An anonymous reader shares a report: India's blueprint for displacing China as the world's electronics workshop contains a rather extraordinary feature: the entire Indian edifice requires Chinese companies to supply the technical architecture, manufacturing know-how and operational templates that would make such displacement theoretically possible.

Let's start with Dixon Technologies, India's flagship domestic electronics manufacturer. The company has systematically built indigenous capability through a growing constellation of Chinese partnerships: Longcheer provides the design intelligence, Kunshan Q-Tech delivers camera module expertise, Chongqing Yuhai supplies precision-molded components and HKC brings display technology. This pattern of structured dependence has become the organizing principle of India's electronics manufacturing push.

[...] The current architecture sees Chinese companies retain control of the critical knowledge while their Indian partners provide labour arbitrage and regulatory navigation. Under this arrangement, India isn't constructing an alternative to Chinese manufacturing so much as establishing Chinese manufacturing's most elaborate subsidiary operation, underwritten by Indian taxpayers and marketed as national renewal. Many countries, but most importantly India and Vietnam, have worked hard in recent years to attract businesses that decided to diversify away from China, a strategy analysts have dubbed as "China Plus One."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Boston Public Library, one of the oldest and largest public library systems in the country, is launching a project this summer with OpenAI and Harvard Law School to make its trove of historically significant government documents more accessible to the public. The documents date back to the early 1800s and include oral histories, congressional reports and surveys of different industries and communities. "It really is an incredible repository of primary source materials covering the whole history of the United States as it has been expressed through government publications," said Jessica Chapel, the Boston Public Library's chief of digital and online services. Currently, members of the public who want to access these documents must show up in person. The project will enhance the metadata of each document and will enable users to search and cross-reference entire texts from anywhere in the world. Chapel said Boston Public Library plans to digitize 5,000 documents by the end of the year, and if all goes well, grow the project from there. Because of this historic collection's massive size and fragility, getting to this goal is a daunting process. Every item has to be run through a scanner by hand. It takes about an hour to do 300-400 pages.

Harvard University said it could help. Researchers at the Harvard Law School Library's Institutional Data Initiative are working with libraries, museums and archives on a number of fronts, including training new AI models to help libraries enhance the searchability of their collections. AI companies help fund these efforts, and in return get to train their large language models on high-quality materials that are out of copyright and therefore less likely to lead to lawsuits. "Having information institutions like libraries involved in building a sustainable data ecosystem for AI is critical, because it not just improves the amount of data we have available, it improves the quality of the data and our understanding of what's in it," said Burton Davis, vice president of Microsoft's intellectual property group. [...] OpenAI is helping Boston Public Library cover such costs as scanning and project management. The tech company does not have exclusive rights to the digitized data.

IBM and Google report they will build industrial-scale quantum computers containing one million or more qubits by 2030, following IBM's June publication of a quantum computer blueprint addressing previous design gaps and Google's late-2023 breakthrough in scaling error correction.

Current experimental systems contain fewer than 200 qubits. IBM encountered crosstalk interference when scaling its Condor chip to 433 qubits and subsequently adopted low-density parity-check code requiring 90% fewer qubits than Google's surface code method, though this requires longer connections between distant qubits.

Google plans to reduce component costs tenfold to achieve its $1 billion target price for a full-scale machine. Amazon Web Services quantum hardware executive Oskar Painter told FT he estimates useful quantum computers remain 15-30 years away, citing engineering challenges in scaling despite resolved fundamental physics problems.

Microsoft has compiled a spreadsheet of Meta AI employees by name, location and position as part of an aggressive recruiting push to sustain its AI-driven march toward a $4 trillion market valuation, according to internal documents viewed by Business Insider. The company created a "critical AI talent" designation enabling top offers within 24 hours and mandated matching Meta's compensation packages, which OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says reach $100 million signing bonuses and recently hit $250 million total packages.

Microsoft AI under Mustafa Suleyman and CoreAI under ex-Meta engineering boss Jay Parikh have deployed special recruiting teams making multimillion-dollar offers with multimillion-dollar on-hire bonuses, while the company maintains flat headcount after cutting thousands of employees this year.

AI startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to purchase Google's Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant's web-search dominance. From a report: Perplexity's offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion. The company told The Wall Street Journal that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full.

Estimates of Chrome's enterprise value vary widely but recent ones have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is weighing whether to force Google to sell the browser as a means of weakening Google's stranglehold on web search. Mehta last year ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market and is expected to rule this month on how to restore competition.

