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AI Agents Plunged the Tech World Into Chaos. Here's Exactly How That Happened

WIRED

Here's Exactly How That Happened The definitive story of how Claude Code and OpenClaw kicked off computing's biggest transformation possibly ever. "Hi, my name is Peter, and I'm a Claudeholic." It was August 2025 and Peter Steinberger was addressing a meetup in London called Claude Code Anonymous. Steinberger and some fellow addicts had arranged the event to network with people like themselves--techies swept up by coding tools such as Anthropic's paradigm-busting Claude Code. "I dedicate pretty much all my waking time to this, yet it doesn't feel enough," he told the gathering in a cozy, brick-walled room. A few months later, Anthropic released a new version of Claude Code, and the ranks of Claudeholics exploded . Called Opus 4.5, it could handle more complicated programming tasks, retain much more in its memory, run for many hours on end, and manage a team of AI subagents. Anthropic has what it describes as a "notoriously difficult" take-home exam for prospective engineering hires; in a head-to-head comparison of those people and its models, Anthropic claimed that Opus 4.5 "scored higher than any human candidate ever," which "raises questions on how AI will change engineering as a profession."


AI-powered version of Ozzy to appear in city

BBC News

A new AI-powered avatar of Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne could make its first UK appearance in Birmingham. Osbourne's wife Sharon and son Jack announced plans for the hyper-real version of the Birmingham-born singer at an expo in the US last week. Talking to Ed James on BBC Radio WM, she said that plans for the avatar were brilliant. I've seen the tests that they've done of Ozzy and you can see every pore on his face, his beard's coming through, it's that detailed, she said. Osbourne died in July aged 76, less than three weeks after he had performed at Villa Park with Black Sabbath.


Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner embraces democratic socialism at Bernie Sanders rally in Portland

FOX News

Graham Platner, Maine's presumptive Democratic Senate nominee, embraced democratic socialism at a Bernie Sanders rally, condemning Sen. Susan Collins and U.S. support for Israel.


Former execs of AI developer Alt found guilty of window dressing

The Japan Times

The Tokyo District Court on Monday found two former executives of artificial intelligence developer Alt guilty of window dressing in violation of the financial instruments and exchange law. The Tokyo District Court on Monday found two former executives of Japanese artificial intelligence developer Alt guilty of window dressing in violation of the financial instruments and exchange law. Former executive officer Katsuya Asai, 46, and former treasury and accounting division chief Takayuki Ariizumi, 53, were both sentenced to three years in prison, suspended for five years. The Tokyo-based company was fined ¥300 million ($1.89 million). Noting that fictitious sales at the firm reached about ¥11 billion in total, Judge Shoji Miyata said, "The window-dressing rate was extremely high, and the company achieved a stock listing that should not have been approved."


NBA star places 36,000 bet on outsider LA mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt winning heated race

