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Elon Musk Boosts New Yorker's Sam Altman Exposé on X as Trial Begins

WIRED

Elon Musk Boosts New Yorker's Sam Altman Exposé on X as Trial Begins The move comes as the trial for Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI kicks off in federal court in Oakland. Elon Musk is boosting a post on X promoting The New Yorker's extensive investigation into Sam Altman's allegedly deceptive behavior, WIRED has confirmed. The move comes just as Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman heads to a jury trial in a federal courtroom on Monday morning. People scrolling X on Monday reported seeing an April 6 post from Ronan Farrow, a coauthor on the New Yorker article, promoting the investigation. A pop-up on the post on X's mobile app says it was boosted by @elonmusk, who also owns the platform.


Airfare Keeps Going Up. Here Are Some Tricks to Finding Cheap(er) Tickets

WIRED

It's an expensive time to fly. These tips can help lighten the load on your wallet. As a general rule, global instability leads to higher prices, and boy, is the world a doozy right now . Airfare hasn't escaped the tumult: US airfares are up 14.9 percent compared to a year ago, according to NerdWallet, largely due to fuel price spikes linked to disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz caused by blockages, bombs, and blockades. While the medium-term outlook for the airline business isn't great, there are still a few smart and tricky ways to save a little money when flying this summer.


What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?

The New Yorker

What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools? The tech world assumes that A.I.-aided education is necessary and inevitable. A growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists say the opposite. I don't like A.I., and I am raising my children not to like it. I've been telling them for years now that chatbots are manipulative and dangerous, that A.I.-image generators are loosening our collective grip on reality, that large language models are built atop industrial-scale intellectual-property theft. At times, I find myself speaking with my kids about A.I. in the same terms that we might discuss a creepy neighbor who lives down the block: avoid eye contact, cross the street when you walk past his house, and, when in doubt, call on a trusted adult. Yes, I, too, have suspected that the creepy neighbor walks on cloven hooves inside his Yeezy Boosts, but he probably isn't going anywhere--in fact, he keeps buying up properties around town--so just try your best not to engage. Somehow, I was not prepared for the creepy neighbor to start hanging around my kids' schools; somehow, I thought we had until high school.


How the Creator of "Beef" Got from Petty Feuds to Class Warfare

The New Yorker

When the Netflix anthology series "Beef" premièred, in 2023, it was a revelation in more ways than one. The show, which traced the depths into which two Angelenos descend after a road-rage incident, reintroduced Ali Wong as a dramatic lead, gave Steven Yeun a chance to go darkly comic, and shined a rare light on the issue of Asian American mental health. It also remade the career of its creator, Lee Sung Jin, a seeming overnight success who actually had nearly two decades of TV-comedy writing under his belt. Lee first pitched the show after he stalked another driver for a half hour following a parking-lot dispute; he similarly drew from life for Season 2, which stars Oscar Isaac as Josh, a country-club manager, and Carey Mulligan as his interior-designer wife, Lindsay. The couple are caught on video having a nasty fight by two members of his staff, Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny). The Gen Z employees, about to embark on their own marriage, see the footage as blackmail material--and thus an opportunity to start their next chapter on secure financial footing. As in the first season, the story quickly broadens beyond the central conflict, roping in the club's new billionaire owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), her unreliable plastic-surgeon husband, and the seething resentments of both the haves and the have-nots. I met Lee earlier this month, at his new office in Hollywood. The space was sparsely decorated, but he'd already mounted posters for "Beef"; "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," the show that gave him his start in the industry; and "Thunderbolts," a 2025 Marvel movie directed by his creative partner, Jake Schreier. Lee, who has gone by Sonny since childhood and was credited as Sonny Lee for the first half of his career, opened up about the long road to "Beef"--a journey toward more intentional storytelling, as well as feeling "O.K. in my own skin." Perhaps surprisingly, the "Beef" character he seemed to relate to most was Josh, a congenial go-getter who mires himself in workaholism to avoid addressing his grief, as Lee did when one of his dogs died suddenly during production. We talked about his method of tailoring dialogue to his actors, the differences between Korean and American billionaires, and why class and capitalism are such inescapable themes on TV today.


