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OpenAI on Thursday said the U.S. National Laboratories will be using its latest artificial intelligence models for scientific research and nuclear weapons security.

Under the agreement, up to 15,000 scientists working at the National Laboratories may be able to access OpenAI’s reasoning-focused o1 series. OpenAI will also work with Microsoft , its lead investor, to deploy one of its models on Venado, the supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to a release. Venado is powered by technology from Nvidia and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise .

Facebook is used by more than 3 billion monthly actives and we’re focused on growing its cultural influence. I’m excited this year to get back to some OG Facebook.

I think that there are a lot of opportunities to make it way more culturally influential than it is today. And I think that that’s sort of a fun and interesting goal that will take our product development in some interesting directions that we maybe haven’t had a focus on it as much over the last several years.

Microsoft is bringing OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model to all Copilot users this week. You won’t need to subscribe to a $20 monthly Copilot Pro or ChatGPT Plus plan to get it either, as Microsoft is making it free for all users of Copilot.

Think Deeper, as Microsoft calls its integration of o1, works by allowing Copilot to handle more complex questions. You can tap the Think Deeper button inside Copilot, and it will take around 30 seconds to “consider your question from all angles and perspectives.”

“Our open source strategy was validated,” said Ragavan Srinivasan, a Meta vice president, in an interview on Tuesday. “The more people who have access to the technology needed to move things forward faster, the better.”

Meta is also taking a close look at the work done at DeepSeek. Following Meta’s lead, the Chinese company released its technology to the open source tech community as well. Meta has created several “war rooms” where employees are reverse engineering DeepSeek’s technology, according to two people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

In a press release on Tuesday, the company said it needs additional liquidity to fund its operations and that “management has determined that there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

Following the news, 23andMe’s stock — which already fell 82% last year — dropped another 10% in after-hours trading and was briefly halted.

The engineer, described by colleagues as introspective, first made his mark in China’s investment world in the late 2010s, cofounding a hedge fund that used artificial-intelligence models to deliver strong returns and attracted billions of dollars in capital.

Buoyed by profits and wary of Beijing’s tightening grip on speculative trading, Mr. Liang pivoted in 2023. He poured money into artificial intelligence, betting on A.I. chips and assembling a team to build China’s answer to the Silicon Valley front-runner OpenAI.

OpenAI is investigating whether Chinese artificial-intelligence startup DeepSeek trained its new chatbot by repeatedly querying the U.S. company’s AI models.

The Silicon Valley-based company said Wednesday it has seen various attempts by China-based entities to exfiltrate large volumes of data from its AI tools, likely to train their own models in a technical process called distillation.

OpenAI said it has banned the accounts it suspected of distilling its models and has worked with Microsoft—a major OpenAI partner that hosts its models—to identify the actors behind the attempts. DeepSeek is among those that OpenAI is looking into, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“It is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take U.S. technology,” an OpenAI spokeswoman said. China-based companies are “constantly trying to distill the models of leading U.S. AI companies,” they added.

Apple has mostly left Calendar unchanged for years. But that’s started to change.

One of the most significant upgrades was the integration of Reminders into the app. You can now create, edit, and view all your reminders from inside Calendar.

iOS 18 also brought:

a refreshed design with several typography and UI improvements and a new Month view that shows your event details

“Yoshua and Dario have made opinions against open source and that’s actually very dangerous,” he said in an interview. “Obstacles to open source distribution would lead to regulatory capture by a few players, either of the west coast of the US or China . . . [putting] power in the hands of a small number of people.

“It’s very strange from people like Dario. We met yesterday where he said that the benefits and risks of AI are roughly on the same order of magnitude, and I said, ‘if you really believe this, why do you keep working on AI?’” LeCun added. “So I think he is a little two-faced on this.”

In the long run, model commoditization and cheaper inference — which DeepSeek has also demonstrated — is great for Big Tech. A world where Microsoft gets to provide inference to its customers for a fraction of the cost means that Microsoft has to spend less on data centers and GPUs, or, just as likely, sees dramatically higher usage given that inference is so much cheaper. Another big winner is Amazon: AWS has by-and-large failed to make their own quality model, but that doesn’t matter if there are very high quality open source models that they can serve at far lower costs than expected.

Apple is also a big winner. Dramatically decreased memory requirements for inference make edge inference much more viable, and Apple has the best hardware for exactly that. Apple Silicon uses unified memory, which means that the CPU, GPU, and NPU (neural processing unit) have access to a shared pool of memory; this means that Apple’s high-end hardware actually has the best consumer chip for inference (Nvidia gaming GPUs max out at 32GB of VRAM, while Apple’s chips go up to 192 GB of RAM).

