where failure costs remain low. In Europe the same bet becomes financially unviable.

European blue-chip firms sell products that are improved versions of what they sold in the 20th century -- turbines, shampoos, vaccines, jetliners. American star firms peddle AI chatbots, cloud computers, reusable rockets. Nvidia is worth more than the European Union's 20 biggest listed firms combined. Microsoft, Google, and Meta each fired over 10,000 staff in recent years despite thriving businesses. Satya Nadella called firing people during success the "enigma of success." Bosch and Volkswagen recently announced layoffs with timelines stretching to 2030.

Vibe coding tools "are transforming the job experience for many tech workers," writes the Los Angeles Times. But Gartner analyst Philip Walsh said the research firm's position is that AI won't replace software engineers and will actually create a need for more. "There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it," Walsh said. "So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it..." The idea that non-technical people in an organization can "vibe-code" business-ready software is a misunderstanding [Walsh said]... "That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there," Walsh said. "These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like."
"Economists, however, are also beginning to worry that AI is taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to young or entry-level workers," the article points out. "In a report last month, researchers at Stanford University found "substantial declines in employment for early-career workers'' — ages 22-25 — in fields most exposed to AI. Stanford researchers also found that AI tools by 2024 were able to solve nearly 72% of coding problems, up from just over 4% a year earlier."

And yet Cat Wu, project manager of Anthropic's Claude Code, doesn't even use the term vibe coding. "We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers." Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying. "When I talk with her about this, I tell her AI will make you a lot faster, but it's still really important to understand the building blocks because the AI doesn't always make the right decisions," Wu said. "A lot of times the human intuition is really important."

"A group of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a way to use the sensors in high-quality optical mice to capture subtle vibrations and convert them into audible data," reports Tom's Hardware: [T]he high polling rate and sensitivity of high-performance optical mice pick up acoustic vibrations from the surface where they sit. By running the raw data through signal processing and machine learning techniques, the team could hear what the user was saying through their desk. Mouse sensors with a 20,000 DPI or higher are vulnerable to this attack. And with the best gaming mice becoming more affordable annually, even relatively affordable peripherals are at risk....

[T]his compromise does not necessarily mean a complicated virus installed through a backdoor — it can be as simple as an infected FOSS that requires high-frequency mouse data, like creative apps or video games. This means it's not unusual for the software to gather this data. From there, the collected raw data can be extracted from the target computer and processed off-site. "With only a vulnerable mouse, and a victim's computer running compromised or even benign software (in the case of a web-based attack surface), we show that it is possible to collect mouse packet data and extract audio waveforms," the researchers state.
The researchers created a video with raw audio samples from various stages in their pipeline on an accompanying web site where they calculate that "the majority of human speech" falls in a frequency range detectable by their pipeline. While the collected signal "is low-quality and suffers from non-uniform sampling, a non-linear frequency response, and extreme quantization," the researchers augment it with "successive signal processing and machine learning techniques to overcome these challenges and achieve intelligible reconstruction of user speech."

They've titled their paper Invisible Ears at Your Fingertips: Acoustic Eavesdropping via Mouse Sensors. The paper's conclusion? "The increasing precision of optical mouse sensors has enhanced user interface performance but also made them vulnerable to side-channel attacks exploiting their sensitivity."

Thanks to Slashdot reader jjslash for sharing the article.

"More than 800,000 drivers for ride-hailing companies in California will soon be able to join a union," reports the Associated Press, "and bargain collectively for better wages and benefits under a measure signed Friday by Gov. Gavin Newsom." Supporters said the new law will open a path for the largest expansion of private sector collective bargaining rights in the state's history. The legislation is a significant compromise in the yearslong battle between labor unions and tech companies.

California is the second state where Uber and Lyft drivers can unionize as independent contractors. Massachusetts voters passed a ballot referendum in November allowing unionization, while drivers in Illinois and Minnesota are pushing for similar rights...

The collective bargaining measure now allows rideshare workers in California to join a union while still being classified as independent contractors and requires gig companies to bargain in good faith.
"The new law doesn't apply to drivers for delivery apps like DoorDash."

"It's not just you. The internet is getting worse, fast," writes Cory Doctorow. Sunday he shared an excerpt from his upcoming book Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

He succinctly explains "this moment we're living through, this Great Enshittening" using Amazon as an example. Platforms amass users, but then abuse them to make things better for their business customers. And then they abuse those business customers too, abusing everybody while claiming all the value for themselves. "And become a giant pile of shit."