FOX News

Greg Sankey makes it clear that SEC didn't start the 16-team CFP format discussion, that's on the Big Ten Emmanuel Acho says it was'pretty stupid' for Jaxson Dart to introduce President Trump Lincoln Riley claims USC was'snaps away' from the playoff, says he's a better coach now than when at Oklahoma Notre Dame's Josh Yago delivers Memorial Day salute during anthem before lacrosse championship game Dak Prescott reunites with ex-fiancée Sarah Jane Ramos to celebrate daughter's first birthday Celtics guard Jaylen Brown challenges ESPN's Stephen A Smith to a debate at Harvard or MIT Wyndham Clark adds to his funky resume, TPC Craig Ranch slander and LIV Golf's pitch to new investors Unearthed fan video shows who Kyle Busch really was, NASCAR's darkest hour & Bubba Wallace's'Rowdy' story California mom speaks with compassion but brutal honesty about presence of trans athlete in daughter's sport Curt Cignetti jokes he had to'coach the hell out' of undefeated Hoosiers to be Indy 500 pace car driver A screenshot has WNBA fans asking: did a player endorse a threat toward Caitlin Clark? MLB reporter Tricia Whitaker hit with line drive during Orioles' game Brit Hume: A Trump endorsement'repeatedly' gives candidates a leg up Democrats' 2028 presidential hopefuls face scrutiny over elitism, political attacks'The Five' reveals what fans always wanted to know about them Defense expert argues Iran has never been'so isolated' Joey Jones calls out Dem candidate Platner for'hiding behind the Purple Hearts' of fellow vets Trump doesn't want Iran to become his Afghanistan: Mike Sarraille Any Iran deal will be judged by'how much it cost' to secure, ex-CIA station chief says Dr Rebecca Grant: Iran has'no place to go,' will have to sign a deal Pope Leo XIV calls for AI to be'disarmed' in critical warning about emerging tech'Fox News @ Night' panelists evaluate Spencer Pratt's Los Angeles mayoral campaign. Milwaukee Bucks forward Kyle Kuzma is betting big that LA will change its ways. Kuzma added some intrigue to next week's nonpartisan primary, placing a $36,000 bet that former The Hills reality star Spencer Pratt will pull off an upset victory and become the next mayor of Los Angeles. With the June 2 vote just days away, Kuzma, who won a championship with the Lakers in 2020, is backing Pratt's campaign.


Modulated learning for private and distributed regression with just a single sample per client device

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This work focuses on the question of learning from a large number of devices with each device holding only a single sample of data. Several real-world applications exist to this one sample per client setup up including learning from fitness trackers, data/app usage aggregators, body-worn sensing devices, and daily event monitors to name a few. When a client has only one sample, the standard federated learning paradigm breaks down as a local update based on that single point is far from being useful, especially in the earlier rounds for estimation of the model coefficients. This utility is further weakened by the privacy-inducing noise applied at every round. This work caters to this problem to enable such clients to collaboratively contribute to effectively learn a global model without leaking the privacy of their data. The proposed approach injects a single, carefully calibrated noisy perturbation to transform the sample at each client, followed by a post-processed representation which is shared with the server. These representations aggregated at the server are processed to obtain an unbiased gradient update that in expectation matches the non-private centralized gradient while preserving data privacy. This approach is different than traditional private federated learning, where the communication payloads involve model coefficients as opposed to privately transformed data samples. This method enables devices with extremely limited data to collaborate and learn accurate, privacy-preserving models without requiring large local datasets or sacrificing individual privacy.


Real vs. Semi-Simulated: Rethinking Evaluation for Treatment Effect Estimation

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Estimating heterogeneous treatment effects with machine learning has attracted substantial attention in both academic research and industrial practice. However, the two communities often evaluate models under markedly different conditions. Methodological work typically relies on semi-simulated benchmarks and metrics that require counterfactual outcomes, whereas real-world applications rely on observable metrics based on ranking or test outcomes. Despite the well-known gap between methodological progress and practical deployment, the relationship between these evaluation regimes has not been examined systematically. We conduct a large-scale empirical study of treatment effect evaluation across standard semi-simulated benchmark families and real-world datasets. Our benchmark covers meta-learners paired with multiple base learners, as well as specialized causal machine learning models. We evaluate these methods using observable metrics common in application-oriented literature, alongside counterfactual metrics commonly used in methods papers. Our results reveal two complementary gaps. First, counterfactual metrics do not reliably recover the estimators preferred by observable metrics, even on the same semi-simulated benchmarks. Second, rankings obtained on semi-simulated benchmarks do not transfer to real datasets. We further find that simple meta-learners with strong base models are consistently competitive, in contrast to specialized causal models. Overall, our findings suggest that progress in treatment effect estimation research should not be assessed solely through counterfactual metrics and semi-simulated benchmarks, but it would benefit from incorporating observable metrics and real-data validation.


