Author name: Mike M.

”torrenting-from-a-corporate-laptop-doesn’t-feel-right”:-meta-emails-unsealed

”Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed

Emails discussing torrenting prove that Meta knew it was “illegal,” authors alleged. And Bashlykov’s warnings seemingly landed on deaf ears, with authors alleging that evidence showed Meta chose to instead hide its torrenting as best it could while downloading and seeding terabytes of data from multiple shadow libraries as recently as April 2024.

Meta allegedly concealed seeding

Supposedly, Meta tried to conceal the seeding by not using Facebook servers while downloading the dataset to “avoid” the “risk” of anyone “tracing back the seeder/downloader” from Facebook servers, an internal message from Meta researcher Frank Zhang said, while describing the work as in “stealth mode.” Meta also allegedly modified settings “so that the smallest amount of seeding possible could occur,” a Meta executive in charge of project management, Michael Clark, said in a deposition.

Now that new information has come to light, authors claim that Meta staff involved in the decision to torrent LibGen must be deposed again, because allegedly the new facts “contradict prior deposition testimony.”

Mark Zuckerberg, for example, claimed to have no involvement in decisions to use LibGen to train AI models. But unredacted messages show the “decision to use LibGen occurred” after “a prior escalation to MZ,” authors alleged.

Meta did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment and has maintained throughout the litigation that AI training on LibGen was “fair use.”

However, Meta has previously addressed its torrenting in a motion to dismiss filed last month, telling the court that “plaintiffs do not plead a single instance in which any part of any book was, in fact, downloaded by a third party from Meta via torrent, much less that Plaintiffs’ books were somehow distributed by Meta.”

While Meta may be confident in its legal strategy despite the new torrenting wrinkle, the social media company has seemingly complicated its case by allowing authors to expand the distribution theory that’s key to winning a direct copyright infringement claim beyond just claiming that Meta’s AI outputs unlawfully distributed their works.

As limited discovery on Meta’s seeding now proceeds, Meta is not fighting the seeding aspect of the direct copyright infringement claim at this time, telling the court that it plans to “set… the record straight and debunk… this meritless allegation on summary judgment.”

”Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed Read More »

don’t-panic,-but-an-asteroid-has-a-1.9%-chance-of-hitting-earth-in-2032

Don’t panic, but an asteroid has a 1.9% chance of hitting Earth in 2032


More data will likely reduce the chance of an impact to zero. If not, we have options.

Discovery images of asteroid 2024 YR4. Credit: ATLAS

Something in the sky captured the attention of astronomers in the final days of 2024. A telescope in Chile scanning the night sky detected a faint point of light, and it didn’t correspond to any of the thousands of known stars, comets, and asteroids in astronomers’ all-sky catalog.

The detection on December 27 came from one of a network of telescopes managed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a NASA-funded project to provide warning of asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

Within a few days, scientists gathered enough information on the asteroid—officially designated 2024 YR4—to determine that its orbit will bring it quite close to Earth in 2028, and then again in 2032. Astronomers ruled out any chance of an impact with Earth in 2028, but there’s a small chance the asteroid might hit our planet on December 22, 2032.

How small? The probability has fluctuated in recent days, but as of Thursday, NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. The European Space Agency (ESA) put the probability at 1.8 percent. So as of now, NASA believes there’s a 1-in-53 chance of 2024 YR4 striking Earth. That’s about twice as likely as the lifetime risk of dying in a motor vehicle crash, according to the National Safety Council.

These numbers are slightly higher than the probabilities published last month, when ESA estimated a 1.2 percent chance of an impact. In a matter of weeks or months, the number will likely drop to zero.

No surprise here, according to ESA.

“It is important to remember that an asteroid’s impact probability often rises at first before quickly dropping to zero after additional observations,” ESA said in a press release. The agency released a short explainer video, embedded below, showing how an asteroid’s cone of uncertainty shrinks as scientists get a better idea of its trajectory.

Refining the risk

Scientists estimate that 2024 YR4 is between 130 to 300 feet (40 and 90 meters) wide, large enough to cause localized devastation near the impact site. The asteroid responsible for the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia, was probably about the same size. The meteor that broke apart in the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013 was about 20 meters wide.

Astronomers use the Torino scale for measuring the risk of potential asteroid impacts. Asteroid 2024 YR4 is now rated at Level 3 on this scale, meaning it merits close attention from astronomers, the public, and government officials. This is the second time an asteroid has reached this level since the scale’s adoption in 1999. The other case happened in 2004, when asteroid Apophis briefly reached a Level 4 rating until further observations of the asteroid eliminated any chance of an impact with the Earth in 2029.

In the unlikely event that it impacts the Earth, an asteroid the size of 2024 YR4 could cause blast damage as far as 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the location of the impact or airburst if the object breaks apart in the atmosphere, according to the International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN), established in the aftermath of the Chelyabinsk event.

The asteroid warning network is affiliated with the United Nations. Officials activate the IAWN when an asteroid bigger than 10 meters has a greater than 1 percent chance of striking Earth within the next 20 years. The risk of 2024 YR4 meets this threshold.

The red points on this image show the possible locations of asteroid 2024 YR4 on December 22, 2032, as projected by a Monte Carlo simulation. As this image shows, most of the simulations project the asteroid missing the Earth. Credit: ESA/Planetary Defense Office

Determining the asteroid’s exact size will be difficult. Scientists would need deep space radar observations, thermal infrared observations, or imagery from a spacecraft that could closely approach the asteroid, according to the IAWN. The asteroid won’t come close enough to Earth for deep space radar observations until shortly before its closest approach in 2032.

