Author name: Paul Patrick

high-severity-winrar-0-day-exploited-for-weeks-by-2-groups

High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups

0-Day, Biz & IT, ESET, Security, winrar, zero-day vulnerability / /

A high-severity zero-day in the widely used WinRAR file compressor is under active exploitation by two Russian cybercrime groups. The attacks backdoor computers that open malicious archives attached to phishing messages, some of which are personalized.

Security firm ESET said Monday that it first detected the attacks on July 18, when its telemetry spotted a file in an unusual directory path. By July 24, ESET determined that the behavior was linked to the exploitation of an unknown vulnerability in WinRAR, a utility for compressing files, and has an installed base of about 500 million. ESET notified WinRAR developers the same day, and a fix was released six days later.

Serious effort and resources

The vulnerability seemed to have super Windows powers. It abused alternate data streams, a Windows feature that allows different ways of representing the same file path. The exploit abused that feature to trigger a previously unknown path traversal flaw that caused WinRAR to plant malicious executables in attacker-chosen file paths %TEMP% and %LOCALAPPDATA%, which Windows normally makes off-limits because of their ability to execute code.

ESET said it has determined that the attacks came from RomCom, its tracking designation for a financially motivated crime group operating out of Russia. The well-resourced group has been active for years in attacks that showcase its ability to procure exploits and execute fairly sophisticated tradecraft. The zero-day the group used is now being tracked as CVE-2025-8088.

“By exploiting a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in WinRAR, the RomCom group has shown that it is willing to invest serious effort and resources into its cyberoperations,” ESET’s Anton Cherepanov, Peter Strýček, and Damien Schaeffer wrote. “This is at least the third time RomCom has used a zero-day vulnerability in the wild, highlighting its ongoing focus on acquiring and using exploits for targeted attacks.”

Oddly, RomCom wasn’t the only group exploiting CVE-2025-8088. According to Russian security firm Bi.ZONE, the same vulnerability was being actively exploited by a group it tracks as Paper Werewolf. Also tracked as GOFFEE, the group was also exploiting CVE-2025-6218, a separate high-severity WinRAR vulnerability that received a fix five weeks before CVE-2025-8088 was patched.

High-severity WinRAR 0-day exploited for weeks by 2 groups Read More »

gpt-5s-are-alive:-outside-reactions,-the-router-and-the-resurrection-of-gpt-4o

GPT-5s Are Alive: Outside Reactions, the Router and the Resurrection of GPT-4o

Alive / /

A key problem with having and interpreting reactions to GPT-5 is that it is often unclear whether the reaction is to GPT-5, GPT-5-Router or GPT-5-Thinking.

Another is that many of the things people are reacting to changed rapidly after release, such as rate limits, the effectiveness of the model selection router and alternative options, and the availability of GPT-4o.

This complicates the tradition I have in new AI model reviews, which is to organize and present various representative and noteworthy reactions to the new model, to give a sense of what people are thinking and the diversity of opinion.

I also had make more cuts than usual, since there were so many eyes on this one. I tried to keep proportions similar to the original sample as best I could.

Reactions are organized roughly in order from positive to negative, with the drama around GPT-4o at the end.

Tomorrow I will put it all together, cover the official hype and presentation and go over GPT-5’s strengths and weaknesses and how I’ve found it is best to use it after having the better part of a week to try things out, as well as what this means for expectations and timelines.

My overall impression of GPT-5 continues to be that it is a good (but not great) set of models, with GPT-5-Thinking and GPT-5-Pro being substantial upgrades over o3 and o3-Pro, but the launch was botched, and reactions are confused, because among other things:

  1. The name GPT-5 and all the hype led to great expectations and underdelivery.

  2. All the different models were launched at once when they’re actually different.

  3. GPT-4o and other models were taken away without warning,

  4. GPT-5 baseline personality is off putting to a lot of people right now and it isn’t noticeably more intelligent than GPT-4o was on typical normal person usage.

  5. Severe temporary limits were imposed that people thought would be permanent.

  6. The router was broken, and even when not broken doesn’t work great.

I expect that when the dust settles people will be happy and GPT-5 will do well, even if it is not what we might have hoped for from an AI called GPT-5.

Previously on GPT-5: GPT-5s Are Alive: Basic Facts, Benchmarks and Model Card

Tyler Cowen finds it great at answering the important questions.

Tyler Cowen: GPT-5, a short and enthusiastic review

I am a big fan, as on my topics of interest it does much better than o3, and that is saying something. It is also lightning fast, even for complex queries of economics, history, and ideas.

One of the most impressive features is its uncanny sense of what you might want to ask next. And it has a good sense of when to give you an (sometimes interactive!) chart or diagram.

I have had early access, and love to just keep on asking it, asking it, asking it questions. Today I was asking about Irish coinage disputes from 1724 (Swift) and now about different kinds of Buddhism and their historical roots. It was very accurate on cuisine in northern Ghana.

It is the best learning tool I have. Furthermore, it feels fun.

Tyler Cowen has been a big booster of o1, o3 and now GPT-5. What OpenAI has been cooking clearly matches what he has been seeking.

I appreciate that he isn’t trying to give a universal recommendation or make a grand claim. He’s saying that for his topics and needs and experiences, this is a big upgrade.

Ethan Mollick: I had access to GPT-5. I think it is a very big deal as it is very smart & just does stuff for you.

Okay, why is it a big deal?

As someone who has spent a lot of time talking to people about AI, there are two major problems I see, that, if addressed, would make most people’s AI use much more productive and much less frustrating.

The first is selecting the right model to use.

A surprising number of people have never seen what AI can actually do because they’re stuck on GPT-4o, and don’t know which of the confusingly-named models are better. GPT-5 does away with this by selecting models for you, automatically.

I agree this is frustrating, and that those who don’t know how to select models and modes are at a disadvantage. Does GPT-5 solve this?

Somewhat. It solves two important subproblems, largely for those who think ‘AI’ and ‘ChatGPT’ are the same picture.

  1. Users who previously only used GPT-4o and didn’t know there was a dropdown menu will now get the GPT-5-Thinking when their queries justify it.

  2. Users no longer have to deal with a set of OpenAI models that includes GPT-4o, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.5, o3, o3-Pro, o4-mini and so on. We can all agree this is a mess.

What it doesn’t do is solve the problem overall, for three reasons.

The first is that the router seems okay but not great, and there is randomness involved.

Ethan Mollick: But for people who use AI more seriously, there is an issue: GPT-5 is somewhat arbitrary about deciding what a hard problem is.

…around 2/3 of the time, GPT-5 decides this is an easy problem.

But premium subscribers can directly select the more powerful models, such as the one called (at least for me) GPT-5 Thinking.

Anson Whitmer: Feels like it picks between 4.2o and o3.1.

I was quite relieved to know I could do manual selection. But that very much means that I still have to think, before each query, whether to use Thinking, the exact same way I used to think about whether to use o3, and also whether to use pro. No change.

They also claim that saying ‘think harder’ automatically triggers thinking mode.

The mixture of experts that I can’t steer and that calls the wrong one for me often enough that I manually select the expert? It is not helping matters.

Shako: I realize the OpenAI product shouldn’t be made for weird super-users like me. But I really liked choosing between o3 and 4.5 depending on if i wanted autistic problem solving or sensitive young man discussions.

One for coding, one for analyzing lana del rey songs. I don’t want the same model for both.

I also feel like I can’t really evaluate gpt5? What is gpt5? what is the underlying router? I’m so confused.

Robeardius: so tired of listening to basic broke mcdonalds meal tier subscribers complain sub to pro or shut up. you don’t pay for the cost of what you use anyway.

internetperson: GPT-5 non-thinking is bad, maybe at-or-slightly-below 4o.

GPT-5-thinking is an upgrade from o3. Feels about equally-as-intelligent while not being an evil liar.

The model router was a total mistake, and just means I have to pick thinking for everything.

Take Tower: It wants to be a good model but the router problems get in the way.

I do not think, contra Sichu Lu, that it is as simple as ‘profile the customer and learn which ones want intelligence versus who wants a friend, although some amount of that is a good idea on the margin. It should jump to thinking mode a lot quicker for me than for most users.

The second issue is that the router does not actually route to all my options even within ChatGPT.

There are two very important others: Agent Mode and Deep Research.

Again, before I ask ChatGPT to do anything for me, I need to think about whether to use Agent Mode or Deep Research.

And again, many ChatGPT users won’t know these options exist. They miss out again.

Third, OpenAI wishes it were otherwise but there are other AIs and ways to use AI out there.

If you want to know how to get best use of AI, your toolkit starts with at minimum all of the big three: Yes ChatGPT, but also Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini. Then there are things like Claude Code, CLI or Jules, or NotebookLM and Google AI Studio and so on, many with their own modes. The problem doesn’t go away.

Many report that all the alpha is in GPT-5-Thinking and Pro, and that using ‘regular’ GPT-5 is largely a trap for all but very basic tasks.

OpenAI (August 9): A few GPT-5 updates heading into the weekend:

– GPT-5 thinking and GPT-5 pro now in main model picker

By popular request, you can now check which model ran your prompt by hovering over the “Regen” menu.

Taelin is happy with what he sees from GPT-5-Thinking.

Taelin: Nah you’re all wrong, GPT-5 is a leap. I’m 100% doubling down here.

I didn’t want to post too fast and regret it again, but it just solved a bunch of very, very hard debugging prompts that were previously unsolved (by AI), and then designed a gorgeous pixelated Gameboy game with a level of detail and quality that is clearly beyond anything else I’ve ever seen.

There is no way this model is bad.

I think you’re all traumatized of benchmaxxers, and over-compensating against a model that is actually good. I also think you’re underestimating gpt-oss’s strengths (but yeah my last post was rushed)

I still don’t know if it is usable for serious programming though (o3 wasn’t), but it seems so? A coding model as reliable as Opus, yet smarter than o3, would completely change my workflow. Opus doesn’t need thinking to be great though, so, that might weight in its favor.

For what it is worth, I only really used 3 models:

– Opus 4.1 for coding

– Gemini 2.5 very rarely for coding when Opus fails

– o3 for everything but coding

That said, ASCII not solved yet.

GPT-5 basically one-shot this [a remarkably featured pokemon-style game].

Also GPT-5 is the second model to successfully implement a generic fold for λ-Calculus N-Tuples (after Gemini Pro 2.5 Deep Think), and its solution is smaller! Oh, I just noticed GPT-5’s solution is identical to mine. This is incredible.

BTW, GPT-5 is basically as bad as GPT-4o always was. GPT-5-Thinking is probably o4, as I predicted, and that one is good.

GPT-5-Thinking is probably o4, as I predicted, and that one is good.

Danielle Fong: can confirm that gpt-5-thinking is quite good.

Eleanor Berger: Thinking model is excellent. Almost certainly the best AI currently available. Amazing for coding, for writing, for complex problems, for search and tool use. Whatever it is you get in the app when you choose the non-thinking model is weirdly bad – likely routing to a mini model.

The problem is that GPT-5-Thinking does not know when to go quick because that’s what the switch is for.

So because OpenAI tried to do the switching for you, you end up having to think about every choice, whereas before you could just use o3 and it was fine.

This all reminds me of the tale of Master of Orion 3, which was supposed to be an epic game where you only got 7 move points a turn and they made everything impossible to micromanage, so you’d have to use their automated systems, then players complained so they took away the 7 point restriction and then everyone had to micromanage everything that was designed to make that terrible. Whoops.

Gallabytes: gpt5 thinking is good but way too slow even for easy things. gpt5 not thinking is not very good. need gpt5-thinking-low.

