Skynet. Ultron. HAL-9000. These are but a few artificial intelligence systems that have gone rogue in films. Whether The Creator can produce a fictional AI that would make a mark on popular culture remains to be seen, but it is another movie that pits humanity against artificial intelligence. Its official website says the movie is about Joshua, an ex-special forces agent recruited to hunt down the Creator. That's the architect behind the advanced AI that was developed to protect humanity only to detonate a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles. 

The Creator apparently also developed a weapon with the power to end all war and all of humanity, and Joshua and his team were tasked to destroy it. They then discovered that the world-ending weapon is an AI in the form of a young child. Of course, Joshua couldn't kill it and ended up taking it places and letting it do kid things like playing with other children. Is it evil or not? We don't know at this point. The trailer released by 20th Century Studios, New Regency and Entertainment One only shows the AI as a playful, inquisitive child. 

The film was directed and conceptualized by Gareth Edwards, the same director behind Rogue One. John David Washington (Tenet) plays Joshua, the protagonist grieving the disappearance of his wife played by Gemma Chan. Ken Watanabe, Sturgill Simpson and Allison Janney also play roles in the movie, which will arrive in theaters on September 29th.

In December 2022, former Twitter employee Ahmad Abouammo was found guilty of taking bribes from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in return for sensitive account information on dissidents using the website. Now, the sister of Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured for operating a Twitter account critical of Saudi Arabia, has filed a lawsuit accusing Twitter of breaking the law for letting its employees reveal his identity. 

Areej al-Sadhan filed the complaint on her and her brother's behalf under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. Her brother, Abdulrahman, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for supporting terrorism. In her complaint, Areej accuses Twitter of giving her brother's "identifying information to the government of Saudi Arabia, which blatantly violates its terms and conditions." She continued: "This puts every Twitter user at risk. As a result, Saudi Arabia kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned, and — through a sham trial — sentenced my brother to 20 years in prison, simply for criticizing Saudi repression on his Twitter account." The Saudi government has apparently denied Abdulrahman contact with his family, who has no idea whether he's still alive. 

Abouammo and another former Twitter employee named Ali Alzabarah accessed confidential Twitter user data 30,892 times in 2015, the lawsuit states. They then allegedly handed Saudi Arabia identifying information for 6,000 Twitter user accounts, including names, birthdates, device identifiers, phone numbers, IP addresses and session IP histories associated with user accounts. 

While Twitter will likely defend itself by saying that it didn't approve or wasn't aware of Saudi's espionage activities, the lawsuit also states that US intelligence agencies warned the company about Alzabarah giving Saudi Arabia user information in late 2015. Six months after the warning, Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter's CEO back then, met with Mohammed bin Salman "despite knowing full well [Saudi Arabia's] malign activities and various crimes," the complaint reads. 

As The Washington Post notes, Twitter faced two other lawsuits related to Saudi's spying activities on its website. However, one was dismissed after it failed to establish a connection between the 2015 leak of information and the hacking of the plaintiff's phone three years later, which had led to his family and friends getting imprisoned. Saudi also isn't the only country conducting espionage on the website. Twitter's former security chief turned whistleblower, Peiter Zatko, revealed last year that the company was also previously warned that it had Chinese intelligence agents on its payroll. 

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has failed to convince the court to let her stay out of prison while she's appealing her 11-year sentence. According to The Wall Street Journal, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said Holmes' appeal doesn't raise legal issues or questions that could impact the outcome of the case. Further, even if it does raise questions, they still wouldn't be enough to overturn her fraud conviction. 

Holmes had asked the court to pause her sentence a couple of days before she was supposed to report to prison on April 27th, with her lawyers arguing that she wasn't a flight risk. The appeals court delayed her reporting date while it considered her request, but it has ultimately decided that she has to start serving her sentence. A district court that previously denied the same request from her camp recommended that she serve her time at a Bryan, Texas federal prison camp, which allows family visitations. The appeals court will now decide on a new reporting date for the former executive. 

In addition to her request being denied, Holmes and former Theranos CEO Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani have also been ordered to pay $452 million in restitution to the blood startup's investors. If you'll recall, Theranos promised to revolutionize healthcare with a technology that could diagnose hundreds of diseases with just a few drops of blood. It soon came out, however, that its technology didn't work and that it was using traditional machines modified to use lesser amounts of blood to run its tests. Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp, will get the biggest share at $125 milli. Meanwhile, Walgreens, which was once Theranos' biggest partner and even provided tests in its drugstores, is getting $40 million. 