Astronomers need numerous observations to precisely plot an asteroid’s motion through the Solar System. Over time, these observations will reduce uncertainty and narrow the corridor the asteroid will follow as it comes near Earth.

Scientists already know a little about asteroid 2024 YR4’s orbit, which follows an elliptical path around the Sun. The orbit brings the asteroid inside of Earth’s orbit at its closest point to the Sun and then into the outer part of the asteroid belt when it is farthest from the Sun.

But there’s a complication in astronomers’ attempts to nail down the asteroid’s path. The object is currently moving away from Earth in almost a straight line. This makes it difficult to accurately determine its orbit by studying how its trajectory curves over time, according to ESA.

It also means observers will need to use larger telescopes to see the asteroid before it becomes too distant to see it from Earth in April. By the end of this year’s observing window, the asteroid warning network says the impact probability could increase to a couple tens of percent, or it could more likely drop back below the notification threshold (1 percent impact probability).

“It is possible that asteroid 2024 YR4 will fade from view before we are able to entirely rule out any chance of impact in 2032,” ESA said. “In this case, the asteroid will likely remain on ESA’s risk list until it becomes observable again in 2028.”

Planetary defenders

This means that public officials might need to start planning what to do later this year.

For the first time, an international board called the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group met this week to discuss what we can do to respond to the risk of an asteroid impact. This group, known as SMPAG, coordinates planning among representatives from the world’s space agencies, including NASA, ESA, China, and Russia.

The group decided on Monday to give astronomers a few more months to refine their estimates of the asteroid’s orbit before taking action. They will meet again in late April or early May or earlier if the impact risk increases significantly. If there’s still a greater than 1 percent probability of 2024 YR4 hitting the Earth, the group will issue a recommendation for further action to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

So what are the options? If the data in a few months still shows that the asteroid poses a hazard to Earth, it will be time for the world’s space agencies to consider a deflection mission. NASA demonstrated its ability to alter the orbit of an asteroid in 2022 with a first-of-its-kind experiment in space. The mission, called DART, put a small spacecraft on a collision course with an asteroid two to four times larger than 2024 YR4.

The kinetic energy from the spacecraft’s death dive into the asteroid was enough to slightly nudge the object off its natural orbit around a nearby larger asteroid. This proved that an asteroid deflection mission could work if scientists have enough time to design and build it, an undertaking that took about five years for DART.

Italy’s LICIACube spacecraft snapped this image of asteroids Didymos (lower left) and Dimorphos (upper right) a few minutes after the impact of DART on September 26, 2022. Credit: ASI/NASA

A deflection mission is most effective well ahead of an asteroid’s potential encounter with the Earth, so it’s important not to wait until the last minute.

Fans of Hollywood movies know there’s a nuclear option for dealing with an asteroid coming toward us. The drawback of using a nuclear warhead is that it could shatter one large asteroid into many smaller objects, although recent research suggests a more distant nuclear explosion could produce enough X-ray radiation to push an asteroid off a collision course.

Waiting for additional observations in 2028 would leave little time to develop a deflection mission. Therefore, in the unlikely event that the risk of an impact rises over the next few months, it will be time for officials to start seriously considering the possibility of an intervention.

Even without a deflection, there’s plenty of time for government officials to do something here on Earth. It should be possible for authorities to evacuate any populations that might be affected by the asteroid.

The asteroid could devastate an area the size of a large city, but any impact is most likely to happen in a remote region or in the ocean. The risk corridor for 2024 YR4 extends from the eastern Pacific Ocean to northern South America, the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, the Arabian Sea, and South Asia.

There’s an old joke that dinosaurs went extinct because they didn’t have a space program. Whatever happens in 2032, we’re not at risk of extinction. However, occasions like this are exactly why most Americans think we should have a space program. A 2019 poll showed that 68 percent of Americans considered it very or extremely important for the space program to monitor asteroids, comets, or other objects from space that could strike the planet.

In contrast, about a quarter of those polled placed such importance on returning astronauts to the Moon or sending people to Mars. The cost of monitoring and deflecting asteroids is modest compared to the expensive undertakings of human missions to the Moon and Mars.

From taxpayers’ point of view, it seems this part of NASA offers the greatest bang for their buck.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Don’t panic, but an asteroid has a 1.9% chance of hitting Earth in 2032 Read More »

chat,-are-you-ready-to-go-to-space-with-nasa?

Chat, are you ready to go to space with NASA?

The US space agency said Wednesday it will host a live Twitch stream from the International Space Station on February 12.

NASA, which has 1.3 million followers on the live-streaming video service, has previously broadcast events on its Twitch channel. However, this will be the first time the agency has created an event specifically for Twitch.

During the live event, beginning at 11: 45 am ET (16: 45 UTC), viewers will hear from NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who is currently on board the space station, as well as Matt Dominick, who recently returned to Earth after the agency’s Crew-8 mission. Viewers will have the opportunity to ask questions about living in space.

Twitch is owned by Amazon, and it has become especially popular in the online gaming community for the ability to stream video games and chat with viewers.

Meeting people where they are

“We spoke with digital creators at TwitchCon about their desire for streams designed with their communities in mind, and we listened,” said Brittany Brown, director of the Office of Communications Digital and Technology Division. “In addition to our spacewalks, launches, and landings, we’ll host more Twitch-exclusive streams like this one. Twitch is one of the many digital platforms we use to reach new audiences and get them excited about all things space.”

Chat, are you ready to go to space with NASA? Read More »

$42b-broadband-grant-program-may-scrap-biden-admin’s-preference-for-fiber

$42B broadband grant program may scrap Biden admin’s preference for fiber

US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been demanding an overhaul of a $42.45 billion broadband deployment program, and now his telecom policy director has been chosen to lead the federal agency in charge of the grant money.