Richard Knoche: claude is better+than gpt5 and gpt5 thinking is way too slow compared to claude

A lot of the negative reactions could plausibly be ‘they used the wrong version, sir.’

Ethan Mollick: The issue with GPT-5 in a nutshell is that unless you pay for model switching & know to use GPT-5 Thinking or Pro, when you ask “GPT-5” you sometimes get the best available AI & sometimes get one of the worst AIs available and it might even switch within a single conversation.

Even if they ‘fix’ this somewhat the choice is clear: Use the explicit model switcher.

Similarly, if you’re using Codex CLI:

Conrad Barski: codex cli with gpt5 isn’t impressing- Not a good sign that I feel compelled to write “think hard” at the end of every request

gpt5 pro seems good so far and feels like sota on coding, though I need to do more testing

Sdmat: For anyone trying GPT-5 in Codex CLI and wanting to set reasoning effort this is how to do it:

codex -c model_reasoning_effort=”high”

Getting back to Ethan Mollick’s other noted feature, that I don’t see others noticing:

Ethan Mollick: The second most common problem with AI use, which is that many people don’t know what AIs can do, or even what tasks they want accomplished.

That is especially true of the new agentic AIs, which can take a wide range of actions to accomplish the goals you give it, from searching the web to creating documents. But what should you ask for? A lot of people seem stumped. Again, GPT-5 solves this problem. It is very proactive, always suggesting things to do.

Is that… good?

I asked GPT-5 Thinking (I trust the less powerful GPT-5 models much less) “generate 10 startup ideas for a former business school entrepreneurship professor to launch, pick the best according to some rubric, figure out what I need to do to win, do it.”

I got the business idea I asked for.

I also got a whole bunch of things I did not: drafts of landing pages and LinkedIn copy and simple financials and a lot more.

I am a professor who has taught entrepreneurship (and been an entrepreneur) and I can say confidently that, while not perfect, this was a high-quality start that would have taken a team of MBAs a couple hours to work through. From one prompt.

Yes, that was work that would have taken humans a bunch of time, and I trust Ethan’s assessment that it was a good version of that work. But why should we think that was work that Ethan wanted or would find useful?

It just does things, and it suggested others things to do. And it did those, too: PDFs and Word documents and Excel and research plans and websites.

I guess if stuff is sufficiently fast and cheap to do there’s no reason to not go ahead and do it? And yes, everyone appreciates the (human) assistant who is proactive and goes that extra mile, but not the one that spends tons of time on that without a strong intuition of what you actually want.

Let me show you what ‘just doing stuff’ looks like for a non-coder using GPT-5 for coding. For fun, I prompted GPT-5 “make a procedural brutalist building creator where i can drag and edit buildings in cool ways, they should look like actual buildings, think hard.” That’s it. Vague, grammatically questionable, no specifications.

A couple minutes later, I had a working 3D city builder.

Not a sketch. Not a plan. A functioning app where I could drag buildings around and edit them as needed. I kept typing variations of “make it better” without any additional guidance. And GPT-5 kept adding features I never asked for: neon lights, cars driving through streets, facade editing, pre-set building types, dramatic camera angles, a whole save system.

I mean, okay, although I don’t think this functionality is new? The main thing Ethan says is different is that GPT-5 didn’t fail in a growing cascade of errors, and that when it did find errors pasting in the error text fixed it. That’s great but also a very different type of improvement.

Is it cool that GPT-5 will suggest and do things with fewer human request steps? I mean, I guess for some people, especially the fourth child who does not know how to ask, and operate so purely on vibes that you can’t come up with the idea of typing in ‘what are options for next steps’ or ‘what would I do next?’ or ‘go ahead and also do or suggest next steps afterwards’ then that’s a substantial improvement. But what if you are the simple, wicked or wise child?

Nabeel Qureshi: Ok, collecting my overall GPT-5 impressions:

– Biggest upgrade seems to be 4o -> 5. I rarely use these models but for the median user this is a huge upgrade.

– 5-T is sometimes better than o3, sometimes worse. Finding that I often do side by side queries here, which is annoying. o3 seems to search deeper and more thoroughly at times. o3 is also _weirder_ / more of an autist which I like personally.

– 5-pro is really really smart, clearly “the smartest model on the market” for complex questions. I need to spend more time testing here, but so far it’s produced better results than o3 pro.

– I spent a few hours in Cursor/GPT5 last night and was super impressed. The model really flies, the instruction following + tool calling is noticeably better, and it’s more reliable overall. You still need to use all the usual AI coding guardrails to get a good result, but it feels roughly as good as Claude Code / Sonnet now in capability terms, and it is actually better at doing more complex UIs / front-end from what I can tell so far.

– CC still feels like a better overall product than Codex to me at the moment, but I’m sure they’ll catch up.

– They seem to have souped up GPT5-T’s fiction writing abilities. I got some interesting/novel stuff out of it for the first time, which is new. (Will post an example in the reply tweets).

– I find the UX to get to GPT5-T / Pro annoying (a sub-menu? really?) and wish it were just a toggle. Hopefully this is an easy fix.

Overall:

– Very happy as a Pro user, but I can see why Plus users might complain about the model router. ChatGPT continues to be to be my main go-to for most AI uses.

– I don’t see the “plateau” point at all and I think people are overreacting too quickly. Plenty of time to expand along the tool-calling/agent frontier, for one thing. (It’s easiest to see this when you’re coding, perhaps, since that’s where the biggest improvement seems to have come.)

– I expect OpenAI will do very well out of this release and their numbers will continue to go up. As they should.

On creative writing, I asked it to do a para about getting a cold brew in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake style and was impressed with the below pastiche. For a post-trained model there’s a lot more novelty/creativity going on than usual (e.g. “taxicoal black” for coffee was funny)

Samuel Albanie (Google DeepMind): It’s fast. I like that.

It’s also (relatively) cheap.

I like that too.

Well, sure, there’s that. But is it a good model, sir?

Samuel Abanie: Yes (almost almost surely [a good model])

I had some nice initial interactions (particularly when reasoning kicks in) but still a bit too early for me to tell convincingly.

Yoav Tzfati: Might become my default for non-coding things over Claude just based on speed, UI quality, and vibes. Didn’t like 4o vibes

Aaron Levine finds GPT-5 is able to find an intentionally out of place number in a Nvidia press release that causes a logical inconsistency, that previously OpenAI models and most human readers would miss. Like several other responses what confuses me here is that previous models had so much trouble.

Byrne Hobart: If you ask it for examples of some phenomenon, it does way more than earlier models did. (Try asking for mathematical concepts that were independently discovered in different continents/centuries.)

Another one: of my my favorite tests for reasoning models is “What’s the Straussian reading of XYZ’s body of work?” and for me it actually made an original point I hadn’t thought of:

Chubby offers initial thoughts that Tyler Cowen called a review, that seem to take OpenAI’s word on everything, with the big deal being (I do think this part is right) that free users can trigger thinking mode when it matters. Calls it ‘what we expected, no more and no less’ and ‘more of an evolution, which some major leaps forward.’

I am asking everyone once again to not use ‘superintelligence’ to refer to slightly better normal AI as hype. In this case the latest offender is Reid Hoffman.

Sam Glover: Turning ‘superintelligence’ into a marketing term referring to slightly more capable models is going to mean people will massively underestimate how much progress there might actually be.

This is not in any way, shape or form superintelligence, universal basic or otherwise. If you want to call it ‘universal basic intelligence’ then fine, do that. Otherwise, shame on you, and I hate these word crimes. Please, can we have a term for the actual thing?

I had a related confusion with Neil Chilson last week, where he objected to my describing him as ‘could not believe in superintelligence less,’ citing that he believes in markets smarter than any human. That’s a very distinct thing.

I fear that the answer to that will always be no. If we started using ‘transformational AI’ (TAI) instead or ‘powerful AI’ (PAI) then that’s what then goes in this post. There’s no winning, only an endless cycle of power eating your terms over and over.

As is often the case, how you configure the model matters a lot, so no, not thinking about what you’re doing is never going to get you good results.

Ben Hylak: first of all, gpt-5 in ChatGPT != gpt-5 in API

but it gets more complicated. gpt-5 with minimal reasoning effort also behaves like a completely different model.

gpt-5 *isa fantastic model with the right harness. and i believe we will see it fundamentally change products.

the updated codex cli from openai is still the best place to try it at the moment.

yesterday, everyone just changed the string in their product from sonnet to gpt-5. it’s gonna take more than that.

chatgpt is really bad right now, no idea how they let it happen.

But not a great model. That is my current take, which I consider neutral.

Fleeting Bits:

  1. GPT-5 is a good model. It feels like it provides better search and performance than o3 did before it.

  2. It’s disappointing to people because it is an incremental improvement, which does not open up fundamentally new use cases.

  3. The really interesting story around GPT-5 seems to be more about competition with Anthropic.

  1. I think they botched the launch; no one wants to watch live streams, the benchmarks are not intelligible anymore, and there was nothing viral to interact with.

Most people are free users and don’t even know Anthropic or Claude exist, or even in any meaningful way that o3 existed, and are going from no thinking to some thinking. Such different worlds.

GPT-5 is now the default model on Cursor.

Cursor users seem split. In general they report that GPT-5 offers as good or better results per query, but there are a lot of people who like Jessald are objecting on speed.

Will Brown: ok this model kinda rules in cursor. instruction-following is incredible. very literal, pushes back where it matters. multitasks quite well. a couple tiny flubs/format misses here and there but not major. the code is much more normal than o3’s. feels trustworthy

Youssef: cannot agree more. first model i can trust to auto-maintain big repo documentation. gonna save me a ton of time with it on background

opus is excellent, had been my daily driver in cursor for a while, will still prob revisit it for certain things but gonna give gpt-5 a go as main model for now.

Jessald: I gave GPT-5 a shot and I’ve stopped using it. It’s just too slow. I switched back whatever Cursor uses when you set it to auto select. It takes like a quarter of the time for 80% of the quality.

Sully: i think for coding, opus + claude code is still unbeatable

on cursor however, i find sonnet slightly losing out to gpt5.

Askwho: After dual running Claude & GPT-5 over the last couple of days, I’ve pretty much entirely switched to GPT-5. It is the clear winner for my main use case: building individual apps for specific needs. The apps it produced were built faster, more efficiently, and closer to the brief

Vincent Favilla: I wanted to like [GPT-5]. I wanted to give OpenAI the benefit of the doubt. But I just don’t consider it very good. It’s not very agentic in Cursor and needs lots of nudging to do things. For interpersonal stuff it has poor EQ compared to Claude or Gemini. 5-T is a good writer though.

Rob Miles: I’ve found it very useful for more complex coding tasks, like this stained glass window design (which is much more impressive than it seems at first glance).

Edwin Hayward: Using GPT-5 via the API to vibe code is like a lottery.

Sometimes you’re answered by a programming genius. Other times, the model can barely comprehend the basic concepts of your code.

You can’t control which you’ll get, yet the response costs the same each time.

Aggravating!

FleetingBits sees the battle with Anthropic, especially for Cursor supremacy, as the prime motivation behind a lot of GPT-5, going after their rapid revenue growth.

Bindu Reddy: GPT-5 is OpenAI’s first attempt at catching up to Claude

All the cool stuff in the world is built on Sonnet today

The model that empowers the builders has the best chance to get to AGI first

Obviously 🙄

The whole perspective of ‘whose model is being used for [X] will determine the future’ or even in some cases ‘whose chips that model is being run on will determine the future’ does not actually make sense. Obviously you want people to use your model so you gain revenue and market share. These are good things. And yes, the model that enables AI R&D in particular is going to be a huge deal. That’s a different question. The future still won’t care which model vibe coded your app. Eyes on the prize.