So first Amazon subsidized prices and shipping, then locked in customers with Prime shipping subscriptions (while adding the chains of DRM to its ebooks and audiobooks)... These tactics — Prime, DRM and predatory pricing — make it very hard not to shop at Amazon. With users locked in, to proceed with the enshittification playbook, Amazon needed to get its business customers locked in, too... [M]erchants' dependence on those customers allows Amazon to extract higher discounts from those merchants, and that brings in more users, which makes the platform even more indispensable for merchants, allowing the company to require even deeper discounts...

[Amazon] uses its overview of merchants' sales, as well as its ability to observe the return addresses on direct shipments from merchants' contracting factories, to cream off its merchants' bestselling items and clone them, relegating the original seller to page umpty-million of its search results. Amazon also crushes its merchants under a mountain of junk fees pitched as optional but effectively mandatory. Take Prime: a merchant has to give up a huge share of each sale to be included in Prime, and merchants that don't use Prime are pushed so far down in the search results, they might as well cease to exist. Same with Fulfilment by Amazon, a "service" in which a merchant sends its items to an Amazon warehouse to be packed and delivered with Amazon's own inventory. This is far more expensive than comparable (or superior) shipping services from rival logistics companies, and a merchant that ships through one of those rivals is, again, relegated even farther down the search rankings.

All told, Amazon makes so much money charging merchants to deliver the wares they sell through the platform that its own shipping is fully subsidised. In other words, Amazon gouges its merchants so much that it pays nothing to ship its own goods, which compete directly with those merchants' goods.... Add all the junk fees together and an Amazon seller is being screwed out of 45-51 cents on every dollar it earns there. Even if it wanted to absorb the "Amazon tax" on your behalf, it couldn't. Merchants just don't make 51% margins. So merchants must jack up prices, which they do. A lot... [W]hen merchants raise their prices on Amazon, they are required to raise their prices everywhere else, even on their own direct-sales stores. This arrangement is called most-favoured-nation status, and it's key to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon...

If Amazon is taxing merchants 45-51 cents on every dollar they make, and if merchants are hiking their prices everywhere their goods are sold, then it follows you're paying the Amazon tax no matter where you shop — even the corner mom-and-pop hardware store. It gets worse. On average, the first result in an Amazon search is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. Click any of the top four links on the top of your screen and you'll pay an average of 25% more than you would for your best match — which, on average, is located 17 places down in an Amazon search result.
Doctorow knows what we need to do:

• Ban predatory pricing — "selling goods below cost to keep competitors out of the market (and then jacking them up again)."

• Impose structural separation, "so it can either be a platform, or compete with the sellers that rely on it as a platform."

• Curb junk fees, "which suck 45-51 cents on every dollar merchants take in."

• End its most favoured nation deal, which forces merchants "to raise their prices everywhere else, too.

• Unionise drivers and warehouse workers.

• Treat rigged search results as the fraud they are.

These are policy solutions. (Because "You can't shop your way out of a monopoly," Doctorow warns.) And otherwise, as Doctorow says earlier, "Once a company is too big to fail, it becomes too big to jail, and then too big to care."

In the mean time, Doctorow also makes up a new word — "the enshitternet" — calling it "a source of pain, precarity and immiseration for the people we love.

"The indignities of harassment, scams, disinformation, surveillance, wage theft, extraction and rent-seeking have always been with us, but they were a minor sideshow on the old, good internet and they are the everything and all of the enshitternet."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot readers mspohr and fjo3 for sharing the article.

The Washington Post notes AI's "increasingly outsize role" in propping up America's economic fortunes.

"Last week, the United States reported that the economy expanded at a rate of 1.6 percent in the first half of the year, with most of that growth driven by AI spending. Without AI investment, growth would have been at about a third of that rate, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis." The huge economic influence of AI spending illustrates how Silicon Valley is placing a bet of unprecedented scale that the technology will revolutionize every aspect of life and work. Its sway suggests there will be economic damage far beyond Silicon Valley if that bet doesn't work out or companies pull back. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are on track to spend nearly $400 billion this year on data centers...

