The GPUs were placed in servers that were supposed to be shipped from Taiwan to companies in Southeast Asia. The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York has charged three people with illegally exporting NVIDIA GPUs to China in violation of the Export Control Reform Act. NVIDIA's chips have become a critical component in the rush to train and run increasingly complex artificial intelligence models, one the US has sought to manipulate with export controls and profit-sharing schemes with NVIDIA. The three people, Yih-Shyan Wally Liaw, Ruei-Tsang Steven Chang and Ting-Wei Willy Sun, two employees and one contractor working for US IT company Super Micro Computer, allegedly circumvented export control laws via a multi-step scheme that involved creating fake orders for servers with NVIDIA chips from Southeast Asian companies, that were then secretly sent to China. The plan involved paying a logistics company to repackage the servers in Taiwan, staging dummy servers to be inspected by Super Micro Computer's compliance team and falsifying records so Liaw, Chang and Sun's employer was unaware where the servers were actually being sent.

TrueSkill can handle multi-player games.

OpenAI is planning to bring over more researchers from Thinking Machines Lab after nabbing two cofounders, a source familiar with the situation says. If someone ever makes an HBO Max series about the AI industry, the events of this week will make quite the episode. On Wednesday, OpenAI's CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, announced the company had rehired Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, cofounders of Mira Murati's AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. We reported last night on two narratives forming around what led to the departures, and have since learned new information. A source with direct knowledge says that Thinking Machines leadership believed Zoph engaged in an incident of serious misconduct while at the company last year.

To prepare AI agents for office work, the company is asking contractors to upload projects from past jobs, leaving it to them to strip out confidential and personally identifiable information. OpenAI is asking third-party contractors to upload real assignments and tasks from their current or previous workplaces so that it can use the data to evaluate the performance of its next-generation AI models, according to records from OpenAI and the training data company Handshake AI obtained by WIRED. The project appears to be part of OpenAI's efforts to establish a human baseline for different tasks that can then be compared with AI models. In September, the company launched a new evaluation process to measure the performance of its AI models against human professionals across a variety of industries. OpenAI says this is a key indicator of its progress towards achieving AGI, or an AI system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable tasks. "We've hired folks across occupations to help collect real-world tasks modeled off those you've done in your full-time jobs, so we can measure how well AI models perform on those tasks," reads one confidential document from OpenAI.

A push by military contractors could alter pending legislation that would have empowered servicemembers to repair equipment. Lobbyists are pitching a subscription service instead. Right to repair provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act, which would secure funding for the US military in 2026, are likely to be struck from the final language of the bill despite enjoying broad bipartisan support, sources familiar with ongoing negotiations tell WIRED. They say that provisions in the act enabling servicemembers to repair their own equipment are likely to be removed entirely, and replaced with a data-as-a-service subscription plan that benefits defense contractors. The right to repair has become a thorny issue in the military.

Meta Claims Downloaded Porn at Center of AI Lawsuit Was for'Personal Use' In a motion to dismiss filed earlier this week, Meta denied claims that employees had downloaded pornography from Strike 3 Holdings to train its artificial intelligence models. This week, Meta asked a US district court to toss a lawsuit alleging that the tech giant illegally torrented pornography to train AI . The move comes after Strike 3 Holdings discovered illegal downloads of some of its adult films on Meta corporate IP addresses, as well as other downloads that Meta allegedly concealed using a "stealth network" of 2,500 "hidden IP addresses." Accusing Meta of stealing porn to secretly train an unannounced adult version of its AI model powering Movie Gen, Strike 3 sought damages that could have exceeded $350 million, TorrentFreak reported . Strike 3 also cited "no facts to suggest that Meta has ever trained an AI model on adult images or video, much less intentionally so," Meta claimed.

The $226 million project uses ocean breezes and seawater to stay cool. China is submerging data centers into the ocean to keep them cool. China has completed the first phase of construction of what it claims is the world's first underwater data center (UDC). Located in Shanghai's Lin-gang Special Area with a price tag of roughly RMB 1.6 billion ($226 million), it's a significant milestone in the quest for sustainable solutions to the growing energy demands of China's computing infrastructure. Powered entirely by wind energy, the initiative has a total power capacity of 24 megawatts.

TrueSkill can handle multi-player games.

Defense tech giant Palantir is selling T-shirts and tote bags as part of a bid to encourage fans to publicly endorse it. Palantir Technologies, which moved from Silicon Valley to Denver in 2020, sells software that immigration authorities use to identify and arrest people, militaries use to organize drone strikes, and corporations use to manage their supply chains. Now, it also sells tote bags. Last year, Palantir re launched an online merchandise store, and its website was recently redesigned with a swanky interface and new payment system . A mock terminal in the lower left corner displays "code" documenting each item you view.