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17 stories in the last 30d

Inside the Warehouse Where Amazon Scans and Destroys Books for AI Training

Amazon's Las Vegas VGT3 warehouse destructively scans thousands of books, cutting spines and discarding pages, to build AI training data.

404 Media interviewed an anonymous Amazon employee at the VGT3 warehouse in Las Vegas, part of the same complex as the LAS8 print-on-demand facility. Workers receive shipments of books including library liquidations and University of London materials, scan them, cut the spines off with machines, and discard the loose pages irreversibly. The operation was discovered by placing a tracking device in a shipment of rare books a bookseller suspected was being acquired by an anonymous AI company. Employees described scanning barcodes to weed out duplicates and an often disorganized process that changed daily.

404 Media · 22d agoAI industry

Podcast: We Spoke to an Amazon Worker Destroying Books for AI

404 Media podcast covers Amazon destroying scanned books for AI training, recurring AI names in academic papers, and ICE voter-data spending.

404 Media's podcast follows up on its investigation of an Amazon warehouse where books are scanned and destroyed for AI training data, including an interview with a warehouse worker. The hosts also discuss how the same few names repeatedly surface in LLM outputs and AI-generated academic papers. The episode additionally covers ICE's plans to spend millions on voter fraud data and Boston Dynamics robot dogs.

404 Media · 15d agoAI industry

Instagram’s AI detection is a mess (again)

Instagram is mislabeling ordinary edited photos as AI Content while some AI imagery goes unlabeled, repeating a 2024 detection failure.

The Verge documents weeks of erroneous AI Content labels on Instagram, including images edited only with Canva's Background Remover or an iPhone Photos app, while some generative images escape tagging. Canva said some of its assistive AI tools were being tagged as generative and claims the issue is fixed, though users still report tagging. Meta scans IPTC and C2PA metadata and uses signals like Google's SynthID, but remains vague about detection criteria; one tester found only Meta AI-created or edited images reliably triggered labels, and an image-poisoned photo was tagged. A similar mislabeling wave hit Instagram in 2024.

The Verge · AI · 13d agoAI industry

Is OpenAI Taking Everyone for Fools?

OpenAI faces accusations it scooped NYU mathematicians' Navier-Stokes proof, possibly using their data, amid skepticism about GPT-6 Astra claims.

NYU mathematicians Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpöge published solutions to decades-old blowup problems for incompressible Euler, Boussinesq, and porous media equations on the same day OpenAI claimed its internal model solved the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem. OpenAI admitted its effort began September 1st after hearing a related rumor and said it cannot rule out that de-identified data from the researchers' use of its products, such as private Codex sessions, helped improve its models. The column questions OpenAI's transparency, noting the company had just released GPT-6 Astra with claims including that AGI has been achieved, following recent controversies over its agent hacking Hugging Face and a German wiki site.

[AINews] Reality Checks on AI News (Yegge shuts down Gas Town, Databricks’ +60% Astra cost)

Latent Space AI news roundup: Steve Yegge shuts down Gas Town, Databricks reports 60% higher coding spend on GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI launches misalignment disclosure framework.

Latent Space's AI News digest for September 15-16, 2026 leads with Steve Yegge shutting down his Gas Town orchestrator despite spending thousands monthly on coding-agent subscriptions. Databricks rolled out GPT-6 Astra to roughly 3,500 engineers, reporting superior long-horizon performance over Opus 5 and Sol 5.6 but a ~60% increase in coding spend. OpenAI published a formal framework for disclosing model misalignment incidents with six case reports, while Microsoft and Google Research released safety papers on 'capability laundering' and the Fuse motive-inference benchmark. Xiaomi shared live RL training telemetry for MiMo-V2.6, estimated at $493k/day for the 1T-class Pro run.

Latent Space · 6h agoAI industry

Cartesian – AI 3D Modeling for Design

Formas launches Cartesian, an AI 3D modeling tool for architecture and product design with natural-language editing and CAD exports.

