Enthusiasm for Sora 2 "wasn't shared in Hollywood," reports the Los Angeles Times, "where the new AI tools have created a swift backlash" that "appears to be only just the beginning of a bruising legal fight that could shape the future of AI use in the entertainment business." [OpenAI] executives went on a charm offensive last year. They reached out to key players in the entertainment industry — including Walt Disney Co. — about potential areas for collaboration and trying to assuage concerns about its technology. This year, the San Francisco-based AI startup took a more assertive approach. Before unveiling Sora 2 to the general public, OpenAI executives had conversations with some studios and talent agencies, putting them on notice that they need to explicitly declare which pieces of intellectual property — including licensed characters — were being opted-out of having their likeness depicted on the AI platform, according to two sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment. Actors would be included in Sora 2 unless they opted out, the people said. OpenAI disputes the claim and says that it was always the company's intent to give actors and other public figures control over how their likeness is used.

The response was immediate.... [Big talent agencies objected, along with performers' unions and major studios.] "Decades of enforceable copyright law establishes that content owners do not need to 'opt out' to prevent infringing uses of their protected IP," Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement... The strong pushback from the creative community could be a strategy to force OpenAI into entering licensing agreements for the content they need, legal experts said... One challenge is figuring out a way that fairly compensates talent and rights holders. Several people who work within the entertainment industry ecosystem said they don't believe a flat fee works.
Meanwhile, "the complete copyright-free-for-all approach that OpenAI took to its new AI video generation model, Sora 2, lasted all of one week," writes Gizmodo. But that means the service has "now pissed off its users." As 404 Media pointed out, social channels like Twitter and Reddit are now flooded with Sora users who are angry they can't make 10-second clips featuring their favorite characters anymore. One user in the OpenAI subreddit said that being able to play with copyrighted material was "the only reason this app was so fun."
Futurism published more reactions, including ""It's official, Sora 2 is completely boring and useless with these copyright restrictions." Others accused OpenAI of abusing copyright to hype up its new app. "This is just classic OpenAI at this point," another user wrote. "They do this s*** all the time. Let people have fun for a day or two and then just start censoring like crazy." The app now has a measly 2.9-star rating on the App Store, indicative of growing disillusionment and frustration with censorship... [It's not dropped to 2.8.]

In an apparent effort to save face, Altman claimed this week that many copyright holders are actually begging to have their characters appear on Sora, instead of complaining about the trend. "In the case of Sora, we've heard from a lot of concerned rightsholders and also a lot of rightsholders who are like 'My concern is you won't put my character in enough,'" he told the a16z podcast earlier this week. "So I can completely see a world where subject to the decisions that a rightsholder has, they get more upset with us for not generating their character often enough than too much," he added. Whether most rightsholders would agree with that sentiment remains to be seen.
Business Insider offers another reaction. After watching Sora 2's main public feed, they write that Sora 2 "seems to be overrun with teenage boys."

The Wall Street Journal marvelled at AMD's "game-changing deal" this week with OpenAI, calling it "the culmination of an extraordinary, decade-long turnaround effort, solidifying AMD's status as Nvidia's most legitimate competitor." Shortly after taking charge of the company in 2014, [CEO] Su implemented a systematic plan to eat Intel's lunch, which she accomplished by going after Intel's main product lines while it was bogged down by manufacturing problems. Now, Su has set her sights on Nvidia, the $4.5 trillion chips behemoth led by her cousin, Jensen Huang. Some analysts believe that if Su can sign up more big customers for its AI chips, AMD could join the $1 trillion valuation club before too long.
"With this, it's natural to ask: Did AMD just say checkmate to Nvidia?" asks the Motley Fool investment site. But their answer seems to be "no"... AMD has increased its push into the AI market over the past few years, launching the AMD Instinct line of accelerators, and in the latest quarter, predicted its MI350 series would drive revenue growth in the second half of the year. Some analysts have said that AMD's innovations position it to compete with Nvidia's Blackwell architecture and chip — released late last year — but Nvidia's commitment to release upgrades on an annual basis could keep it a step ahead when it comes to overall GPU performance and therefore revenue. Big tech companies are looking for the most powerful compute available — and so far, they know they can find that at Nvidia...

