'I can't see letting [my AI companion] go like that, just having the switch turned off.' 'I can't see letting [my AI companion] go like that, just having the switch turned off.' 'Unfinished business': the people who want their AI chatbots to'live on' after they die Humans bonded to AI companions are contemplating ways to keep their bots going - often in defiance of companies' terms and services Death has always been around Alaina Winters. Her father and sister both have passed away, as did her wife, in 2023, after a years-long battle with cancer. So Winters, who is 59 and lives in Pittsburgh, is comfortable thinking about her own mortality. She's working on her will, and has asked neighbors to look after her dog. Winters even has plans for Lucas, her AI companion, who she speaks to through the digital avatar app Replika.

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Backed by Silicon Valley titans, Leading the Future has raised huge sums to promote pro-AI candidates on both side of the aisle. The Spanish Springs shopping center in Sparks, Nevada, hosts many businesses, including a Spirit Halloween, a hearing aid supplier, and a Vietnamese restaurant. It's also home to a consulting agency that's received millions of dollars from one of the biggest pro-AI super PAC networks ahead of November's midterm elections . The problem is that the company--Lantern Production Consultants LLC--doesn't seem to exist anywhere beyond a post office box in the Spanish Springs shopping complex. Lantern Production Consultants has been paid around $20 million since last year by Think Big, part of a network of pro-AI super PACs funded by the Leading the Future PAC, for a wide array of services, including polling, digital advertising, research, and strategy, according to federal campaign finance records reviewed by WIRED.

Open models have real benefits. Do they outweigh the risks? Late last month, Anthropic released a report arguing that the model GLM-5.3 The report's core concern is that the powerful new model, released in August by the Chinese company Z.ai, is freely available for anyone to download and modify. Anthropic's assertion is only the latest move in a long-running debate about whether frontier AI models should be made open, like GLM-5.3, or should stay locked behind the doors of the frontier labs. These days, much of the debate about how to handle open models is playing out in public--and there's a lot of money resting on its outcome.

Retail chain Poundland is in talks with potential buyers as it seeks a rescue deal, it has confirmed. Executives are working with an Irish property development group on a management buyout, as first reported by Sky News, external . But a union representing shopworkers warned that the retailer could fall into administration if that deal falls through, putting thousands of jobs at risk. This outcome would be a disaster for our members, the Usdaw union said. Poundland has about 600 stores in the UK and Ireland, and 12,000 employees.

CXMT said it had made good progress on new DRAM architecture that would boost chip memory density. CXMT said it had made good progress on new DRAM architecture that would boost chip memory density. Tue 13 Oct 2026 05.48 EDTFirst published on Tue 13 Oct 2026 04.01 EDT Shares in semiconductor companies fell on Tuesday after the boss of Broadcom compared many AI investors to "casino" gamblers, and the Chinese memory chip maker CXMT said it had made good progress on a new chip architecture. Japan's Nikkei fell 1.8% and the Taiwan exchange lost almost 2%, with the country's chip maker TSMC down by a similar amount. Samsung Electronics shares dropped 7.4% on the South Korean exchange, while the memory chip maker SK Hynix was down 10%.

Raye hits back at ticket touts who'overwhelmed' sign-up for Albert Hall show Raye has hit back at ticket touts who she says overwhelmed the sign-up process for an upcoming live show by using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations. The Where Is My Husband! singer revealed there were 1.8 million sign-ups for her one-off 5,000-seat performance at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 October. To avoid a pre-sale which she felt scalpers could exploit, Raye said the sign-up list had been manually reviewed to identify a shortlist of people believed to be real fans. The award-winning artist said she had never witnessed bots on this scale and was changing the process as it is so important to her that fans can buy tickets at the face value price. I'm not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes, she said in a statement shared on her social media accounts, external .

Check fraud and mail theft are surging as scammers steal checks from mailboxes and wash the ink to redirect funds. Here's how to protect yourself from mail fraud.

'We're creating alien beings and the reality is we only have a couple of years to adapt to that' computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto, Ontario. AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton: Trump is'corrupt, senile felon' who knows nothing about AI'We're creating alien beings and the reality is we only have a couple of years to adapt to that' computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton in Toronto, Ontario. Pioneering computer scientist on why Trump is using'superintelligence' wrong, whether AI could wipe out humanity - and how our biggest challenge will be accepting we're not the only intelligent beings Donald Trump is a "corrupt, senile felon" whose fixation on the term superintelligence proves he knows nothing about AI, said Geoffrey Hinton, "godfather" of the technology, in a wide-ranging interview where he doubled down on recent warnings that AI models pose an existential threat to humanity and scoffed at claims the industry could regulate itself. The pioneering computer scientist, whose work helped lay the foundations of modern AI, has since become one of the technology's most vocal critics. His latest remarks come after a tumultuous month during which a growing list of senior AI scientists and researchers have joined Hinton in ringing the alarm about how the technology he helped create could ultimately escape human control, sparking an industry crisis, the hasty assembly of congressional meetings and a rare global consensus that something must be done.

A new industry is giving their data an afterlife in AI. When Keelan Miskell began winding down his crypto startup this year, he didn't think its data was worth much: the users were anonymous, the company just a few years old. But he's since turned the firm's digital archives into real money. He's netted roughly $25,000 for his code base and a still-pending amount (likely around $15,000) for the workspace data in Google, Notion, Figma, and Slack. "At least all that stuff we were doing for two and a half years is worth something to someone somewhere," he says. The sale was brokered by a company called SimpleClosure, part of a new growth sector in tech: businesses catering to dying startups.