Concern about a potential bubble in AI investment has recently grown in technology and financial circles. ChatGPT and other AI tools are hugely popular with companies and consumers, and hundreds of billions of dollars has been sunk into AI ventures over the past three years. But few of the new initiatives are profitable, and huge profits will be needed for the immense investments to pay off... "I'm getting more and more skeptical and more and more concerned with what's happening" with artificial intelligence, said Andrew Odlyzko, an economic historian and University of Minnesota emeritus professor who has studied financial bubbles closely, including the telecom bubble that collapsed in 2001 as part of the dot-com crash. Some industry insiders have expressed concern that the latest AI releases have fallen short of expectations, suggesting the technology may not advance enough to pay back the huge investments being made, he said. "AI is a craze," Odlyzko said...

[The Federal Reserve's August "beige book" summarizes interviews with business owners across the country, according to the article — and it found surging investments in AI data centers, which could tie their fortunes to other sectors.] That's boosting demand for electricity and trucking in the Atlanta region, a hot spot for the facilities, and creating new projects for commercial real estate developers in the Philadelphia region. Because tech companies now dominate public markets, any change in their fortunes and share prices can also have a powerful influence on stock indexes, 401(k)s and the wider economy... Stock market slumps can have knock-on effects by undercutting the confidence of American businesses and consumers, leading them to spend less, said Gregory Daco [chief economist at strategy consulting firm EY-Parthenon]... "That directly affects economic activity," he said, potentially widening the economic fallout...

Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a Sept. 4 note to clients that even if AI investment works out for companies like Google, there will be an "inevitable slowdown" in data center construction. That will cut revenue to companies providing the projects with chips and electricity, the note said. In a more extreme scenario where Big Tech pulls back spending to 2022 levels, the entire S&P 500 would lose 30 percent of the revenue growth Wall Street currently expects next year, the analysts wrote.
The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, according to estimates in a recent note from independent research firm the MacroStrategy Partnership (as reported by MarketWatch).

And "never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains somewhat unproven as a profit-making business model," writes Bloomberg, adding that OpenAI and other large tech companies are "relying increasingly on debt to support their unprecedented spending." (Although Bloomberg also notes that ChatGPT alone has roughly 700 million weekly users, and that last month Anthropic reported roughly three quarters of companies are using Claude to automate work.)

From 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. today (EDT), the Free Software Foundation celebrates its 40th anniversary with an online and in-person event. "We will broadcast the talks and workshops via a fully free software livestream on fsf.org/live," according to the FSF's official "FSF40 Celebration" page. "Everyone will be able to join the discussion via the #fsf40 IRC channel on Libera.Chat."

"4 decades, 4 freedoms, 4 all users" is the event's slogan.

And during the ceremony, a 40th-anniversary cake was sliced by newly-elected FSF president Ian Kelling (who was unanimously confirmed by FSF board members): Kelling, age 43, has held the role of a board member and a voting member since March 2021. The board said of Kelling's confirmation: "His hands-on technical experience resulting from his position as the organization's senior systems administrator proved invaluable for his work on the board of directors... He has the technical knowledge to speak with authority on most free software issues, and he has a strong connection with the community as an active speaker and blogger."

Kelling earned a bachelor's degree in computer science and is a continuous user, developer, and advocate for free software. His personal commitment to complete software freedom has been shaped by his past experiences working as a software developer for proprietary software companies while using, learning, and contributing to GNU/Linux on his own time.

"Ian has shown good judgment on the board, and a firm commitment to the free software movement," FSF founder and Chief GNUisance Richard Stallman said. Outgoing FSF President and long-time board member Geoff Knauth added: "Since joining the board in 2021, Ian has shown a clear understanding of the free software philosophy in today's technology, and a strong vision. He recognizes threats in upcoming technologies, promotes transparency, has played a significant role in designing and implementing the new board recruitment processes, and has always adhered to ethical principles. He has also given me valuable advice at critical moments, for which I am very grateful..."

Kelling will continue to fill the role of senior systems administrator for the FSF, which he has held since 2017, where he leads the FSF's tech team under the direction of Zoë Kooyman, executive director of the FSF. True to the FSF's tradition for this role, he takes on the governance role as a volunteer.
Upcoming on the livestream:

• Free Software Foundation trivia
• LibreLocal group lightning talks
• A panel with the FSF, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) , F-Droid, and Sugar Labs

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: CBS News has a TL;DR video report, but Jeremy Stern's earlier epic Class Dismissed [at Collosus.com] offers a deep dive into Alpha School, "the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day.

Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to "mastery-level" (i.e., scoring over 90%) in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in 'workshops,' learning things like how to run an Airbnb or food truck, manage a brokerage account or Broadway production, or build a business or drone."

Founder MacKenzie Larson's dream that "kids must love school so much they don't want to go on vacation" drew the attention of — and investments of money and time from — mysterious tech billionaire Joe Liemandt, who sent his own kids to Larson's school and now aims to bring the experience to rest of the world. "When GenAI hit in 2022," Liemandt said, "I took a billion dollars out of my software company. I said, 'Okay, we're going to be able to take MacKenzie's 2x in 2 hours groundwork and get it out to a billion kids.' It's going to cost more than that, but I could start to figure it out. It's going to happen. There's going to be a tablet that costs less than $1,000 that is going to teach every kid on this planet everything they need to know in two hours a day and they're going to love it.

"I really do think we can transform education for everybody in the world. So that's my next 20 years. I literally wake up now and I'm like, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I will work 7 by 24 for the next 20 years to fricking do this. The greatest 20 years of my life are right ahead of me. I don't think I'm going to lose. We're going to win."

Of course, Stern writes at Collosus.com, there will be questions about this model of schooling, but asks: "Suppose that from kindergarten through 12th grade, your child's teachers were, in essence, stacks of machines. Suppose those machines unlocked more of your child's academic potential than you knew was possible, and made them love school. Suppose the schooling they loved involved vision monitoring and personal data capture. Suppose that surveillance architecture enabled them to outperform your wildest expectations on standardized tests, and in turn gave them self-confidence and self-esteem, and made their own innate potential seem limitless.... Suppose poor kids had a reason to believe and a way to show they're just as academically capable as rich kids, and that every student on Earth could test in what we now consider the top 10%. Suppose it allowed them to spend two-thirds of their school day on their own interests and passions. Suppose your child's deep love of school minted a new class of education billionaires.

"If you shrink from such a future, by which principle would you justify stifling it?"

The food delivery robots that arrived in Atlanta in June "are not our friends," argues a headline at CNN.

The four-wheeled Serve Robotics machines "get confused at crosswalks. They move with the speed and caution of a first-time driver, stilted and shy, until they suddenly speed up without warning. Their four wheels look like they were made for off-roading, but they still get stuck in the cracks of craggy sidewalks. Most times I see the bots, they aren't moving at all... " Cyclists swerve to avoid them like any other obstacle in the road. Patrons of Shake Shack (a national partner of Serve) weave around the mess of robots parked in front of the restaurant to make their way inside and place orders on iPads... The dawn of everyday, "friendly" robots may be here, but they haven't proven themselves useful — or trustworthy — yet. "People think they are your friends, but they're actually cameras and microphones of corporations," said Joanna Bryson, a longtime AI scholar and professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. "You're right to be nervous..."

When robots show up in a city, it's often not because the residents of said city actively wanted them there or had a say in their arrival said Edward Ongweso Jr. [a researcher at the Security in Context initiative, a tech journalist and self-proclaimed "decelerationist" urging a slower rollout for Silicon Valley tech pioneers and civic leaders embracing untested and unregulated technology]... "They're being rolled out without any sort of input from people, and as a result, in ways that are annoying and inconvenient," Ongweso Jr. said. "I suspect that people would feel a lot differently if they had a choice ... 'what kind of robots are we interested in rolling out in our homes, in our workplaces, on our college campuses or in our communities?'"

Delivery robots aren't unique to Atlanta. AI-driven companies including Avride and Coco Robotics have sent fleets of delivery robots to big cities like Chicago, Dallas and Jersey City, as well as sleepy college towns... "They're popping up everywhere," Ongweso Jr. continued, "because there's sort of a realization that you have to convince people to view them as inevitable. The way to do that is to just push it into as many places as possible, and have these spectacle demonstrations, get some friendly coverage, try to figure out the ways in which you're selling this as the only alternative.... If you humanize it, you're more willing to entertain it and rationalize it being in your area — 'That's just Jeffrey,' or whatever they name it — instead of seeing it for what it is, which is a bunch of investors privately encroaching on a community or workplace," Ongweso Jr. said. "It's not the future. It's a business model."
Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani told CNN their goal in Atlanta was reducing traffic — and that the robots' average delivery distance there was under a mile, taking about 18 minutes per delivery.