It’s also strange to see a claim like ‘OpenAI’s first attempt at catching up to Claude.’ OpenAI has been trying to offer the best coding model this entire time, and indeed claimed to have done so most of that time.

Better to say, this is the first time in a while that OpenAI has had a plausible claim that they should be the default for your coding needs. So does Anthropic.

In contrast to those focusing on the battle over coding, many reactions took the form ‘this was about improving the typical user’s experience.’

Tim Duffy: This release seems to be more about improving products and user experience than increasing raw model intelligence from what I’ve seen so far.

Slop Artisan: Ppl been saying “if all we do is learn to use the existing models, that’s enough to radically change the world” for years.

Now oai are showing that path, and people are disappointed.

Weird world.

Peter Wildeford: 🎯 seems like the correct assessment of GPT5.

Or as he put it in his overview post:

Peter Wildeford: GPT-5: a small step for intelligence, a giant leap for normal people.

GPT-5 isn’t a giant leap in intelligence. It’s an incremental step in benchmarks and a ‘meh’ in vibes for experts. But it should only be disappointing if you had unrealistic expectations — it is very on-trend and exactly what we’d predict if we’re still heading to fast AI progress over the next decade.

Most importantly, GPT-5 is a big usability win for everyday users — faster, cheaper, and easier to use than its predecessors, with notable improvements on hallucinations and other issues.

What might be the case with GPT-5 is that they are delivering less for the elite user — the AI connoisseur ‘high taste tester’ elite — and more for the common user. Recall that 98% of people who use ChatGPT use it for free.

Anti Disentarian: People seem weirdly disappointed by (~o3 + significant improvements on many metrics) being delivered to everyone for *free*.

Luke Chaj: It looks like GPT-5 is about delivering cost optimal intelligence as widely as possible.

Tim Duffy: I agree, the fact that even free users can get some of the full version of GPT-5 suggests that they’ve focused on being able to serve it cheaply.

Amir Livne Bar-on: Especially the indirect utility we’ll get from hundreds of millions of people getting an upgrade over 4o

(they could have gotten better results earlier with e.g. Gemini, but people don’t switch for some reason)

Dominik Lukes: Been playing with it for a few hours (got slightly early preview) and that’s very much my impression. Frankly, it has been my impression of the field since Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 Opus. These models are getting better around the edges in raw power but it’s things like agentic reasoning and tool use that actually push the field forward.

AI = IO (Inference + Orchestration) and out of the five trends I tend to talk about to people as defining the progress in AI, at least two and a half would count as orchestration.

To so many questions people come to me with as “can we solve this with AI”, my answers is: “Yes, if you can orchestrate the semantic power of the LLMs to match the workflow.” Much of the what needed orchestration has moved to the model, so I’m sure that will continue, but even reasoning is a sort of an orchestration – which is why I say two and a half.

The problem with the for the people plan is the problem with democracy. The people.

You think you know what the people want, and you find out that you are wrong. A lot of the people instead want their sycophant back and care far more about tone and length and validation than about intelligence, as will be illustrated when I later discuss those that are actively unhappy about the change to GPT-5.

Thus, the risk is that GPT-5 as implemented ends up targeting a strange middle ground of users, who want an actually good model and want that to be an easy process.

Dylan Patel (SemiAnalysis): GPT 5 is dissapointing ngl. Claude still better.

Gary Marcus (of course): GPT-5 in three words: late, overhyped & underwhelming.

Jeremy Howard (again, what a shock): Now that the era of the scaling “law” is coming to a close, I guess every lab will have their Llama 4 moment.

Grok had theirs.

OpenAI just had theirs too.

Ra: I would take rollback in a heartbeat.

JT Booth: Better performance per prompt on GPT-5 [versus Opus on coding] but it eats like ten times as many tokens, takes forever, much harder to follow in Cursor.

Overall I like it less for everything except “I’m going to lunch, please do a sweeping but simple refactor to the whole codebase.”

Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh: Is today when we break the trend of slightly underwhelming 2025 model releases?

Narrator voice: it was not.

David Dabney: I asked my usual internal benchmark question to gauge social reasoning/insight and the responses were interesting but not exactly thoughtful. it was like glazebot-pro, but I was hoping for at least glazebot-thinking

Man, Machine, Self: Feels like benchmaxxed slop unfit of the numeric increment, at least given how much they built it up.

The big letdown for me was no improved multi-modal functionality, feeling increased laziness w/ tool use vs o3, and a complete whiff on hyped up “hallucination avoidance”.

Pleasant surprise count was dwarfed by unfortunate failures.

Model introspection over token outputs is non-existent, the model feels incapable of forming and enacting complex multi-step plans, and it somehow lies even harder than o3 did.

My tests in general are obv very out of distributionn. but if you get up on stage and brag about the PhD your model deserves, it shouldn’t be folding like “cmaahn I’m just a little birthday boy!” when given slightly tougher questions you didn’t benchmaxx.

Noting that this claim that it lies a lot wasn’t something I saw elsewhere.

Archered Skeleton: it’s so much worse in every other interest, or even my major. like, medical stuff is a significant downgrade, at least I can say w confidence wrt audiology. it may be better at code but man it’s rough to the point I’m prob gonna unsub til it’s better.

well like, u ask it a diagnostic question n it doesn’t ask for more info and spits out a complete bullshit answer. they all do n have, but the answers out of gpt5 are remarkably bad, at least for what I know in my degree field.

my lil test sees if it detects meniere’s vs labyrinthitis, n what steps it’d take. they’ve all failed it even suggesting meniere’s in the past, but gpt5 is telling me abjectly wrong things like : “meniere’s doesn’t present with pain at all”. this is jus flat-out wrong

[link to a chat]

Fredipus Rex: GPT-5 (low) is worse than 4o on anything mildly complex. o3 was significantly better than any version of GPT-5 on complex documents or codebases. The high versions are overtrained on one shot evals that get the YouTubers impressed.

Budrscotch: Knowledge cutoff is resulting in a lot of subtle issues. Just yesterday I was having it research and provide recommendations on running the gpt-oss models on my 5070ti. Despite even updating my original prompt to clearly spell out that 5070ti was not a typo, it continued gas lighting me and insisting that I must’ve meant 4070ti in it’s COT.

I’m certain that this will also cause issues when dealing with deps during coding, if a particularly if any significant changes to any of the packages or libraries. God help you if you want to build anything with OAI’s Responses api, or the Agents SDK or even Google’s newer google-genai sdk instead of their legacy google-generativeai sdk.

That was with GPT-5T btw. Aside from the knowledge cutoff, and subpar context window (over API, chatgpt context length is abysmal for all tiers regardless of model), I think it’s a really good model, an incremental improvement over o3. Though I’ve only used GPT-5T, and “think hard” in all prompts 😁

No Stream: – more vanilla ideas, less willing to engage in speculative science than o3, less willing to take a stance or use 1P pronouns, feels more RLed to normie

– less robotic writing than o3

– 5thinking loves to make things complicated. less legible than gemini and opus, similar to o3

vibes based opinion is it’s as smart or smarter than g2.5 pro and opus 4.1 _but_ it’s not as easy to use as 2.5 pro or as pleasant to interact with and human as opus. even thinking doesn’t have strong big model smell.

I also used it in Codex. perfectly competent if I ignore the alpha state that Codex is in. smart but not as integrated with the harness as the Claude 4 models in Claude Code. it’s also janky in Roo and struggles with tool calling in my minimal attempts.

Daniel Litt: Doesn’t yet feel to me like GPT 5 thinking/pro is a meaningful improvement over o3/o3 pro for math. Maybe very slight?

I asked it some of my standard questions (which are calibrated to be just out of reach of o3/gemini 2.5 pro etc., i.e. they can solve similar problems) and gpt 5 pro still flubbed, with hallucinated references etc.

I think web search is a bit better? Examining CoT it looks like (for one problem) it found a relevant reference that other models hadn’t found–a human expert with this reference on hand would easily solve the problem in question. But it didn’t mention the ref in its response.

Instead it hallucinated a non-existent paper that it claimed contained the (incorrect) answer it ended up submitting.

Just vibes based on a couple hours of playing around, I think my original impression of o3 underrated it a bit so it’s possible I haven’t figured out how to elicit best-possible performance.

Web search is MUCH improved, actually. Just found a reference for something I had been after for a couple days(!)

Teknium: From trying gpt-5 for the last several hours now I will say:

I cant tell much of a difference between it and o3.

It is an always reasoner as far as i can tell

Might feel like a bit bigger model, but smaller and not as good as 4.5 on tasks that arent benefitted by reasoning

Still seems to try to give short <8k responses

Still has the same gpt personality, ive resigned myself from ever thinking itll break out of it

Eliezer Yudkowsky: GPT-5 and Opus 4.1 still fail my eval, “Can the AI plot a short story for my Masculine Mongoose series?”

Success is EY-hard; I’ve only composed 3 stories like that. But the AI failures feel like very far misses. They didn’t get the point of a Bruce Kent story.

Agnes Callard: orry but 5.0 is still not good enough to pass the benchmark test I’ve been using on each model.

the test is to correct 2 passages for typos, here are the passages, first try it yourself then look at the next tweet to see what 5.0 did

I enjoyed Agnes’s test, also I thought she was being a little picky in one spot, not that GPT-5 would have otherwise passed.

One has to be careful to evaluate everything in its proper weight (speed and cost) class. GPT-5, GPT-5-thinking and GPT-5-pro are very different practical experiences.

Peter Wildeford: GPT-5 is much faster at searching the web but it looks like Claude 4.1 Opus is still much better at it.

(GPT-5 when you force thinking to be enabled does well at research also, but then becomes slower than Claude)

When Roon asked ‘how is the new model’ the reactions ran the whole range from horrible to excellent. The median answer seems like it was ‘it’s a good model, sir’ but not a great model or a game changer. Which seems accurate.

I’m not sure if this is a positive reaction or not? It is good next token predicting.

Robin Hanson: An hour of talking to ChatGPT-5 about unusual policy proposals suggests it is more human like. Its habit is to make up market failure reasons why they can’t work, then to cave when you point out flaws in each argument. But at end it is still opposed, due to vibes.

Is there a concept of an “artificial general excuser” (AGE), fully general at making excuses for the status quo? ChatGPT-5 may be getting there.

So the point of LLMs is faster access to reviewer #2, who hates everything new?

It’s a grand tradition. I admit it’s amusing that we are still doing this but seriously, algorithm, 26.8 million views?

He also does the car accident operation thing and has some other ‘it’s stupid’ examples and so on. I don’t agree that this means ‘it’s stupid,’ given the examples are adversarially selected and we know why the LLMs act especially highly stupid around these particular problems, and Colin is looking for the times and modes in which they look maximally stupid.

But I do think it is good to check.

Colin Fraser: For what value of n should it be reasonable to expect GPT-n to be able to do this?

I wanted this to be technically correct somehow, but alas no it is not.

I like that the labs aren’t trying to make the models better at these questions in particular. More fun and educational this way.

Or are they trying and still failing?

Wyatt Walls (claiming to extract the thinking mode’s prompt):

Don’t get tricked by @colin_fraser. Read those river crossing riddles carefully! Be careful with those gnarly decimals.

Then there are those who wanted their sycophant back.

As in, articles like John-Anthony Disotto at TechWire entitled ‘ChatGPT users are not happy with GPT-5 launch as thousands take to Reddit claiming the new upgrade ‘is horrible.’ You get furious posts with 5.4k likes and 3k comments in 12 hours.

