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OpenAI's co-founder and Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is leaving the company to work on "something personally meaningful," wrote CEO Sam Altman in a post on X. "This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. [...] I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together." He will be replaced by OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachocki. Here's Altman's full X post announcing the departure: Ilya and OpenAI are going to part ways. This is very sad to me; Ilya is easily one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light of our field, and a dear friend. His brilliance and vision are well known; his warmth and compassion are less well known but no less important. OpenAI would not be what it is without him. Although he has something personally meaningful he is going to go work on, I am forever grateful for what he did here and committed to finishing the mission we started together. I am happy that for so long I got to be close to such genuinely remarkable genius, and someone so focused on getting to the best future for humanity. Jakub is going to be our new Chief Scientist. Jakub is also easily one of the greatest minds of our generation; I am thrilled he is taking the baton here. He has run many of our most important projects, and I am very confident he will lead us to make rapid and safe progress towards our mission of ensuring that AGI benefits everyone. The New York Times notes that Ilya joined three other board members to force out Altman in a chaotic weekend last November. Ultimately, Altman returned as CEO five days later. Ilya said he regretted the move.

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Dan Robinson reports via The Register: VMware has made another small but notable post-merger concession to users: the Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro desktop hypervisor products will now be free for personal use. The cloud and virtualization biz, now a Broadcom subsidiary, has announced that its Pro apps will be available under two license models: a "Free Personal Use" or a "Paid Commercial Use" subscription for organizations. Workstation Pro is available for PC users running Windows or Linux, while Fusion Pro is available for Mac systems with either Intel CPUs or Apple's own processors. The two products allow users to create a virtual machine on their local computer for the purpose of running a different operating system or creating a sandbox in which to run certain software. [...] According to VMware, users will get to decide for themselves if their use case calls for a commercial subscription. There are no functional differences between the two versions, the company states, and the only visual difference is that the free version displays the text: "This product is licensed for personal use only." "This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows, or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com," VMware says. Customers that require a paid commercial subscription must purchase through an authorized Broadcom Advantage partner. The move also means that VMware's Workstation Player and Fusion Player products are effectively redundant as the Pro products now serve the same role, and so those will no longer be offered for purchase. Organizations with commercial licenses for Fusion Player 13 or Workstation Player 17 can continue to use these, however, and they will continue to be supported for existing end of life (EOL) and end of general support (EoGS) dates.

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Plus: Google Chrome, Apple bugs also exploited in the wild

Happy May Patch Tuesday. We've got a lot of vendors joining this month's patchapalooza, which includes a handful of bugs that have been exploited — either in the wild or at Pwn2Own — and now fixed by Microsoft, Apple, Google and VMware.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Crashing into parked cars, drifting over into oncoming traffic, intruding into construction zones -- all this "unexpected behavior" from Waymo's self-driving vehicles may be violating traffic laws, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said (PDF) Monday. To better understand Waymo's potential safety risks, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) is now looking into 22 incident reports involving cars equipped with Waymo's fifth-generation automated driving system. Seventeen incidents involved collisions, but none involved injuries. Some of the reports came directly from Waymo, while others "were identified based on publicly available reports," NHTSA said. The reports document single-party crashes into "stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains" as well as instances in which Waymo cars "appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices." The ODI plans to compare notes between incidents to decide if Waymo cars pose a safety risk or require updates to prevent malfunctioning. There is already evidence from the ODI's initial evaluation showing that Waymo's automated driving systems (ADS) were either "engaged throughout the incident" or abruptly "disengaged in the moments just before an incident occurred," NHTSA said. The probe is the first step before NHTSA can issue a potential recall, Reuters reported. A Waymo spokesperson said the company currently serves "over 50,000 weekly trips for our riders in some of the most challenging and complex environments." When a collision occurs, Waymo reviews each case and continually updates the ADS software to enhance performance. "We are proud of our performance and safety record over tens of millions of autonomous miles driven, as well as our demonstrated commitment to safety transparency," Waymo's spokesperson said, confirming that Waymo would "continue to work" with the ODI to enhance ADS safety.

