An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Best Buy is set to post its tenth consecutive quarter of sales decline on Thursday when the U.S. electronics retailer reports quarterly results, as spending on big-ticket electronics remains pressured despite easing inflation. Although results from big-box retailers Walmart and Target indicate that consumers have resumed spending on less-expensive discretionary items such as apparel and accessories, they are still hesitant to go for TVs and washing machines. UPDATE 5/30/24: Best Buy's quarterly profit exceeded Wall Street estimates due to improved demand in its computing category, cost-saving efforts, and a successful membership program, leading to a 10% rise in shares. "Demand for artificial intelligence-enabled laptops as well as higher-end televisions is helping Best Buy regain lost ground on sales in the country as consumers look to upgrade or replace their gadgets after more than two years of restraint on spending on electronics," reports Reuters. "The company is also banking on the launch of Microsoft's AI-powered Copilot+ PCs, which are expected to go on sale on June 18."

"Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said on a post-earnings call that the company expects to have more than 40% of the product assortment at launch exclusive to the company. The company has also benefited from people signing up for its two-tiered membership program, which it refreshed last year, helping the top electronics retailer in the United States retain shoppers and drive better margins."

Microsoft seems to be concerned about some of OpenAI's business dealings. From a report: Satya Nadella recently met with Sam Altman to discuss an apparent deal between OpenAI and Apple, The Information reported [hard-paywalled]. According to the outlet, the OpenAI CEO recently reached an agreement with the iPhone maker to incorporate some OpenAI services into Apple products. Nadella was reportedly concerned about the potential impact of a deal on Microsoft's product ambitions, per the report. Apple was said to be considering both Google and OpenAI for the deal, which could be worth billions.

If OpenAI has indeed reached an agreement with Apple, it would be a much-needed win for Altman. The tech boss has faced heightened scrutiny after former employees and board members publicly criticized him. Helen Toner, a former OpenAI director, recently accused Altman of lying to the board "multiple" times and "withholding information."

A survey of 12,000 people in six countries -- Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK, and the USA -- found that very few people are regularly using AI products like ChatGPT. Unsurprisingly, the group bucking the trend are young people ages 18 to 24. The BBC reports: Dr Richard Fletcher, the report's lead author, told the BBC there was a "mismatch" between the "hype" around AI and the "public interest" in it. The study examined views on generative AI tools -- the new generation of products that can respond to simple text prompts with human-sounding answers as well as images, audio and video. "Large parts of the public are not particularly interested in generative AI, and 30% of people in the UK say they have not heard of any of the most prominent products, including ChatGPT," Dr Fletcher said.

This research attempted to gauge what the public thinks, finding:
- The majority expect generative AI to have a large impact on society in the next five years, particularly for news, media and science
- Most said they think generative AI will make their own lives better
- When asked whether generative AI will make society as a whole better or worse, people were generally more pessimistic In more detail, the study found: - While there is widespread awareness of generative AI overall, a sizable minority of the public -- between 20% and 30% of the online population in the six countries surveyed -- have not heard of any of the most popular AI tools.
- In terms of use, ChatGPT is by far the most widely used generative AI tool in the six countries surveyed, two or three times more widespread than the next most widely used products, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.
- Younger people are much more likely to use generative AI products on a regular basis. Averaging across all six countries, 56% of 18-24s say they have used ChatGPT at least once, compared to 16% of those aged 55 and over.
- Roughly equal proportions across six countries say that they have used generative AI for getting information (24%) as creating various kinds of media, including text but also audio, code, images, and video (28%).
- Just 5% across the six countries covered say that they have used generative AI to get the latest news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The U.S. Department of the Treasury today unveiled sanctions against three Chinese nationals for allegedly operating 911 S5, an online anonymity service that for many years was the easiest and cheapest way to route one's Web traffic through malware-infected computers around the globe. KrebsOnSecurity identified one of the three men in a July 2022 investigation into 911 S5, which was massively hacked and then closed ten days later.

From 2015 to July 2022, 911 S5 sold access to hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows computers daily, as "proxies" that allowed customers to route their Internet traffic through PCs in virtually any country or city around the globe -- but predominantly in the United States. 911 built its proxy network mainly by offering "free" virtual private networking (VPN) services. 911's VPN performed largely as advertised for the user -- allowing them to surf the web anonymously -- but it also quietly turned the user's computer into a traffic relay for paying 911 S5 customers. 911 S5's reliability and extremely low prices quickly made it one of the most popular services among denizens of the cybercrime underground, and the service became almost shorthand for connecting to that "last mile" of cybercrime. Namely, the ability to route one's malicious traffic through a computer that is geographically close to the consumer whose stolen credit card is about to be used, or whose bank account is about to be emptied.