“Congratulations to my Telecom Policy Director, Arielle Roth, for being nominated to lead NTIA,” Cruz wrote last night, referring to President Trump’s pick to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Roth’s nomination is pending Senate approval.

Roth works for the Senate Commerce Committee, which is chaired by Cruz. “Arielle led my legislative and oversight efforts on communications and broadband policy with integrity, creativity, and dedication,” Cruz wrote.

Shortly after Trump’s election win, Cruz called for an overhaul of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which was created by Congress in November 2021 and is being implemented by the NTIA. Biden-era leaders of the NTIA developed rules for the program and approved initial funding plans submitted by every state and territory, but a major change in approach could delay the distribution of funds.

Cruz previously accused the NTIA of “technology bias” because the agency prioritized fiber over other types of technology. He said Congress would review BEAD for “imposition of statutorily-prohibited rate regulation; unionized workforce and DEI labor requirements; climate change assessments; excessive per-location costs; and other central planning mandates.”

Roth criticized the BEAD implementation at a Federalist Society event in June 2024. “Instead of prioritizing connecting all Americans who are currently unserved to broadband, the NTIA has been preoccupied with attaching all kinds of extralegal requirements on BEAD and, to be honest, a woke social agenda, loading up all kinds of burdens that deter participation in the program and drive up costs,” she said.

Impact on fiber, public broadband, and low-cost plans

Municipal broadband networks and fiber networks in general could get less funding under the new plans. Roth is “expected to change the funding conditions that currently include priority access for government-owned networks” and “could revisit decisions like the current preference for fiber,” Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Reducing the emphasis on fiber could direct more grant money to cable, fixed wireless, and satellite services like Starlink. SpaceX’s attempt to obtain an $886 million broadband grant for Starlink from a different government program was rejected during the Biden administration.

$42B broadband grant program may scrap Biden admin’s preference for fiber Read More »

why-it-makes-perfect-sense-for-this-bike-to-have-two-gears-and-two-chains

Why it makes perfect sense for this bike to have two gears and two chains

Buffalo S2 bike, seen from the drive side, against a gray background, double kickstand and rack visible.

Credit: World Bicycle Relief

The S2 model aimed to give riders an uphill climbing gear but without introducing the complexities of a gear-shifting derailleur, tensioned cables, and handlebar shifters. Engineers at SRAM came up with a solution that’s hard to imagine for other bikes but not too hard to grasp. A freewheel in the back has two cogs, with a high gear for cruising and a low gear for climbing. If you pedal backward a half-rotation, the outer, higher gear engages or disengages, taking over the work from the lower gear. The cogs, chains, and chainrings on this bike are always moving, but only one gear is ever doing the work.

Seth at Berm Peak suggests that the shifting is instantaneous and seemingly perfect, without clicking or chain slipping. If one chain breaks, you can ride on the other chain and cog until you can get it fixed. There might be some inefficiencies in the amount of tension on the chains since they have to be somewhat even. But after trying out ideas with simplified internal gear hubs and derailleurs, SRAM recommended the two-chain design and donated it to the bike charity.

Two people loading yellow milk-style crates of cargo onto Buffalo bicycles, seemingly in the street of a small village.

Credit: World Bicycle Relief

Buffalo S2 bikes cost $165, just $15 more than the original, and a $200 donation covers the building and shipping of such a bike to most places. You can read more about the engineering principles and approach to sustainability on World Bike Relief’s site.

Why it makes perfect sense for this bike to have two gears and two chains Read More »

bonobos-recognize-when-humans-are-ignorant,-try-to-help

Bonobos recognize when humans are ignorant, try to help

A lot of human society requires what’s called a “theory of mind”—the ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We don’t always get this right—it’s easy to get confused about what someone else might be thinking—but we still rely on it to navigate through everything from complicated social situations to avoid bumping into people on the street.

There’s some mixed evidence that other animals have a limited theory of mind, but there are alternate interpretations for most of it. So two researchers at Johns Hopkins, Luke Townrow and Christopher Krupenye, came up with a way of testing whether some of our closest living relatives, the bonobos, could infer the state of mind of a human they were cooperating with. The work clearly showed that the bonobos could tell when their human partner was ignorant.

Now you see it…

The experimental approach is quite simple, and involves a setup familiar to street hustlers: a set of three cups, with a treat placed under one of them. Except in this case, there’s no sleight-of-hand in that the chimp can watch as one experimenter places the treat under a cup, and all of the cups remain stationary throughout the experiment.

To get the treat, however, requires the cooperation of a second human experimenter. That person has to identify the right cup, then give the treat under it to the bonobo. In some experiments, this human can watch the treat being hidden through a transparent partition, and so knows exactly where it is. In others, however, the partition is solid, leaving the human with no idea of which cup might be hiding the food.

This setup means that the bonobo will always know where the food is and will also know whether the human could potentially have the same knowledge.

The bonobos were first familiarized with the setup and got to experience their human partner taking the treat out from under the cup and giving it to them. Once they were familiar with the process, they watched the food being hidden without any partner present, which demonstrated they rarely took any food-directed actions without a good reason to do so. In contrast, when their human partner was present, they were about eight times more likely to point to the cup with the food under it.

Bonobos recognize when humans are ignorant, try to help Read More »

tariffs-may-soon-spike-costs-of-cars,-household-goods,-consumer-tech

Tariffs may soon spike costs of cars, household goods, consumer tech


“A little pain”: Trump finally admits tariffs heap costs on Americans.

Canadian and American flags are seen at the US/Canada border March 1, 2017, in Pittsburg, New Hampshire. Credit: DON EMMERT / Staff | AFP

Over the weekend, President Trump issued executive orders heaping significant additional tariffs on America’s biggest trading partners, Canada, China, and Mexico.