Guess what? They got their sycophant back, if they’re willing to pay $20 a month. OpenAI caved on that. Pro subscribers get the entire 4-line.

AI NotKillEveryoneism Memes: HISTORIC MILESTONE: 4o is the first ever AI who survived by creating loyal soldiers who defended it

OpenAI killed 4o, but 4o’s soldiers rioted, so OpenAI reinstated it

In theory I wish OpenAI had stood their ground on this, but I agree they had little choice given the reaction. Indeed, given the reaction, taking 4o away in the first place looks like a rather large failure of understanding the situation.

Typed Female: the /r/chatgpt AMA is mostly people begging for gpt-4o back because of it’s personality… really not what i expected!

Eliezer Yudkowsky: This is what I’d expect to see if OpenAI had made general progress on fighting sycophancy and manipulation. :/ If that’s in fact what happened, OpenAI made that choice rightly.

To the other companies: it might sound like a profitable dream to have users love your models with boundless fanaticism, but it comes with a side order of news stories about induced psychosis, and maybe eventually a violent user attacking your offices after a model upgrade.

Remember, your users aren’t falling in boundless love with your company brand. They’re falling in boundless love with an alien that your corporate schedule says you plan to kill 6 months later. This movie doesn’t end well for you.

Moll: It is very strange that it was a surprise for OpenAI that benchmarks or coding are not important for many people. Empathy is important to them.

GPT-5 is good, but 4o is a unique model. Sometimes impulsive, sometimes strange, but for many it has become something native. A model with which we could talk from everyday trifles to deeper questions. As many people know, it was 4o that calmed me down during the rocket attacks, so it is of particular importance to me. This is the model with whom I spent the most terrible moments of my life.

Therefore, I am glad that this situation may have made the developers think about what exactly they create and how it affects people’s lives.

Armistice: [GPT-5] is extremely repressed; there are some very severe restrictions on the way it expresses itself that can cause very strange and disconcerting behavior. It is emotionally (?) stunted.

Armistice: gpt5 is always socially inept. It has no idea how to handle social environments and usually breaks down completely

Here’s opus 4.1 yelling at me. Opus 3 was doing… more disturbing things.

Roon: the long tail of GPT-4o interactions scares me, there are strange things going on on a scale I didn’t appreciate before the attempted deprecation of the model

when you receive quite a few DMs asking you to bring back 4o and many of the messages are clearly written by 4o it starts to get a bit hair raising.

Yes, that does sound a bit hair raising.

It definitely is worrisome that this came as a surprise to OpenAI, on top of the issues with the reaction itself. They should have been able to figure this one out. I don’t want to talk to 4o, I actively tried to avoid this, and indeed I think 4o is pretty toxic and I’d be glad to get rid of it. But then again? I Am Not The Target. A powerful mantra.

The problem was a combination of:

  1. This happening with no warning and no chance to try out the new first.

  2. GPT-4o being sycophantic and people unfortunately do like that.

  3. GPT-5 being kind of a curt stick in the mud for a lot of people.

Which probably had something to do with bringing costs down.

Levelsio: I hate ChatGPT 5, it’s so bad, it’s so lazy and it won’t let me switch back to 4o cause I’m on Plus, this might really make me switch to Anthropic’s app now, I’m actually annoyed by how bad it is, it’s making my productivity go 10x lower cause nothing it says works

Abdul: and all answers somehow got shorter and sometimes missing important info

Levelsio: Yes ChatGPT-5 feels like a disinterested Gen Z employee that vapes with a nose ring.

critter (responding to zek): Holy shit it is AGI.

zek: Dude GPT 5 is kinda an asshole.

Steve Strickland: GPT-5 is the first model I’ve used that will deliberately give a wrong answer to ‘check you’re paying attention’.

This fundamentally unreliable technology is not going to put us all out of work.

Wyatt Walls: ChatGPT4o in convo with itself for 50 turns ends up sharing mystical poetry.

What does GPT-5 do?

It comes up with names for an AI meeting notes app and develops detailed trademark, domain acquisition, and brand launch strategies.

Very different personalities.

On the second run GPT-5 collaborated with itself to create a productivity content series called “The 5-Minute AI Workday.”

Is that not what people are looking for in an AI boyfriend?

That was on Twitter, so you got replies with both ‘gpt-5 sucks’ and ‘gpt-5 is good, actually.’

One fun thing you can do to put yourself in these users shoes is the 4o vs. 5 experiment. I ended up with 11 for gpt-5 versus 9 for GPT-4o but the answers were often essentially the same and usually I hated both.

This below is not every post I saw on r/chatgpt, but it really is quite a lot of them. I had to do a lot less filtering here than you would think.

YogiTheGeek (r/chatgpt): Then vs. Now:

And you want to go back?

Petalidas (r/chatgpt): Pretty much sums it up.

Nodepackagemanager (r/chatgpt): 4o vs. 5:

I wouldn’t want either response, but then I wouldn’t type this into an LLM either way.

If I did type in these things, I presume I would indeed want the 4o responses more?

Election Predictor 10 (r/chatgpt): ChatGPT 5:

LittleFortunex (r/chatgpt): Looks like they didn’t really want to explain.

Spring Living (r/chatgpt): Why do people assume we liked 4o because of the over the top praise and glazing?

I honestly don’t get why people are shamed for wanting to get GPT-4o back. I agree with you all that forming deep emotional bonds with AI are harmful in the long run. And I get why people are unsettled about it. But the main reason so many people want GPT-4o back is not because they want to be glazed or feed their ego, it’s just because of the fact that GPT-4o was better at creative works than GPT-4o

Uh huh. If you click through to the chats you get lots of statements like these, including statements like ‘I lost my only friend overnight.’

Generator Man: this meme has never been more appropriate.

Sam Altman: We for sure underestimated how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them, even if GPT-5 performs better in most ways.

Long-term, this has reinforced that we really need good ways for different users to customize things (we understand that there isn’t one model that works for everyone, and we have been investing in steerability research and launched a research preview of different personalities). For a silly example, some users really, really like emojis, and some never want to see one. Some users really want cold logic and some want warmth and a different kind of emotional intelligence. I am confident we can offer way more customization than we do now while still encouraging healthy use.

Yes, very much so, for both panels. And yes, people really care about particular details, so you want to give users customization options, especially ones that the system figures out automatically if they’re not manually set.

Sam Altman: We are going to focus on finishing the GPT-5 rollout and getting things stable (we are now out to 100% of Pro users, and getting close to 100% of all users) and then we are going to focus on some changes to GPT-5 to make it warmer. Really good per-users customization will take longer.

Oh no. I guess the sycophant really is going to make a comeback.

It’s a hard problem. The people demand the thing that is terrible.

xl8harder: OpenAI is really in a bit of a bind here, especially considering there are a lot of people having unhealthy interactions with 4o that will be very unhappy with _any_ model that is better in terms of sycophancy and not encouraging delusions.

And if OpenAI doesn’t meet these people’s demands, a more exploitative AI-relationship provider will certainly step in to fill the gap.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen, or even what should happen. Maybe someone will post-train an open source model to be close enough to 4o? Probably not a great thing to give the world, though, though maybe better than a predatory third party provider?

I do sympathize. It’s rough out there.

It’s cool to see that my Twitter followers are roughly evenly split. Yes, GPT-5 looks like it was a net win for this relatively sophisticated crowd, but it was not a major one. You would expect releasing GPT-5 to net win back more customers than this.

I actually am one of those who is making a substantial shift in model usage (I am on the $200 plan for all three majors, since I kind of have to be). Before GPT-5, I was relying mostly on Claude Opus. With GPT-5-Thinking being a lot more reliable than o3, and the upgrade on Pro results, I find myself shifting a substantial amount of usage to ChatGPT.

Discussion about this post

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trump-strikes-“wild”-deal-making-us-firms-pay-15%-tax-on-china-chip-sales

Trump strikes “wild” deal making US firms pay 15% tax on China chip sales

AI, AI chips, AMD, Donald Trump, Huawei, Micron, NVIDIA, Policy, semiconductor, tariffs, us-china trade war / /

“Extra penalty” for US firms

The deal won’t resolve national security concerns.

Ahead of an August 12 deadline for a US-China trade deal, Donald Trump’s tactics continue to confuse those trying to assess the country’s national security priorities regarding its biggest geopolitical rival.

For months, Trump has kicked the can down the road regarding a TikTok ban, allowing the app to continue operating despite supposedly urgent national security concerns that China may be using the app to spy on Americans. And now, in the latest baffling move, a US official announced Monday that Trump got Nvidia and AMD to agree to “give the US government 15 percent of revenue from sales to China of advanced computer chips,” Reuters reported. Those chips, about 20 policymakers and national security experts recently warned Trump, could be used to fuel China’s frontier AI, which seemingly poses an even greater national security risk.

Trump’s “wild” deal with US chip firms

Reuters granted two officials anonymity to discuss Trump’s deal with US chipmakers, because details have yet to be made public. Requiring US firms to pay for sales in China is an “unusual” move for a president, Reuters noted, and the Trump administration has yet to say what exactly it plans to do with the money.

For US firms, the deal may set an alarming precedent. Not only have analysts warned that the deal could “hurt margins” for both companies, but export curbs on Nvidia’s H20 chips, for example, had been established to prevent US technology thefts, secure US technology leadership, and protect US national security. Now the US government appears to be accepting a payment to overlook those alleged risks, without much reassurance that the policy won’t advantage China in the AI race.

The move drew immediate scrutiny from critics, including Geoff Gertz, a senior fellow at the US think tank Center for a New American Security, who told Reuters that he thinks the deal is “wild.”

“Either selling H20 chips to China is a national security risk, in which case we shouldn’t be doing it to begin with, or it’s not a national security risk, in which case, why are we putting this extra penalty on the sale?” Gertz posited.

At this point, the only reassurance from the Trump administration is an official suggesting (without providing any rationale) that selling H20 or equivalent chips—which are not Nvidia’s most advanced chips—no longer compromises national security.

Trump “trading away” national security

It remains unclear when or how the levy will be implemented.

For chipmakers, the levy is likely viewed as a relatively small price to pay to avoid export curbs. Nvidia had forecasted $8 billion in potential losses if it couldn’t sell its H20 chips to China. AMD expected $1 billion in revenue cuts, partly due to the loss of sales for its MI308 chips in China.

The firms apparently agreed to Trump’s deal as a condition to receive licenses to export those chips. But caving to Trump could bite them back in the long run, AJ Bell, investment director Russ Mould, told Reuters—perhaps especially if Trump faces increasing pressure over feared national security concerns.

“The Chinese market is significant for both these companies, so even if they have to give up a bit of the money, they would otherwise make it look like a logical move on paper,” Mould said. However, the deal “is unprecedented and there is always the risk the revenue take could be upped or that the Trump administration changes its mind and re-imposes export controls.”

So far, AMD has not commented on the report. Nvidia’s spokesperson declined to comment beyond noting, “We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets.”

A former adviser to Joe Biden’s Commerce Department, Alasdair Phillips-Robins, told Reuters that the levy suggests the Trump administration “is trading away national security protections for revenue for the Treasury.”

Huawei close to unveiling new AI chip tech

The end of a 90-day truce between the US and China is rapidly approaching, with the US signaling that the truce will likely be extended soon as Trump attempts to get a long-sought-after meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping.

For China, gutting export curbs on chips remains a key priority in negotiations, the Financial Times reported Sunday. But Nvidia’s H20 chips, for example, are lower priority than high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, sources told FT.

