Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at a rally for Democratic candidates Saturday in Monroe, N.C. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.

OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman speaks at the G20 innovation ministerial summit in North Carolina on Wednesday. OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman speaks at the G20 innovation ministerial summit in North Carolina on Wednesday. The Times accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI's popular chatbot. Other newspapers have joined in the suit, first filed in 2023. A brief has advisory rather than legal weight but could bolster tech companies as they fight the claims.

Burnt out on wrist buzzes and notification overload? A new crop of minimalist wearables promises to collect your health data without demanding your attention. There's a new kind of gadget on shelves, designed for you to ignore it 99 percent of the time--it only needs attention when its battery is low. You rarely look at it or touch it, yet it collects health stats day and night so you can view them later on in an app, when you get the time--if you can find the time. They have been exploding of late and are only set to grab more attention in the coming months, with the promise of demanding less of your attention once you actually buy one.

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen The answer is where you least expect it. New watermarks on Claude content are upsetting some people. Reactions reveal company priorities and human over-reliance on AI tools. To avoid possible watermarks, write it yourself (sorry!). Last week, Anthropic announced it would start watermarking text output from several of its LLMs via Claude to comply with Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which requires participating AI companies to provide transparency tools for AI-generated content.

Proton's Andy Yen Says It Will Have To Proton's CEO is a champion of encryption for everyone. So why is he going all in on un-encryptable AI? In the eyes of many privacy advocates, AI is just another surveillance technology . It supercharges online tracking and real-world spying tools, sifts through vast troves of everyone's data to spit out its results, and then encourages users to share their deepest secrets and desires with a cloud-hosted large-language model. Surveillance capitalism made AI possible, and AI returns the favor by making surveillance more powerful and the businesses that run on it more data-rich and profitable than ever. Andy Yen is among the most influential voices in the tech industry who equates AI with privacy invasion. He says the push to integrate AI into every consumer tech product--whether people want it or not--is driving new users in droves to Proton's products, which are, put simply, the end-to-end encrypted versions of every Google service from Gmail to Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Meet. Yet Yen is anti-AI, he says, any more than he is anti-internet. In late June, Proton released the latest version of its very own AI chatbot, Lumo--just one way that Proton is integrating AI ever more deeply into its suite of tools, but seeking to do so in a way that's more voluntary and preserves users' privacy far more than the typical tech giant. That willingness to embrace the apparent contradiction between AI and privacy is just one way in which Yen's views don't cut cleanly across party lines--from current US politics to the lessons of Edward Snowden's leaks to the question of the best corporate structure for a tech company that's not solely designed to maximize profit. You can read our conversation about all of it here or listen wherever you get your podcasts. ANDY GREENBERG: I want to start by asking about your background and the origin story of Proton. You're a trained particle physicist. You worked at CERN, the nuclear research facility, but you were inspired by the leaks of Edward Snowden back in 2013 to create Proton, right? I'm not actually a tech person or even an entrepreneur by training, so I really happened into this field a little bit by accident. I used to work at the Large Hadron Collider, which is a particle accelerator.

For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working. An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025, external . Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director's prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself. However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there.

The Moonshot AI stand at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. The Moonshot AI stand at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July. China's tech advances are causing chaos from Silicon Valley to the White House O ver the past month, a series of advancements in China's artificial intelligence, chip manufacturing and robotics technologies have rattled financial markets, caused divisions among US tech moguls and left the Trump administration scrambling to respond. Silicon Valley has long pointed to China's tech industry as a competitive threat and used its growth as rationale for why US firms should not face regulatory oversight that could slow them down. In recent weeks, however, China's progress has pushed US tech CEOs past vague warnings and into open disagreement over how to address Chinese-made products upending their industry.

A mid tech companies' ongoing efforts to vacuum up as much data as possible to train AI models, Meta has taken public posts from its own platforms, scraped massive amounts of content from the rest of the internet, and pirated millions of books to train its AI models. Now the company is being accused of downloading much more illicit material: huge volumes of porn, nonconsensual celebrity nudes, blueprints for 3-D-printable handguns, and millions of passwords acquired by hackers. But in its efforts to collect evidence about these purported downloads, Strike 3 also captured information relating to many other files that Meta may have acquired over the course of two years: They include images from "Celebgate," a 2014 hack that resulted in the leak of private photos belonging to Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and others, plus several collections of deepfake celebrity porn featuring the faces of Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Gal Gadot, and others. Strike 3's file-transfer lists include ordinary movies and TV shows, alongside dozens of videos from GirlsDoPorn, which was shut down after six people associated with the site were charged with sex trafficking . Strike 3 also presents evidence that Meta made some content publicly available in addition to downloading it.

The clip features the David Bowie track "Five Years," which includes lyrics such as "Earth was really dying (dying)." On Thursday morning, Meta published an ad to its official Instagram account with the message that artificial intelligence will not "make us less connected" or "leave us behind." It was set to the 1972 David Bowie track "Five Years," which is about, among other things, the end of the world. "Call us optimists, call us dreamers, call us whatever the hell you want--but we're betting on people, and we like those odds," the narrator says, as a toddler plays with a butterfly, two parents laugh with their infant, and Jalen Brunson waves at the Knicks Championship Parade. The snippet of "Five Years" used in the ad includes the following lyrics: I never thought I'd need so many people When reached for comment, Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan said he "would like to highlight what David Bowie himself said about'Five Years' and its meaning: having optimism for the future." Brennan sent along a 1972 quote about the song that he sourced to BowieBible.com .

Where Did All the Computer-Science Professors Go? AI companies are stripping universities of their best researchers. Anthropic has poached such an array of high-profile professors that it has become a punch line in academia. "'I'm joining Anthropic' is the new meme right now," Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer-science professor at Arizona State University (who has not joined Anthropic), told us. This month, the AI company hired the chair of UC Berkeley's department of electrical engineering and computer science, presumably to help build more capable bots. Perhaps more surprisingly, Anthropic has in recent weeks also picked up a Stanford economist, a theoretical physicist from the University of Maryland, and an analytic philosopher from UT Austin.