[AMD's deal this week] is indeed an interesting operation, ensuring the company a major position in this infrastructure scale-up phase. [Nvidia CEO] Huang has said AI infrastructure spending may reach $4 trillion by the end of the decade, and this represents an enormous opportunity for chip designers such as AMD and Nvidia. So, the OpenAI deal is positive for AMD — but I wouldn't say it's negative for Nvidia. This chip giant signed its own deal with OpenAI last month, and it involves the deployment of 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems across data centers...

A quick comparison of the two deals: The Nvidia-OpenAI agreement involves more gigawatts, and Nvidia isn't giving up a stake in its business — on top of this, though Nvidia is offering OpenAI funding, this will result in revenue growth as OpenAI returns to Nvidia to order GPUs. This pretty much guarantees that Nvidia will be the chip designer to benefit the most as OpenAI expands — and AMD isn't about to step ahead of the market leader. All of this means that, yes, AMD should score a win thanks to its agreement with OpenAI and this may boost its growth in the market. But the chip designer can't say "checkmate" to its bigger rival as Nvidia is perfectly positioned to maintain its lead over the long term.

"I'm here to say we have to give these AI bubble predictions a rest," says Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi. First of all, AI is a real technology being deployed in real ways inside of Corporate America. Second, this technology is requiring more physical assets in the ground — which are being built to support AI's real-world application. What Zach Dell (son of Michael Dell) is working on at startup Base Power (which just raised $1 billion) impressed me this week. It's addressing a key issue — power availability and costs in part because of rising stress on the grid due to AI development.

Next, the spending on AI infrastructure doesn't strike me as reckless. I talk to CFOs and they walk me through their thinking, which seems logical. They aren't foaming at the mouth with wild-eyed predictions of grandeur similar to the late '90s. Plus, the tech giants making the biggest AI investments are fueling their ambitions by cash on hand — not loading up balance sheets with debt. The upstarts in AI are well funded, not being 100% stupid in their organizational build-outs. They're working on tangible technology that has actual orders behind it...

Lastly here in my scolding of the AI worrywarts is that valuations don't support the warning calls. According to new research out of Goldman Sachs this week, the median forward P/E ratio across the Magnificent Seven is 27 times, or 26 times if excluding Tesla (TSLA), which has a much higher multiple than the other companies. This is roughly half the equivalent valuation of the biggest seven companies in the late 1990s, while the dominant companies in Japan (mostly banks) traded at higher valuations still. What's more, the current enterprise-to-sales ratios are also much lower than those of the dominant companies in the late 1990s.

"So it is true that valuations are high but, in our view, generally not at levels that are as high as are typically seen at the height of a financial bubble," said Goldman Sachs strategist Peter Oppenheimer.

Australia's Queensland state government said on Friday it would run coal power plants at least into the 2040s, reversing a previous plan to pivot rapidly to renewables and in turn making national emissions reduction targets harder to achieve. From a report: The centre-right Liberal National Party won last year's election in Queensland, a huge chunk of land in Australia's northeast where more than 60% of electricity comes from coal-fired plants that are mostly owned by the state.

Shayne Coplan, a 27-year-old NYU dropout who founded Polymarket from his bathroom in 2020, has become the youngest self-made billionaire after Intercontinental Exchange (owner of the NYSE) invested up to $2 billion in his once-controversial prediction market platform. Bloomberg reports: A couple of years after dropping out of New York University with dreams of making it big in crypto, Shayne Coplan was so broke that he took an inventory of his Lower East Side apartment so that he could sell belongings to make rent. Fed up with crypto grifts, in 2019 he started to explore economist Robin Hanson's ideas on prediction markets and their potential for improving society's ability to identify likely outcomes. "This is too good of an idea to just exist in whitepapers," he recalled thinking in a later post on X. Then Covid struck -- the perfect time to develop an app for stuck-at-home folks to bet on real-world outcomes, he reasoned. He began building Polymarket from his bathroom and launched the platform in June 2020.