Yield Curves Dynamics Using Variational Autoencoders Under No-arbitrage

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper introduces a physics-informed generative framework that resolves the fundamental conflict between the statistical flexibility of deep learning and the rigorous theoretical constraints of fixed-income modeling. We demonstrate that standard generative models and unconstrained statistical extrapolations suffer from "manifold collapse" and severe arbitrage violations when forecasting term structures across diverse macroeconomic regimes. To overcome this, we propose a two-stage architecture. First, a Student-t Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Dynamic Level Injection (CVAEsT+LS) extracts a robust, heavy-tailed term structure manifold, effectively decoupling macroeconomic shape dynamics from absolute base rates. Second, the latent dynamic evolution is governed by a continuous-time Neural Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) strictly penalized by a No-Arbitrage Partial Differential Equation (PDE). Empirical results across multiple sovereign currencies (USD, GBP, JPY) confirm that our synergistic approach drastically reduces out-of-sample forecasting errors -- achieving an exceptional 6.58 bps Mean Tenor RMSE -- and successfully overcomes the massive parallel drift and zero-lower-bound violations exhibited by the classical HJM model in extreme environments. Furthermore, through phase space vector field analysis, we demonstrate the model's superior capability in unsupervised macroeconomic regime detection and high-quality continuous-time scenario generation. Ultimately, this research provides a highly scalable, mathematically sound evolutionary engine for term structure modeling.


Decision-Path Patterns as Tree Reliability Signals: Path-based Adaptive Weighting for Random Forest Classification

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The global uniform aggregation of random forests leaves conditional bias along the decision boundary uncorrected. To correct this locally, we propose exploiting the structural pattern of each tree's decision path. At inference, a random forest reaches its prediction through the root-to-leaf path the sample traverses in each tree, so path-level reliability offers a finer granularity than tree-level weighting can access. We show that reliability varies meaningfully across path patterns in the boundary region identified by the forest itself, and that using this signal yields a statistically significant accuracy improvement over RF on 36 binary classification benchmarks (Wilcoxon p < 0.0001). We further devise a way to measure the sufficiency of residual information in the fitted RF's decision boundary, providing an estimate of the expected gain before the method is applied; on the qualifying group identified this way, the method delivers a mean +0.99 pp accuracy improvement with strict wins on every dataset (7/0/0). Class-recall regression -- the typical failure mode of RF correction methods -- is measured: zero minority-recall regressions and a single majority-recall regression at the 0.2 pp threshold, indicating that the correction operates in the direction of bias reduction rather than class trade-off. Our work suggests that the structural information of decision paths, previously overlooked in random forest research, can contribute to RF performance improvement.


Causality as the Statistical Conscience of Artificial Intelligence: From Pearl's Ladder to Trustworthy Machines

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Modern Artificial Intelligence achieves remarkable predictive power by optimizing statistical risk functionals over vast corpora. Yet a gap separates this from genuine intelligence: the inability to distinguish correlation from causation. This paper argues that causal inference (identifying mechanisms invariant under intervention) is AI's indispensable statistical conscience. Without causal grounding, AI systems are correlation machines: powerful in familiar domains, brittle under distribution shift, and biased in high-stakes settings. Three contributions develop this argument. First, a Statistical Necessity Theorem for Causal Generalization: any algorithm achieving out-of-distribution generalization must encode causal structure, formalizing the distinction between prediction P(Y|X) and intelligence P(Y|do(X)). Second, a unified framework connects Pearl's do-calculus, the Potential Outcomes framework, Double Machine Learning, and Invariant Risk Minimization as a family of Causal Statistical Estimators, each identifying interventional distributions under different assumptions. Third, three AI failure modes (hallucination in large language models, reward hacking in reinforcement learning from human feedback, and degradation under distribution shift) are manifestations of causal blindness, each admitting a principled statistical remedy. Trustworthy AI is, at its core, a problem of causal statistics. The statistical community is not merely equipped to solve it -- it is the only community with the foundational tools to do so rigorously.