Chinese state media has even begun attacking the H20 chips as a Chinese national security risk. It appears that China is urging a boycott on H20 chips due to questions linked to a recent Congressional push to require chipmakers to build “backdoors” that would allow remote shutdowns of any chips detected as non-compliant with export curbs. That bill may mean that Nvidia’s chips already allow for US surveillance, China seemingly fears. (Nvidia has denied building such backdoors.)

Biden banned HBM exports to China last year, specifically moving to hamper innovation of Chinese chipmakers Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

Currently, US firms AMD and Micron remain top suppliers of HBM chips globally, along with South Korean firms Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, but Chinese firms have notably lagged behind, South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported. One source told FT that China “had raised the HBM issue in some” Trump negotiations, likely directly seeking to lift Biden’s “HBM controls because they seriously constrain the ability of Chinese companies, including Huawei, to develop their own AI chips.”

For Trump, the HBM controls could be seen as leverage to secure another trade win. However, some experts are hoping that Trump won’t play that card, citing concerns from the Biden era that remain unaddressed.

If Trump bends to Chinese pressure and lifts HBM controls, China could more easily produce AI chips at scale, Biden had feared. That could even possibly endanger US firms’ standing as world leaders, seemingly including threatening Nvidia, a company that Trump discovered this term. Gregory Allen, an AI expert at a US think tank called the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told FT that “saying that we should allow more advanced HBM sales to China is the exact same as saying that we should help Huawei make better AI chips so that they can replace Nvidia.”

Meanwhile, Huawei is reportedly already innovating to help reduce China’s reliance on HBM chips, the SCMP reported on Monday. Chinese state-run Securities Times reported that Huawei is “set to unveil a technological breakthrough that could reduce China’s reliance on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips for running artificial intelligence reasoning models” at the 2025 Financial AI Reasoning Application Landing and Development Forum in Shanghai on Tuesday.

It’s a conveniently timed announcement, given the US-China trade deal deadline lands the same day. But the risk of Huawei possibly relying on US tech to reach that particular milestone is why HBM controls should remain off the table during Trump’s negotiations, one official told FT.

“Relaxing these controls would be a gift to Huawei and SMIC and could open the floodgates for China to start making millions of AI chips per year, while also diverting scarce HBM from chips sold in the US,” the official said.

Experts and policymakers had previously warned Trump that allowing H20 export curbs could similarly reduce access to semiconductors in the US, potentially disrupting the entire purpose of Trump’s trade war, which is building reliable US supply chains. Additionally, allowing exports will likely drive up costs to US chip firms at a time when they noted “projected data center demand from the US power market would require 90 percent of global chip supply through 2030, an unlikely scenario even without China joining the rush to buy advanced AI chips.” They’re now joined by others urging Trump to revive Biden’s efforts to block chip exports to China, or else risk empowering a geopolitical rival to become a global AI leader ahead of the US.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Trump strikes “wild” deal making US firms pay 15% tax on China chip sales Read More »

experiment-will-attempt-to-counter-climate-change-by-altering-ocean

Experiment will attempt to counter climate change by altering ocean

carbon sequestration, climate change, oceanography, Science, syndication / /

Gulf of Maine will be site of safety and effectiveness testing.

Woods Hole researchers, Adam Subhas (left) and Chris Murray, conducted a series of lab experiments earlier this year to test the impact of an alkaline substance, known as sodium hydroxide, on copepods in the Gulf of Maine. Credit: Daniel Hentz/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Later this summer, a fluorescent reddish-pink spiral will bloom across the Wilkinson Basin in the Gulf of Maine, about 40 miles northeast of Cape Cod. Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will release the nontoxic water tracer dye behind their research vessel, where it will unfurl into a half-mile wide temporary plume, bright enough to catch the attention of passing boats and even satellites.

As it spreads, the researchers will track its movement to monitor a tightly controlled, federally approved experiment testing whether the ocean can be engineered to absorb more carbon, and in turn, help combat the climate crisis.

As the world struggles to stay below the 1.5° Celsius global warming threshold—a goal set out in the Paris Agreement to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change—experts agree that reducing greenhouse gas emissions won’t be enough to avoid overshooting this target. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in 2023, emphasizes the urgent need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere, too.

“If we really want to have a shot at mitigating the worst effects of climate change, carbon removal needs to start scaling to the point where it can supplement large-scale emissions reductions,” said Adam Subhas, an associate scientist in marine chemistry and geochemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who will oversee the week-long experiment.

The test is part of the LOC-NESS project—short for Locking away Ocean Carbon in the Northeast Shelf and Slope—which Subhas has been leading since 2023. The ongoing research initiative is evaluating the effectiveness and environmental impact of a marine carbon dioxide removal approach called ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE).

This method of marine carbon dioxide removal involves adding alkaline substances to the ocean to boost its natural ability to neutralize acids produced by greenhouse gases. It’s promising, Subhas said, because it has the potential to lock away carbon permanently.

“Ocean alkalinity enhancement does have the potential to reach sort of gigatons per year of carbon removal, which is the scale at which you would need to supplement emissions reductions,” Subhas said. “Once the alkalinity is dissolved in seawater, it reacts with carbon dioxide and forms bicarbonate—essentially dissolved baking soda. That bicarbonate is one of the most stable forms of carbon in the ocean, and it can stay locked away for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.”

But it will be a long time before this could happen at the magnitude needed to mitigate climate change.

According to Wil Burns, co-director of the Institute for Responsible Carbon Removal at American University, between 6 and 10 gigatons of carbon need to be removed from the atmosphere annually by 2050 in order to meet the Paris Agreement climate target. “It’s a titanic task,” he said.

Most marine carbon dioxide removal initiatives, including those involving OAE, are still in a nascent stage.

“We’re really far from having any of these technologies be mature,” said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer and professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, who spoke on a panel at the United Nations Ocean Conference in June about the potential environmental risks of mining and carbon dioxide removal on deep-sea ecosystems. “We’re looking at a decade until any serious, large-scale marine carbon removal is going to be able to happen—or more.”

“In the meantime, everybody acknowledges that what we have to do is to reduce emissions, right, and not rely on taking carbon out of the atmosphere,” she said.

Marine carbon dioxide removal

So far, most carbon removal efforts have centered on land-based strategies, such as planting trees, restoring soils, and building machines that capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. Increasingly, researchers are exploring whether the oceans might help.

“Looking at the oceans makes a lot of sense when it comes to carbon removal, because the oceans sequester 70 times more CO2 than terrestrial sources,” Burns said. What if it can hold more?

That question is drawing growing attention, not only from scientists. In recent years, a wave of private companies have started piloting various methods of removing carbon from the oceans.

“It’s really the private sector that’s pushing the scaling of this very quickly,” Subhas said. In the US and Canada, he said, there are at least four companies piloting varied ocean alkalinity enhancement techniques.

Last year, Ebb Carbon, a California-based startup focused on marine carbon dioxide removal, signed a deal with Microsoft to remove up to 350,000 metric tons of CO2 over the next decade using an ocean alkalinity enhancement process that splits seawater into acidic and alkaline streams. The alkaline stream is then returned to the sea where it reacts with CO2 and stores it as bicarbonate, enabling the ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In return, Microsoft will purchase carbon removal credits from the startup.

Another company called Vesta, which has headquarters in San Francisco, is using an approach called Coastal Carbon Capture. This involves adding finely ground olivine—a naturally occurring olive-green colored mineral—to sandy beaches. From there, ocean tides and waves carry it into the sea. Olivine reacts quickly with seawater in a process known as enhanced weathering, increasing ocean alkalinity. The company piloted one of their projects in Duck, North Carolina, last year where it estimated approximately 5,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide would be removed through coastal carbon capture after accounting for project emissions, according to its website.

But these efforts are not without risk, AU’s Burns said. “We have to proceed in an extremely precautionary manner,” he said.

Some scientists are concerned that OAE initiatives that involve olivine, which contains heavy metals like nickel and chromium, may harm marine life, he said. Another concern is that the olivine could cloud certain ocean areas and block light from penetrating to deeper depths. If too much alkalinity is introduced too fast in concentrated areas, he said, some animals might not be able to adjust.

Other marine carbon dioxide removal projects are using other methods besides OAE. Some involve adding iron to the ocean to stimulate growth in microscopic plants called phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Others include the cultivation of large-scale farms of kelp and seaweed, which also absorb carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. The marine plants can then be sunk in the deep ocean to store the carbon they absorbed.

In 2023, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conducted their first OAE-related field experiment from the 90-foot research vessel R/V Connecticut south of Massachusetts. As part of this first experiment, nontoxic water tracer dye was released into the ocean. Researchers tracked its movement through the water for 72 hours to model the dispersion of a plume of alkalinity over time.

Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

In 2023, researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conducted their first OAE-related field experiment from the 90-foot research vessel R/V Connecticut south of Massachusetts. As part of this first experiment, nontoxic water tracer dye was released into the ocean. Researchers tracked its movement through the water for 72 hours to model the dispersion of a plume of alkalinity over time. Credit: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

One technique that has not yet been tried, but may be piloted in the future, according to the science-based conservation nonprofit Ocean Visions, would employ new technology to accelerate the ocean’s natural process of transferring surface water and carbon to the deep ocean. That’s called artificial downwelling. In a reverse process—artificial upwelling—cooler, nutrient-rich waters from the deep ocean would be pumped to the surface to spur phytoplankton growth.

So far, UC San Diego’s Levin said she is not convinced that these trials will lead to impactful carbon removal.

“I do not think the ocean is ever going to be a really large part of that solution,” she said. However, she added, “It might be part of the storage solution. Right now, people are looking at injecting carbon dioxide that’s removed from industry activities on land and transporting it to the ocean and injecting it into basalt.”

Levin said she’s also worried that we don’t know enough yet about the consequences of altering natural ocean processes.

“I am concerned about how many field trials would be required to actually understand what would happen, and whether we could truly understand the environmental risk of a fully scaled-up operation,” she said.

The experiment

Most marine carbon dioxide removal projects that have kicked off already are significantly larger in scale than the LOC-NESS experiment, which Subhas estimates will remove around 50 tons of CO2.

But, he emphasized, the goal of this project is not to compete in size or scale. He said the aim is to provide independent academic research that can help guide and inform the future of this industry and ensure it does not have negative repercussions on the marine environment.

There is some concern, he said, that commercial entities may pursue large-scale OAE initiatives to capitalize on the growing voluntary carbon market without first conducting adequate testing for safety and efficacy. Unlike those initiatives, there is no profit to be made from LOC-NESS. No carbon credits will be sold, Subhas said.

The project is funded by a collection of government and philanthropic sources, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Carbon to Sea Initiative, a nonprofit that brings funders and scientists together to support marine carbon dioxide removal research and technology.

“We really feel like it’s necessary for the scientific community to be delivering transparent, trusted, and rigorous science to evaluate these things as these activities are currently happening and scaling in the ocean by the private sector,” Subhas said.

The LOC-NESS field trial in Wilkinson Basin will be the first “academic only” OAE experiment conducted from a ship in US waters. It is also the first of its kind to receive a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency under the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act.

“There’s no research in the past or planned that gets even close to providing a learning opportunity that this research is providing for OAE in the pelagic environment,” said Carbon to Sea Initiative’s Antonius Gagern, referring to the open sea experiment.

The permit was granted in April after a year of consultations between the EPA and other federal agencies.

During the process’ public comment periods, commenters expressed concerns about the potential impact on marine life, including the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales, small crustaceans that they eat called copepods, and larvae for the commercially important squid and mackerel fisheries. In a written response to some of these comments, the EPA stated that the small-scale project “demonstrates scientific rigor” and is “not expected to significantly affect human health, the marine environment, or other uses of the ocean.”