It wasn't a smooth road. The company's move-fast, ask-permission-later approach repeatedly ran afoul of regulators, who forced it to ban US-based users for years because it wasn't a registered exchange. A week after the 2024 presidential election -- one that Polymarket users wagered more than $3 billion on -- Coplan's apartment was raided by FBI agents. But he and his company are now riding high after Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, said it would invest as much as $2 billion in Polymarket at an $8 billion pre-money valuation. That deal makes its 27-year-old founder the youngest self-made billionaire tracked by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

A computer-generated actress appearing in Instagram shorts now has a talent agent, reports the Los Angeles Times.

The massive screen actors union SAG-AFTRA "weighed in with a withering response." SAG-AFTRA believes creativity is, and should remain, human-centered. The union is opposed to the replacement of human performers by synthetics.

To be clear, "Tilly Norwood" is not an actor, it's a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers — without permission or compensation. It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we've seen, audiences aren't interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience. It doesn't solve any "problem" — it creates the problem of using stolen performances to put actors out of work, jeopardizing performer livelihoods and devaluing human artistry.

Additionally, signatory producers should be aware that they may not use synthetic performers without complying with our contractual obligations, which require notice and bargaining whenever a synthetic performer is going to be used.
"They are taking our professional members' work that has been created, sometimes over generations, without permission, without compensation and without acknowledgment, building something new," SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin told the Los Angeles Times in an interview: "But the truth is, it's not new. It manipulates something that already exists, so the conceit that it isn't harming actors — because it is its own new thing — ignores the fundamental truth that it is taking something that doesn't belong to them," Astin said. "We want to allow our members to benefit from new technologies," Astin said. "They just need to know that it's happening. They need to give permission for it, and they need to be bargained with...."

Some actors called for a boycott of any agents who decide to represent Norwood. "Read the room, how gross," In the Heights actor Melissa Barrera wrote on Instagram. "Our members reserve the right to not be in business with representatives who are operating in an unfair conflict of interest, who are operating in bad faith," Astin said.
But this week the head of a new studio from startup Luma AI "said all the big companies and studios were working on AI assisted projects," writes Deadline — and then claimed "being under NDA, she was not in a position to announce any of the details."

The Washington Post notes AI's "increasingly outsize role" in propping up America's economic fortunes.

"Last week, the United States reported that the economy expanded at a rate of 1.6 percent in the first half of the year, with most of that growth driven by AI spending. Without AI investment, growth would have been at about a third of that rate, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis." The huge economic influence of AI spending illustrates how Silicon Valley is placing a bet of unprecedented scale that the technology will revolutionize every aspect of life and work. Its sway suggests there will be economic damage far beyond Silicon Valley if that bet doesn't work out or companies pull back. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon are on track to spend nearly $400 billion this year on data centers...

Concern about a potential bubble in AI investment has recently grown in technology and financial circles. ChatGPT and other AI tools are hugely popular with companies and consumers, and hundreds of billions of dollars has been sunk into AI ventures over the past three years. But few of the new initiatives are profitable, and huge profits will be needed for the immense investments to pay off... "I'm getting more and more skeptical and more and more concerned with what's happening" with artificial intelligence, said Andrew Odlyzko, an economic historian and University of Minnesota emeritus professor who has studied financial bubbles closely, including the telecom bubble that collapsed in 2001 as part of the dot-com crash. Some industry insiders have expressed concern that the latest AI releases have fallen short of expectations, suggesting the technology may not advance enough to pay back the huge investments being made, he said. "AI is a craze," Odlyzko said...

[The Federal Reserve's August "beige book" summarizes interviews with business owners across the country, according to the article — and it found surging investments in AI data centers, which could tie their fortunes to other sectors.] That's boosting demand for electricity and trucking in the Atlanta region, a hot spot for the facilities, and creating new projects for commercial real estate developers in the Philadelphia region. Because tech companies now dominate public markets, any change in their fortunes and share prices can also have a powerful influence on stock indexes, 401(k)s and the wider economy... Stock market slumps can have knock-on effects by undercutting the confidence of American businesses and consumers, leading them to spend less, said Gregory Daco [chief economist at strategy consulting firm EY-Parthenon]... "That directly affects economic activity," he said, potentially widening the economic fallout...

Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a Sept. 4 note to clients that even if AI investment works out for companies like Google, there will be an "inevitable slowdown" in data center construction. That will cut revenue to companies providing the projects with chips and electricity, the note said. In a more extreme scenario where Big Tech pulls back spending to 2022 levels, the entire S&P 500 would lose 30 percent of the revenue growth Wall Street currently expects next year, the analysts wrote.
The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, according to estimates in a recent note from independent research firm the MacroStrategy Partnership (as reported by MarketWatch).

And "never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains somewhat unproven as a profit-making business model," writes Bloomberg, adding that OpenAI and other large tech companies are "relying increasingly on debt to support their unprecedented spending." (Although Bloomberg also notes that ChatGPT alone has roughly 700 million weekly users, and that last month Anthropic reported roughly three quarters of companies are using Claude to automate work.)

The food delivery robots that arrived in Atlanta in June "are not our friends," argues a headline at CNN.

The four-wheeled Serve Robotics machines "get confused at crosswalks. They move with the speed and caution of a first-time driver, stilted and shy, until they suddenly speed up without warning. Their four wheels look like they were made for off-roading, but they still get stuck in the cracks of craggy sidewalks. Most times I see the bots, they aren't moving at all... " Cyclists swerve to avoid them like any other obstacle in the road. Patrons of Shake Shack (a national partner of Serve) weave around the mess of robots parked in front of the restaurant to make their way inside and place orders on iPads... The dawn of everyday, "friendly" robots may be here, but they haven't proven themselves useful — or trustworthy — yet. "People think they are your friends, but they're actually cameras and microphones of corporations," said Joanna Bryson, a longtime AI scholar and professor of ethics and technology at the Hertie School in Berlin. "You're right to be nervous..."

When robots show up in a city, it's often not because the residents of said city actively wanted them there or had a say in their arrival said Edward Ongweso Jr. [a researcher at the Security in Context initiative, a tech journalist and self-proclaimed "decelerationist" urging a slower rollout for Silicon Valley tech pioneers and civic leaders embracing untested and unregulated technology]... "They're being rolled out without any sort of input from people, and as a result, in ways that are annoying and inconvenient," Ongweso Jr. said. "I suspect that people would feel a lot differently if they had a choice ... 'what kind of robots are we interested in rolling out in our homes, in our workplaces, on our college campuses or in our communities?'"

Delivery robots aren't unique to Atlanta. AI-driven companies including Avride and Coco Robotics have sent fleets of delivery robots to big cities like Chicago, Dallas and Jersey City, as well as sleepy college towns... "They're popping up everywhere," Ongweso Jr. continued, "because there's sort of a realization that you have to convince people to view them as inevitable. The way to do that is to just push it into as many places as possible, and have these spectacle demonstrations, get some friendly coverage, try to figure out the ways in which you're selling this as the only alternative.... If you humanize it, you're more willing to entertain it and rationalize it being in your area — 'That's just Jeffrey,' or whatever they name it — instead of seeing it for what it is, which is a bunch of investors privately encroaching on a community or workplace," Ongweso Jr. said. "It's not the future. It's a business model."
Serve Robotics CEO Ali Kashani told CNN their goal in Atlanta was reducing traffic — and that the robots' average delivery distance there was under a mile, taking about 18 minutes per delivery.

Serve Robotics has also launched their robots in Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta, according to the site Robotics 247, as part of an ongoing collaboration with Uber Eats. (Although after the robots launched in Los Angeles, a man in a mobility scooter complained the slow-moving robot swerved in front of him.) And "residents of other cities have had to rescue them when they've been felled by weather," reports CNN.

CNN also spoke to Dylan Losey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech who studies human-robot interaction, who notes that the robots' AI algorithms are "completely unregulated... We don't know if a third party has checked the hardware and software and deemed the system 'safe' — in part because what it means for these systems to be 'safe' is not fully understood or standardized." (CNN's reporter adds that "the last time I got close to a bot, to peer down at a flier someone left on top of it, it revved at me loudly. Perhaps they can sense a hater.")