Spectral-Transport Stability and Benign Overfitting in Interpolating Learning

Fredriksson-Imanov, Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Lundström

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We develop a theoretical framework for generalization in the interpolating regime of statistical learning. The central question is why highly overparameterized estimators can attain zero empirical risk while still achieving nontrivial predictive accuracy, and how to characterize the boundary between benign and destructive overfitting. We introduce a spectral-transport stability framework in which excess risk is controlled jointly by the spectral geometry of the data distribution, the sensitivity of the learning rule under single-sample replacement, and the alignment structure of label noise. This leads to a scale-dependent Fredriksson index that combines effective dimension, transport stability, and noise alignment into a single complexity parameter for interpolating estimators. We prove finite-sample risk bounds, establish a sharp benign-overfitting criterion through the vanishing of the index along admissible spectral scales, and derive explicit phase-transition rates under polynomial spectral decay. For a model-specific specialization, we obtain an explicit theorem for polynomial-spectrum linear interpolation, together with a proof of the resulting rate. The framework also clarifies implicit regularization by showing how optimization dynamics can select interpolating solutions of minimal spectral-transport energy. These results connect algorithmic stability, double descent, benign overfitting, operator-theoretic learning theory, and implicit bias within a unified structural account of modern interpolation.


Under the Influence at the Whitney Biennial

The New Yorker

How the artists in this year's survey do or, more often, don't acknowledge those who paved the way for them. Machado makes pieces that one might call documents of reverence, excavated burial grounds. If nothing else, the 2026 Whitney Biennial, curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer (at the Whitney Museum through August 23rd), introduces viewers to what I call ChatGPT art--facsimiles of facsimiles by makers who have little if any relationship to what they're putting out there, aside from its being a product in service of a career. Indeed, it's difficult to think of the people who grew up with and apparently condone the use of A.I. sources in the creation of "art" as artists themselves, especially if you define art as a creative expression of thoughts or feelings that have changed, and contributed to the vision of, the artists who made it. It's true that, nearly from the beginning, postmodern art challenged the notion of originality, or, more specifically, the weight of originality--often with great joy and wit and not a little fear.


How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really?

The New Yorker

How Bad Is Plagiarism, Really? From ancient Rome to the era of A.I., people have prized originality, but the line where influence ends and cribbing begins is notoriously blurry. One pleasing facet of plagiarism is that, in the eyes of the law, it doesn't exist. I could come over later, bring a few beers, and we could, you know, get down to some serious humanizing. Hard to resist, these days, given what's at stake. For students with assignments to complete, who have already vanquished their desolation by asking ChatGPT to compose an essay on their behalf, a humanizer is an A.I. tool that takes what has been produced, puts it through a further digital mill, and makes it sound as if it had emerged from a verifiable person. Among the companies that offer such tools are StealthWriter, HIX AI, and QuillBot. Anyone who has buttered and blitzed a mountain of mashed potatoes into a purée will understand.


Why Can't You Finish Anything?

The New Yorker

The skills needed for wrapping up aren't always what you expect. My house contains a vaguely defined room--a parlor-like space that was created by a renovation decades ago. After my son was born, it served as a playroom, full of baby and toddler toys. Then it became a nook where, late at night, my wife and I could listen to music and read. That equilibrium held until the Legos and board games arrived; their incursion was the beginning of the end.


The Pentagon Wants an Obedient A.I. Soldier. Will It Get One?

The New Yorker

The reported use of Claude in recent military operations has shifted the Overton window around A.I. in warfare--and sparked a battle between Anthropic and the Department of War. The staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the escalating standoff between the A.I. company Anthropic and the Department of War. They consider recent reporting on the use of Claude--Anthropic's family of large language models--in military operations in Venezuela and Iran, and how that news has pushed the company's relationship with the Pentagon to a breaking point. They also explore how the tech industry is responding to the conflict between the Trump Administration and Anthropic, and the thorny question of whether A.I. should be subject to greater safeguards and more oversight than previous technological innovations. " The Pentagon Went to War with Anthropic. " The Iran War Is Another Reason to Quit Oil," by Bill McKibben " How Should We Remember the Hippies?


Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste

The New Yorker

In the age of A.I., the term has become as much of a Silicon Valley cliché as "disruption" was in the twenty-tens. With artificial intelligence continuing to dominate corporate strategies and news headlines, Silicon Valley has embraced a new buzzword, one that may feel too close to home for those already feeling embattled by automation. That word is "taste," and in recent months it has become as much of a tech-world cliché as "disruption" was in the twenty-tens. The esteemed technologist Paul Graham posted on X, "In the AI age, taste will become even more important." Koen Bok, a founder of the booming A.I. design tool Framer, said on a podcast that "great taste" is what will create the best new products.