Google said Monday it will change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America” in Google Maps after the Trump administration updates its “official government sources.”

The company also said it will start using the name “Mount McKinley” for the mountain in Alaska currently called Denali.

Today's links It's not a crime if we do it with an app: How Big Potato and the other food cartels did greedflation and got away with it. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest.

Two caricatures of top-hatted millionaires whose bodies are bulging money-sacks. Their heads have been replaced with potatoes. The potatoes' eyes have been replaced with the hostile red eye of HAL 9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' They stand in a potato field filled with stoop laborers. The sky is a 'code waterfall' as seen in the credit sequences of the Wachowskis' 'Matrix' movies.

It's not a crime if we do it with an app (permalink)

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You have TWO DAYS LEFT to pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The core regulatory proposition of the tech industry is "it's not a crime if we do it with an app." It's not an unlicensed taxi if we do it with an app. It's not an illegal hotel room if we do it with an app. It's not an unregistered security if we do it with an app. It's not wage theft if we do it with an app.

Inflation is one of the most politically salient factors of this decade, and so much of inflation can be attributed to a crime, done with an app, with impunity for the criminals. The entire food supply has been sewn up by cartels of 2-5 giant companies, and they colluded to raise prices, and bragged about it, and got away with it, because neoclassical economists insist that it's impossible for this kind of price fixing to occur in an "efficient market."

Some of these cartels are well-known, like the Coke/Pepsi duopoly. Pepsi's bosses boasted to their shareholders about "Pepsi pricing power," and how they were able to raise prices over the inflationary increases caused by covid and the Russian invasion of Ukraine:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

You might know that pretty much every packaged good in your grocery store is made by one of two companies, Unilever and Procter and Gamble. Both CEOs boasted to their investors about their above-inflation price increases:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/20/quiet-part-out-loud/#profiteering

But other cartels are harder to spot. It may seem like your grocer's eggs department is filled with many different companies' products. In reality, a single company, Cal-Maine Foods, owns practically every brand of eggs in the case: Farmhouse Eggs, Sunups, Sunny Meadow, Egg-Land’s Best and Land O’ Lakes. They made record profits after the pandemic and through bird flu, a fact that CFO Max Bowman attributed to "significantly higher selling prices" and "our ability to adapt to inflationary market pressures":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

But Cal-Maine is comparatively transparent. The other food cartels – especially those that serve the restaurant sector – are harder to spot. In The Lever, Katya Schwenk describes how four companies – Lamb Weston, JR Simplot, McCain Foods and Cavendish Farms – have captured the frozen potato market and all that comes with it (fries, tater tots, etc):

https://www.levernews.com/the-rise-of-big-potato/

These companies have been hiking prices for years, but really started to turn the screws during the post-covid inflationary period. One of Schwenk's sources is Josh Saltzman, owner of the DC sports bar Ivy and Coney. Ten years ago, Saltzman charged $3 for fries; now it's $6 – and Saltzman's margins have declined. Saltzman has a limited number of suppliers, and they all get their potatoes from Big Potato, and they bundle those potato orders with their other supplies, making it effectively impossible for Saltzman to buy his potatoes from anyone else.

Big Potato controls 97% of the frozen potato market, and any sector that large and concentrated is going to be pretty cozy. The execs at these companies all meet at industry associations, lobbying bodies, and as they job-hop between companies in the cartel. But they don't have to rely on personal connections to rig the price of potatoes: they do it through a third-party data-broker called Potatotrac. Each cartel member sends all their commercially sensitive data – supply costs, pricing, sales figures – to Potatotrac, and then Potatotrac uses that data to give "advice" to the cartel members about "optimal pricing."

This is just price-fixing, with an app. The fact that they don't sit around a table and openly discuss pricing doesn't keep this from being price-fixing. What's more, they admit it. A director at McCain said that "higher ups" forbade anyone in the company from competing on price. A Lamb Weston exec described the arrangement as everyone "behaving themselves," chortling that they'd "never seen margins this high in the history of the potato industry." Lamb Weston's CEO attributed a 111% increase in net income to "pricing actions."

Sony is officially ending production of recordable Blu-rays. In an announcement from Japan spotted by Tom’s Hardware, Sony Storage Media Solutions said it will stop manufacturing the discs in February, alongside recordable MiniDiscs, MD-Data, and MiniDV cassettes, adding, “there will be no successor models.”

This discontinuation doesn’t impact the Blu-rays you can buy with films or TV shows on them; it just affects the blank ones consumers use to record stuff on themselves with PCs or DVRs. Sony hinted at the discontinuation last year, telling the Japanese outlet AVWatch that it would “gradually end development and production of ‘recordable optical disc media.’’