Media
What WILL lead to humanity's demise? As Bill Gates says it won't be climate change, experts reveal the bleak reality of our extinction
Thousands of tourists warned they'll be'stranded for weeks' in the Caribbean as monster Hurricane Melissa carves path of destruction German activist dubbed'anti-Greta' seeks asylum in US with support of Elon Musk It's an extraordinary power grab that will leave Harry and Meghan quaking... but Diana predicted it all along: MAUREEN CALLAHAN Zohran Mamdani's deep family ties to George Soros revealed: TOM LEONARD unravels years-long web of finances and scheming that leads (wouldn't you guess it!) to Obama Netanyahu orders'powerful strikes in Gaza' and'kills nine' after accusing Hamas of violating ceasefire terms following'faked' return of hostage remains Taylor Swift is HIDING: Insiders spill on secretive behavior at NFL games... and why she's adamant about new life in the shadows Baseball fans go wild for the'most beautiful woman on the planet' singing national anthem at the World Series Sydney Sweeney sparks liberal meltdown with shock appearance on Fox's World Series coverage ...
OnlyFans Goes to Business School
In its first foray into business content, the platform has asked lingerie entrepreneur and ex-SuicideGirl Rachael McCrary to teach creators how to monetize their ideas. OnlyFans has tapped the founder of a lingerie company and former nude model to launch business classes on the platform. Rachael McCrary, a longtime lingerie designer and founder of the company Spice Rack, is launching four videos on OnlyFans Wednesday. The videos are quite different from the usual OnlyFans fare. They'll focus on pitching investors, building a brand, and navigating being an entrepreneur as a woman, McCrary tells WIRED.
KDDI enters into 'responsible' AI agreement with Google
KDDI enters into'responsible' AI agreement with Google KDDI said its AI service, which will be launched in spring 2026, will "protect the rights of content providers." Major Japanese telecommunications firm KDDI signed an agreement Tuesday with Google Cloud Japan in a bid to develop a "responsible" AI search service that only shows content that creators have given consent to. The agreement would allow KDDI to harness Google's AI assistant Gemini and AI-optimized research tool NotebookLM. "We will promote'responsible AI' that uses AI ethically, legally, and appropriately, and provide an environment where content providers and customers can use AI safely and securely," the company said in a statement. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.
Google Workspace Promo Code: Up to 14% Off in October 2025
Boost your productivity and save with exclusive Google Workspace coupons from WIRED. Get up to 14% off plans for three months, including Starter, Standard, and Plus tiers. Google Workspace is the modern business world's de facto productivity suite, and it's only gotten better over the years. There's the centralization of Google Docs, Drive, and Gmail, of course, but Google has bolstered its productivity suite with an AI infusion via Gemini, as well as simplified its offerings to work for massive corporations all the way down to individual users . If you want to get the best price, you need a Google Workspace promo code.
The Distracting Effect: Understanding Irrelevant Passages in RAG
Amiraz, Chen, Cuconasu, Florin, Filice, Simone, Karnin, Zohar
A well-known issue with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is that retrieved passages that are irrelevant to the query sometimes distract the answer-generating LLM, causing it to provide an incorrect response. In this paper, we shed light on this core issue and formulate the distracting effect of a passage w.r.t. a query (and an LLM). We provide a quantifiable measure of the distracting effect of a passage and demonstrate its robustness across LLMs. Our research introduces novel methods for identifying and using hard distracting passages to improve RAG systems. By fine-tuning LLMs with these carefully selected distracting passages, we achieve up to a 7.5% increase in answering accuracy compared to counterparts fine-tuned on conventional RAG datasets. Our contribution is two-fold: first, we move beyond the simple binary classification of irrelevant passages as either completely unrelated vs. distracting, and second, we develop and analyze multiple methods for finding hard distracting passages. To our knowledge, no other research has provided such a comprehensive framework for identifying and utilizing hard distracting passages.
Repurposing Synthetic Data for Fine-grained Search Agent Supervision
Zhao, Yida, Li, Kuan, Wu, Xixi, Zhang, Liwen, Zhang, Dingchu, Li, Baixuan, Song, Maojia, Chen, Zhuo, Wang, Chenxi, Wang, Xinyu, Tu, Kewei, Xie, Pengjun, Zhou, Jingren, Jiang, Yong
LLM-based search agents are increasingly trained on entity-centric synthetic data to solve complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. However, prevailing training methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) discard this rich entity information, relying instead on sparse, outcome-based rewards. This critical limitation renders them unable to distinguish informative "near-miss" samples-those with substantially correct reasoning but a flawed final answer-from complete failures, thus discarding valuable learning signals. We address this by leveraging the very entities discarded during training. Our empirical analysis reveals a strong positive correlation between the number of ground-truth entities identified during an agent's reasoning process and final answer accuracy. Building on this insight, we introduce Entity-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (E-GRPO), a novel framework that formulates a dense entity-aware reward function. E-GRPO assigns partial rewards to incorrect samples proportional to their entity match rate, enabling the model to effectively learn from these "near-misses". Experiments on diverse question-answering (QA) and deep research benchmarks show that E-GRPO consistently and significantly outperforms the GRPO baseline. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that E-GRPO not only achieves superior accuracy but also induces more efficient reasoning policies that require fewer tool calls, demonstrating a more effective and sample-efficient approach to aligning search agents.