But Serve's CEO says there's one crucial way robot delivery will be cheaper than humans. "You don't have to tip the robots."

OpenAI's valuation has surged to $500 billion after a $6.6 billion secondary stock sale, briefly making it the world's most valuable startup ahead of SpaceX and ByteDance. The Associated Press reports: Current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors, pushing the privately held artificial intelligence company's valuation to $500 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. The investors buying the shares included Thrive Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group and T. Rowe Price, along with Japanese tech giant SoftBank and the United Arab Emirates' MGX, the source said Thursday.

The valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology and continues OpenAI's remarkable trajectory from its start as a nonprofit research lab in 2015. But with the San Francisco-based company not yet turning a profit, it could also amplify concerns about an AI bubble if the generative AI products made by OpenAI and its competitors don't meet the expectations of investors pouring billions of dollars into research and development.

Ford's push for a four-day in-office workweek hit turbulence when someone hijacked meeting room screens to display an anti-RTO protest image targeting CEO Jim Farley. The company quickly removed it and is investigating. The Detroit Free Press reports: According to photos employees took of the image, which were posted on social media and sent to the Detroit Free Press, it contained an image of CEO Jim Farley along with a big red circle with a slash through it over his face and the words "(Expletive) RTO."

"We're aware of an inappropriate use of Ford's IT technology and we're investigating it," Dave Tovar, Ford spokesman, told the Detroit Free Press. Tovar said the image was up for "a short amount of time" and Ford was able to quickly remove it. He said the company is investigating whether the image appeared only in Dearborn offices or globally.

Farley mandated that employees return to the office four days a week earlier this year and it has been in place since Sept. 1, with no fallout such as people quitting over it, Tovar said. Therefore, Tovar said, "I wouldn't be able to speculate on it, as to why someone would do this."

Meta will begin using data from AI chatbot conversations and other AI-powered products to fuel targeted advertising across Facebook and Instagram, with no way to opt out. The policy change, effective December 16, excludes users in South Korea, the UK, and the EU due to stricter privacy laws. TechCrunch reports: If a user chats with Meta AI about hiking, for example, the company may show ads for hiking gear. However, Meta spokesperson Emil Vazquez tells TechCrunch that the privacy update is broader than just Meta AI and applies to the company's other AI offerings. That means Meta may use data from AI features in its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses -- including voice recordings, pictures, and videos analyzed with AI -- to further target its ad products.

Meta may also use data from its new AI-video feed, Vibes, and its AI image generation product, Imagine. Conversations with Meta AI will only influence ads on Facebook and Instagram if a user is logged into the same account across products. [...] Meta says the company has "no plans imminently" to put ads in its AI products, though CEO Mark Zuckerberg has suggested they may be coming in the future.

"Computer science went from a future-proof career to an industry in upheaval in a shockingly small amount of time," writes Business Insider, citing remarks from UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid said during a recent episode of Nova's "Particles of Thought" podcast.

"Our students typically had five internship offers throughout their first four years of college," Farid said. "They would graduate with exceedingly high salaries, multiple offers. They had the run of the place. That is not happening today. They're happy to get one job offer...." It's too easy to just blame AI, though, Farid said. "Something is happening in the industry," he said. "I think it's a confluence of many things. I think AI is part of it. I think there's a thinning of the ranks that's happening, that's part of it, but something is brewing..."

Farid, one of the world's experts on deepfake videos, said he is often asked for advice. He said what he tells students has changed... "Now, I think I'm telling people to be good at a lot of different things because we don't know what the future holds."

Like many in the AI space, Farid said that those who use breakthrough technologies will outlast those who don't. "I don't think AI is going to put lawyers out of business, but I think lawyers who use AI will put those who don't use AI out of business," he said. "And I think you can say that about every profession."

"As awareness grows around the dangers of head trauma in sports, a small number of professional fighters and football players are turning to a psychedelic called ibogaine for treatment," reports the Los Angeles Times.