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Agency is on the lookout for a Prince among men

The US Federal Communications Commission has named its first robocall gang, dubbing the crew "Royal Tiger," and detailed its operations in an attempt to encourage international action against the scammers.…

A portal linking New York City to Dublin via a livestream has been temporarily shut down after inappropriate behavior ensued, according to the Dublin City Council. From a report: Less than a week after the 24/7 visual art installation was put in place, officials have opted to close it down temporarily after people began to flash each other, grind on the portal, and one person even shared pictures of the twin tower attack to people in New York City. Alternatively, the portal had also been the site of reunions with old friends and even a proposal, with many documenting their experience with the installation online. The Dublin City Council said that although those engaged in the inappropriate behavior were few and far between, videos of said behavior went viral online. "While we cannot control all of these actions, we are implementing some technical solutions to address this and these will go live in the next 24 hours," the council said in a Monday statement. "We will continue to monitor the situation over the coming days with our partners in New York to ensure that portals continue to deliver a positive experience for both cities and the world."

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Google's Gemini AI often just feels like a chatbot built into a text-input field, but you can really start to do special things when you give it access to a ton of data. Gemini in Gmail will soon be able to search through your entire backlog of emails and show a summary in a sidebar. That's simple to describe but solves a huge problem with email: even searching brings up a list of email subjects, and you have to click-through to each one just to read it. Having an AI sift through a bunch of emails and provide a summary sounds like a huge time saver and something you can't do with any other interface. Google's one-minute demo of this feature showed a big blue Gemini button at the top right of the Gmail web app. Tapping it opens the normal chatbot sidebar you can type in. Asking for a summary of emails from a certain contact will get you a bullet-point list of what has been happening, with a list of "sources" at the bottom that will jump you right to a certain email. In the last second of the demo, the user types, "Reply saying I want to volunteer for the parent's group event," hits "enter," and then the chatbot instantly, without confirmation, sends an email.

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Promises 4.7x performance boost over its older silicon

I/O  Google blew the lid off its sixth tensor processing unit (TPU) codenamed Trillium, designed to support a new generation of bigger, more capable of large language and recommender models.…

Reports of collisions with stationary objects and failing to obey traffic laws

The US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Monday opened an investigation into self-driving car maker Waymo following reports that its robocars have not been complying with traffic laws.…

The Framework Laptops are some great systems with their upgradeable/modular design, friendly Linux support, both Intel and AMD options, the latest models making use of an open-source embedded controller, and nice build quality. The Framework Laptops have proven very popular with Linux/open-source enthusiasts but one of the recurring critiques has been the lack of Coreboot firmware support for these laptops as an alternative (or outright replacement) to the proprietary BIOS/firmware. As a promising avenue for the future, there is experimental work being done on getting Coreboot up and running with the Framework 13 laptop powered by the AMD Ryzen 7040 series...

Marc Whitten, Unity Create's chief product and technology officer, is stepping down on June 1, 2024, following the company's contentious Runtime Fee policy. Whitten will assist with the transition until December 31, 2024. The now-discarded Runtime Fee, announced in September 2023, faced severe backlash from developers who viewed it as a punitive per-install tariff. Unity reworked the fee and acknowledged its lack of communication with developers. CEO John Riccitiello also departed in October 2023, succeeded by Matthew Bromberg. Upon resignation, Whitten will receive a total of $814,801 in various payouts and benefits.

