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Google has told the EU it will not comply with a forthcoming fact-checking law, according to a copy of a letter obtained by Axios. The company states that it will not be adding fact checks to search results or YouTube videos and will not use fact-checking data when ranking or removing content.

It’s important to note that Google has never really participated in fact-checking as part of its content moderation policies. The company did, however, invest in a European fact-checking database ahead of recent EU elections.

The upcoming fact-checking requirement was originally implemented by the European Commission’s new Code of Practice on Disinformation. It started as a voluntary set of “self-regulatory standards to fight disinformation” but will soon become mandatory.

General Motors and its subsidiary OnStar are banned from selling customer geolocation and driving behavior data for five years, the Federal Trade Commission announced Thursday.

The settlement comes after a New York Times investigation found that GM had been collecting micro-details about its customers’ driving habits, including acceleration, braking, and trip length — and then selling it to insurance companies and third-party data brokers like LexisNexis and Verisk. Clueless vehicle owners were then left wondering why their insurance premiums were going up.

“Cash App created the conditions for fraud to proliferate on its popular payment platform,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra in a statement Thursday. “When things went wrong, Cash App flouted its responsibilities and even burdened local banks with problems that the company caused.”

The sum includes $120 million to compensate consumers and a fine of $55 million that will go to the CFPB’s victims relief fund.

“We’re betting on a different path to build AI capable of true invention, adaptation, and innovation,” Chollet wrote in a series of posts on X. “We believe we have a small but real chance of achieving a breakthrough — creating AI that can learn at least as efficiently as people, and that can keep improving over time with no bottlenecks in sight.”

Ndea plans to use a technique called program synthesis, in tandem with other technical approaches, to unlock AGI. Chollet thinks that program synthesis, which allows AI to generalize problems it hasn’t seen before from only a few examples, can help to overcome the most intractable problems in AI research.

If o1 is not a chat model — what is it?

I think of it like a “report generator.” If you give it enough context, and tell it what you want outputted, it’ll often nail the solution in one-shot.

swyx’s Note: OpenAI does publish advice on prompting o1, but we find it incomplete, and in a sense you can view this article as a “Missing Manual” to lived experience using o1 and o1 pro in practice.

1. Don’t Write Prompts; Write Briefs

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized Instagram competitor. On Facebook, the company is labeling links to Pixelfed.social as “spam” and deleting them immediately.

Pixelfed is an open-source, community funded and decentralized image sharing platform that runs on Activity Pub, which is the same technology that supports Mastodon and other federated services. Pixelfed.social is the largest Pixelfed server, which was launched in 2018 but has gained renewed attention over the last week.

Bluesky user AJ Sadauskas originally posted that links to Pixelfed were being deleted by Meta; 404 Media then also tried to post a link to Pixelfed on Facebook. It was immediately deleted.

The Wyoming Industrial Siting Council has granted a construction permit to TerraPower for its Natrium nuclear power plant near Kemmerer — a milestone achievement both in Wyoming and nationwide for commercial-scale “advanced nuclear” energy, the company says.

“This is the first state permit ever awarded to a commercial-scale advanced nuclear project and is a testament to the groundbreaking work of our TerraPower team,” TerraPower President and CEO Chris Levesque said in a prepared statement Tuesday.

For over a decade, you couldn’t easily fly a DJI drone over restricted areas in the United States. DJI’s software would automatically stop you from flying over runways, power plants, public emergencies like wildfires, and the White House.

But confusingly, amidst the greatest US outpouring of drone distrust in years, and an incident of a DJI drone operator hindering LA wildfire fighting efforts, DJI is getting rid of its strong geofence. DJI will no longer enforce “No-Fly Zones,” instead only offering a dismissible warning — meaning only common sense, empathy, and the fear of getting caught by authorities will prevent people from flying where they shouldn’t.

Previously, Google charged an additional $20+ per user/month for Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Meet, and other Workspace apps. The full Gemini experience is now coming to Google Workspace business users as part of a price increase.

In the past, Workspace users only got access to the Gemini app as part of their productivity subscription. To access the Gemini side panel in Gmail and Drive, companies had to pay $20 or $30 per user/month for Gemini Business or Gemini Enterprise, respectively.

That separate Gemini Add-on is now going away. Google is adding the integrated Gemini experience to Workspace Business and Enterprise plans.

OpenAI will underwrite the expansion of Axios to four cities of its choice as part of a broader content-sharing and technology deal, the firms said Wednesday.

Why it matters: It's the first time OpenAI is funding newsrooms as a part of a publisher deal, although the idea isn't novel.

Platformer can now confirm that misinformation-related demotions have been eliminated at the company.

The company plans to replace its professional fact-checking program with volunteers from the user base appending information to posts in a system modeled after X’s community notes. But Meta has offered few details on how the program will work, and has not said when it will become available.

As a result, Meta has chosen to open a window for viral hoaxes to spread unchecked on its properties while it works to build a new system to mitigate their impact.

Elon Musk cheated Twitter shareholders out of more than $150 million by waiting too long to disclose his growing stake in the company as he prepared a takeover bid, the US Securities and Exchange Commission claimed in a lawsuit filed days before the Trump administration takes over.

The agency’s complaint, which was immediately disputed by a lawyer for Musk, accuses the billionaire of failing to promptly report that he had amassed more than 5% of the social-media platform’s stock in early 2022 — a revelation that would have sent the stock’s price up.

Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

When founder Eugen Rochko started working on Mastodon, his focus was on creating the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned. The legal setup was a means to an end, a quick fix to allow him to continue operations. From the start, he declared that Mastodon would not be for sale and would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual, and he could ensure that because he was the person in control, the only ultimate decision-maker.