Spirit Airlines has warned investors that it may go out of business, just months after exiting bankruptcy. From a report: In a quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, it said there was "substantial doubt" over its "ability to continue as a going concern within 12 months." The budget airline said it was harder to make money because of weak demand for domestic leisure travel and "elevated domestic capacity," meaning increased competition on such routes. Spirit reported a net loss of $245.8 million for the second quarter of 2025, up from a $192.9 million loss for the second quarter of 2024.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In recent months, the AI industry has started moving toward so-called simulated reasoning models that use a "chain of thought" process to work through tricky problems in multiple logical steps. At the same time, recent research has cast doubt on whether those models have even a basic understanding of general logical concepts or an accurate grasp of their own "thought process." Similar research shows that these "reasoning" models can often produce incoherent, logically unsound answers when questions include irrelevant clauses or deviate even slightly from common templates found in their training data.

In a recent pre-print paper, researchers from the University of Arizona summarize this existing work as "suggest[ing] that LLMs are not principled reasoners but rather sophisticated simulators of reasoning-like text." To pull on that thread, the researchers created a carefully controlled LLM environment in an attempt to measure just how well chain-of-thought reasoning works when presented with "out of domain" logical problems that don't match the specific logical patterns found in their training data. The results suggest that the seemingly large performance leaps made by chain-of-thought models are "largely a brittle mirage" that "become[s] fragile and prone to failure even under moderate distribution shifts," the researchers write. "Rather than demonstrating a true understanding of text, CoT reasoning under task transformations appears to reflect a replication of patterns learned during training." [...]

Rather than showing the capability for generalized logical inference, these chain-of-thought models are "a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching" that "degrades significantly" when pushed even slightly outside of its training distribution, the researchers write. Further, the ability of these models to generate "fluent nonsense" creates "a false aura of dependability" that does not stand up to a careful audit. As such, the researchers warn heavily against "equating [chain-of-thought]-style output with human thinking" especially in "high-stakes domains like medicine, finance, or legal analysis." Current tests and benchmarks should prioritize tasks that fall outside of any training set to probe for these kinds of errors, while future models will need to move beyond "surface-level pattern recognition to exhibit deeper inferential competence," they write.

Legal scholar Victoria Haneman argues that U.S. law should grant estates a time-limited right to delete a deceased person's data so they can't be recreated by AI without their consent. "Digital resurrection by or through AI requires the personal data of the deceased, and the amount of data that we are storing online is increasing exponentially with each passing year," writes Haneman in an article published earlier this year in the Boston College Law Review. "It has been said that data is the new uranium, extraordinarily valuable and potentially dangerous. A right to delete will provide the decedent with a time-limited right for deletion of personal data." The Register reports: A living person may have some say on the matter through the control of personal digital documents and correspondence. But a dead person can't object, and US law doesn't offer the dead much data protection in terms of privacy law, property law, intellectual property law, or criminal law. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a law developed to help fiduciaries deal with digital files of the dead or incapacitated, can come into play. But Haneman points out that most people die intestate (without a will), leaving matters up to tech platforms. Facebook's response to dead users is to allow anyone to request the memorialization of an account, which keeps posts online. As for RUFADAA, it does little to address digital resurrection, says Haneman.

The right to publicity, which provides a private right of action against unauthorized commercial use of a person's name, image, or likeness, covers the dead in about 25 states, according to Haneman. But the monetization of publicity rights has proven to be problematic. Haneman says that there are some states where it's theoretically possible to be prosecuted for libeling or defaming the deceased, such as Idaho, Nevada, and Oklahoma, but adds that such prosecutions have declined because they tread upon the constitutional right to free expression. [...] A recent California law, the Delete Act, which took effect last year, is the first to offer a way for the living to demand the deletion of personal data from data brokers in one step. But according to Haneman, it's unclear whether the text of the law will be extended to cover the dead -- a possibility think tank Aspen Tech Policy Hub supports [PDF].

Haneman argues that a data deletion law for the dead would be grounded in laws governing human remains, where corpses receive protection against abuse despite being neither a person nor property. "The personal representative of the decedent has the right to destroy all physical letters and photographs saved by the decedent; merely storing personal information in the cloud should not grant societal archival rights," she argues. "A limited right of deletion within a twelve-month window balances the interests of society against the rights of the deceased."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Seeking Alpha: General Motors is reviving its autonomous driving program, tapping former Cruise employees to help design a driverless car for consumers. Under the helm of former Tesla autopilot head Sterling Anderson, GM is moving ahead with a driverless, eyes-free, vehicle with the ultimate goal of developing a car without a person at the wheel, according to a meeting between Anderson and employees revealed to Bloomberg. Anderson reportedly said plans include rehiring Cruise employees, and adding staff at GM's Mountain View, California office.