Tesla is known for being ad-averse and hasn't really ran traditional advertising since it launched in the early 2000's, choosing to rely on word of mouth to promote its vehicles instead. Now things could change for the automaker. During the company's latest shareholder meeting, Tesla chief Elon Musk replied to an audience question regarding advertising with: "We will try a little advertising and see how it goes." Apparently, the executive changed his mind about advertising after acquiring Twitter, which makes most of its money from ads. 

"It's indeed ironic that Twitter is highly dependent on advertising. Here I am, never used advertising really before, and now I have a company that’s highly dependent on advertising. So, I guess I should say advertising is awesome, and everyone should do it." That's a total reversal from the executive's previous stance. He said a few years ago that he hated advertising and that Tesla uses money other automakers set aside for ads and endorsements "to make the product great."

In his response during the shareholder meeting, Musk said Tesla vehicles have functionalities and features that most people don't know about. The company does post them on its Twitter account, but he acknowledges that doing so is like preaching to the choir. In a follow-up interview with CNBC, he said ads could be "informative and entertaining" so that they're more content than typical advertisements. He suggested that future Tesla ads could take on that format and highlight its vehicles' lesser-known features. 

Musk has also teased two new EVs during the shareholder meeting, where he said that the vehicles' design and manufacturing techniques "are head and shoulders above anything else that is present in the industry." He said that the company is already in the process of "building a new product," which could mean that Tesla is already working on a prototype for at least one of the EVs.

Samsung will start rolling out an update for the Galaxy Buds 2 Pro that will give users more control over how much ambient sound they want to hear. After the software updates goes out, users will find two additional levels on top of the original three for their ambient sound volume settings under the Laboratory menu of the Galaxy Wearable app. And they can customize how much ambient sound to let in for each ear, since it's possible to adjust the volume for each earbud independently. 

The settings page already offers users the capability to customize their ambient tone range, with five stages from soft to clear. But the update will introduce a new section called "adapt ambient sound," which adds even more clarity to the environmental sounds getting into the earbuds. Samsung says it unveiled an enhancement to ambient sounds on Global Accessibility Awareness Day for people who could benefit from sounds amplification. The update, however, could also be useful for those with no hearing issues and simply just want to hear the world around them better so they could feel safe while they're running or walking outside. 

Samsung is releasing its enhanced ambient sound feature and will be rolling out a software update for it over the coming weeks.

You may have to get a Peacock subscription if you want to watch every single game in the NFL playoffs. The streaming service will serve as home to the first-ever exclusive livestreamed NFL playoff game, NBCUniversal and the league have announced. It's a wild card game that's scheduled to take place on January 13th, 2024, which is the first playoff weekend. And by "exclusive," they meant it will not be aired on national TV or even on cable. Only the local markets for the two competing teams will have access to the game outside Peacock, through a local TV channel that'll most likely be an NBC affiliate. 

As The Wall Street Journal notes, the NFL made postseason games available for streaming in the past. However, this marks the first time one can only be accessed on a streaming service by most viewers. NFL chief operating officer Hans Schroeder has acknowledged that the decision could upset some fans who'll have to get Peacock to watch that one game, but he believes it "will be transformative for sports on digital."

In fact, Schroeder said the NFL will likely continue making one of its wild card games exclusively accessible via streaming going forward. Whether Peacock will carry the game again in 2025 will probably depend on how the 2024 game performs for the service: Peacock and the NFL only signed a one-year deal, which The Journal says cost around $110 million. 

Canadians will no longer have access to the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Binance has announced that it's withdrawing from the Canadian marketplace due to new stablecoin and investor limits in the country. Back in February, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) released new guidance that gives crypto trading platforms operating in the region 30 days to register or to leave. The crypto firms that decide to register and stay will have to adhere to stricter rules, such as seeking the CSA's approval before allowing users to buy or deposit stablecoins. 

According to CoinDesk, Binance will have to pass authorities' due diligence checks before it gets approval. The crypto exchange has been under intense scrutiny in North America over the past years. In the US, the DOJ and the Internal Revenue Service have been looking into reports that Binance is being used for money laundering schemes since 2021. It's also reportedly under investigation for allowing users to bypass sanctions against Russian financial institutions. In March this year, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged Binance for allegedly offering unregistered crypto derivatives, among other things. 

In its announcement, Binance said it put off the decision as long as it could "to explore other reasonable avenues to protect [its] Canadian users." Indeed, Bloomberg says its Canadian affiliate filed paperwork to begin its registration process in March. But in the end, it had decided that continuing its operations in the country is "no longer tenable."

Binance ended its announcement with a note saying it's confident it will return to Canada, it's CEO Changpeng Zhao's home country, someday. It also said it hopes to continue engaging with Canadian authorities when it comes to forming a "thoughtful, comprehensive regulatory framework."