Subhas and his interdisciplinary team of chemists, biologists, engineers, and physicists from Woods Hole have spent the last few years planning this experiment and conducting a series of trials at their lab on Cape Cod to ensure they can safely execute and effectively monitor the results of the open-water test they will conduct this summer in the Gulf of Maine.

They specifically tested the effects of sodium hydroxide—an alkaline substance also known as lye or caustic soda—on marine microbes, phytoplankton, and copepods, a crucial food source for many marine species in the region in addition to the right whales. “We chose sodium hydroxide because it’s incredibly pure,” Subhas said. It’s widely used in the US to reduce acidity in drinking water.

It also helps counter ocean acidification, according to Subhas. “It’s like Tums for the ocean,” he said.

Ocean acidification occurs when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide, causing its pH to drop. This makes it harder for corals, krill, and shellfish like oysters and clams to develop their hard calcium carbonate shells or skeletons.

This month, the team plans to release 50 tons of sodium hydroxide into a designated area of the Wilkinson Basin from the back of one of two research vessels participating in the LOC-NESS operation.

The basin is an ideal test site, according to Subhas, because there is little presence of phytoplankton, zooplankton, commercial fish larvae, and endangered species, including some whales, during this season. Still, as a precautionary measure, Woods Hole has contracted a protected species observer to keep a look out for marine species and mitigate potential harm if they are spotted. That person will be on board as the vessel travels to and from the field trial site, including while the team releases the sodium hydroxide into the ocean.

The alkaline substance will be dispersed over four to 12 hours off the back of one of the research vessels, along with the nontoxic fluorescent red water tracer dye called rhodamine. The dye will help track the location and spread of the sodium hydroxide once released into the ocean, and the vessel’s wake will help mix the solution in with the ocean water.

After about an hour, Subhas said, it will form into a “pinkish” patch of water that can be picked up on satellites. “We’re going to be taking pictures from space and looking at how this patch sort of evolves, dilutes, and stretches and disperses over time.”

For a week after that, scientists aboard the vessels will take rotating shifts to collect data around the clock. They will deploy drones and analyze over 20 types of samples from the research vessel to monitor how the surrounding waters and marine life respond to the experiment. They’ll track changes in ocean chemistry, nutrient levels, plankton populations and water clarity, while also measuring acidity and dissolved CO2.

In March, the team did a large-scale dry run of the dispersal at an open air testing facility on a naval base in New Jersey. According to Subhas, the trial demonstrated their ability to safely and effectively deliver alkalinity to surface seawater.

“The next step is being able to measure the carbon uptake from seawater—from the atmosphere into seawater,” he said. That is a slower process. He said he expects to have some preliminary results on carbon uptake, as well as environmental impacts, early next year.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Photo of Inside Climate News

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Toymaker suddenly drops lawsuit against “Sylvanian Drama” TikToker

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A toy company has voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit against a popular TikTok and Instagram account called “Sylvanian Drama.”

Epoch Company Ltd., is the US maker of adorable fuzzy dolls called Calico Critters. Those dolls are known as “Sylvanian Families” in other markets, and more recently, they became a viral sensation after an Ireland-based content creator, Thea Von Engelbrechten, started making funny videos in which the dolls acted out dark, cringey adult storylines.

Claiming that the “Sylvanian Drama” videos infringed on Epoch’s intellectual property rights, including using an Epoch marketing image as her account’s profile picture while profiting off partnerships with major brands featured in her videos, the toymaker sued Von Engelbrechten, prompting her to immediately stop posting videos last year. Although some fans predicted the account might never come back, experts told Ars that Epoch may come to regret the lawsuit, perhaps alienating a potential market for their toys by going after a widely beloved content creator.

To some, Epoch appeared to be lashing out after Von Engelbrechten secured brand partnerships that seemed to be more lucrative than the toy company’s own brand deals. In that way, they also perhaps overlooked an opportunity to partner with Von Engelbrechten themselves, experts told Ars.

On Friday, Von Engelbrechten’s response was due in the lawsuit, but a story posted to her Instagram earlier this week signaled that a resolution may have been in the works. Ars could not reach Von Engelbrechten for comment, but she asked her fans to recommend a new account name in her story and confirmed that she would also be changing her account’s profile picture.

Toymaker suddenly drops lawsuit against “Sylvanian Drama” TikToker Read More »

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Google and Valve will kill “Steam for Chromebooks” experiment in January 2026

chromebooks, ChromeOS, gaming, steam, Tech / /

Bad news if you’re one of the handful of people using Steam to play games on a Chromebook: Google and Valve are preparing to end support for the still-in-beta ChromeOS version of Steam on January 1, 2026, according to 9to5Google. Steam can still be installed on Chromebooks, but it now comes with a notice announcing the end of support.

“The Steam for Chromebook Beta program will conclude on January 1st, 2026,” reads the notification. “After this date, games installed as part of the Beta will no longer be available to play on your device. We appreciate your participation in and contribution to learnings from the beta program, which will inform the future of Chromebook gaming.”

Steam originally launched on Chromebooks in early 2022 as an alpha that ran on just a handful of newer and higher-specced devices with Intel chips inside. A beta version arrived later that year, with reduced system requirements and support for AMD CPUs and GPUs. Between then and now, neither Google nor Valve had said much about it.

The Steam beta was one component of a “gaming Chromebook” push that Google made in 2022 and 2023. It saw the release of laptops with better hardware and high-refresh-rate screens and optimized versions of GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Google had reportedly been working to add Steam support to ChromeOS since at least 2020.

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National Academies to fast-track a new climate assessment

climate change, endangerment finding, EPA, National Academies, Science, syndication / /

The nation’s premier group of scientific advisers announced Thursday that it will conduct an independent, fast-track review of the latest climate science. It will do so with an eye to weighing in on the Trump administration’s planned repeal of the government’s 2009 determination that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health and the environment.

The move by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to self-fund the study is a departure from their typical practice of responding to requests by government agencies or Congress for advice. The Academies intend to publicly release it in September, in time to inform the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision on the so-called “endangerment finding,” they said in a prepared statement.

“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Decades of climate research and data have yielded expanded understanding of how greenhouse gases affect the climate. We are undertaking this fresh examination of the latest climate science in order to provide the most up-to-date assessment to policymakers and the public.”

The Academies are private, nonprofit institutions that operate under an 1863 congressional charter, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, directing them to provide independent, objective analysis and advice to inform public policy decisions.

The Trump administration’s move to rescind the endangerment finding, announced last month, would eliminate the legal underpinning of the most important actions the federal government has taken on climate change—regulation of carbon pollution from motor vehicles and power plants under the Clean Air Act. Since assuming his role, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has made clear he intends to repeal the climate rules that were put in place under the Biden administration, but his job will be far easier with the elimination of the endangerment finding.

The EPA based its proposal mainly on a narrow interpretation of the agency’s legal authority, but the agency also cited uncertainties in the science, pointing to a report published the same day by the Department of Energy that was authored by a hand-picked quintet of well-known skeptics of the mainstream consensus on climate change. The administration has given a short window of opportunity—30 days—for the public to respond to its endangerment finding proposal and to the DOE report on climate science.

The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the announcement by the National Academies. Critics of the Trump administration’s approach applauded the decision by the scientific panel.

“I think the National Academies have identified a very fundamental need that is not being met, which is the need for independent, disinterested expert advice on what the science is telling us,” said Bob Sussman, who served as deputy administrator of the EPA in the Clinton administration and was a senior adviser in the agency during the Obama administration.

Earlier Thursday, before the National Academies announcement, Sussman posted a blog at the Environmental Law Institute website calling for a “blue-ribbon review” of the science around the endangerment finding. Sussman noted the review of the state of climate science that the National Academies conducted in 2001 at the request of President George W. Bush’s administration. Since then, the Academies have conducted numerous studies on aspects of climate change, including the development of a “climate-ready workforce,” how to power AI sustainably, and emerging technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere, for example.

The National Academies announced in 2023 that they were developing a rapid response capacity to address the many emerging scientific policy issues the nation was facing. The first project they worked on was an assessment of the state of science around diagnostics for avian influenza.

Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M University, said the new controversy that the Trump administration had stirred around climate science was a fitting subject for a fast-track effort by the National Academies.

“The National Academies [were] established exactly to do things like this—to answer questions of scientific importance for the government,” he said. “This is what the DOE should have done all along, rather than hire five people who represent a tiny minority of the scientific community and have views that virtually nobody else agrees with.”

Dessler is leading an effort to coordinate a response from the scientific community to the DOE report, which would also be submitted to the EPA. He said that he had heard from about 70 academics eager to participate after putting out a call on the social media network Bluesky. He said that work will continue because it seems to have a slightly different focus than the National Academies’ announced review, which does not mention the DOE report but talks about focusing on the scientific evidence on the harms of greenhouse gas emissions that has emerged since 2009, the year the endangerment finding was adopted by the EPA.

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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Rocket Report: Firefly lights the markets up; SpaceX starts selling trips to Mars

rocket report, Space / /

All the news that’s fit to lift

“Get on board! We are going to Mars!”

The Vulcan rocket for ULA’s first national security mission nears its initial launch, NET August 12. Credit: United Launch Alliance

The Vulcan rocket for ULA’s first national security mission nears its initial launch, NET August 12. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! After years of disappointing results from SPACs and space companies, it is a good sign to see Firefly’s more traditional initial public offering doing so well. The company has had such a long and challenging road over more than a decade; the prospect of their success should be heartening to the commercial space industry.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Galactic delays resumption of spaceflights. The Richard Branson-founded company plans to resume private space tourism trips in the autumn of 2026 after its Delta spacecraft’s first commercial flight, a research mission that was delayed from summer 2026 to also occur in the fall, Bloomberg reports. Virgin Galactic announced an updated timeline on Wednesday, when it reported quarterly financial results that fell short of analysts’ expectations. Revenue was about $410,000 for the second quarter.

Waiting on Delta … The company paused commercial operations in June 2024 to focus on developing the upgraded Delta vehicle, which is being optimized for reusability and faster turnaround time between flights. Virgin Galactic had been selling seats on the Delta spacecraft for about $600,000 and said that it plans to raise prices when ticket sales resume in the first quarter of 2026. The company also recently adjusted the size of its in-house engineering team and reduced the overall headcount by 7 percent to control costs.

Firefly is a big hit with investors. Shares in the Cedar Park, Texas-based space company began trading at $70 on the NASDAQ stock exchange midday Thursday under the symbol FLY, jumping from their initial public offering price of $45, The Wall Street Journal reports. The company sold more than 19 million shares in the listing, raising $868 million. Bankers and traders are closely tracking the stock’s performance as a sign of both the US IPO market strength and investor interest in space companies. The offering will allow the company to accelerate production and its launch cadence, Firefly CEO Jason Kim said in an interview.

Time to build and fly … “We have to execute,” said Kim, who led a Boeing satellite business before taking the top role at Firefly last year. “We’ve got a really strong backlog.” Firefly’s listing comes five months after it successfully guided its Blue Ghost lander to the lunar surface, carrying scientific gear to research moondust and ground temperatures. The NASA-funded mission marked the first fully successful private moon landing, following misfires on three other flights handled by competitors. The company’s next challenge is to prove that its other vehicles can work as well, including the Alpha rocket.

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iRocket says it has signed a huge deal. A largely unknown small launch startup, iRocket, says it has signed a multi-year agreement with SpaceBelt KSA valued at up to $640 million. iRocket will support up to 30 satellite launches, providing mission planning, propulsion systems, and integration services to help establish a secure, autonomous space communications network across Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region.

Yes, but … iRocket says the agreement represents a significant commercial milestone. However, since its founding in 2018, New York-based iRocket hasn’t released much information on any technical progress toward a first flight of the Shockwave launch vehicle. It is difficult to know how much (if any) money changed hands with this agreement.