They note that the drug's proponents "tout its ability to treat addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, or TBI. " Ibogaine, which is derived from a West African shrub, is a Schedule 1 drug in America with no legal medical uses, and experts urge caution because of the need for further studies. But the results, several athletes say, are "game-changing".... Although athletes are just discovering ibogaine, the drug is well known within the veteran community, which experiences high rates of brain injury and PTSD. In Stanford's study on the effects of ibogaine on special forces veterans, participants saw average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms. They also exhibited improvements in concentration, information processing and memory.

"No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury," Dr. Nolan Williams, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement on the results. "The results are dramatic, and we intend to study this compound further...."

States can work faster than the federal government by carving out exemptions for supervised ibogaine therapy programs, similar to what Oregon has done with psilocybin therapy. Many states have also opted to legalize marijuana for medicinal or recreational use... In June, Texas approved a historic $50-million investment in state funding to support drug development trials for ibogaine, inspired by the results seen by veterans. Arizona legislators approved $5 million in state funding for a clinical study on ibogaine in March, and California legislators are pushing to fast-track the study of ibogaine and other psychedelics.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The dramatic rise in unemployment among Americans under 25 -- especially recent graduates -- has become one of the most troubling economic headlines of 2025. Recent insights from economists, central bankers, and labor market analysts signal that this appears to be a uniquely American challenge, underpinned by a "no hire, no fire" economy rather than solely by the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence.

For many Gen Z workers, the struggle to land a job can feel isolating and fuel self-doubt. But that frustration recently got some high-level validation: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell echoed economists' concerns about the cooling labor market, telling reporters at his regular press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee that it's an "interesting labor market" right now, adding that "kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs." Noting a low job finding rate, along with a low redundancy rate, he said, "you've got a low firing, low hiring environment." and noting that it's harder than ever for young jobseekers to break in.

While recent months have been dubbed by Deutsche Bank "the summer AI turned ugly," and some major studies find AI adoption disrupting some entry-level roles, Powell was less sure. AI "may be part of the story," but he insisted the main drivers are a broadly slowed economy and hiring restraint. Top economists at Goldman Sachs and UBS tackled the subject soon after and found Powell to be mostly on the money. This isn't an AI story, at least not yet. "The U.S. labor market experience is peculiar," said Paul Donovan, UBS Chief Economist. "Young Euro area workers have a record low unemployment rate. In the UK, the young persons' unemployment rate has fallen steadily. Employment participation by young Japanese workers is near all-time highs. It seems highly implausible that AI uniquely hurts the employment prospects of younger US workers."

"It might be tempting to blame technology... Machines, robots, or computers replacing humans is an ever-popular dystopian scenario." Donovan concludes that the U.S. pattern "more convincingly fits a broader hiring freeze narrative, affecting new entrants to the workforce."

Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei said last Thursday that "finding a job takes longer in a low-turnover labor market." He argued that "job reallocation," or the pace at which new jobs are created and existing ones destroyed, has been on the decline since the late 1990s... "almost all the variation in turnover since the Great Recession mostly falls on younger workers" and is taking place as "churn." Goldman found that in 2019, it took a young unemployed worker about 10 weeks to find a new job in a low-churn state; now that's 12 weeks on average.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Venture capitalists in clean tech are starting to say out loud what they've suspected for a while: China's dominance has left key sectors in the West uninvestable. A group of eight VCs from Western firms agreed to share with Bloomberg the details of a July road trip across China during which they visited factories, spoke with startup investors, and interviewed founders of companies.

They knew China had raced ahead in sectors like batteries and "everything around energy," but seeing how big the gap was firsthand left them wondering how European and North American competitors can even survive, says Talia Rafaeli, a former investment banker at both Goldman Sachs and Barclays who's now a partner at Kompas VC. "Everyone needs to take this kind of trip," she said.

"New research suggests ash and soot from burning wildlands has caused more than 41,000 excess deaths annually from 2011 to 2020," reports the Los Angeles Times: By 2050, as global warming makes large swaths of North America hotter and drier, the annual death toll from smoke could reach between 68,000 and 71,000, without stronger preventive and public health measures...