Open Korean Historical Corpus: A Millennia-Scale Diachronic Collection of Public Domain Texts
Song, Seyoung, Kim, Nawon, Chae, Songeun, Park, Kiwoong, Jin, Jiho, Yoo, Haneul, Cho, Kyunghyun, Oh, Alice
The history of the Korean language is characterized by a discrepancy between its spoken and written forms and a pivotal shift from Chinese characters to the Hangul alphabet. However, this linguistic evolution has remained largely unexplored in NLP due to a lack of accessible historical corpora. To address this gap, we introduce the Open Korean Historical Corpus, a large-scale, openly licensed dataset spanning 1,300 years and 6 languages, as well as under-represented writing systems like Korean-style Sinitic (Idu) and Hanja-Hangul mixed script. This corpus contains 18 million documents and 5 billion tokens from 19 sources, ranging from the 7th century to 2025. We leverage this resource to quantitatively analyze major linguistic shifts: (1) Idu usage peaked in the 1860s before declining sharply; (2) the transition from Hanja to Hangul was a rapid transformation starting around 1890; and (3) North Korea ' s lexical divergence causes modern tokenizers to produce up to 51 times higher out-of-vocabulary rates. This work provides a foundational resource for quantitative diachronic analysis by capturing the history of the Korean language. Moreover, it can serve as a pre-training corpus for large language models, potentially improving their understanding of Sino-Korean vocabulary in modern Hangul as well as archaic writing systems.
Can LLMs Write Faithfully? An Agent-Based Evaluation of LLM-generated Islamic Content
Mushtaq, Abdullah, Naeem, Rafay, Elmahjub, Ezieddin, Ghaznavi, Ibrahim, Al-Maliki, Shawqi, Abdallah, Mohamed, Al-Fuqaha, Ala, Qadir, Junaid
Large language models are increasingly used for Islamic guidance, but risk misquoting texts, misapplying jurisprudence, or producing culturally inconsistent responses. We pilot an evaluation of GPT-4o, Ansari AI, and Fanar on prompts from authentic Islamic blogs. Our dual-agent framework uses a quantitative agent for citation verification and six-dimensional scoring (e.g., Structure, Islamic Consistency, Citations) and a qualitative agent for five-dimensional side-by-side comparison (e.g., Tone, Depth, Originality). GPT-4o scored highest in Islamic Accuracy (3.93) and Citation (3.38), Ansari AI followed (3.68, 3.32), and Fanar lagged (2.76, 1.82). Despite relatively strong performance, models still fall short in reliably producing accurate Islamic content and citations -- a paramount requirement in faith-sensitive writing. GPT-4o had the highest mean quantitative score (3.90/5), while Ansari AI led qualitative pairwise wins (116/200). Fanar, though trailing, introduces innovations for Islamic and Arabic contexts. This study underscores the need for community-driven benchmarks centering Muslim perspectives, offering an early step toward more reliable AI in Islamic knowledge and other high-stakes domains such as medicine, law, and journalism.
V-SAT: Video Subtitle Annotation Tool
Kundu, Arpita, Chakraborty, Joyita, Desarkar, Anindita, Sen, Aritra, Patil, Srushti Anil, Raman, Vishwanathan
The surge of audiovisual content on streaming platforms and social media has heightened the demand for accurate and accessible subtitles. However, existing subtitle generation methods primarily speech-based transcription or OCR-based extraction suffer from several shortcomings, including poor synchronization, incorrect or harmful text, inconsistent formatting, inappropriate reading speeds, and the inability to adapt to dynamic audio-visual contexts. Current approaches often address isolated issues, leaving post-editing as a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. In this paper, we introduce V-SAT (Video Subtitle Annotation Tool), a unified framework that automatically detects and corrects a wide range of subtitle quality issues. By combining Large Language Models(LLMs), Vision-Language Models (VLMs), Image Processing, and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), V-SAT leverages contextual cues from both audio and video. Subtitle quality improved, with the SUBER score reduced from 9.6 to 3.54 after resolving all language mode issues and F1-scores of ~0.80 for image mode issues. Human-in-the-loop validation ensures high-quality results, providing the first comprehensive solution for robust subtitle annotation.