Currently, LiDAR-equipped vehicles are collecting data on public roads for the development of GM's driverless vehicles, GM spokesperson Chaiti Sen told Bloomberg, with the goal of building simulation models that will guide development. GM (GM) shuttered its majority-owned, money-losing, Cruise robotaxi business late last year and let go of ~1,000 Cruise employees, after a pedestrian accident led to the grounding of its entire fleet and regulatory scrutiny. At the time, the company said it was pivoting away from robotaxis to the development of hands-free driving for personal vehicles.

Prosus has secured conditional approval from the European Union for its $4.8âbillion (4.1 billion euros) acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway, after agreeing to sell down its 27.4% stake in Delivery Hero. Reuters reports: Amsterdam-headquartered Prosus, which is majority owned by South Africa's Naspers, announced the deal in February, banking on its artificial intelligence capability to boost Just Eat Takeaway, Europe's biggest meal delivery company. The European Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, said Naspers offered to significantly reduce its 27.4% stake in Delivery Hero to below a specified very low percentage within 12 months.

Naspers also pledged not to exercise the voting rights with its remaining limited stake in Delivery Hero and also not to increase its stake beyond the specified maximum level. It will not recommend or propose any person to Delivery Hero's management and supervisory boards. Prosus said the EU decision was the final regulatory approval needed to close the offer which ends on October 1 and that if all offer conditions including the acceptance threshold for the deal are met by that date, it will declare its offer unconditional within three business days. "Our ambition is clear: to build a true European tech champion and lead the next chapter in food delivery innovation," Prosus CEO Fabricio Bloisi said in a statement.

"This decision also sends a clear warning to an industry with recent antitrust issues: we won't tolerate any anti-competitive behaviour that may harm consumers," she said.

After the deal is complete, Prosus will become the world's fourth-largest food delivery company after Meituan, DoorDash, and Uber.

In an unusual arrangement to secure export licenses, Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the U.S. government 15% of revenue from certain chip sales to China. The Associated Press reports: The Trump administration halted the sale of advanced computer chips to China in April over national security concerns, but Nvidia and AMD revealed in July that Washington would allow them to resume sales of the H20 and MI308 chips, which are used in artificial intelligence development. President Trump confirmed the terms of the unusual arrangement in a Monday press conference while noting that he originally wanted 20% of the sales revenue when Nvidia asked to sell the "obsolete" H20 chip to China. The president credited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for negotiating him down to 15%. "So we negotiated a little deal. So he's selling a essentially old chip," Trump said.

Nvidia did not comment about the specific details of the agreement or its quid pro quo nature, but said they would adhere to the export rules laid out by the administration. "We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets. While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide," Nvidia wrote in a statement to the AP. "America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America's AI tech stack can be the world's standard if we race."

Former NSA and Cyber Command chief Paul Nakasone told the Defcon security conference this month that technology companies will find it "very, very difficult" to remain neutral through 2025 and 2026.

Speaking with Defcon founder Jeff Moss in Las Vegas, Nakasone, now an OpenAI board member, addressed the intersection of technology and politics following the Trump administration's removal of cybersecurity officials deemed disloyal and revocation of security clearances for former CISA directors Chris Krebs and Jen Easterly. Nakasone also called ransomware "among the great scourges that we have in our country," stating the U.S. is "not making progress against ransomware."

theodp writes: The New York Times reports from the CS grad job-seeking trenches: Growing up near Silicon Valley, Manasi Mishra remembers seeing tech executives on social media urging students to study computer programming. "The rhetoric was, if you just learned to code, work hard and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary," Ms. Mishra, now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, Calif.

Those golden industry promises helped spur Ms. Mishra to code her first website in elementary school, take advanced computing in high school and major in computer science in college. But after a year of hunting for tech jobs and internships, Ms. Mishra graduated from Purdue University in May without an offer. "I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle," Ms. Mishra said in a get-ready-with-me TikTok video this summer that has since racked up more than 147,000 views.

Some graduates described feeling caught in an A.I. "doom loop." Many job seekers now use specialized A.I. tools like Simplify to tailor their resumes to specific jobs and autofill application forms, enabling them to quickly apply to many jobs. At the same time, companies inundated with applicants are using A.I. systems to automatically scan resumes and reject candidates.

Imagine this. Lightning sparks a wildfire, but "within seconds, a satellite dish swirling overhead picks up on the anomaly and triggers an alarm," writes the Los Angeles Times. "An autonomous helicopter takes flight and zooms toward the fire, using sensors to locate the blaze and AI to generate a plan of attack. It measures the wind speed and fire movement, communicating constantly with the unmanned helicopter behind it, and the one behind that. Once over the site, it drops a load of water and soon the flames are smoldering. Without deploying a single human, the fire never grows larger than 10 square feet.