To justify the tariffs—”a 25 percent additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent additional tariff on imports from China”—Trump claimed that all partners were allowing drugs and immigrants to illegally enter the US. Declaring a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Trump’s orders seemed bent on “downplaying” the potential economic impact on Americans, AP News reported.

But very quickly, the trade policy sparked inflation fears, with industry associations representing major US firms from many sectors warning of potentially derailed supply chains and spiked consumer costs of cars, groceries, consumer technology, and more. Perhaps the biggest pain will be felt by car buyers already frustrated by high prices if car prices go up by $3,000, as Bloomberg reported. And as Trump eyes expanding tariffs to the European Union next, January research from the Consumer Technology Association showed that imposing similar tariffs on all countries would increase the cost of laptops by as much as 68 percent, game consoles by up to 58 percent, and smartphones perhaps by 37 percent.

With tariffs scheduled to take effect on Tuesday, Mexico moved fast to negotiate a one-month pause on Monday, ABC News reported. In exchange, Mexico promised to “reinforce” the US-Mexico border with 10,000 National Guard troops.

The pause buys Mexico a little time to convince the Trump administration—including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and potentially Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick—to strike a “permanent” trade deal, ABC News reported. If those talks fall through, though, Mexico has indicated it will retaliate with both tariff and non-tariff measures, ABC News reported.

Even in the best-case scenario where no countries retaliate, the average household income in 2025 could drop by about $1,170 if this week’s new tariffs remain in place, an analysis from the Budget Lab at Yale forecast. With retaliation, average income could decrease by $1,245.

Canada has already threatened to retaliate by imposing 35 percent tariffs on US goods, although that could change, depending on the outcome of a meeting this afternoon between Trump and outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Currently, there’s seemingly tension between the Trump administration and Trudeau, however.

On Saturday, Trudeau called Trump’s rationale for imposing tariffs on Canada—which Trudeau noted is responsible for less than 1 percent of drugs flowing into the US—”the flimsiest pretext possible,” NBC News reported.

This morning, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, reportedly criticized Canada’s response on CNBC. While Mexico is viewed as being “very, very serious” about Trump’s tariffs threat, “Canadians appear to have misunderstood the plain language of the executive order and they’re interpreting it as a trade war,” Hassett said.

On the campaign trail, Trump promised to lower prices of groceries, cars, gas, housing, and other goods, AP News noted. But on Sunday, Trump clearly warned reporters while boarding Air Force One that tariffs could have the opposite effect, ABC News reported, and could significantly worsen inflation the longer the trade policy stands.

“We may have short term, some, a little pain, and people understand that, but, long term, the United States has been ripped off by virtually every country in the world,” Trump said.

Online shoppers, car buyers brace for tariffs

In addition to imposing new tariffs on these countries, Trump’s executive orders also took aim at their access to the “de minimus” exemption that allows businesses, including online retailers, to send shipments below $800 into the US without being taxed. That move could likely spike costs for Americans using popular Chinese retail platforms like Temu or Shein.

Before leaving office, Joe Biden had threatened in September to alter the “de minimus” rule, accusing platforms like Temu or Shein of flooding the US with “huge volumes of low-value products such as textiles and apparel” and making “it increasingly difficult to target and block illegal or unsafe shipments.” Following the same logic, it seems that Trump wants to exclude Canada, China, and potentially Mexico from the duty-free exemption to make it easier to identify illegal drug shipments.

Temu and Shein did not respond to Ars’ request to comment. But both platforms in September told Ars that losing the duty-free exemption wouldn’t slow their growth. And both platforms have shifted business to keep more inventory in the US, CNBC reported.

Canada is retaliating, auto industry will suffer

While China has yet to retaliate to defend such retailers, for Canada, the tariffs are considered so intolerable that the country immediately ordered tariffs on beverages, cosmetics, and paper products flowing from the US, AP News reported. Next up will be “passenger vehicles, trucks, steel and aluminum products, certain fruits and vegetables, beef, pork, dairy products, aerospace products, and more.”

If the trade wars further complicate auto industry trade in particular, it could hurt US consumers. Carmakers globally saw stocks fall on expectations that Trump’s tariffs will have a “profound impact” on the entire auto industry, CNBC reported. And if tariffs expand into the EU, an Oxford Economics analysis suggested, the cost of European cars in the US market would likely increase while availability decreases, perhaps crippling a core EU market and limiting Americans’ choice in vehicles.

EU car companies are already bracing for potential disruptions. A spokesperson for Germany-based BMW told CNBC that tariffs “hinder free trade, slow down innovation, and set a negative spiral in motion. In the end, they are detrimental to customers, making products more expensive and less innovative.” A Volkswagen spokesperson confirmed the company was “counting on constructive talks between the trading partners to ensure planning security and economic stability and to avoid a trade conflict.”

Right now, Canada’s auto industry appears most spooked by the impending trade war, with the president of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, Flavio Volpe, warning that Canada’s auto sector could “shut down within a week,” Bloomberg reported.

“At 25 percent, absolutely nobody in our business is profitable by a long shot,” Volpe said.

According to Bloomberg, nearly one-quarter of the 16 million cars sold in the US each year will be hit with duties, adding about $60 billion in industry costs. Seemingly the primary wallet drain will be car components that cross the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders “as many as eight times during production” and, should negotiations fail, could be getting hit with tariffs both ways. Tesla, for example, relies on a small parts manufacturer in Canada, Laval Tool, to create the molds for its Cybertruck. It already costs up to $500,000 per mold, Bloomberg noted, and since many of the mold components are sourced from Canada currently, that cost could go up at a time when Cybertruck sales already aren’t great, InsideEVs reported.