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More stringent rules led to staff to find more remote options

A study has found that return to office mandates resulted in a noteworthy number of senior employees leaving jobs at Microsoft, Apple, and SpaceX.…

Among Google's swath of new AI models and tools announced today, the company is also expanding its AI content watermarking and detection technology to work across two new mediums. The Verge: Google's DeepMind CEO, Demis Hassabis, took the stage for the first time at the Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday to talk not only about the team's new AI tools, like the Veo video generator, but also about the new upgraded SynthID watermark imprinting system. It can now mark video that was digitally generated, as well as AI-generated text. [...] Google had also enabled SynthID to inject inaudible watermarks into AI-generated music that was made using DeepMind's Lyria model. SynthID is just one of several AI safeguards in development to combat misuse by the tech, safeguards that the Biden administration is directing federal agencies to build guidelines around.

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samleecole writes: For the last decade, farmers have been warning that John Deere, a company celebrated by farmers, country musicians, and politicians, has been doing something else very American: Concentrating power, stripping away the ownership rights of people who buy their products, and adding a bevy of artificial, software-based repair restrictions that have effectively created a regime in which farmers can no longer fix their own tractors, combines, harvesters, and other agricultural equipment. Farmers have resorted to pirating John Deere's software and firmware on underground forums and torrent sites, and have used software cracked by Ukrainian pirates in order to simply fix the things they own. Farmers often have to wait days or weeks for an "authorized" John Deere dealership to come to their farms to repair their equipment, meanwhile their crops die on the vine. For years, very little happened to slow down John Deere's march toward total control of the repair market. But interviews with farmers, activists, and lawyers, and a review of court records reveal a turn in the story: There is increased scrutiny on Deere's repair practices not just in this class action lawsuit, but from state legislators, the White House, and a series of federal agencies. The walls on Deere's repair monopoly may finally be closing in.

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More cores, more memory, more delays

ISC  Chip designer SiPearl has issued updated specs for its Rhea1 processor that will power Europe's first exascale system and is working with Samsung to integrate high-bandwidth memory (HBM) into its design.…

Intel just published a new set of CPU microcode files for updating Alder lake and newer as well as Xeon Scalable 4th Gen and 5th Gen in order to address three security issues plus take care of various functional issues...

Google is shaking up Search. On Tuesday, the company announced big new AI-powered changes to the world's dominant search engine at I/O, Google's annual conference for developers. From a report: With the new features, Google is positioning Search as more than a way to simply find websites. Instead, the company wants people to use its search engine to directly get answers and help them with planning events and brainstorming ideas. "[With] generative AI, Search can do more than you ever imagined," wrote Liz Reid, vice president and head of Google Search, in a blog post. "So you can ask whatever's on your mind or whatever you need to get done -- from researching to planning to brainstorming -- and Google will take care of the legwork." Google's changes to Search, the primary way that the company makes money, are a response to the explosion of generative AI ever since OpenAI's ChatGPT released at the end of 2022. [...] Starting today, Google will show complete AI-generated answers in response to most search queries at the top of the results page in the US. Google first unveiled the feature a year ago at Google I/O in 2023, but so far, anyone who wanted to use the feature had to sign up for it as part of the company's Search Labs platform that lets people try out upcoming features ahead of their general release. Google is now making AI Overviews available to hundreds of millions of Americans, and says that it expects it to be available in more countries to over a billion people by the end of the year.

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Chrome is getting an onboard artificial intelligence model that devs can query

Google's annual developer conference is still called Google I/O, though this year Google A/I would be equally apt.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: At a privately held event, Google recently demonstrated a special build of Chromium OS -- code-named "ferrochrome" -- running in a virtual machine on a Pixel 8. However, Chromium OS wasn't shown running on the phone's screen itself. Rather, it was projected to an external display, which is possible because Google recently enabled display output on its Pixel 8 series. Time will tell if Google is thinking of positioning Chrome OS as a platform for its desktop mode ambitions and Samsung DeX rival.

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It’s definitely to protect the whales and not the fossil fuel industry

In a rally held on Saturday in Wildwood, New Jersey, former US President Donald Trump promised that his first day back in office would feature the destruction of offshore wind farms.…