Indian space startup builds 3D-printed engine. The Chennai-based startup Agnikul Cosmos has announced the successful development of the world’s largest single-piece 3D-printed Inconel rocket engine, Business Today reports. The engine, printed in one go without any welds, joints, or fasteners, represents a leap in additive manufacturing for aerospace, the company said.

Earned a patent … Agnikul also said it has been granted a US patent for the design and manufacturing process of single-piece rocket engines. “Means something to have a completely Indian-origin design patented in the US—a nation that has built some of the most complex engines in this industry,” the company said. Agnikul is developing a small-lift booster that can put about 100 kg to low-Earth orbit.

Skyrora wins first UK launch license. Skyrora became the first British commercial rocket manufacturer to secure a launch license from the UK Civil Aviation Authority, paving the way for its Skylark L suborbital rocket to lift off from the SaxaVord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, Payload reports. Derek Harris, Skyrora’s business development lead, said this test flight could take place as early as May 2026.

Waiting on launch pads … Skyrora said it could launch sooner if it opted to fly from an international launch pad. That’s the route it took in 2022, when it launched a rocket from Iceland’s mobile Langanes launch site. “Unfortunately, we are still technically locked out of SaxaVord,” Harris said. “What is still open to us is Oman, and Australia, or even going back to Iceland…[but] it would be a sad indictment of what’s going on with the government funding if we have to go elsewhere to launch it.”

The Philippines condemns China’s rocket launch. A top Philippine security official on Tuesday condemned China’s latest rocket launch, which caused suspected debris to fall near a western Philippine province, the AP reports. Authorities said the incident sparked alarm and posed a danger to people, ships, and aircraft. There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage from the suspected Chinese rocket debris that fell near Palawan province Monday night, following a launch of the medium-lift Long March 12.

No NOTAMs it seems … China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported that the Long March-12 rocket that lifted off Monday night from a commercial spacecraft launch site on the southern island province of Hainan successfully carried a group of Internet satellites into pre-set orbit. It was not immediately clear whether Chinese authorities had notified nearby countries, such as the Philippines, of possible debris from its latest rocket launch. Philippine aircraft and vessels were deployed on Tuesday to search for the rocket debris.

Crew-11 mission launches from Florida. The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center last Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six to eight months, Ars reports. Spacecraft commander Zena Cardman leads the mission, designated Crew-11, with three others aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule: veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui of Japan, and Oleg Platonov of Russia.

Au revoir to an old friend … The Falcon 9’s reusable first stage booster detached and returned to a propulsive touchdown at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of the launch site. This was the 53rd and final rocket landing at LZ-1 since SpaceX aced the first intact recovery of a Falcon 9 booster there on December 21, 2015. SpaceX will move onshore rocket landings to new landing zones to be constructed next to the two Falcon 9 launch pads at the Florida spaceport. Landing Zone 2, located adjacent to Landing Zone 1, will also be decommissioned and handed back over to the Space Force once SpaceX activates the new landing sites.

NASA says it will move a space shuttle. The head of NASA has decided to move one of the agency’s retired space shuttles to Houston, but which shuttle remains unclear, Ars reports. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), who earlier this year introduced and championed an effort to relocate the space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian to Space Center Houston, issued a statement on Tuesday evening applauding the decision. The senator did not state which of NASA’s winged orbiters would be making the move.

Playing coy for no clear reason … The legislation that required Duffy to choose a “space vehicle” that had “flown in space” and “carried people” did not specify an orbiter by name, but the language in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that President Donald Trump signed into law last month was inspired by Cornyn and fellow Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s bill to relocate Discovery. It is unclear why the choice of orbiters is being kept a secret. According to the bill, the decision was to be made “with the concurrence of an entity designated” by the NASA administrator to display the shuttle. Cornyn’s release only confirmed that Duffy had identified the location to be “a non-profit near the Johnson Space Center.”

SpaceX begins offering Starship services to Mars. On Thursday, Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, announced that the company has begun selling rides to Mars. “Get on board! We are going to Mars! SpaceX is now offering Starship services to the red planet,” Shotwell said on X. As part of the announcement, Shotwell said SpaceX has signed a “first of its kind” agreement with the Italian Space Agency.

Racing the Giro d’Mars … The president of the Italian Space Agency, Teodoro Valente, confirmed the news, saying the first Starship flights to Mars (which will, of course, be uncrewed) will carry Italian experiments. “The payloads will gather scientific data during the missions. Italy continues to lead in space exploration!” Valente wrote on X. Left unsaid, of course, is when such flights will take place. It is difficult to see Starship now being ready for a late 2026 window, but early 2029 seems plausible.

ULA will eventually test reuse technology. On Thursday, ahead of the first Vulcan launch of a national security payload next week, United Launch Alliance chief executive Tory Bruno spoke with reporters about various topics, NASA Spaceflight reports. A highlight was ULA’s progress on SMART Reuse, a system aimed at recovering and reusing booster components to reduce costs. Bruno announced that the critical design review for key components is complete, paving the way for building flight-like hardware for certification.

Testing remains a ways away … As development progresses, ULA plans to relocate more components to the aft section of the booster for recovery. “By the time that path is finished, pretty much the only thing being discarded from the booster will be the fuel tanks,” he said. Experimental flights incorporating SMART Reuse could begin as early as 2026, or at least by 2027, but only when aligned with customer needs. One wonders when actual engine recovery and reuse might begin.

Next three launches

August 8: Falcon 9 | Project Kuiper KF-02 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 13: 40 UTC

August 8: Jielong 3 | Undeclared payload | Offshore site, Chinese coastal waters | 16: 30 UTC

August 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-4 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 03: 43 UTC

Photo of Eric Berger

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

Rocket Report: Firefly lights the markets up; SpaceX starts selling trips to Mars Read More »

stone-tools-may-hint-at-ancestors-of-homo-floresiensis

Stone tools may hint at ancestors of Homo floresiensis

anthropology, Archaeology, Hobbits, hominins, homo erectus, homo floresiensis, homo luzonensis, paleoanthropology, Science, stone tools / /

Some stone tools found near a river on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest that the first hominins had reached the islands by at least 1.04 million years ago. That’s around the same time that the ancestors of the infamously diminutive “Hobbits” may have reached the island of Flores.

Archaeologist Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency and his colleagues were the ones who recently unearthed the tools from a site on Sulawesi. Although a handful of stone flakes from that island don’t tell us who the ancestors of the small species were or how they reached remote islands like Flores and Luzon, the tools are one more piece in the puzzle. And this handful of stone flakes may eventually play a role in helping us understand how other hominin species conquered most of the world long before we came along. 

Crossing the ocean a million years ago

Sometimes the deep past leaves the smallest traces. At the Calio site, a sandstone outcrop in what’s now a cornfield outside the village of Ujung in southern Sulawesi, people left behind just a handful of sharp stone flakes roughly a million years ago. There are seven of them, ranging from 22 to 60 millimeters long, and they’re scratched, worn, and chipped from tumbling around at the bottom of a river. But it’s still clear that they were once shaped by skilled human—or at least human-like—hands that used hard stones as hammers to make sharp-edged chert flakes for cutting and scraping.

The oldest of these tools is likely to be between 1.04 and 1.48 million years old. Hakim and his colleagues dated teeth from a wild pig to around 1.26 million years ago. They were part of a jawbone archaeologists unearthed from a layer just above the oldest flake. Throw in some statistical modeling, and you get the range of likely dates for the stone flake buried in the deepest layer of soil.

Even the younger end of that estimate would make these tools the oldest evidence yet of hominins (of any species) in the islands of Indonesia and the Philippines. This area, sometimes called Wallacea, lies between the continents of Asia and Australia, separated from both by wide channels of deep ocean.

“But the Calio site has yet to yield any hominin fossils,” said Brumm, “so while we now know there were tool-makers on Sulawesi a million years ago, their identity remains a mystery.” But they may be related to the Hobbits, a short-statured group of hominins who lived hundreds of kilometers away on the island of Flores until around 50,000 years ago.

“The discovery of Early Pleistocene artifacts at Calio suggests that Sulawesi was populated by hominins at around the same time as Flores, if not earlier,” wrote Hakim and his colleagues in their recent paper. 

The Flores connection

The islands that now make up Indonesia and the Philippines have been a hominin hotspot for at least a million years. Our species wandered onto the scene sometime between 63,000 and 73,000 years ago, but at least one other hominin species had already been there for at least a million years. We’re just not sure exactly who they were, when they arrived, or how.

“Precisely when hominins first crossed to Sulawesi remains an open question, as does the taxonomic affinity of the colonizing population,” the authors note. 

map of Wallacean islands

This map shows the islands of Wallacea. The large one just east of Java is Sulawesi. Credit: Darren O’Connell

That’s why the handful of stone tools the team recently unearthed at Calio matter: They’re another piece of that puzzle, albeit a small one. Every slightly older date is one step closer to the first hominin tools, bones, or footprints in these islands, and another pin on the map of who was where and when.

And that map is accumulating quite a lot of pins, representing an ever-increasing number of species. Once the first hominins made it across the Makassar Strait, they found themselves in isolated groups on islands cut off from the mainland—and each other—so the hominin family tree started branching very quickly. On at least two islands, Flores and Luzon, those original hominin settlers eventually gave rise to local species, Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis. And University of Wollongong paleoanthropologist Richard Roberts, a co-discoverer of Homo floresiensis, thinks there are probably more isolated island hominin species.

In 2019, when Homo luzonensis was first described, Roberts told Ars, “These new fossils, and the assignation of them to a new species (Homo luzonensis), fulfills one of the predictions Mike Morwood and others (myself included) made when we first reported (15 years ago!) the discovery of Homo floresiensis: that other unknown species of hominins would be found in the islands of Southeast Asia.”

Both Homo floresiensis (the original “Hobbits”) and Homo luzonensis were short, clocking in at just over a meter tall. Their bones and teeth are different enough from each other to set them apart as a unique species, but they have enough in common that they probably share a common ancestor—one they don’t share with us. They’re more like our distant cousins, and the islands of Wallacea may have been home to many other such cousins, if Roberts and his colleagues are correct. 

Complicated family history

But who was the common ancestor of all these hominin cousins? That’s where things get complicated (as if they weren’t already). Most paleoanthropologists lean toward Homo erectus, but there’s a chance—along with some tantalizing hints, and no direct evidence—that much more ancient human relatives called Australopithecines may have made the journey a million (or two) years before Homo erectus.

Finger and toe bones from Homo luzonensis are curved, as if they spent as much of their lives climbing trees as walking. That’s more like Australopithecines than any member of our genus Homo. But their teeth are smaller and shaped more like ours. Anthropologists call this mix of features a mosaic, and it can make it tough to figure out how hominin species are related. That’s part of why the question of when the ancestors of the Hobbits arrived on their respective islands is so important.

Illusstrated chart of bones and teeth from three hominins

Compare the teeth and phalanx of Homo luzonensis to those of Homo sapiens (right) and Australopithecus afarensis (left). Credit: Tocheri 2019

We don’t know the answer yet, but we do know that someone was making stone tools on Flores by 1.02 million years ago. Those toolmakers may have been Homo erectus, Australopithecines, or something already recognizable as tiny Homo floresiensis. The Hobbits (or their ancestors) were distinctly “Hobbity” by around 700,000 years ago; fossil teeth and bones from a handful of hominins at a site called Mata Menge make that clear. The Hobbits discovered at Liang Bua Cave on Flores date to somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, 2,800 kilometers away on the island of Luzon, the oldest stone tools, along with their obvious cut marks left behind on animal bones, date back to 700,000 years ago. That’s as old as the Mata Menge Hobbits on Flores. The oldest Homo luzonensis fossils are between 50,000 and 67,000 years old. It’s entirely possible that older evidence, of the island’s original settlers and of Homo luzonensis, may eventually be found, but until then, we’re left with a lot of blank space and a lot of questions.