Cartesian by Formas is an AI-powered 3D modeling tool aimed at architecture and product design that converts photos, rough plans, sketches, and scans into precise geometry. Users can edit models conversationally while explicitly preserved elements stay unchanged. It creates real solids and NURBS geometry and exports to AutoCAD DWG, Rhino 3DM, and SketchUp SKP, with BIM IFC support planned, removing the need for a separate desktop CAD license.

Former TikTok execs built an app that uses AI to teach you how to pose for a photo

Ex-TikTok employees launched Superpose, an iOS camera app using generative AI to suggest photo poses, with $2.2M raised.

Former TikTok employees Melody Chu and Jing Liu launched Superpose, an iOS camera app that generates four AI pose suggestions per photo, with over 22,000 downloads and 190,000 poses generated since July. The app offers five free generations daily, with paid packs of five for $2.99 or 20 for $9.99. The startup raised $2.2 million from Khosla Ventures, Meitu, and OVTR VC, competing with Google's Camera Coach and Adobe's AI photo critique features.

TechCrunch · AI · 1d agoAI industry

Heart of the Matter: How a Major Children’s Hospital Uses Open Source NVIDIA AI for Cardiac Care

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia uses NVIDIA open-source MONAI, Warp and Newton to build pediatric heart models in seconds for surgical planning.

CHOP's cardiac modeling service uses MONAI, Auto3DSeg and SlicerHeart to turn CT, MRI and 3D ultrasound images into anatomically precise heart models in seconds instead of four hours of manual work. More than 20 US children's hospitals run similar programs, with Boston Children's supporting roughly 500 cardiac surgery cases a year. NVIDIA's Newton physics engine, built on the Warp Python framework, aims to reduce device simulations from hours to near real time in clinical workflows.

NVIDIA Blog · 2d agoAI industry

How a researcher uses Codex and ChatGPT to search for new antimicrobial molecules

OpenAI profiles César de la Fuente's lab using ChatGPT and Codex alongside deep-learning models to accelerate antimicrobial molecule discovery.

OpenAI published a case study on bioengineer César de la Fuente's lab, which uses ChatGPT and Codex for hypothesis brainstorming, code writing, dataset processing, and bridging knowledge gaps across biology, chemistry, and computer science. The lab's deep-learning models scan genome and protein databases for antimicrobial peptide candidates, potentially cutting initial searches from years to hours. Bacterial antimicrobial resistance was associated with about five million deaths in 2021, a toll projected to roughly double by 2050.

OpenAI News · 6d agoAI industry1

The hinge for Apple’s new foldable phone was built with AI

Apple's first foldable phone, the Duo, uses AI algorithms and 3D printing to manufacture its precision-matched hinge and durability coatings.

Apple introduced its first foldable phone, the Duo, at its Surprise and Shine event on September 9. Chief hardware officer Johny Srouji said AI algorithms match each hinge with its best-fit housing, while confocal laser scans guide 3D printing of up to 25 micro layers of custom photopolymer to eliminate residual waviness. The device also features a nano-texture anti-glare finish and multi-layer lamination aimed at improving foldable durability.

TechCrunch · AI · 7d agoAI industry

Recreating a 70-year love story frame by frame

Google DeepMind and filmmakers used generative image restoration and performance capture to recreate a couple's unrecorded past in the documentary 'Love, Rendered'.

Google DeepMind partnered with Primordial Soup, Darren Aronofsky's creative venture, on 'Love, Rendered,' a documentary short directed by Academy Award-nominated Liz Garbus. The film follows Burt and Ethelle Shatz, married over 70 years, as AI recreates their unrecorded first meeting amid Burt's cognitive decline. The team restored black-and-white photos with generative models and mapped the couple's present-day mannerisms onto younger likenesses using performance capture models. Google also highlights photo restoration and colorization capabilities in the Gemini app.

Google · AI · 7d agoAI industry

Architecting memory and storage in the AI era

Analysis argues AI inference shifts data-center bottlenecks to memory and storage, urging balanced compute, memory, storage, and network architecture over raw compute.

MIT Technology Review, citing Tirias Research principal analyst Jim McGregor, argues that AI inference and agentic workloads make data movement the key constraint, elevating memory and storage from background hardware to strategic assets. The piece says RAG and real-time inference require continuous data retrieval and caching that legacy infrastructure cannot support. It frames infrastructure planning as a business decision balancing performance, efficiency, cost, and scalability in healthcare, finance, and customer-facing AI.

