Lauren Bannon says ChatGPT helped diagnose her with cancer. 'LUCKY TO BE ALIVE': A mother of two credits ChatGPT for saving her life, claiming the artificial intelligence chatbot flagged the condition leading to her cancer when doctors missed it. AUTONOMY TEST RUN: Robotaxis are closer to becoming a reality, after Tesla launched a full self-driving (FSD) supervised ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, and the San Francisco Bay Area "for an early set of employees." HARVESTING YOUR DATA?: A powerful House Committee is demanding information from DeepSeek on what U.S. data it used to train the AI model as members accuse the company of being in the pocket of the Chinese government. EDUCATION REFORMS: President Donald Trump signed multiple Executive Orders relating to education Wednesday afternoon, with several tied to the theme of returning meritocracy back to the education system.

If you've been keeping up with the recent discussion around how best to use Signal and how to keep journalists out of your private chats about national security matters, you'll know that White House officials have been blaming an iPhone feature called Siri Suggestions for adding unauthorized members to a private group chat. Siri Suggestions works on iPhones (and iPads and Macs) to give you contextually aware assistance when you need it. The feature might make suggestions about who to invite to events based on previous events, for example, or give you prompts for searches on your device, based on what you've searched for at certain times in the past. In the case of the White House Signal chat blunders, it appears Siri made a contact suggestion based on details included in an email--only the contact details in the email weren't those of the email sender but those of someone mentioned in the message, which is where the confusion arose. As with many modern day AI tools, Siri Suggestions lets you choose where to draw the line on how much assistance to get.

You can want different things from a university--superlative basketball, an arts center, competent instruction in philosophy or physics, even a cure for cancer. No wonder these institutions struggle to keep everyone happy. The Trump Administration has effectively declared open war on higher education, targeting it with deep cuts to federal grant funding. University presidents are alarmed, as are faculty members, and anyone who cares about the university's broader role. Because I'm a historian of science and technology, part of my terrain is the evolving role of the university--from its medieval, clerical origins to the entrepreneurial R. & D. engines of today.

On February 19th, Donald Trump logged onto Truth Social to congratulate himself on vanquishing congestion pricing in his home state. "CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD," he posted. "Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. The message was amplified by the White House's official X account, which tweeted it with an A.I.-generated image of Trump, golden-haired and golden-crowned, blotting out the New York City skyline. The illustration, which was styled to look like the cover of Time magazine, displayed the President's fondness for crude symbols of power and wealth.

Sign up for the Surge, the newsletter that covers most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Hello once again from the Surge, Slate's roundup of the most relevant characters of the week in the delightful novel called United States Politics in 2025. I'm Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, who is currently protesting the administration's refusal to exempt bananas from import tariffs, even though they can't be grown at scale domestically, by standing outside the Department of Commerce dressed as a sad banana. This week we had the usual mess of absurd economic chaos and disconcerting announcements from people who are shutting down entire government departments on the basis of things they saw on Facebook. But first, the preliminary public opinion verdict on whether Donald Trump should have unlimited Judge Dredd powers is in … and it's not good news for Mr. Dredd's many fans in the White House.

A suspected drone attack by Sudan's Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary has killed at least 11 people at a displacement camp in River Nile state, authorities said. In a statement late on Friday, the local governor said the attack knocked out a nearby power station for the fourth time since the war between the RSF and the Sudanese army began two years ago. The attack marks a deadly escalation in the ongoing conflict, with a further 23 people injured, a medical official said. Witnesses said at least nine children were among the wounded. "My son, my cousin, my daughter's husband and two children, my cousin's children are dead. The boy is 10 years old and the girl is about two years old," witness Haleema told Al Jazeera.

In the past 18 months, Israel has also combined A.I. with facial recognition software to match partly obscured or injured faces to real identities, turned to A.I. to compile potential airstrike targets, and created an Arabic-language A.I. model to power a chatbot that could scan and analyze text messages, social media posts and other Arabic-language data, two people with knowledge of the programs said. Many of these efforts were a partnership between enlisted soldiers in Unit 8200 and reserve soldiers who work at tech companies such as Google, Microsoft and Meta, three people with knowledge of the technologies said. Unit 8200 set up what became known as "The Studio," an innovation hub and place to match experts with A.I. projects, the people said. Yet even as Israel raced to develop the A.I. arsenal, deployment of the technologies sometimes led to mistaken identifications and arrests, as well as civilian deaths, the Israeli and American officials said. Some officials have struggled with the ethical implications of the A.I. tools, which could result in increased surveillance and other civilian killings.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has terminated government research grants for studying misinformation and disinformation. The defunding comes at a time when propaganda and scams fuelled by the latest artificial intelligence technologies are flooding social media networks, and tech companies are abandoning content moderation efforts and eliminating fact-checking teams. The grant cancellations began on 18 April when the NSF published a statement saying it would not support research on misinformation or disinformation "that could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights…

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. "Free speech" was the battering ram that Elon Musk used to justify his pursuit of Twitter in 2022. He talked about the platform as the new digital town square. He said social media companies' moderation policies should be no more restrictive than national laws. "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means," he wrote after agreeing to a 44 billion takeover. In the three years since making the deal, Musk has continued to cloak himself in the armor of a free speech warrior, out there fighting for the rest of us.

Google has a monopoly, and that's the official line of the US federal government. In fact, it has two of them, losing two separate antitrust cases that threaten to cripple the tech giant. The Department of Justice has proposed forcing Google to sell or otherwise divest itself of the Chrome browser as its first and preferred remedy. But who would buy it? Unsurprisingly, there are beaucoup business beaus lining up around the block for this browser bachelorette.