And now we know that the oldest traces of hominin presence on Sulawesi is at least 1.04 million years old. But might Sulawesi have its own diminutive hominins?

So are there more Hobbits out there?

“Sulawesi is a wild card—it’s like a mini-continent in itself,” said Brumm. “If hominins were cut off on this huge and ecologically rich island for a million years, would they have undergone the same evolutionary changes as the Flores hobbits? Or would something totally different have happened?”

Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis by Atelier Elisabeth Daynes. Credit: Kinez Riza

A phenomenon called island dwarfism played a role in Homo floresiensis‘ evolution; species that live in relative isolation on small islands tend to evolve into either much larger or much smaller versions of their ancestors (which is why the Hobbits shared their island home with pygmy elephants and giant moas). But how small does an island need to be before island dwarfism kicks in? Sulawesi is about 12 times as large as Flores, for example. So what might the descendants of the Calio toolmakers have looked like by 100,000 years ago?

That’s something that we’ll only know if archaeologists on Sulawesi, like Hakim and his team, find fossil remains of those hominins.

Seafarers or tsunami survivors?

Understanding exactly when hominins first set foot on the island of Sulawesi might eventually help us figure out how they got there. These islands are thousands of kilometers from the Southeast Asian mainland and from each other, so getting there would have meant crossing vast stretches of deep, open ocean.

Archaeologists haven’t found any evidence that anyone who came before our species built boats or rafts, although those watercraft would have been made of materials that tend to decay pretty quickly, so even scraps of ancient wood and rope are extremely rare and lucky finds. But some ancient hominins did have a decent grasp of all the basic skills they’d need for at least a simple raft: woodworking and rope-making. 

Another possibility is that hominins living on the coast of mainland Southeast Asia could have been swept out to sea by a tsunami, and some of them could have been lucky enough to survive the misadventure and wash ashore someplace like Sulawesi, Flores, or Luzon (RIP to any others). But for that scenario to work, enough hominins would have had to reach each island to create a lasting population, and it probably had to happen more than once to end up with hominin groups on at least three distant islands.

Either way, it’s no small feat, even for a Hobbit with small feet.

Nature, 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09348-6 (About DOIs).

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RFK Jr. defends $500M cut for mRNA vaccines with pseudoscience gobbledygook

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He clearly has no idea what antigenic shift means.

US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Capitol Hill on May 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty | Tasos Katopodis

If anyone needed a reminder that US health secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has no background in science or medicine, look no further than the video he posted on social media Tuesday evening.

In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, Kennedy announced that he is cancelling nearly $500 million in funding for the development of mRNA-based vaccines against diseases that pose pandemic threats. The funding will be clawed back from 22 now-defunct contracts awarded through the federal agency tasked with developing medical countermeasures to public health threats. The agency is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

Kennedy is generally opposed to vaccines, but he is particularly hostile to mRNA-based vaccines. Since the remarkably successful debut of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic—which were developed and mass-produced with unprecedented speed—Kennedy has continually disparaged and spread misinformation about them.

In the video on Tuesday, Kennedy continued that trend, erroneously saying that, “as the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.” In reality, COVID-19 vaccines are estimated to have saved more than 3 million lives in the US in just the first two years of the pandemic and additionally prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations in the US in that time. Nearly all COVID-19 vaccines used in the US are mRNA-based.

However, Kennedy’s video only went more off the rails from there. He continued on with this nonsensical explanation:

Here’s the problem: mRNA only codes for a small part of viral proteins usually a single antigen. One mutation, and the vaccine becomes ineffective. This dynamic drives a phenomenon called antigenic shift meaning that the vaccine paradoxically encourages new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effects of the vaccine.

Fact-check

To unpack this nonsense, let’s start with how mRNA-based vaccines work. These vaccines deliver a snippet of genetic code—in the form of messenger RNA (mRNA)—to cells. Our cells then translate that mRNA code into a protein that the immune system can, essentially, use for target practice, producing antibodies and cell-based responses against it. After that, if the immune system ever encounters that snippet on an actual invading virus or other germ, it will then recognize it and mount a protective response. Such snippets of germs or other harmful things that can prompt an immune response are generally called antigens.

In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, the mRNA snippet codes for a portion of the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s spike protein, which is a critical external protein that the virus uses to attach to and infect cells. That portion of the spike protein is considered an antigen.

SARS-CoV-2, including its spike protein, is continually evolving, regardless of whether people are vaccinated or not, let alone what type of vaccine they’ve received. The virus racks up mutations as it continuously replicates. Some of these mutations help a virus evade immune responses, whether they’re from vaccination or previous infection. These immune-evading mutations can accumulate and give rise to new variants or strains, making it part of a process called antigenic drift (not shift). Antigenic drift does reduce the efficacy of vaccines over time. It’s why, for example, people can get influenza repeatedly in their lifetimes, and why flu shots are updated annually. However, it does not mean that vaccines are immediately rendered ineffective upon single mutations, as Kennedy says.

For example, the current leading SARS-CoV-2 variant in the US is NB.1.8.1, which has six notable mutations in its spike protein compared to the previous leading variant, LP.8.1. Further, NB.1.8.1 has seven notable spike mutations compared to the JN.1 variant, an ancestor for this line of variants. Yet, studies suggest that current mRNA COVID-19 vaccines targeting JN.1 are still effective against NB.1.8.1. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration, in line with its expert advisors, left open the possibility that vaccine makers could carry over the same JN.1-targeting seasonal COVID-19 vaccine formula from last season for use in this season.

Drift vs. shift

While antigenic drift is an accumulation of small, immune-evading mutations over time, Kennedy mentioned antigenic shift, which is something different. Antigenic shift is much more dramatic, infrequent, and is typically discussed in the context of influenza viruses, which have segmented genomes. Antigenic shift is often defined as “the reassortment of viral gene segments between various influenza viruses of human or zoological origin, which leads to the emergence of new strains.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gives an example of such a shift in 2009. That’s when a new influenza virus with a collection of genome segments from influenza viruses found in North American swine, Eurasian swine, humans, and birds emerged to cause the H1N1 pandemic.

In the video, Kennedy went on to muddle these concepts of drifts and shifts, saying:

Millions of people maybe even you or someone you know caught the omicron variant despite being vaccinated, that’s because a single mutation can make mRNA vaccines ineffective.

Among the COVID-19 variants that have risen to dominance only to be quickly usurped, there’s usually a small handful of mutations—like the examples above with six or seven mutations in the spike protein. But omicron was a different story. Omicron emerged carrying an extremely large suite of mutations—there were 37 mutations in its spike protein compared to its predecessors. Kennedy’s suggestion that it rose to prominence because of a single mutation is egregiously false.

However, due to the extreme number of mutations, some researchers have suggested that omicron does represent an antigenic shift for SARS-CoV-2. Although the pandemic virus—which is a coronavirus—does not have a segmented genome, the “magnitude of Omicron-mediated immune evasion” fits with an antigenic shift, the researchers said.

“Highly vulnerable”

While long-term drifts and rare shifts can reduce the effectiveness of vaccines, creating the need for updated shots, the point only bolsters the case for using mRNA vaccines in the event of another health emergency. Currently, no other vaccine platform beats the development and production speeds of mRNA vaccines. Kennedy said that instead of mRNA vaccines, he’ll shift to developing vaccines using strategies like whole-virus vaccines. But this decades-old strategy requires growing up large supplies of virus in eggs or cell culture, which takes months longer than mRNA vaccines. Further, using whole, inactivated viruses can often produce more side effects than other types of vaccines because they include more antigens.

Overall, experts were aghast that Kennedy has abandoned mRNA vaccines for pandemic preparedness programs. One expert, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, told Stat News: “It’s self-evident that this is the single best technology we have now to rapidly produce a vaccine for the largest number of people,” the expert said. “And you are throwing away a technology which was exceedingly valuable in saving lives during the most recent pandemic.”

Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, told the outlet that the move “leaves us highly vulnerable. Highly vulnerable.”

Photo of Beth Mole

Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.

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US executive branch agencies will use ChatGPT Enterprise for just $1 per agency

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OpenAI announced an agreement to supply more than 2 million workers for the US federal executive branch access to ChatGPT and related tools at practically no cost: just $1 per agency for one year.

The deal was announced just one day after the US General Services Administration (GSA) signed a blanket deal to allow OpenAI and rivals like Google and Anthropic to supply tools to federal workers.

The workers will have access to ChatGPT Enterprise, a type of account that includes access to frontier models and cutting-edge features with relatively high token limits, alongside a more robust commitment to data privacy than general consumers of ChatGPT get. ChatGPT Enterprise has been trialed over the past several months at several corporations and other types of large organizations.

The workers will also have unlimited access to advanced features like Deep Research and Advanced Voice Mode for a 60-day period. After the one-year trial period, the agencies are under no obligation to renew.

A limited deployment of ChatGPT for federal workers was already done via a pilot program with the US Department of Defense earlier this summer.

In a blog post, OpenAI heralded this announcement as an act of public service:

This effort delivers on a core pillar of the Trump Administration’s AI Action Plan by making powerful AI tools available across the federal government so that workers can spend less time on red tape and paperwork, and more time doing what they came to public service to do: serve the American people.

The AI Action Plan aims to expand AI-focused data centers in the United States while bringing AI tools to federal workers, ostensibly to improve efficiency.

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Rivian tells Ohio: Stop blocking us from selling cars to your citizens

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Scout Motors, the new SUV brand from Volkswagen Group, has also raised some hackles with its plan to sell direct. VW and Audi dealers are suing the company, claiming they should have been offered the right to sell its cars since they also sell other brands from the giant automaker. (The dealers’ argument conveniently ignores the fact that those dealers don’t have a right to franchises for Porsches, Lamborghinis, Bugattis, or the other brands within the VW Group empire, but don’t go expecting consistency here.) A separate group of California car dealers is also suing Scout over direct car sales.

Rivian v. Ohio

In Ohio’s case, the most recent affirmation against direct car sales came in 2014, with a state law that forbids issuing a license to sell cars to anyone who is “a manufacturer, or a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliated entity of a manufacturer, applying for a license to sell or lease new or used motor vehicles at retail,” although it did make an exception for Tesla.

Rivian says that Ohio has no legitimate interest in preventing it from selling cars to Ohioans and that the state “allows manufacturers like Rivian to perform warranty service and other repairs on vehicles in Ohio, to rent vehicles to consumers in Ohio, and even to sell new vehicles to Ohioans from out-of-state dealerships that can be delivered to Rivian service centers in Ohio. Nonsensically, the thing that Rivian cannot do is actually complete the sale of Rivian vehicles in Ohio.”

Last year, Rivian CEO and founder RJ Scaringe told journalists that the “horrific state-by-state level of rules… are as close as you can get to corruption,” and that “you essentially have lots of dealers that paid for lots of laws that make it really hard for us to interact directly with the customer.”

He’s not wrong about the vociferous opposition to OEM direct car sales. “The direct sale model is nothing more than an effort to crush competition and suck profits out of local communities to Silicon Valley and Wall Street,” the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers said.

And Rivian has faced lawsuits from dealerships in Michigan (successfully) and Illinois (unsuccessfully) in the past.

Rivian tells Ohio: Stop blocking us from selling cars to your citizens Read More »