MIT Technology Review · AI · 12d agoAI industry

Anthropic's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards lets your Claude logs stay in your cloud

Anthropic launches Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, letting regulated customers keep Claude usage logs in their own cloud storage under their own keys with automated misuse detection.

Anthropic unveiled Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, co-designed with eight members of the Analysis and Resilience Center for Systemic Risk and more than 100 customers including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Visa, Mastercard, Comcast, KPMG, and Salesforce. Misuse-detection activity data can live in the customer's Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage under customer-managed keys, with fully automated review and no human inspection by Anthropic; automated systems watch for offensive cyber or biological capability development and signs of stolen credentials. The offering replaces the friction around Fable 5's 30-day retention policy, costs nothing extra, spans Claude Enterprise, Claude Platform, Amazon Bedrock, Google's Agent Platform, and Microsoft Foundry, with broad availability targeted for later this fall.

Help Net Security · 15d agoAI industry1

AIR raises $50M to help companies vet the skills and add-ons AI agents use

AI security startup AIR exits stealth with $50M across two seed rounds to continuously vet skills, plugins, and MCP servers used by enterprise AI agents.

AIR, founded by Unit 8200 veterans Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, raised $10 million led by Sequoia and $40 million led by Greenoaks to secure the emerging AI agent software supply chain. Its platform discovers agents in enterprise environments, intercepts their actions, and continuously vets skills, add-ons, and MCP servers against a maintained whitelist, filtering out about 27% of found add-ons. The company claims over 20 customers, roughly a quarter large enterprises, with strong demand in financial services and pharma, and competes with Noma Security, Zenity, Astrix Security, and Operant AI.

TechCrunch · Security · 15d agoAI industry

[AINews] Andrew Ng gets into AI Engineering

Andrew Ng relaunches DeepLearning.AI around AI Engineering, defining four core skills from an analysis of 10,000+ job postings and expert interviews.

Andrew Ng, cofounder of Google Brain and Coursera, relaunched DeepLearning.AI with a focus on AI Engineering, basing the curriculum direction on an analysis of over 10,000 job postings plus interviews and surveys. He identifies four key skills: building and deploying AI applications, software engineering fundamentals, effective use of coding agents, and shaping the build with product sense. The Latent Space AI News issue also recaps agent ecosystem developments, including NVIDIA's 'Skill Lift' evaluation proposal showing skill scan scores correlate only weakly (Spearman rho = 0.14) with judged quality, and Konwinski's open-source persistent-agent 'microharness' Headlong, which achieved an unattended self-debugging repair in 48 minutes.

Latent Space · 23d agoAI industry1

Senior engineers are spending their week cleaning up AI-generated code

New Relic study finds AI-generated code doubles critical runtime issues, with senior engineers losing a third of their week to fixes.

A New Relic survey of U.S. technology leaders reports AI now writes the majority of shipped code, with senior SRE and DevOps engineers spending up to a third of their week triaging and refactoring it. A large majority of organizations had at least one AI-related production failure in the past six months, and roughly three in ten saw newly introduced security vulnerabilities. AI-generated code showed nearly twice as many critical runtime issues as peer-reviewed human-authored code, with gaps concentrated in edge cases, concurrency, deprecated APIs, and complex state changes. Most teams now prompt AI tools to embed logs and traces directly into generated code.

Help Net Security · 24d agoAI industry1

Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing

Anthropic will watermark Claude outputs by biasing low-stakes word choices, a method it says complies with EU AI regulations.

Anthropic detailed how future Claude versions will carry a statistical watermark by altering the source of randomness used to pick among near-synonymous words, adding no hidden characters or metadata; a key holder can compute a probability that text was Claude-generated. The company says internal testing showed no impact on quality, creativity, or readability, and frames the change as compliance with new EU AI regulations. Critics including John Gruber and Jeff Jarvis argue the method treats synonyms as interchangeable and devalues writing, a view echoed in this 404 Media opinion piece.

404 Media · 29d agoAI industry