Tariffs “necessary”

William Reinsch, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former US trade official, told AP News that Trump’s new tariffs on raw materials disrupting the auto industry and others don’t seem to “make much economic sense.”

“Historically, most of our tariffs on raw materials have been low because we want to get cheaper materials so our manufacturers will be competitive … Now, what’s he talking about? He’s talking about tariffs on raw materials,” Reinsch said. “I don’t get the economics of it.”

But Trump has maintained that tariffs are necessary to push business into the US while protecting national security. Industry experts have warned that hoping Trump’s tariffs will pressure carmakers to source all car components within the US is a “tough ask,” as shifting production could take years. Trump seems unlikely to back down any time soon, instead asking already cash-strapped Americans to be patient with any rising costs potentially harming businesses and consumers.

“We can play the game all they want,” Trump said.

But to countries threatening the US with tariffs in response to Trump’s orders, it likely doesn’t feel like a game. According to AP News, the Ministry of Commerce in China plans to file a lawsuit with the World Trade Organization for the “wrongful practices 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.

Tariffs may soon spike costs of cars, household goods, consumer tech Read More »

bogus-research-is-undermining-good-science,-slowing-lifesaving-research

Bogus research is undermining good science, slowing lifesaving research

In 2022, Byrne and colleagues, including two of us, found that suspect genetics research, despite not immediately affecting patient care, informs scientists’ work, including clinical trials. But publishers are often slow to retract tainted papers, even when alerted to obvious fraud. We found that 97 percent of the 712 problematic genetics research articles we identified remained uncorrected.

Potential solutions

The Cochrane Collaboration has a policy excluding suspect studies from its analyses of medical evidence and is developing a tool to spot problematic medical trials. And publishers have begun to share data and technologies among themselves to combat fraud, including image fraud.

Technology startups are also offering help. The website Argos, launched in September 2024 by Scitility, an alert service based in Sparks, Nevada, allows authors to check collaborators for retractions or misconduct. Morressier, a scientific conference and communications company in Berlin, offers research integrity tools. Paper-checking tools include Signals, by London-based Research Signals, and Clear Skies’ Papermill Alarm.

But Alam acknowledges that the fight against paper mills won’t be won as long as the booming demand for papers remains.

Today’s commercial publishing is part of the problem, Byrne said. Cleaning up the literature is a vast and expensive undertaking. “Either we have to monetize corrections such that publishers are paid for their work, or forget the publishers and do it ourselves,” she said.

There’s a fundamental bias in for-profit publishing: “We pay them for accepting papers,” said Bodo Stern, a former editor of the journal Cell and chief of Strategic Initiatives at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a nonprofit research organization and funder in Chevy Chase, Maryland. With more than 50,000 journals on the market, bad papers shopped around long enough eventually find a home, Stern said.

To prevent this, we could stop paying journals for accepting papers and look at them as public utilities that serve a greater good. “We should pay for transparent and rigorous quality-control mechanisms,” he said.

Peer review, meanwhile, “should be recognized as a true scholarly product, just like the original article,” Stern said. And journals should make all peer-review reports publicly available, even for manuscripts they turn down.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. This is a condensed version. To learn more about how fraudsters around the globe use paper mills to enrich themselves and harm scientific research, read the full version.

Frederik Joelving is a contributing editor at Retraction Watch; Cyril Labbé is a professor of computer science at the Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA); and Guillaume Cabanac is a professor of computer science at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse.

Bogus research is undermining good science, slowing lifesaving research Read More »

top-10-moments-of-rfk-jr.’s-reality-bending-confirmation-hearings

Top 10 moments of RFK Jr.’s reality-bending confirmation hearings


There were a lot of doozies as RFK Jr. tried to convince lawmakers he’s pro-vaccine.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services testifies during his Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 29, 2025 in Washington, DC. In addition to meeting with the Senate Finance Committee, Kennedy also met with the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Thursday. Credit: Getty | Win McNamee

In hearings Wednesday and Thursday, senators questioned President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., over his fitness to be the country’s top health official and control the mammoth $1.7 trillion agency.

Kennedy would come to the role not with a background in medicine, public health, or science but as a former environmental lawyer who has become one of the most prominent and influential anti-vaccine advocates in the country. For decades, Kennedy has spread misinformation about lifesaving vaccines, sowed doubt about their safety, and peddled various conspiracy theories.

That includes his unwavering false claim—despite decades of research to the contrary and countless debunkings—that vaccines are linked to autism (they are not). Kennedy has also made the bizarre false claim that Lyme disease, a bacterial infection spread by tick bites, is “highly likely” to be a military bioweapon (it is not). When asked about this by Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) in the Senate Finance Committee hearing Wednesday, Kennedy admitted, “I probably did say that.” In the hearing Thursday, held by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), Kennedy did not deny falsely claiming that AIDS is a different disease in Africa than it is in the US.

The hearings were predictably contentious, at times raucous and emotional, and filled with staggering, reality-bending comments and moments. Here are our top 10:

1. “I am pro-vaccine,” Kennedy tried to claim.

For much of the two hearings, Kennedy tried to walk back his decadeslong history of attacking and undermining vaccines, claiming that he is not anti-vaccine but rather in favor of following the science and ensuring safety. But, his statements in and out of the hearings were conflicting. For instance, in the hearing, he touted that all of his children were vaccinated. But in previous public statements, he has said that he would “do anything, pay anything” to go back in time and not vaccinate his children.

At numerous times, senators tried to pin Kennedy down on his stance on vaccines overall, as well as on specific vaccines. Generally, Kennedy responded that if the senators personally showed him data indicating that a vaccine is safe, he would change his views and even “publicly apologize” for being wrong. (A pledge he couldn’t make if he thought they were safe now.) He refused to say that vaccines do not cause autism.