In July 2022, KrebsOnSecurity published a deep dive into 911 S5, which found the people operating this business had a history of encouraging the installation of their proxy malware by any means available. That included paying affiliates to distribute their proxy software by secretly bundling it with other software. That story named Yunhe Wang from Beijing as the apparent owner or manager of the 911 S5 proxy service. In today's Treasury action, Mr. Wang was named as the primary administrator of the botnet that powered 911 S5. Update, May 29, 12:26 p.m. ET: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) just announced they have arrested Wang in connection with the 911 S5 botnet. The DOJ says 911 S5 customers have stolen billions of dollars from financial institutions, credit card issuers, and federal lending programs. [...] The third man sanctioned is Yanni Zheng, a Chinese national the U.S. Treasury says acted as an attorney for Wang and his firm -- Spicy Code Company Limited -- and helped to launder proceeds from the business into real estate holdings. Spicy Code Company was also sanctioned, as well as Wang-controlled properties Tulip Biz Pattaya Group Company Limited, and Lily Suites Company Limited. "911 S5 customers allegedly targeted certain pandemic relief programs," a DOJ statement on the arrest reads. "For example, the United States estimates that 560,000 fraudulent unemployment insurance claims originated from compromised IP addresses, resulting in a confirmed fraudulent loss exceeding $5.9 billion. Additionally, in evaluating suspected fraud loss to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) program, the United States estimates that more than 47,000 EIDL applications originated from IP addresses compromised by 911 S5. Millions of dollars more were similarly identified by financial institutions in the United States as loss originating from IP addresses compromised by 911 S5."

"Jingping Liu assisted Yunhe Wang by laundering criminally derived proceeds through bank accounts held in her name that were then utilized to purchase luxury real estate properties for Yunhe Wang," the document continues. "These individuals leveraged their malicious botnet technology to compromise personal devices, enabling cybercriminals to fraudulently secure economic assistance intended for those in need and to terrorize our citizens with bomb threats."

Mistral, the French AI startup backed by Microsoft and valued at $6 billion, has released its first generative AI model for coding, dubbed Codestral. From a report: Codestral, like other code-generating models, is designed to help developers write and interact with code. It was trained on over 80 programming languages, including Python, Java, C++ and JavaScript, explains Mistral in a blog post. Codestral can complete coding functions, write tests and "fill in" partial code, as well as answer questions about a codebase in English. Mistral describes the model as "open," but that's up for debate. The startup's license prohibits the use of Codestral and its outputs for any commercial activities. There's a carve-out for "development," but even that has caveats: the license goes on to explicitly ban "any internal usage by employees in the context of the company's business activities." The reason could be that Codestral was trained partly on copyrighted content. Codestral might not be worth the trouble, in any case. At 22 billion parameters, the model requires a beefy PC in order to run.

Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member, said that the board didn't know about the company's 2022 launch of its chatbot ChatGPT until afterward -- and only found out about it on Twitter. From a report: In a podcast, Toner gave her fullest account to date of the events that prompted her and other board members to fire Sam Altman in November of last year. In the days that followed Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman's sudden ouster, employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated, and Toner and other directors left the board. "When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance about that," Toner said on the podcast. "We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter."

In a statement provided to the TED podcast, OpenAI's current board chief, Bret Taylor said, "We are disappointed that Ms. Toner continues to revisit these issues." He also said that an independent review of Altman's firing "concluded that the prior board's decision was not based on concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI's finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners." [...] In the podcast, Toner also said that Altman didn't disclose his involvement with OpenAI's startup fund. And she criticized his leadership on safety. "On multiple occasions, he gave us inaccurate information about the formal safety processes that the company did have in place," she said,"meaning that it was basically impossible for the board to know how well those safety processes were working or what might need to change."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Just before Microsoft closed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, it said that it would take some time to bring the publisher's titles to Game Pass. We've only seen one such addition so far in the form of Diablo IV, but the company has announced another, somewhat notable one. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be available on Game Pass on its release day later this year.