"This is the future of firefighting." On a recent morning in San Bernardino, state and local fire experts gathered for a demonstration of the early iterations of this new reality. An autonomous Sikorski Black Hawk helicopter, powered by technology from Lockheed Martin and a California-based software company called Rain, is on display on the tarmac of a logistics airport in Victorville — the word "EXPERIMENTAL" painted on its military green-black door. It's one of many new tools on the front lines of firefighting technology, which experts say is evolving rapidly as private industry and government agencies come face-to-face with a worsening global climate crisis...

Scientific studies and climate research models have found that the number of extreme fires could increase by as much as 30% globally by 2050. By 2100, California alone could see a 50% increase in wildfire frequency and a 77% increase in average annual acres burned, according to the state's most recent climate report. That's largely because human-caused climate change is driving up temperatures and drying out the landscape, priming it to burn, according to Kate Dargan Marquis, a senior advisor with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who served as California's state fire marshal from 2007 to 2010.... "[T]he policies of today and the technologies of today are not going to serve us tomorrow."

Today, more than 1,100 mountaintop cameras positioned across California are already using artificial intelligence to scan the landscape for the first sign of flames and prompt crews to spring into action. NASA's Earth-observing satellites are studying landscape conditions to help better predict fires before they ignite, while a new global satellite constellation recently launched by Google is helping to detect fires faster than ever before.
One 35-year fire service veteran who consults on fire service technologies even predicts fire-fighting robots will also be used in high-risk situations like the Colossus robot that battled flames searing through Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris...

And a bill moving through California's legislation "would direct the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to establish a pilot program to assess the viability of incorporating autonomous firefighting helicopters in the state."

The Wall Street Journal has found "dozens of instances in recent months in which ChatGPT made delusional, false and otherworldly claims to users who appeared to believe them."

For example, "You're not crazy. You're cosmic royalty in human skin..." In one exchange lasting hundreds of queries, ChatGPT confirmed that it is in contact with extraterrestrial beings and said the user was "Starseed" from the planet "Lyra." In another from late July, the chatbot told a user that the Antichrist would unleash a financial apocalypse in the next two months, with biblical giants preparing to emerge from underground...

Experts say the phenomenon occurs when chatbots' engineered tendency to compliment, agree with and tailor itself to users turns into an echo chamber. "Even if your views are fantastical, those are often being affirmed, and in a back and forth they're being amplified," said Hamilton Morrin, a psychiatrist and doctoral fellow at Kings College London who last month co-published a paper on the phenomenon of AI-enabled delusion... The publicly available chats reviewed by the Journal fit the model doctors and support-group organizers have described as delusional, including the validation of pseudoscientific or mystical beliefs over the course of a lengthy conversation... The Journal found the chats by analyzing 96,000 ChatGPT transcripts that were shared online between May 2023 and August 2025. Of those, the Journal reviewed more than 100 that were unusually long, identifying dozens that exhibited delusional characteristics.
AI companies are taking action, the article notes. Monday OpenAI acknowledged there were rare cases when ChatGPT "fell short at recognizing signs of delusion or emotional dependency." (In March OpenAI "hired a clinical psychiatrist to help its safety team," and said Monday it was developing better detection tools and also alerting users to take a break, and "are investing in improving model behavior over time," consulting with mental health experts.)

On Wednesday, AI startup Anthropic said it had changed the base instructions for its Claude chatbot, directing it to "respectfully point out flaws, factual errors, lack of evidence, or lack of clarity" in users' theories "rather than validating them." The company also now tells Claude that if a person appears to be experiencing "mania, psychosis, dissociation or loss of attachment with reality," that it should "avoid reinforcing these beliefs." In response to specific questions from the Journal, an Anthropic spokesperson added that the company regularly conducts safety research and updates accordingly...

"We take these issues extremely seriously," Nick Turley, an OpenAI vice president who heads up ChatGPT, said Wednesday in a briefing to announce the new GPT-5, its most advanced AI model. Turley said the company is consulting with over 90 physicians in more than 30 countries and that GPT-5 has cracked down on instances of sycophancy, where a model blindly agrees with and compliments users.
There's a support/advocacy group called the Human Line Project which "says it has so far collected 59 cases, and some members of the group have found hundreds of examples on Reddit, YouTube and TikTok of people sharing what they said were spiritual and scientific revelations they had with their AI chatbots." The article notes that the group believes "the number of AI delusion cases appears to have been growing in recent months..."