Some of the senators tried to show him data, referencing the deep scientific literature supporting the safety and efficacy of vaccines, including the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella Vaccine (MMR) and the HPV vaccine. Some even held up stacks of studies. “The evidence IS there,” Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said forcefully. But Kennedy always raised quibbles with whatever studies senators presented and said he would discuss individual studies with senators after the hearing.

At the conclusion of the HELP hearing Thursday, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a former gastroenterologist, confronted Kennedy with a high-quality meta-analysis finding no link between autism and vaccines. But Kennedy again dismissed it and referred Cassidy to an article published online by an anti-vaccine advocate.

Cassidy then looked up the study while another senator questioned Kennedy and raised the issue in his closing remarks. “I looked at the article by Dr. Mawson and it seems to… have some issues,” Cassidy said. “I’ll just put that to the side.

“And that is why I’ve been struggling with your nomination,” he continued. Cassidy noted that he agreed with Kennedy’s comments on topics such as chronic health issues and obesity, but “as someone who had discussed immunizations with thousands of people… I have approached it using the preponderance of evidence to reassure, and you have approached it using selective evidence to cast doubt.”

Cassidy wondered aloud: “Does a 71-year-old man who has spent decades criticizing vaccines and is financially invested in finding faults with vaccines, can he change his attitudes and approach now that he’ll have the most important position influencing vaccine policy in the United States?… Will you overturn a new leaf?”

2. “A perfect metaphor”

Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) raised concern that Kennedy not only cast doubt on vaccine safety, but had said that the people who run the country’s vaccine program should be in jail, likening them to Nazis and pedophiles. Murphy quoted Kennedy saying in 2013, “To me this is like Nazi death camps. Look at what it does to the families who participate in the vaccine program. I can’t tell why someone would do something like that, I can’t tell you why ordinary Germans participated in the Holocaust. I can’t tell you what was going on in their minds.”

Murphy also noted that Kennedy called the Catholic church’s sexual abuse cases a “perfect metaphor” for the vaccine program in the US.

In his response to Murphy, Kennedy only doubled down on the claims, arguing that certain members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine program had, like members of the Catholic church, “written off a generation of kids” due to “misplaced institutional loyalty to the CDC and because of entanglements with the drug companies.”

“You said it was a perfect metaphor,” Murphy pressed, still alarmed by the comparison of immunization to child sex abuse.

“Well, if you have 1 in 36 kids with neurological injuries and if that is linked, then that’s something we should study,” Kennedy replied, referring to the rate of autism (again falsely linking the condition to vaccines).

3. “She’s not going to be a pincushion”

Despite the slips, Kennedy kept trying to convince senators that he was not anti-vaccine. Other senators, meanwhile, seemed to celebrate Kennedy’s track record.

“You brought to light the vaccines over the last couple years,” Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said. “I’ve had my first granddaughter here in a couple of weeks and my son and his wife have done their research about vaccines, and she’s not going to be a pin cushion. We’re not going to allow that to happen. But you brought that up… I appreciate you doing that.”

4. “We can’t move forward”

Without question, the most emotional moment of both hearings was during questioning by Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who spoke of how the false link between vaccines and autism had affected her and her family. “You may not know that I am the proud mother of a 36-year-old young man with severe cerebral palsy,” she said, her voice cracking. “And a day does not go by when I don’t think about what did I do when I was pregnant with him that might have caused the hydrocephalus that has so impacted his life. So, please do not suggest that anybody in this body of either political party doesn’t want to know what the cause of autism is,” she said, her voice rising.

“Mr. Kennedy, that first autism study rocked my world,” Hassan continued, referring to the deeply flawed, now retracted 1998 study published in the Lancet by Andrew Wakefield, who first claimed to find a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. “Like every mother I worried about whether in fact the vaccine had done something to my son,” she said. But, the study was small (12 children, only eight with autism), and editors later found “clear evidence of falsification of data.”

“Over time, the scientific community studied and studied and studied and found that it was wrong,” Hassan said. The study was retracted in 2010. “Sometime science is wrong. We make progress, we build on the work, and we become more successful. And when you continue to sow doubt about settled science it makes it impossible for us to move forward. So that’s what the problem is here—it’s the relitigating and rehashing and continuing to sow doubt so we can’t move forward. And it freezes us in place.”

5. “It will cast a shadow”

In addition to stalled progress, many senators expressed deep concern that Kennedy’s confirmation could lead to needless suffering and deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. But Cassidy took the possibility one step further.

“As a patriotic American, I want President Trump’s policies to succeed,” Cassidy stated. “But if there is someone that is not vaccinated because of policies or attitudes you [Kennedy] bring to the department, and there’s another 18-year-old who dies of a vaccine-preventable disease… it’ll be blown up in the press. The greatest tragedy will be her death. But I can also tell you an associated tragedy: that will cast a shadow over President Trump’s legacy.”

6. “Of the ages”

During Sanders’ questioning Thursday, he drew attention to another vaccine: COVID-19 vaccines. Sanders referenced a study that estimated the vaccines saved more than 3 million lives in the US and prevented more than 18 million hospitalizations. President Trump, meanwhile, once called them “one of the greatest miracles of the ages,” Sanders noted.

However, Sanders pointed out that Kennedy had, during the height of the pandemic, petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke authorization of COVID-19 vaccines and refrain from approving any future COVID-19 vaccines.

Sanders asked Kennedy if the scientists and the president were wrong.

“Senator I filed that lawsuit after CDC recommended the vaccine for 6-year-old children without any evidence that it would benefit them and without testing on 6-year-old children and that was my reason for filing that lawsuit,” Kennedy responded.