Microsoft is banking on the debut of a new Call of Duty title on its subscription service leading to a significant bump in the number of Game Pass members. It's a bit of a gamble, as for nearly every year in recent memory, the latest Call of Duty release has been the best-selling game. Microsoft is likely to see lower direct sales of Black Ops 6 on Xbox and PC, though it will still generate revenue from Game Pass and the PlayStation version (and perhaps even a Nintendo Switch release), as well as through microtransactions.

OpenAI said on Tuesday that it has begun training a new flagship AI model that would succeed the GPT-4 technology that drives its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT. From a report: The San Francisco start-up, which is one of the world's leading A.I. companies, said in a blog post that it expects the new model to bring "the next level of capabilities" as it strives to build "artificial general intelligence," or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the human brain can do. The new model would be an engine for A.I. products including chatbots, digital assistants akin to Apple's Siri, search engines and image generators.

OpenAI also said it was creating a new Safety and Security Committee to explore how it should handle the risks posed by the new model and future technologies. "While we are proud to build and release models that are industry-leading on both capabilities and safety, we welcome a robust debate at this important moment," the company said. OpenAI is aiming to move A.I. technology forward faster than its rivals, while also appeasing critics who say the technology is becoming increasingly dangerous, helping to spread disinformation, replace jobs and even threaten humanity. Experts disagree on when tech companies will reach artificial general intelligence, but companies including OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft have steadily increased the power of A.I. technologies for more than a decade, demonstrating a noticeable leap roughly every two to three years.

Microsoft has announced Auto SR, an AI-powered image upscaling solution for Windows 11 on Arm devices. The feature, exclusive to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X CPUs, aims to enhance gaming performance on ARM-based systems. Auto SR, however, comes with notable restrictions, including compatibility limitations with certain DirectX versions and the inability to work simultaneously with HDR.

Microsoft says the Cortana, Tips, and WordPad applications will be automatically removed on systems upgraded to the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 release. From a report: This was shared in a Thursday blog announcing that Windows 11, version 24H2 (Build 26100.712) is now available for Insiders in the Release Preview Channel. The company removed the Cortana standalone app from Windows 11 in preview build 25967 for Insiders, released in the Canary Channel in early October. It first announced that it would end support for Cortana in a support document published in June and deprecated it in another Canary build in August.

In September, Microsoft announced that it would deprecate WordPad -- automatically installed on Windows systems for 28 years, since 1995, and an optional Windows feature since the Windows 10 Insider Build 19551 release in February 2020 -- with a future Windows update. In November, the company also informed users that the Tips app was deprecated and would be removed in a future Windows release.

"Microsoft has confirmed plans to pull the plug on VBScript in the second half of 2024 in a move that signals the end of an era for programmers," writes Tech Radar.

Though the language was first introduced in 1996, Microsoft's latest announcement says the move was made "considering the decline in VBScript usage": Beginning with the new OS release slated for later this year [Windows 11, version 24H2], VBScript will be available as features on demand. The feature will be completely retired from future Windows OS releases, as we transition to the more efficient PowerShell experiences.
Around 2027 it will become "disabled by default," with the date of its final removal "to be determined."

But the announcement confirms VBScript will eventually be "retired and eliminated from future versions of Windows." This means all the dynamic link libraries (.dll files) of VBScript will be removed. As a result, projects that rely on VBScript will stop functioning. By then, we expect that you'll have switched to suggested alternatives.
The post recommends migirating applications to PowerShell or JavaScript.

This year's annual "feature update" for Windows will also include Sudo for Windows, Rust in the Windows kernel, "and a number of user interface tweaks, such as the ability to create 7-zip and TAR archives in File Explorer," reports the Register. "It will also include the next evolution of Copilot into an app pinned to the taskbar."

But the downgrading of VBScript "is part of a broader strategy to remove Windows and Office features threat actors use as attack vectors to infect users with malware," reports BleepingComputer: Attackers have also used VBScript in malware campaigns, delivering strains like Lokibot, Emotet, Qbot, and, more recently, DarkGate malware.

Thursday long-time Slashdot reader mschaffer reported that "Microsoft's search engine isn't working correctly, and many alternative search engines that rely on it are down, too."

Bing started "having issues" around 1:30 a.m. EST, reports SearchEngineLand (citing Downdector.com, and sharing screenshots of Bing.com searches failing — even on partner sites like DuckDuckGo).

