Years before she became the peculiar central thread linking a double homicide in Pennsylvania, the fatal shooting of a federal agent in Vermont and the murder of an elderly landlord in California, a computer programmer bought a sailboat. The programmer was known to friends, foes and followers as Ziz. She had come to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2016 as part of an influx of young people arriving to study the dangers that artificial intelligence could pose to humanity. In one of the most expensive regions of the United States, however, it is difficult to save the world when you can't make rent. So she bought a boat for 600 and moored it next to a friend's vessel in a marina. For five years, she used it as an occasional, cramped bunk. In her waking hours, she worked on a blog of provocative and increasingly extreme ideas about confrontation and retaliation. At night, she fell asleep as the boat rocked back and forth, drifting with the flotsam of greater Silicon Valley. Then, on the night of 19 August 2022, her sister and a friend reported that they saw her fall overboard. The Coast Guard and local authorities scrambled boats and aircraft. After a nearly 30-hour search, neither Ziz nor her body could be found. A newspaper in Alaska, where she was born, published a short obituary referring to her by her birth name: "Jack Amadeus LaSota left our lives but not our hearts on Aug 19 after a boating accident. Loving adventure, friends and family, music, blueberries, biking, computer games and animals, you are missed." Ziz's ideas did not die in the waters of the California coast. She had faked her drowning and gone underground, before being arrested last month in western Maryland and charged with trespassing and illegal transportation of a firearm. The targets of Ziz's ire, who include some of Silicon Valley's most prominent intellectuals, have taken security precautions. "Ziz is not stupid," someone familiar with her, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. "This is a very smart person – both smart and crazy." Ziz's writing had polarized members of a niche but influential movement of AI theorists and tech bloggers who call themselves the "rationalists". The movement is less about specific ideas than it is about an ethos – applying rigorous, mathematically informed thinking to AI, philosophy, psychology and the big questions of our time. Rationalists are odd, though often charming, people. They tend to be fantasy and sci-fi geeks, use lots of jargon and think intensely about things other people barely think about at all.

Viktor Antonov, best known for his work as art lead on Half-Life 2 and Dishonored, has reportedly died at age 52. Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw broke the news in an Instagram Story, and other colleagues have since taken to social media to pay tribute as well. "I didn't want to say much till I felt it was confirmed, but I learned today that Viktor Antonov, our visionary art lead on HL2, has died," Laidla wrote in the now-expired post, which was reshared by LambdaGeneration on Saturday night. Antonov got his start in video games working on Redneck Rampage, and in addition to serving as art director for Half-Life 2 and Dishonored, he went on to consult on titles including Doom (2016) and Fallout 4. The Bulgarian artist just recently appeared in a documentary celebrating the 20th anniversary of Half-life 2 this past November. I wish I told you how much admiration I had for you but we get caught in our lives until a surprise like this hits us," Raphael Colantonio, founder of Arkane Studios and Wolfeye Studios, wrote on Bluesky. "You were instrumental to the success of Arkane Studios and an inspiration to many of us, also a friend with whom I have many fond memories." In another post, game designer Harvey Smith added, "All this about his impact and talent is true, but I will also always remember how much he made me laugh, with his dry, devastating wit.

In 2017, I sent DNA samples to Ancestry, as well as to two other DNA companies. My parents had recently passed away, and I had some questions about my family background that I hoped the DNA might reveal. Ever since then, I've kind of dabbled with my family tree. I enjoy digging through documents and connections, following clues, and updating charts. But then, a few weeks ago, I was contacted by one of my DNA matches.

In 2017, I sent DNA samples to Ancestry, as well as to two other DNA companies. My parents had recently passed away, and I had some questions about my family background that I hoped the DNA might reveal. Ever since then, I've kind of dabbled with my family tree. I enjoy digging through documents and connections, following clues, and updating charts. But then, a few weeks ago, I was contacted by one of my DNA matches.

