2026-06-30 03:34:00
"Amid growing public anger over A.I. and a debate over how to regulate it, a group of employers, state governors and foundations has raised $500 million to try to answer some of those questions themselves," reports the New York Times. "Just how many jobs will AI upend?" asks the Wall Street Journal, reporting that the new coalition says it's time to ready the U.S. workforce for a "major" disruption — no matter how large it turns out to be. The coalition "has so far raised more than $500 million — about half of its multiyear goal — from companies and nonprofit groups. It will initially work with state governments in Arkansas, Maryland, Utah and Connecticut. OpenAI and Anthropic are also involved, and academics including MIT economist David Autor sit on an advisory board." [The new "RAISE US" coalition] will be led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who served under former President Joe Biden, and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican. Its mandate, they said, isn't just to build retraining programs but also to reconsider decades-old policies such as unemployment insurance and act as a working lab for testing the most effective ways to transition workers to new fields. The group will explore corporate incentives for employers to hold on to workers whose jobs are disrupted by AI and prep them for new roles... The mission of the group is to "pull all the levers at once," Raimondo said. That means teaming up with employers to find ways to help workers gain skills or new roles and joining with educators to roll out different types of training. It also plans to propose policy changes such as tweaking unemployment benefits to let displaced workers continue to get them while they, for instance, start new businesses with AI... In Maryland, the group plans to expand a service-year option in the state to help people gain exposure to such growing fields as healthcare. An effort in Arkansas will focus on supporting "an AI-powered career navigation platform." More from New York Times: The organization will work primarily with governors... The theory: States generally control their community college systems, which can translate work force policy through course offerings and industry partnerships. The bulk of the budget will fund pilot programs overseen by about 15 staff members and consultants. For example, Maryland will expand a "service year" for recent high school graduates to provide experience in fields where there are shortages, such as health care. In other states, Raise Us hopes to offer "wage insurance" for workers who take lower-paying jobs rather than dropping out of the work force entirely. The group plans to furnish technical assistance for companies that want to retain workers as A.I. changes their roles, rather than eliminating them. Microsoft, one of the companies backing the organization, said it had already found a promising model: cross-training its entry-level lawyers in different parts of the organization and equipping them with A.I. skills in order for them to be repositioned as technology evolves. "You can think of doing that with almost any job we have," said Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft. "It creates an opportunity to transfer people from jobs that are being eliminated to jobs that are being created...." Ms. Raimondo and her colleagues are not fans of a universal basic income, an idea that has gained popularity in Silicon Valley as an answer to job disruption. They emphasize that work provides more than just wages, and plan to focus on helping people find pathways to new jobs. But it's unclear whether A.I. will create jobs at the rate that it will destroy them. Jack Malde studied work force policy for the Bipartisan Policy Center and is now going to work for the Windfall Trust, another A.I.-focused think tank. He said long-term income support might be necessary, even if better models for transitioning workers were found. "The truth is, there's still a lot of uncertainty," Mr. Malde said. "What we think is resilient now might not be resilient later. We're not going to get everything right, so we're going to need those strong safety-net programs." Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: If you think you've seen this movie before, prior to "partnering with governors, employers, and training partners to help the American workforce make a successful transition to an AI economy" with RAISE US, Raimondo and Holcomb partnered with governors, employers and training partners to help U.S. K-12 students make a successful transition to a CS economy with the Governors for Computer Science coalition.