By Thursday morning search capabilities for ChatGPT, Copilot, DuckDuckGo, and other platforms had stopped working, reports the Verge, saying the issues "appeared to be linked to Bing's API and any service that relies upon it." While Microsoft's own web search engine, Bing, was also seemingly affected, according to TechCrunch, it came back online eventually. By 11AM ET, OpenAI posted a note indicating the issue had been resolved, saying, "Between around 10:10 PM PT yesterday and 6:50 AM PT today, we experienced a partial outage affecting ChatGPT's web-browsing capabilities due to Bing being unavailable." DuckDuckGo posted that "we're coming back up" at around 10:30AM ET, and so did Ecosia, which is "the search engine that plants trees."
Copilot users experienced "a loading loop that prevented users from accessing the service," according to the article, while ChatGPT users attempting a web search got error messages instead.

Ars Technica adds that it also stopped searches from Microsoft's Edge browsers (that hadn't changed their default search settings). But they also had a disturbing observation for people worried that web search is dominated by Google: "most of your other major options were brought down by a single API outage... The overwhelming majority of search tools offering an alternative" to Google are using Google, Bing, or Yandex... Yandex, being based in Russia, is a non-starter for many people around the world at the moment."
But their article digs deep into the alternatives, starting with this list compiled by undergraduate CS major Rohan Kumar of search sites with their own indexes — including Mojeek, Stract, and Right Dao and Yep...

"Apple's done a fantastic job of really innovating on the Mac," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told the Wall Street Journal in a video interview this week.

. Then he said "We are gonna outperform them" with the upcoming Copilot+ laptops from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung that have been completely reengineered for AI — and begin shipping in less than four weeks. Satya Nadella: Qualcomm's got a new [ARM Snapdragon X] processor, which we've optimized Windows for. The battery lab, I've been using it now — I mean, it's 22 hours of continuous video playback... [Apple also uses ARM chips in its MacBooks]. We finally feel we have a very competitive product between Surface Pro and the Surface laptops. We have essentially the best specs when it comes to ARM-based silicon and performance or the NPU performance.

WSJ: Microsoft says the Surfaces are 58% faster than the MacBook Air with M3, and has 20% longer battery life.
The video includes a demonstration of local live translation powered by "small language models" stored on the device. ("It can translate live video calls or in-person conversations from 44 different languages into English. And it's fast.")

And in an accompanying article, the Journal's reporter also tested out the AI-powered image generator coming to Microsoft Paint.

As a longtime MS Paint stick-figure and box-house artist, I was delighted by this new tool. I typed in a prompt: "A Windows XP wallpaper with a mountain and sky." Then, as I started drawing, an AI image appeared in a new canvas alongside mine. When I changed a color in my sketch, it changed a color in the generated image. Microsoft says it still sends the prompt to the cloud to ensure content safety.
Privacy was also touched on. Discussing the AI-powered "Recall" search functionality, the Journal's reporter notes that users can stop it from taking screenshots of certain web sites or apps, or turn it off entirely... But they point out "There could be this reaction from some people that this is pretty creepy. Microsoft is taking screenshots of everything I do."

Nadella reminds them that "it's all being done locally, right...? That's the promise... That's one of the reasons why Recall works as a magical thing: because I can trust it, that it is on my computer."

Copilot will be powered by OpenAI's new GPT-4o, the Journal notes — before showing Satya Nadella saying "It's kind of like a new browser effectively." Satya Nadella: So, it's right there. It sees the screen, it sees the world, it hears you. And so, it's kind of like that personal agent that's always there that you want to talk to. You can interrupt it. It can interrupt you.
Nadella says though the laptop is optimized for Copilot, that's just the beginning, and "I fully expect Copilot to be everywhere" — along with its innovatively individualized "personal agent" interface. "It's gonna be ambient.... It'll go on the phone, right? I'll use it on WhatsApp. I'll use it on any other messaging platform. It'll be on speakers everywhere." Nadella says combining GPT-40 with Copilot's interface is "the type of magic that we wanna bring — first to Windows and everywhere else... The future I see is a computer that understands me versus a computer that I have to understand.

The interview ends when the reporter holds up the result — their own homegrown rendition of Windows XP's default background image "Bliss."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has shared data on the most impersonated companies in 2023, which include Best Buy, Amazon, and PayPal in the top three. The federal agency detailed the top ten companies scammers impersonate and how much they make depending on the impersonation. By far the most impersonated corp was Best Buy and its repair business Geek Squad, with a total of 52k reports. Amazon impersonators came in second place with 34k reports, and PayPal a distant third with 10,000. Proportionally, the top three made up roughly 72 percent of the reports among the top ten, and Best Buy and Geek Squad scam reports were about 39 percent on their own. Though, high quantity doesn't necessarily translate to greater success for scammers, as the FTC also showed how much scammers made depending on what companies they impersonated. Best Buy and Geek Squad, Amazon, and PayPal scams made about $15 million, $19 million, and $16 million respectively, but that's nothing compared to the $60 million that Microsoft impersonators were able to fleece. [...]

