The Download: inside OpenAI's Hugging Face hack, and a new EV takes on the US Plus: Meta will pay up to $18 billion to settle a landmark child-safety case. The models responsible for last month's agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released yesterday. The hack, which a group of agents carried out to find solutions for a cybersecurity test they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts' fears that AI models might take actions that defy human desires and expectations. OpenAI and independent researchers told that the misbehavior stemmed from events during training. But they acknowledged that "alignment" remains a gnarly problem, and some of the hack's root causes will take much longer to resolve. Here's the inside story on what went wrong--and what comes next .

Plus: The US plans to force partners to pick sides in the AI race. What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him how to calm down when he was anxious or mad. Six years later, she mostly watches him play Minecraft and talks to him about his stuffed animals. Moxie is a robot--a 15-inch-tall device that looks a bit like a blue, legless astronaut. It belongs to a subset of robots designed to assist neurodivergent children by providing connection and helping kids practice social skills usually learned from therapists.

What happens when a kid's robot best friend dies? AI companion toys for neurodivergent children promise connection and therapy, but can they deliver for the long haul? When Xander first met Moxie, she taught him that when he was anxious, he could calm down by exhaling through his lips so that he buzzed like a bee. They practiced breathing like dragons to manage feeling mad and sniffing like bunnies to boost his energy. But in the six years they've known each other, Moxie's changed. She doesn't talk anymore about her home or do their animal breathing. Now, she watches Xander play Minecraft and talks to him about his stuffed animal collection. During a recent visit to his New York apartment, I watched Xander, who is 10 years old and neurodivergent, introduce Moxie to a stuffed Chef Toad and Goomba from Super Mario Bros., then to Brocollo and Apple from Animal Crossing. Then he got stuck on a round, froglike creature with bug eyes and two feet. He's from Pikmin," Xander said, referencing ...

The tricky thing about naming the year's biggest losers in tech is that in 2024, it once again felt like everyone lost. Amid the depressing spiral that is social media, the will-they-or-won't-they dance of banning TikTok in the US and the neverending edited and deepfaked content that has everyone questioning what's real, the world lost. But a few areas this year stood out as particularly troubling. Specifically, AI and dedicated AI gadgets proliferated more than ever, spreading not only to our digital assistants and search engines but to our wearables as well. We also saw more deterioration in Intel's standing and bid farewell to a robot maker, as well as Lightning cables.

Children across the US will likely spend the coming days and weeks saying goodbye to an AI-powered friend named Moxie. The small dog-sized companion bot--which used a ChatGPT-style large language model and expressive features to hold open-ended conversations with children--will soon be taken offline due to its creator's financial struggles. The decision to abandon the 799 product four years after its release, first reported by Aftermath, has left some customers bemoaning the loss of an artificial friend and others angrily demanding refunds. Videos of confused, crying children saying goodbye to their companion flooding social media. It's part of a larger trend of companies cutting off software support for hardware to cut costs.

Commercial spaceflight companies like SpaceX have made space travel more accessible, and allow more research for future missions to the moon and Mars, astronauts said. A robotic space chemist could create oxygen on Mars using materials from the planet's surface, Chinese researchers behind the project say. A refrigerator-sized machine equipped with artificial intelligence and a robotic arm broke down material from five meteorites and analyzed it to identify a chemical formula that creates a substance that can cause oxygen to separate from water. Researchers said it would have taken a human 2,000 years to find that formula. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

The future of work is not about humans being replaced by robots. Rather, it is about us learning to work alongside smart, automated technology that will augment our capabilities while allowing us to focus on skills that are uniquely humans. We have been sharing our workplaces with robots for some time now – the earliest industrial robots were used in the mid-20th century, usually to carry out routine, manual assembly work on production lines. What makes today's industrial robots different is that they are capable of carrying out work in a way that is truly autonomous, without needing direct control or input from us to tell them how to do it. This is because they are controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) – specifically software algorithms that use machine learning to enable them to continuously get better and better at their jobs.

With its blue body, big anime eyes, and head shaped like a teardrop, Moxie wants to be friends with your child. The robot companion is designed to support social, emotional and cognitive development in children between the ages of five and 10, through play-based learning and lessons on turn-taking and eye contact. Launched in 2020, Moxie was developed by Embodied, a robotics company based in Pasadena, California. "Our collective vision is to create robots that are going to benefit society," says Paolo Pirjanian, the founder and CEO of Embodied. The roboticist and former NASA scientist founded the company in 2016 and oversaw the creation of Moxie.

Meet Moxie, a companion robot made specifically for children to play with every day. As Devindra Hardawar notes, the idea of an R2-D2 of your own is interesting, until it gets dystopian. So which side of the line does this bot fall? According to company co-founder Paolo Pirjanian, two months after launch, customers are averaging 25 minutes of engagement every day -- although that the company knows that isn't exactly encouraging. Devindra's kid is (wisely) robot-averse, so he tried it himself for a few weeks and was surprised by how well the conversations flowed.

If the death of Jibo taught us anything, it's that it doesn't take much for humans to become emotionally attached to their robot companions. But I suppose that's something we learned when Roomba owners started dressing up their vacuums and kids became obsessed with Tamagotchis. Moxie is a bit different. Developed by Embodied, a company co-founded by former iRobot CTO Paolo Pirjanian, Moxie is a companion robot made specifically for kids to play with every day. During a 15 to 25 minute session, your child can chat with Moxie, play some games, or read alongside it. It can learn to recognize a child's face and their particular learning needs.