For screenwriters like me--and job seekers all over--AI gig work is the new waiting tables. In eight months, I've done 20 of these soul-crushing contracts for five different platforms. My name on the platform is ri611. I work as an AI trainer. I assess whether a chatbot's tone is natural or flat, affected or annoying. I identify patterns in pictures of furniture; search the internet for group photos of strangers whom I'll eliminate from the portrait, one by one. I trawl through bizarre videos so I can annotate and time-stamp the barking of a dog, the moment a stranger walks past a window, the precise millisecond a balloon pops. I generate anime sex scenes and decapitate young women, coax LLMs into giving me recipes for bombs made of household items, and generate invites to a reprise of January 6 at the White House, all as part of a red team whose purpose is to test safety precautions and probe weaknesses. I work for companies with names like Mercor and Outlier and Task-ify and Turing and Handshake and Micro1. In my "other" career, I am a Hollywood writer and showrunner. I create prime-time TV, usually featuring a middle-class white lady having the worst day of her life, with some salt-of-the-earth police interference to raise the stakes. You can find my shows on Paramount and Hulu and the BBC.

There's a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia--and it has nothing to do with hardware. Forgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I'm afraid I must talk about "moats." Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company's competitive advantage, the word found its way into Silicon Valley pitch decks when a memo purportedly leaked from Google, titled "We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI," fretted that open-source AI would pillage Big Tech's castle. A few years on, the castle walls remain safe. Apart from a brief bout of panic when DeepSeek first appeared, open-source AI models have not vastly outperformed proprietary models.

Things to Do in L.A. Fears of an AI breakthrough force the U.S. and China to talk Quiet discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump's state visit to China this week to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel, officials told The Times. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump's state visit to China to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel for AI matters between Washington and Beijing, officials say. Any talks between the United States and China over AI regulations will be fraught with suspicion and risk.

Every time my cat Mira walks across a keyboard, I learn a few new Mac and PC keyboard shortcuts I never knew about. All cats love keyboards (but this is not a photo of my cat). My cat Mira is perfect, and has never done anything wrong. She also loves walking on laptop keys--both my MacBook and my wife Kathy's Windows PC . You might think that walking on laptops is an example of Mira doing something wrong. And, in any case, we've both learned a lot about how our computers work because of this.

SoftBank will partner with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to enable mass production of large-scale battery cells from the fiscal year starting next April. SoftBank Group's mobile unit said it plans to begin large-scale battery cell manufacturing at its plant in Sakai, Osaka Prefecture, to address growing power demand for AI services. SoftBank Corp. will partner with South Korea's Cosmos Lab and DeltaX to enable mass production from the fiscal year starting next April, the company said in a statement Monday. The aim is to output energy storage systems at a scale of one gigawatt-hour per year, SoftBank said, which would make it one of the largest facilities in Japan, according to data from BloombergNEF. SoftBank could scale up to a capacity of several GWh, Bloomberg reported last month.

Samsung's Bespoke update is big step towards a useful AI for your fridge Samsung's Bespoke update is big step towards a useful AI for your fridge The idea of installing a software update on your fridge already feels kind of weird, let alone one centered around improving its AI capabilities. But that's exactly what's happening to Samsung's line of Bespoke refrigerators this week, and to my surprise this patch is making major strides at providing truly useful machine learning in a modern day icebox. As a quick recap, Samsung has offered AI-powered features like automatic food recognition and meal planning on its Bespoke refrigerators for a couple years already. However, as I found out after reviewing its flagship model late last year, the company's AI capabilities are still very much a work in progress. Previously, the fridge could recognize around 60 different kinds of fresh foods (like fruits and veggies) alongside another 50 or so packaged goods like yogurt or popcorn.

Flytrex has partnered with Little Caesars to deliver full pizza orders by drone in Wylie, Texas, with food arriving in roughly four and a half minutes.

What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' At least three people have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine in the past 24 hours despite a three-day ceasefire announced by US President Donald Trump that came into effect on May 9. Regional authorities on Sunday reported one death each in Ukraine's Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kherson regions. Governor Oleksandr Prokudin confirmed the death on Telegram, saying the woman had been struck while walking down the street. Seven people, including a child, have also been injured across the region in drone or artillery attacks since early Saturday, he added. Ivan Fedorov, the governor of the southeastern Zaporizhia region, said one person had been killed and three others injured by artillery and drone attacks in the past 24 hours. In the northeastern Kharkiv region, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said eight people, including two children, were injured in drone attacks on the city of Kharkiv and nearby settlements.

I knew my writing students were using AI. It's what's lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words I have been teaching fiction writing at MIT since 2017. Mark what works and what doesn't - underline great sentences, flag clunky syntax, gaps in logic and unrealistic dialogue. Ask yourself: does the story work? Answer in a signed letter to the author, attached to their story.

How well do you know Iran? A fragile ceasefire in the US-Israel war on Iran is coming under growing strain as several Gulf countries have reported drone attacks. Qatar said on Sunday that a drone struck a cargo ship in Qatari waters, sparking a fire, while Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates said they repelled drone attacks. Qatar's Ministry of Defence said the freighter had been arriving in the country's waters from the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, and was hit by a drone northeast of the port of Mesaieed. "The vessel continued its journey toward Mesaieed Port after the fire was brought under control," the ministry said. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) said a bulk carrier reported being struck by an "unknown projectile", and a small fire had been extinguished, but there were no casualties from the incident.