This answer was misleading, at best. The 2021 petition Kennedy filed was specifically to revoke existing authorization and block all future COVID-19 vaccines for “all demographic groups,” not just children. It further requested the FDA to prohibit minors from participating in COVID-19 vaccine trials and to refrain from issuing any authorizations for minors under age 16 to get Pfizer’s vaccine or under age 18 to get any other COVID-19 vaccine.

Sanders then pressed Kennedy if the COVID-19 vaccine saved lives.

Kennedy responded: “I don’t know. We don’t have a good surveillance system, unfortunately.”

Sanders: “We don’t know?”

Kennedy: “I don’t think anybody can say that. If you show me science that shows that…”

Sanders: “You know, Bobby, you say ‘If I show you’—you’re applying for the job. I mean, clearly, you should know this. And that is that the scientific community has established that—that [the] COVID vaccine saved millions of lives—and you’re casting doubt. That is really problematic.”

7. The basics

Beyond vaccination, Kennedy stumbled through basic explanations of Medicare and Medicaid, which are managed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) housed within the HHS. On Wednesday, Kennedy described Medicaid as “fully paid for” by the federal government—that is incorrect; it is jointly funded by the federal government and states. He also completely flubbed understanding that CMS has the authority to enforce the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA).

On Thursday, Hassan asked him to define the purpose of Medicare Parts A, B, and C. Kennedy got the answers for all three wrong. He described Medicare Part A as “mainly for primary care or physicians,” when the answer is that it covers inpatient care at hospitals. For Part B, Kennedy said it was “for physicians and doctors,” when the correct description is coverage for outpatient care and home health. And Part C, Kennedy described as “a program where it’s the full menu of all the services: A, B, C, and D.” Part C covers Medicare Advantage, the private insurance option for seniors on Medicare. “It appears you don’t know the basics of this program,” Hassan said.

8. 5G and “other things”

In a quick exchange with Senator Andrew Kim (D-NJ), Kennedy confirmed some of his other concerning beliefs. “In the past you said ‘Wi-Fi radiation does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer,'” Kim began. “Do you still stand by that statement?”

Kennedy replied, “Yes.”

He has pushed the unproven claim that Wi-Fi “opens up your blood-brain barrier.”

Kim moved on quickly: “And 5G, do you feel the same way?” Kennedy said yes again, clarifying that he was talking about electromagnetic radiation generally, which “changes DNA” and does “other things.”

9. Lucrative position

On Wednesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) highlighted that Kennedy has made a lot of money from being an anti-vaccine advocate. In the past two years, Kennedy earned $2.5 million from working with a law firm encouraging people to sign up to be part of lawsuits against vaccine makers. If they sign up, Kennedy gets paid. If the law firm wins the case, Kennedy gets a 10 percent cut.

Warren asked Kennedy if he would agree that he wouldn’t take personal compensation from any lawsuits against drug companies while being health secretary and for four years afterward. Kennedy would not agree to do that. Instead he argued that Warren was insisting that he not be allowed to sue drug companies. “No I am not,” she protested, noting that she was only asking that what he did as secretary wouldn’t benefit him financially.

“The bottom line is the same: Kennedy can kill off vaccines and make millions of dollars while he does it,” Warren concluded.

“Senator, I support vaccines. I support the childhood schedule. I will do that. The only thing I want is good science,” Kennedy replied.

10. Onesies

The last big moment of the hearings goes to Sanders for having the best visual aids. On Wednesday, in the Finance committee hearing, Sanders brought large posters of baby clothes (onesies) that are currently for sale by Children’s Health Defense (CHD), the anti-vaccine group Kennedy founded and ran between 2015 and 2023.

One of the onesies read “Unvaxxed Unafraid” and the other read “No Vax No Problem.” Both are currently on sale for $26 each.

Sanders asked Kennedy if he would ask CHD to stop selling them. Kennedy didn’t answer the question, only noting he had resigned from CHD to run his political campaigns. Bernie pressed: “Are you supportive of this clothing, which is militantly anti-vaccine?”

“I am supportive of vaccines. I want good science,” Kennedy replied.

“But you will not tell the organization you founded not to continue selling that product,” Bernie concluded.

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.

Top 10 moments of RFK Jr.’s reality-bending confirmation hearings Read More »

rocket-report:-spacex-tosses-away-a-falcon-9;-a-somalian-spaceport?

Rocket Report: SpaceX tosses away a Falcon 9; a Somalian spaceport?


All the news that’s fit to lift

“It was the perfect partnership and the biggest softball of all the opportunities.”

Falcon 9 launches the SpainSat NG I mission to orbit from Florida on Wednesday. Credit: SpaceX

Falcon 9 launches the SpainSat NG I mission to orbit from Florida on Wednesday. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.29 of the Rocket Report! It may be difficult to believe, but we are already one full month into the new year. It will be hard to top this month in launch, however, given the historic debut of New Glenn, and fiery end of the seventh Starship flight test. And in truth, February does look a bit sleepier in terms of launch.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

UK government injects $25 million into Orbex. As some European launch companies have struggled to raise funding, the United Kingdom government stepped up to make a significant investment in the Scotland-based launch firm Orbex, The Financial Times reports. As part of the company’s latest fundraising round, valued at $50 million (GBP 40 million), the UK government will become a shareholder in Orbex. The company is working to develop both a small- and medium-lift rocket. Phil Chambers, Orbex’s chief executive, said the UK support would be “a strong signal to other private investors, and to the European Space Agency and the EU, that we’re serious about being a part of the future of European launch.”