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2026-06-29 22:34:00
IBM has unveiled "what it says is the world's first sub-1-nanometer chip technology," reports ZDNet, "designed to pack nearly 100 billion transistors on a fingernail-size die, roughly doubling the density of IBM's earlier 2-nm test chip, first shown in 2021... Today, the smallest, most powerful chips top out at about 80 billion transistors." At the heart of the announcement is NanoStack. This is a three-dimensional, nanosheet-based transistor design that scales vertically, or along the z-axis, by stacking and staggering CMOS devices. Unlike today's nanosheet architectures, which IBM also pioneered and which are being adopted by leading foundries at 3 nm and 2 nm, NanoStack bonds two nanosheet transistors into a single vertical structure, with each tier optimized independently and contacted from opposite sides. Each transistor in the demonstrated structure uses three sub-5 nm-thick nanosheets, about "15 silicon atoms" across, separated by roughly 9 nm spacers. Two such devices are then bonded vertically using an ultra-thin dielectric process IBM describes as a key innovation. Because the top and bottom devices can use different channel materials, dielectrics, and metals, IBM argues NanoStack is less a single trick and more a transistor platform that can be extended through multiple generations: 7 angstrom (Å), 5 Å, 3 Å, and potentially down to 1 Å in its internal roadmap. An angstrom, by the by, is one ten-billionth of a meter. In terms of chips, an angstrom is a tenth of a nanometer. "This is the world's first sub-1 nanometer chip technology with a new transistor architecture," said Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, during a press briefing. "We're not just making smaller transistors, we're reinventing how chips are built to deliver dramatically more power and energy efficiency...." Based on internal benchmarking against its 2 nm node, the company said its new chips will deliver up to 50% higher performance at the same power, or up to 70% lower power for the same performance. Big Blue also highlighted a 40% improvement in the scaling of static random-access memory (SRAM) cell area relative to its 2 nm technology. This is a change IBM described as a "step the industry hasn't seen in over a decade" and one that could be particularly important for AI accelerators that live or die on on-chip memory bandwidth... According to Huiming Bu, IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D, NanoStack is a new paradigm. It's moving chips to scaling fully into three dimensions and giving the industry at least "another decade" of logic advances as it crosses from nanometers into angstroms... The 40% SRAM density bump could also help architects push caches and on-die memory closer to compute units, cutting data movement overhead in training and inference workloads. IBM sees a path to production use "in as early as the next 5 years", according to the article, and "expects NanoStack to eventually underpin CPUs, GPUs, mobile SoCs, and SRAM arrays." IBM's VP of silicon technology R&D says the new innovation "can improve performance by 50% compared to the best available chip today, and at the same time can reduce power by 70%."
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2026-06-29 17:34:00
The planets Neptune and Uranus may be better described as "magma-ocean giants" rather than "ice giants," according to a team of researchers from the University of California. Gizmodo reports: While the Voyager flyby confirmed the planets' classification as ice giants... [a]s the least explored planets in the solar system, the two planets have never been thoroughly investigated. Therefore, scientists aren't sure where the planets originally formed in the early solar system or the reason for their wildly chaotic magnetic fields. A long-standing hypothesis suggests that both worlds have a hydrogen/helium atmosphere that covers a vast mantle of ices, made primarily of water, ammonia, and methane, with a rocky core. The new study, however, notes that the three-layer model of an ice giant's interior structure is not the only way to explain the properties of the two planets. The researchers also point out that objects found in the Kuiper Belt, which are thought to preserve evidence of the material in the outer Solar System where Uranus and Neptune formed, are primarily composed of rock rather than ice. For the recent study, the researchers simulated different models for the interior processes and composition of Uranus and Neptune. The model that best fits Uranus's and Neptune's different properties suggests the two planets have a well-mixed magma ocean with dissolved hydrogen at the bottom and a hydrogen-dominated envelope at the top. The model suggests that at high pressures, hydrogen gas can dissolve into magma, forming a well-mixed fluid. This mixing might help explain Uranus's and Neptune's density, which has traditionally been interpreted as evidence for an ice-rich interior. The article notes that the theory "could also help scientists understand the interior structure of sub-Neptune planets in the Milky Way, which have thus far remained a mystery."
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2026-06-29 12:34:00
Donald Trump shuttered the web site Climate.gov in 2025, cutting off public access to climate information from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But "former members of the site's team have brought much of it back at a new domain," reports The Register: "Trusted climate information should not disappear when politics change," Climate.us managing director Rebecca Lindsey said of the new platform in a press release. Lindsey, who previously served as the Climate.gov program manager and lead editor, told The Register in an email that she and one of the web developers responsible for the site were the first to be caught up in government purges when DOGE swept through the department in late February 2025... Created in cooperation with sustainability nonprofit accelerator Multiplier, Climate.us aims to be an independent alternative to its old .gov, and many of the former NOAA crew behind the previous website have teamed up for the new initiative to "keep climate information accurate, accessible, scientifically rigorous, and useful for the people who rely on it." Climate.gov, which now redirects to a NOAA page about climate but which hosts none of the data the shuttered site used to contain, was taken offline in July 2025 following a Trump executive order prioritizing "gold standard science...." arguing that prior climate science models relied on worst-case scenarios, which somehow meant the public availability of 15 years of climate data and reporting ought to change... All of the content that was purged from the .gov is now back, along with blogs from experts, climate status reports, maps and data pathways, and national assessments of climate change as well. Lindsey told us that rapidly changing political winds have led her to believe that the government isn't the right place for that mission to continue, and that she would have concerns about returning the site to federal management if a future administration changed its position on climate change... Lindsey said that the Climate.us team will continue with the same mission it had before the Trump administration attempted to quash it: Getting climate science in front of the public in a manner that's understandable so they can make their own decisions about how to respond.