Serve Robotics has also launched their robots in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, according to the site Robotics 247, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Uber Eats. (Although after the robots launched in Los Angeles, a man in a mobility scooter complained the slow-moving robot swerved in front of him.) And "residents of other cities have had to rescue them when they've been felled by weather," reports CNN.

CNN also spoke to Dylan Losey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech who studies human-robot interaction, who notes that the robots' AI algorithms are "completely unregulated... We don't know if a third party has checked the hardware and software and deemed the system 'safe' — in part because what it means for these systems to be 'safe' is not fully understood or standardized." (CNN's reporter adds that "the last time I got close to a bot, to peer down at a flier someone left on top of it, it revved at me loudly. Perhaps they can sense a hater.")

But Serve's CEO says there's one crucial way robot delivery will be cheaper than humans. "You don't have to tip the robots."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is bringing its AI coding agent Jules deeper into developer workflows with a new command-line interface and public API, allowing it to plug into terminals, CI/CD systems, and tools like Slack -- as competition intensifies among tech companies to own the future of software development and make coding more of an AI-assisted task.

Until now, Jules -- Google's asynchronous coding agent -- was only accessible via its website and GitHub. On Thursday, the company introduced Jules Tools, a command-line interface that brings Jules directly into the developer's terminal. The CLI lets developers interact with the agent using commands, streamlining workflows by eliminating the need to switch between the web interface and GitHub. It allows them to stay within their environment while delegating coding tasks and validating results. "We want to reduce context switching for developers as much as possible," Kathy Korevec, director of product at Google Labs, told TechCrunch.

Jules differs from Gemini CLI in that it focuses on "scoped," independent tasks rather than requiring iterative collaboration. Once a user approves a plan, Jules executes it autonomously, while the CLI needs more step-by-step guidance. Jules also has a public API for workflow and IDE integration, plus features like memory, a stacked diff viewer, PR comment handling, and image uploads -- capabilities not present in the CLI. Gemini CLI is limited to terminals and CI/CD pipelines and is better suited for exploratory, highly interactive use.

OpenAI's valuation has surged to $500 billion after a $6.6 billion secondary stock sale, briefly making it the world's most valuable startup ahead of SpaceX and ByteDance. The Associated Press reports: Current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors, pushing the privately held artificial intelligence company's valuation to $500 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. The investors buying the shares included Thrive Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group and T. Rowe Price, along with Japanese tech giant SoftBank and the United Arab Emirates' MGX, the source said Thursday.

The valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology and continues OpenAI's remarkable trajectory from its start as a nonprofit research lab in 2015. But with the San Francisco-based company not yet turning a profit, it could also amplify concerns about an AI bubble if the generative AI products made by OpenAI and its competitors don't meet the expectations of investors pouring billions of dollars into research and development.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As we careen toward a future in which Google has final say over what apps you can run, the company has sought to assuage the community's fears with a blog post and a casual "backstage" video. Google has said again and again since announcing the change that sideloading isn't going anywhere, but it's definitely not going to be as easy. The new information confirms app installs will be more reliant on the cloud, and devs can expect new fees, but there will be an escape hatch for hobbyists.

Confirming app verification status will be the job of a new system component called the Android Developer Verifier, which will be rolled out to devices in the next major release of Android 16. Google explains that phones must ensure each app has a package name and signing keys that have been registered with Google at the time of installation. This process may break the popular FOSS storefront F-Droid. It would be impossible for your phone to carry a database of all verified apps, so this process may require Internet access. Google plans to have a local cache of the most common sideloaded apps on devices, but for anything else, an Internet connection is required. Google suggests alternative app stores will be able to use a pre-auth token to bypass network calls, but it's still deciding how that will work.

The financial arrangement has been murky since the initial announcement, but it's getting clearer. Even though Google's largely automated verification process has been described as simple, it's still going to cost developers money. The verification process will mirror the current Google Play registration fee of $25, which Google claims will go to cover administrative costs. So anyone wishing to distribute an app on Android outside of Google's ecosystem has to pay Google to do so. What if you don't need to distribute apps widely? This is the one piece of good news as developer verification takes shape. Google will let hobbyists and students sign up with only an email for a lesser tier of verification. This won't cost anything, but there will be an unclear limit on how many times these apps can be installed. The team in the video strongly encourages everyone to go through the full verification process (and pay Google for the privilege). We've asked Google for more specifics here.