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is calling for a recall of 67 million airbag inflators after a lengthy investigation over allegations that they could rupture and injure drivers and passengers. These inflators were designed by ARC Automotive, Inc. and were manufactured for the US market during the 18-year period before January 2018. They were supplied to six airbag manufacturers, which then incorporated them into the airbag modules used in vehicles by at least 12 automakers. 

In the NHTSA's letter (PDF) to ARC urging the company to issue a recall, it listed nine incidents wherein a driver (and, in some cases, a passenger) had been injured because an inflator had ruptured. Seven of those incidents happened in the US, and one had resulted in death. There was one other incident outside the US wherein the driver had sustained fatal injuries. The agency wrote in its letter: "Air bag inflators that project metal fragments into vehicle occupants, rather than properly inflating the attached air bag, create an unreasonable risk of death and injury."

ARC, however, disagrees with the agency's tentative conclusion that certain inflators manufactured by the company have a safety defect. "After nearly eight years of intensive scrutiny, none of [the manufacturers using its products] has identified a systemic or prevalent defect across this inflator population," the company wrote in a response letter (PDF) addressed to the NHTSA. It also mentioned a test on 918 inflators taken from vehicles in salvage yards. Apparently, none of them exploded when they were subjected to various testing in the lab. 

ARC said it believes the incidents wherein the inflators had ruptured resulted from "one-off" manufacturing anomalies that had already been properly addressed by automakers though lot-specific recalls. GM, for one, issued a recall (PDF) on May 10th for 1 million vehicles that "may have received a suspect airbag inflator." The NHTSA warned the company, though, that it will have to write a full explanation with "additional analysis of the problem beyond ARC's past presentations" it it decides not to issue a recall. Further, it might still decide that ARC's inflators have a safety defect, and it "may take other appropriate action."

The NHTSA has been investigating airbag rupture-related incidents over the past 15 years. Over 67 million airbags by the now defunct Japanese manufacturer Takata have already been recalled in the United States, with 100 million more recalled around the world. Like the ARC-made inflators, Takata's could also explode and unleash metal fragments inside the vehicle. Takata's airbags were involved in at least 18 deaths and more than 400 injuries, which led to numerous lawsuits, a massive settlement and, ultimately, the company's closure. 

Anthropic says it has vastly expanded the amount of information its generative AI, Claude, is able to process. Claude has gone from having a limit of 9,000 tokens to 100,000 tokens, which corresponds to roughly 75,000 words. That's a full novel. To put that into perspective, Claude now has the ability to easily read and finish Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (74,240 words), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (74,800 words) and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (69,000 words). And, as The Verge notes, the company says Claude can read and analyze information from each book in under a minute. 

Generative AIs like Claude are still limited by the number of "tokens" they can process. As OpenAI explains in its help page, you can think of tokens as pieces of words. The AI cuts up words for processing, and they're not always chopped up from the start to the end of each word, since spaces and other characters are also included. At the moment, OpenAI's standard GPT-4 model is capable of processing 8,000 tokens, while an extended version can process 32,000 tokens. Meanwhile, its publicly available ChatGPT chatbot has a limit of around 4,000 tokens. 

Now Claude has a much wider context window than all of them. According to Anthropic, it loaded Great Gatsby onto the AI during testing and modified a single line to say Mr. Carraway was "a software engineer that works on machine learning tooling at Anthropic." Claude was able to spot how the book was modified within 22 seconds. 

The AI's expanded context window is now available to Anthropic's business partners who are using its API. Anthropic says the capability will help businesses quickly digest and summarize lengthy financial statements and research papers, assess pieces of legislation, identify risks and arguments across legal documents and comb through dense developer documentation, among other possible tasks. 

Twitch has a new clip editor that will make it much, much easier for streamers to promote their content across platforms that put a focus on mobile users. Streamers will find the new editor under the clip manager in their creator dashboard. As TechCrunch notes, clicking "edit and share clip" will open a tool that'll give them an easy way to create vertical video clips. They can choose to create a video that shows one portion of their stream in full or to create a clip that splits the view between their stream and their camera. Either way, they're getting a vertical video they can share. 

There's also a toggle at the bottom of the editor they can switch on to add their channel name to the clip. After they decide on what their video snippet will look like, they can then either download it or share it straight to YouTube Shorts with a title and a description that they'd written. While the feature only comes with YouTube integration right now, Twitch seems to have plans to add quick sharing for other platforms in the future. For now, creators will have to manually upload their videos if they want to promote their streams through Instagram Reels, Snapchat and TikTok. The still entails a bit more work than sharing on YouTube Shorts, but by doing so, they're putting themselves in front of more potential viewers who could end up being loyal subscribers. 

The new vertical clip editor is making its way to all users' clip manager this week.