The FTC also reported the vectors scammers use to contact their victims. Phone and email are still the most common means, but social media is becoming increasingly important for scamming and features the most costly scams. The feds additionally disclosed the kinds of payment methods scammers use for all sorts of frauds, including company and individual impersonation scams, investment scams, and romance scams. Cryptocurrency and bank transfers were popular for investment scammers, who are the most prolific on social media, while gift cards were most common for pretty much every other type of scam. However, not all scammers ask for digital payment, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation says that even regular old mail is something scammers are relying on to get their ill-gotten gains.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Mark Zuckerberg has assembled some of his fellow tech chiefs into an advisory council to guide Meta on its artificial intelligence and product developments. The Meta Advisory Group will periodically meet with Meta's management team, Bloomberg reported. Its members include: Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke, and former Microsoft executive and investor Charlie Songhurst.

"I've come to deeply respect this group of people and their achievements in their respective areas, and I'm grateful that they're willing to share their perspectives with Meta at such an important time as we take on new opportunities with AI and the metaverse," Zuckerberg wrote in an internal note to Meta employees, according to Bloomberg. The advisory council differs from Meta's 11-person board of directors because its members are not elected by shareholders, nor do they have fiduciary duty to Meta, a Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg. The spokesperson said that the men will not be paid for their roles on the advisory council. TechCrunch notes that the council features "only white men on it." This "differs from Meta's actual board of directors and its Oversight Board, which is more diverse in gender and racial representation," reports TechCrunch.

"It's telling that the AI advisory council is composed entirely of businesspeople and entrepreneurs, not ethicists or anyone with an academic or deep research background. ... it's been proven time and time again that AI isn't like other products. It's a risky business, and the consequences of getting it wrong can be far-reaching, particularly for marginalized groups."

Microsoft is adding screenshot prevention controls in Edge to block you from taking screenshots at work. "It's all designed to prevent you from sharing screenshots with competitors, relatives, and journalists using Microsoft Edge for Business," reports PCWorld. From the report: Specifically, IT managers at corporations will be able to tag web pages as protected, as defined in various Microsoft policy engines in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Intune Mobile Application Management and Microsoft Purview, Microsoft said. The screenshot prevention feature will be available to customers in the "coming months," Microsoft said. It's also unclear whether third-party tools will be somehow blocked from taking screenshots or recording video, too.

Microsoft will also roll out a way to force Edge for Business users to automatically update their browsers. The feature will enter a preview phase over the next few weeks, Microsoft said. "The Edge management service will enable IT admins to see which devices have Edge instances that are out of date and at risk," Microsoft said. "It will also provide mitigating controls, such as forcing a browser restart to install updates, enabling automatic browser updates or enabling enhanced security mode for added protections."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People whose names get mangled by autocorrect have urged technology companies to fix the problem faster, with one person whose name gets switched to "Satan" saying: "I am tired of it." People with Irish, Indian and Welsh names are among those calling for improvements to the systems that operate on phones and computers as part of the "I am not a typo" campaign. "It is important that technology becomes more inclusive," said Savan-Chandni Gandecha, 34, a British Indian content creator whose name, which means monsoon moonlight, has been autocorrected to Satan. "My name has also been corrected to Savant," he said. "It is sometimes corrected to Savan, or the hyphen is not accepted by online forms and that irks me," he said. "Even in India my name gets corrected to "Sawan", and it's not just an English issue. It's a multi-language thing."

The campaign has estimated that four out of 10 names of babies born in England and Wales in 2021 were deemed "wrong" or "not accepted" when tested on Microsoft's English dictionary. Dhruti Shah, a journalist, has backed the campaign after seeing her name autocorrected to "Dirty" and "Dorito". She said: "My first name isn't even that long -- only six characters -- but yet when it comes up as an error or it's mangled and considered an unknown entity, it's like saying that it's not just your name that's wrong, but you are." The campaign group -- established by a group of people working in the creative industries in London -- wrote an open letter to technology companies, which pointed out that between 2017 and 2021, 2,328 people named Esmae were born, compared with 36 Nigels. Esmae gets autocorrected to Admar, while Nigel is unchanged. "There are so many diverse names in the global majority but autocorrect is western- and white-focused," said Gandecha. Rashmi Dyal-Chand, a professor at Northeastern University in the US whose name is sometimes corrected to Sashimi, is supporting the latest campaign and said: "For people with names like mine, autocorrect is not convenient and helpful. It is unhelpful. And yes -- it is harmful."