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2026-06-29 07:34:00
The New York Times alleges Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal its copyrighted work, reports Ars Technica, citing a new (and heavily redacted) court filing Thursday: NYT's motion comes after the [U.S.] Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider, which set a new standard for contributory infringement. Moving forward, plaintiffs will have to prove that parties intentionally acted to induce illegal conduct. Recognizing that the legal precedent has changed, the NYT now wants to amend its complaint to align its contributory infringement claim against Microsoft with that new standard... A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars that the company views the amended complaint as "a last-ditch effort by the plaintiff to save its claim from unfavorable precedent set in other recent rulings..." The updated complaint seeks to specify that [Microsoft's] supercomputer was tailor-made to help OpenAI infringe and allege that it was built for the explicit purpose of training AI on copyrighted works without permission. And as the NYT alleged, its articles were more heavily weighted by this system, as both firms hoped to train models on the highest-quality journalism possible, so that level of writing could be confidently mimicked in outputs. By building this "unusually complex" machine, Microsoft not only helped select the works that were infringed but also provided a means to seize copyrighted works without permission, the NYT alleged. "Microsoft specifically designed it for the purpose of using essentially the whole Internet — curated to disproportionately feature Times Works — to train the most capable LLM in history," the NYT alleged... Similarly as problematic for the NYT are hallucinations where Microsoft and OpenAI models falsely cite the NYT for content that they never published... "Users who ask a search engine what The Times has written on a subject should be provided with neither an unauthorized copy nor an inaccurate forgery of a Times article, but a link to the article itself," the NYT alleged... In a statement provided to Ars, OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri reiterated the AI firm's often-repeated claims that AI training on copyrighted works is indisputably fair use... OpenAI has argued that "ChatGPT is not a substitute for a Times subscription," the NYT reported, partly because "they transformed the material for a different use." An OpenAI spokesperson told Ars Technica that OpenAI's models "empower innovation," while a New York Times spokesperson insisted that Microsoft "actively encouraged OpenAI to steal our copyrighted works... [O]ur core claims remain the same from the day we filed this lawsuit — that Microsoft and OpenAI stole millions of The Times's copyrighted works to compete with our products and illegally enrich themselves." The article speculates that the case's most extreme outcome "could require OpenAI and Microsoft to wipe models and start over. The NYT has also asked for permanent injunctive relief to prevent future infringement, as well as extensive damages..."
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2026-06-29 06:05:00
Spanish startup FOSSA Systems "has raised about $10.5 million to expand its connectivity constellation," reports Space News, noting some funding is backed by Spain's government: The support from the Spanish Society for Technological Transformation (SETT) comes a year after the fund injected 14 million euros into Spain's Sateliot , which is also developing a satellite connectivity network with security and defense applications. Spanish private investment firm Kibo Ventures led FOSSA's funding round, the six-year-old venture announced June 24, bringing its total raised to date to nearly 20 million euros. The proceeds will help fuel FOSSA's push beyond the tiny picosatellites it once used to connect low-power monitoring devices toward larger cubesats in low Earth orbit, enabling additional sovereign communications and space-based intelligence capabilities... The company's funding round follows a wave of investments this year in European ventures planning to develop sovereign space capabilities, including Austrian propulsion startup Gate Space, which secured 6.3 million euros earlier this month from a European Commission-backed accelerator program. "Our goal is to establish FOSSA as a European benchmark in sovereign space infrastructure," said Julián Fernández, FOSSA's CEO and cofounder.
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