Switch 2 games are on sale through Jan. 5 OpenAI is hiring a new Head of Preparedness to try to predict and mitigate AI's harms CEO Sam Altman posted about the role on X, saying the models'are starting to present some real challenges.' OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy. It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits . In a post on X about the position, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that the potential impact of models on mental health was something we saw a preview of in 2025, along with other real challenges that have arisen alongside models' capabilities. The Head of Preparedness is a critical role at an important time, he said.

Our findings indicate that no method excels across all metrics, showing significant room for research in this unique problem setting and indicating potential unresolved challenges for live policy proposals.

'It brings you closer to the natural world': the rise of the Merlin birdsong identifying app W hen Natasha Walter first became curious about the birds around her, she recorded their songs on her phone and arduously tried to match each song with online recordings. After a friend recommended Merlin Bird ID, a free app, she tried it in her London garden and was delighted to discover the birds she assumed were female blackbirds - "this is how bad a birder I was" - were actually song thrushes and mistle thrushes. "I'm obsessed with Merlin - it's wonderful and it's been a joy to me," says Walter, a writer and human rights activist. "This is what AI and machine-learning have been invented for. Merlin is having a moment. The app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, which listens for birdsong and identifies the species singing, has been downloaded 33m times, in 240 countries and territories around the world. Britain has the second highest total number of users - more than 1.5 million in 2024, an 88% increase from 2023. Every month, there has been a 30% increase in new users of the app, whose sound identification function was launched in 2021. Merlin has been trained to identify the songs of more than 1,300 species around the world, with more birds added twice a year. Different songs make distinct patterns on spectrograms and Merlin is trained to recognise these different shapes and attribute them to a species. For latecomers to birding, or those lacking a knowledgeable friend, the app has become their teacher. "My fear at first was I wouldn't actually learn because I'm outsourcing my understanding of birds to this app," says Walter. "But that hasn't come to pass.

If a major disaster like Fukushima or Chornobyl ever happens again, the world would know almost straight away, thanks to an array of government and DIY radiation-monitoring programs running globally. Why Don't Norwegians Hate Tesla Like the Rest of Europe Does? November's Tesla registrations were down in France, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Norway, however, is bucking the trend--thanks to a tax incentive system that will soon be rolled back.

Nude man arrested Christmas night after police say Vladimir Demidovich broke into two multimillion-dollar Golden Beach homes, including a $12 million residence.

President Donald Trump teased potential new marble armrests at the Kennedy Center after a vote to rename the venue in his honor triggered a legal challenge.

Alexander Eugene Smith faces multiple charges, including robbery and assault, after allegedly stealing a Washington State Patrol vehicle on Christmas Day.

Survival analysis is a crucial semi-supervised task in machine learning with significant real-world applications, especially in healthcare. The most common approach to survival analysis, Cox's partial likelihood, can be interpreted as a ranking model optimized on a lower bound of the concordance index. We follow these connections further, with listwise ranking losses that allow for a relaxation of the pairwise independence assumption. Given the inherent transitivity of ranking, we explore differentiable sorting networks as a means to introduce a stronger transitive inductive bias during optimization.

High-dimensional mediation analysis is often associated with a multiple testing problem for detecting significant mediators. Assessing the uncertainty of this detecting process via false discovery rate (FDR) has garnered great interest. To control the FDR in multiple testing, two essential steps are involved: ranking and selection. Existing approaches either construct p-values without calibration or disregard the joint information across tests, leading to conservation in FDR control or non-optimal ranking rules for multiple hypotheses. In this paper, we develop an adaptive mediation detection procedure (referred to as AMDP) to identify relevant mediators while asymptotically controlling the FDR in high-dimensional mediation analysis. AMDP produces the optimal rule for ranking hypotheses and proposes a data-driven strategy to determine the threshold for mediator selection. This novel method captures information from the proportions of composite null hypotheses and the distribution of p-values, which turns the high dimensionality into an advantage instead of a limitation. The numerical studies on synthetic and real data sets illustrate the performances of AMDP compared with existing approaches.