In the span studied, millions of people were exposed to unhealthful levels of air pollution. When inhaled, this microscopic pollution not only aggravates people's lungs, it also enters the bloodstream, provoking inflammation that can induce heart attacks and stroke. For years, researchers have struggled to quantify the danger the smoke poses. In the paper published in Nature, they report it's far greater than public health officials may have recognized. Yet most climate assessments "don't often include wildfire smoke as a part of the climate-related damages. And it turns out, by our calculation, this is one of the most important climate impacts in the U.S."

The study also estimates a higher number of deaths than previous work in part because it projected mortality up to three years after a person has been exposed to wildfire smoke. It also illustrates the dangers of smoke drifting from fire-prone regions into wetter parts of the country, a recent phenomenon that has garnered more attention with large Canadian wildfires contributing to hazy skies in the Midwest and East Coast in the last several years. "Everybody is impacted across the U.S.," said Minghoa Qiu [lead author and assistant professor at Stony Brook University]. "Certainly the Western U.S. is more impacted. But the Eastern U.S. is by no means isolated from this problem."

Meta is moving to break into the wholesale power-trading business to better manage the massive electricity needs of its data centers. Bloomberg: The company, which owns Facebook, filed an application with US regulators this week seeking authorization to do so. A Meta representative said it was a natural next step to participate in energy markets as it looks to power operations with clean energy.

Buying electricity has become an increasingly urgent challenge for technology companies including Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet's Google. They're all racing to develop more advanced artificial intelligence systems and tools that are notoriously resource-intensive. Amazon, Google and Microsoft are already active power traders, according to filings with US regulators.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Gen Z borrowers took the biggest hit of any age group this year, helping pull overall credit scores lower in the worst year for US consumer credit quality since the global financial crisis roiled the world's economy. The average FICO score slipped to 715 in April from 717 a year earlier, marking the second consecutive year-over-year drop, according to a report released Tuesday by Fair Isaac Corp. The average score dropped three points to 687 in 2009.

Gen Z borrowers saw the largest drop, not only this year, but of any age group since 2020, with their average score falling three points to 676, the Montana-based creator of the FICO credit score said. FICO scores are a measure of consumer credit risk and are frequently used by US banks to assess whether to provide loans. The scores typically range from 300 to 850. The credit scoring agency attributed the recent overall drop to higher rates of utilization and delinquency, including the resumption of reporting student loan delinquencies -- a category that hit a record high of 3.1% of the entire scorable population. [...] While the overall average score dropped, the median FICO score continued to rise to 745 from 744 a year ago, indicating that a large drop in scores at the low end dragged down the average.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apollo is exploring a sale of early internet darling AOL after receiving inbound interest in the business, according to people familiar with the matter. Any deal could value AOL at around $1.5 billion, the people said. It is also possible the talks won't result in any deal, they cautioned.

Apollo bought AOL in 2021 as part of a $5 billion deal to acquire that business and Yahoo from Verizon. AOL generates around $400 million in annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, the people familiar with the matter said. Its main business lines include software for internet privacy and protection, and the AOL.com website and email domain.

In 2015 Kim Dotcom answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Now CBS News reports on "the latest chapter in a protracted 13-year battle by the U.S. government" to extradite Finnish-German millionaire Kim Dotcom from New Zealand: A New Zealand court has rejected the latest bid by internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom to halt his deportation to the U.S. on charges related to his file-sharing website Megaupload. Dotcom had asked the High Court to review the legality of an official's August 2024 decision that he should be surrendered to the U.S. to face trial on charges of copyright infringement, money laundering and racketeering... The Megaupload founder had applied for what in New Zealand is called a judicial review, in which a judge is asked to evaluate whether an official's decision was lawful. A judge on Wednesday dismissed Dotcom's arguments that the decision to deport him was politically motivated and that he would face grossly disproportionate treatment in the U.S...

New Zealand's government hasn't disclosed what will happen next in the extradition process or divulged an expected timeline for Dotcom to be surrendered to the United States
Dotcom "has been free on bail in New Zealand since February 2012," the article points out — and "One of his lawyers, Ron Mansfield, told Radio New Zealand that Dotcom's team had 'much fight left in us as we seek to secure a fair outcome,' but he didn't elaborate..."

The article notes that the latest decision "could be challenged in the Court of Appeal, where a deadline for filing is October 8."