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State Bar of California admits it used AI to develop exam questions, triggering new furor

Los Angeles Times

Nearly two months after hundreds of prospective California lawyers complained that their bar exams were plagued with technical problems and irregularities, the state's legal licensing body has caused fresh outrage by admitting that some multiple-choice questions were developed with the aid of artificial intelligence. The State Bar of California said in a news release Monday that it will ask the California Supreme Court to adjust test scores for those who took its February bar exam. But it declined to acknowledge significant problems with its multiple-choice questions -- even as it revealed that a subset of questions were recycled from a first-year law student exam, while others were developed with the assistance of AI by ACS Ventures, the State Bar's independent psychometrician. "The debacle that was the February 2025 bar exam is worse than we imagined," said Mary Basick, assistant dean of academic skills at UC Irvine Law School. Having the questions drafted by non-lawyers using ...


U.K. AI startup Wayve makes Japan debut after Nissan partnership

The Japan Times

Wayve Technologies, a U.K.-based artificial intelligence startup backed by SoftBank, has tapped Japan as the next location in its global expansion. On Tuesday, it announced the opening of a test center in Yokohama, making Japan its fourth market after the U.K., U.S. and Germany as it looks to work with major carmakers in developing AI-driven autonomous driving technology. "The platform we provide can give a safer and more reliable driving performance than any single manufacturer can build on their own," Chief Executive Officer Alex Kendall said during an interview.


RFK Jr. Knows Amazingly Little About Autism

Mother Jones

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. conducts a news conference to discuss the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network survey.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP While his anti-vaccine allies swooned and scientists cringed, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used his first-ever press conference this week, in response to new data showing an apparent increase in the number of autistic kids, to promote a variety of debunked, half-true, and deeply ableist ideas about autism. He painted the condition as a terrifying "disease" that "destroys," as he put it, children and their families. Kennedy made it clear he planned to use his powerful role as the person in charge of a massive federal agency devoted to protecting public health to promote the idea that autism is caused by "environmental factors," a still-speculative thesis that's clearly a short walk towards advancing his real aim: blaming vaccines. Kennedy has spent the last 20 years promoting anti-vaccine rhetoric, falsely and repeatedly claiming that vaccines are linked to autism. Yet as the press conference made clear, Kennedy knows startlingly little about autism.


Meta will start using data from EU users to train its AI models

Engadget

Meta plans to start using data collected from its users in the European Union to train its AI systems, the company announced today. Starting this week, the tech giant will begin notifying Europeans through email and its family of apps of the fact, with the message set to include an explanation of the kind of data it plans to use as part of the training. Additionally, the notification will link out to a form users can complete to opt out of the process. "We have made this objection form easy to find, read, and use, and we'll honor all objection forms we have already received, as well as newly submitted ones," says Meta. The company notes it will only use data it collects from public posts and Meta AI interactions for training purposes.


OpenAI's New GPT 4.1 Models Excel at Coding

WIRED

OpenAI announced today that it is releasing a new family of artificial intelligence models optimized to excel at coding, as it ramps up efforts to fend off increasingly stiff competition from companies like Google and Anthropic. The models are available to developers through OpenAI's application programming interface (API). OpenAI is releasing three sizes of models: GPT 4.1, GPT 4.1 Mini, and GPT 4.1 Nano. Kevin Weil, chief product officer at OpenAI, said on a livestream that the new models are better than OpenAI's most widely used model, GPT-4o, and better than its largest and most powerful model, GPT-4.5, in some ways. GPT-4.1 scored 55 percent on SWE-Bench, a widely used benchmark for gauging the prowess of coding models.


An Open Source Pioneer Wants to Unleash Open Source AI Robots

WIRED

Hugging Face, a company that hosts open source artificial intelligence models and software, announced today that it has acquired Pollen Robotics, the French startup behind the bug-eyed, two-armed, humanoid robot called Reachy 2. Hugging Face plans to sell the robot and will also allow developers to download, modify, and suggest improvements to its code. "It's really important for robotics to be as open source as possible," says Clรฉment Delangue, chief executive of Hugging Face. "When you think about physical objects doing physical things at work and at home, the level of trust and transparency I need is much higher than for something I chat with on my laptop." Simon Alibert and Rรฉmi Cadene are research engineers in AI and robotics at Hugging Face. In videos shared by Pollen Robotics, Reachy 2 can be seen performing tricks like tidying coffee mugs and picking up fruit.


New Jersey woman accused of hiring Tinder date to kill her ex and his teen daughter: court docs

FOX News

'The Big Weekend Show' co-hosts discuss Tinder user traffic peaking during'Dating Sunday.' A New Jersey woman is accused of hiring a man she met on Tinder to kill her police officer ex-boyfriend and his daughter, according to authorities. Camden County Prosecutor Grace C. MacAulay charged Jaclyn Diiorio, 26, with two counts of attempted first-degree murder, one count of conspiracy to commit murder and one count of third-degree possession of a controlled dangerous substance in connection with the alleged crime. Diiorio, of Runnemede, allegedly told a confidential informant she met on Tinder that she wanted her ex, a 53-year-old Philadelphia Police Department officer, and his 19-year-old daughter killed, Gloucester New Jersey Township Police said in a news release. The informant and Diiorio allegedly exchanged several phone calls and text messages after meeting on the dating app and later in person at a Wawa, according to court documents obtained by Fox News Digital.


Samsung's cute Ballie robot arrives this summer with Google Gemini in tow

Engadget

Samsung's Ballie will go on sale in the US and South Korea this summer, the company announced today. What's more, through a partnership with Google Cloud, the diminutive robot will ship with a Gemini AI model. Samsung didn't state the specific system that powers Ballie, but in combination with the company's own proprietary language models, it says the robot has multimodal capabilities, meaning Ballie can process voice, audio and visual data from its sensors. According to Samsung, Ballie can also manage your smart home devices and even offer health and styling recommendations, if you're inclined to seek that type of advice from a robot. Samsung has yet to announce pricing for Ballie, though with the uncertainty around the Trump administration's recently announced tariffs, you can't blame Samsung, can you?


The Morning After: Trump's tariffs are disrupting Nintendo's Switch 2 plans

Engadget

Hours after I published our Friday newsletter, debating the price of Nintendo's new console, the company announced it would delay US pre-orders for the Switch 2 as it wrestled with a new set of tariffs introduced by President Trump. "Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the US will not start April 9, 2025, in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions," Nintendo told Engadget. It added that the console is still set to launch on June 5, however. Last week, the Trump administration announced a set of new tariffs on a swath of countries, including Japan (Nintendo's base of operations), China and Vietnam. Those last two countries, where Nintendo manufactures much of its hardware, will be subject to import duties of 54 percent and 46 percent.


Meta introduces Llama 4 with two new AI models available now, and two more on the way

Engadget

Meta has released the first two models from its multimodal Llama 4 suite: LLama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick. Maverick is "the workhorse" of the two and excels at image and text understanding for "general assistant and chat use cases," the company said in a blog post, while the smaller model Scout could tackle things like "multi-document summarization, parsing extensive user activity for personalized tasks, and reasoning over vast codebases." The company also introduced Llama 4 Behemoth, an upcoming model it says is "among the world's smartest LLMs" -- and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said we'll be hearing about a fourth model, LLama 4 Reasoning, "in the next month." Both Maverick and Scout are available to download now from the LLama website and Hugging Face, and they've been added to Meta AI, including for WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram DMs. Scout has 17 billion active parameters with 16 experts, Meta says.