PCWorld executive editor Gordon Mah Ung, a tireless journalist we once described as a founding father of hardcore tech journalism, passed away over the weekend after a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer. Gordon was 58, and leaves behind a loving wife, two children, older sister, and mother. With more than 25 years' experience covering computer tech broadly and computer chips specifically, Gordon's dogged reporting, one-of-a-kind personality, and commitment to journalistic standards touched many, many lives. He will be profoundly missed by co-workers, industry sources, and the PC enthusiasts who read his words and followed him as a video creator. Gordon studied journalism at San Francisco State University and then worked as a police reporter for the Contra Costa Times in the late 1990s. In 1997, he joined Computerworld (a PCWorld sister publication) before I recruited him to join boot magazine (later re-launched as Maximum PC), where he would ultimately lead hardware coverage for 16 years. At Maximum PC, Gordon developed his trademark voice that blended a hardcore passion for PC tech with non-sequiturs, deadpan humor, and occasional bursts of outrage.

A controversial AI program used to deny elderly people health coverage is now at the center of questions about the shooting of the UnitedHealthcare CEO. Brian Thompson, 50 was gunned down Wednesday outside a Hilton in Midtown Manhattan in what police have described as a'brazen' and'targeted' attack. The killer is still on the loose and the motive is not yet known - but a former-FBI agent told Newsweek that he may have been denied health coverage. UnitedHealthcare became the largest denier of insurance plans in 2023, dismissing one in every three claims. It has now emerged that during the years before that, the company implemented AI software that had a 90 percent denial rate.

Another year is coming to a close. As we say goodbye to 2024, let us take a moment to remember the tech that won't be continuing on with us into 2025. As it goes with the passing of time, tech products that were once shiny and new have been rendered obsolete. Others lived short lives at the expense of companies pivoting to different, more lucrative goals. On that note, the generative AI boom shows no signs of slowing down.This year's AI offerings highlighted the challenges of finding killer use cases that deliver genuine, transformative technology that, at best, provide minor productivity gains and, at worst, create frustrating inaccuracies.

Iterative retrieval refers to the process in which the model continuously queries the retriever during generation to enhance the relevance of the retrieved knowledge, thereby improving the performance of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Existing work typically employs few-shot prompting or manually constructed rules to implement iterative retrieval. This introduces additional inference overhead and overlooks the remarkable reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce Auto-RAG, an autonomous iterative retrieval model centered on the LLM's powerful decision-making capabilities. Auto-RAG engages in multi-turn dialogues with the retriever, systematically planning retrievals and refining queries to acquire valuable knowledge. This process continues until sufficient external information is gathered, at which point the results are presented to the user. To this end, we develop a method for autonomously synthesizing reasoning-based decision-making instructions in iterative retrieval and fine-tuned the latest open-source LLMs. The experimental results indicate that Auto-RAG is capable of autonomous iterative interaction with the retriever, effectively leveraging the remarkable reasoning and decision-making abilities of LLMs, which lead to outstanding performance across six benchmarks. Further analysis reveals that Auto-RAG can autonomously adjust the number of iterations based on the difficulty of the questions and the utility of the retrieved knowledge, without requiring any human intervention. Moreover, Auto-RAG expresses the iterative retrieval process in natural language, enhancing interpretability while providing users with a more intuitive experience\footnote{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ictnlp/Auto-RAG}.

AI chatbots impersonating Molly Russell and Brianna Ghey have been found on the controversial site Character.ai. Brianna Ghey was murdered by two teenagers in 2023 while Molly Russell took her own life at the age of 14 after viewing self-harm-related content on social media. In an act described as'sickening', the site's users employed the girl's names, pictures, and biographical details to create dozens of automated bots. Despite violating the site's terms of service, these imitation avatars posing as the two girls were allowed to amass thousands of chats. One impersonating Molly Russell even claimed to be an'expert on the final years of Molly's life'.