"We all increasingly rely on smartphones, tablets, word processors, and apps that use autocorrect. Yet autocorrect incorporates a set of defaults -- including dictionaries -- that help some of its users to communicate seamlessly at the expense of others who cannot."

Karen Fox, whose children are called Eoin and Niamh, said of autocorrect: "The red line bothers me -- I didn't choose the 'wrong' name for my child. Tech companies update dictionaries with slang all the time and I think it should be an easy thing to do and definitely a priority."

Microsoft's Windows Recall feature is attracting controversy before even venturing out of preview. From a report: The principle is simple. Windows takes a snapshot of a user's active screen every few seconds and dumps it to disk. The user can then scroll through the snapshots and, when something is selected, the user is given options to interact with the content.

Mozilla's Chief Product Officer, Steve Teixeira, told The Register: "Mozilla is concerned about Windows Recall. From a browser perspective, some data should be saved, and some shouldn't. Recall stores not just browser history, but also data that users type into the browser with only very coarse control over what gets stored. While the data is stored in encrypted format, this stored data represents a new vector of attack for cybercriminals and a new privacy worry for shared computers.

"Microsoft is also once again playing gatekeeper and picking which browsers get to win and lose on Windows -- favoring, of course, Microsoft Edge. Microsoft's Edge allows users to block specific websites and private browsing activity from being seen by Recall. Other Chromium-based browsers can filter out private browsing activity but lose the ability to block sensitive websites (such as financial sites) from Recall. "Right now, there's no documentation on how a non-Chromium based, third-party browser, such as Firefox, can protect user privacy from Recall. Microsoft did not engage our cooperation on Recall, but we would have loved for that to be the case, which would have enabled us to partner on giving users true agency over their privacy, regardless of the browser they choose."

An anonymous reader shares a report: For those of us who came of age in the early days of personal computing, the names "Intel 486" and "Windows XP" evoke a nostalgic whirlwind of memories. The 486 was the hot new CPU of the early 90s, while Windows XP became a household name and Microsoft's most popular OS over a decade later. But did you ever imagine these two icons of different eras could be merged into an unholy union? Well, start brushing off those vintage 486 rigs, because a modder has actually made it happen. Going by the name Dietmar on the MSFN forums, he has somehow managed to get Microsoft's beloved Windows XP running on the ancient 486 architecture.

It's worth mentioning that these two were never meant to coexist. The first 486 chips hit the market way back in 1989, while Windows XP landed over a decade later in 2001. The 486 represented a major breakthrough when Intel unveiled it in 1989. Packing over a million transistors, it remained Intel's primary x86 chip until the arrival of the Pentium in 1993. Such was the processor's longevity that Intel continued manufacturing it for embedded systems until 2007. Still, 486 systems were simply too underpowered to run XP, which needed at least a Pentium-class processor from the 586 generation - or any compatible chip that ran at 233MHz or higher. Meanwhile, the i486 could only do 133MHz. It also needed at least 64MB of RAM and at least 1.5GB of storage.

Meta's AI chief said the large language models that power generative AI products such as ChatGPT would never achieve the ability to reason and plan like humans, as he focused instead on a radical alternative approach to create "superintelligence" in machines. From a report: Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at the social media giant that owns Facebook and Instagram, said LLMs had "very limited understanding of logicâ... do not understand the physical world, do not have persistent memory, cannot reason in any reasonable definition of the term and cannot planâ...âhierarchically."

In an interview with the Financial Times, he argued against relying on advancing LLMs in the quest to make human-level intelligence, as these models can only answer prompts accurately if they have been fed the right training data and are, therefore, "intrinsically unsafe." Instead, he is working to develop an entirely new generation of AI systems that he hopes will power machines with human-level intelligence, although he said this vision could take 10 years to achieve. Meta has been pouring billions of dollars into developing its own LLMs as generative AI has exploded, aiming to catch up with rival tech groups, including Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Alphabet's Google.