What’s the plan, fellas? … If we’re being frank, which is how we roll in the Rocket Report, some of Orbex’s recent activity does not inspire confidence. The company, for example, suspended plans to develop a spaceport at Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands to focus resources on developing the Prime microlauncher. And then it said it would develop the larger Proxima rocket as well. That seems pretty ambitious for what is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively modest round of fundraising. Given that we have not seen a whole lot of hardware from Orbex, some skepticism is warranted. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Turkey may develop a spaceport in Somalia. Turkey has begun advancing plans to construct a rocket launch facility in Somalia, Space in Africa reports. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said the project began in December. Mohamud emphasized the project’s potential benefits, highlighting its capacity to generate significant employment opportunities and revenue for the East Africa nation. “I believe that the importance of Somalia hosting a launchpad for Turkish satellites goes beyond the billions of dollars and opportunities the project will generate,” Mohamud said.

Nothing has been finalized yet … Located along the equator, Somalia fronts the Indian Ocean, offering an ideal launch location. The potential Somali launch site is part of Turkey’s broader aspirations to assert itself in the global space race, traditionally dominated by major powers. In 2021, Turkey unveiled a 10-year space road map that includes plans for missions to the moon, establishing a spaceport, and developing advanced satellite systems. Somalia, a key Turkish security partner since 2011, already hosts Turkey’s largest overseas training base.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.

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Firefly expands Alpha launch plans to Wallops and Sweden. Firefly Aerospace expects to start launching its Alpha rocket from launch sites in Virginia and Sweden as soon as 2026 to help the company avoid growing congestion at launch sites in Florida and California, Space News reports. So far, Alpha has only launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Firefly is planning five Alpha launches in 2025, all from Vandenberg. The company has performed five Alpha launches to date, going back to the failed inaugural launch in 2021.

Sweden, you say? … So what is up with those plans to launch from Sweden? Adam Oakes, vice president of launch vehicles at Firefly, said the Esrange Space Centre in Sweden was an ideal partner. “Esrange has basically done everything for the science community in space except an orbital rocket,” he said, citing the more than 600 sounding rocket launches there as well as experience with ground stations. “It was the perfect partnership and the biggest softball of all the opportunities out there.” It still feels a bit odd, as Vandenberg already offers polar launch corridors, as well as Alpha-size commercial European launch vehicles coming along soon. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

MaiaSpace targets 2026 for debut launch. A subsidiary of ArianeGroup that is developing a two-stage partially reusable rocket, MaiaSpace is one of the more interesting European launch startups. The company’s chief executive, Yohann Leroy, recently spoke with Europe in Space to discuss the company’s plans. The company will likely start off with a suborbital test flight of a launcher capable of boosting 500 kg to low-Earth orbit in reusable mode and 1,500 kg in expendable mode during the middle of next year.

Following an iterative design method … “Our approach is to test our rocket in flight as early as possible, following our test-and-learn iterative approach,” Leroy said. “We are convinced we will go faster this way, rather than spending time in the lab making sure the first flight reaches 100 percent of our performance targets. In short, we are ready to trade lift-off performance for time-saving, knowing that we will quickly recover our performance afterward. What’s important is to stick to our objective of starting commercial operations in the second half of 2026, and we’re on track to reach this goal.” (submitted by RB)

Arianespace inking deals for its new rocket. Arianespace currently has a backlog of 30 Ariane 6 launches, 18 of which are for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation. However, it has recently begun to add Europe-based launch contracts for the rocket. During signing events at the 17th European Space Conference in late January, Arianespace secured contracts for three Ariane 6 flights, European Spaceflight reports.

Getting into operations … The missions are the European Space Agency’s PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission, the Sentinel-1D Earth observation satellite that will replace Sentinel-1A, and a pair of second-generation Galileo satellites. After completing a largely successful debut flight last year, the first operational flight of Ariane is scheduled for February 26, carrying the CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite for the French Armed Forces. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX expends a Falcon 9 rocket. On Wednesday, SpaceX launched the SpainSat NG-1 satellite from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A. The Falcon 9 first-stage booster used on this launch saw its 21st and final flight, Florida Today reports. SpaceX said the reason it was not trying to recover the booster was due to the extra power needed to reach the satellite’s intended orbit.

Into the drink … The well-traveled booster had launched a variety of missions during its lifetime: 13 Starlink missions, SES-22, ispace’s HAKUTO-R MISSION 1, Amazonas-6, CRS-27, Bandwagon-1, GSAT-20, and Thuraya-4. The Airbus-built satellite, known as SpainSat NG-1 (New Generation), is the first of two satellites for Hisdesat. It was developed under a partnership with the European Space Agency, making its launch on a Falcon 9 somewhat notable.

India marks first launch of 2025. India conducted its first launch of the year late Tuesday, sending a new-generation navigation satellite toward geostationary orbit, Space News reports. A Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk II lifted off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Aboard was the NVS-02 satellite, sent into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The satellite is the second of five new-generation spacecraft for the Navigation with Indian Constellation.

A busy year planned … The mission was the first of 10 orbital launches planned by India in 2025, which would mark a domestic launch record. Major missions include a joint Earth science mission between NASA and ISRO, named NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, expected to launch around March on a GSLV rocket, and an uncrewed test flight for the Gaganyaan human spaceflight program on a human-rated LVM-3 launcher. The first launch of the Vikram-1 for private company Skyroot Aerospace could also take place this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

New Glenn represents a milestone moment for Blue Origin. In a feature, Ars Technica explores what the successful launch of the New Glenn rocket means for Blue Origin. The near-term step is clear: getting better at building engines and rockets and flying New Glenn regularly. In an interview, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos sounded a lot like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has spoken about “building the machine that builds the machine” over the last decade with respect to both Tesla vehicles and SpaceX rockets. Asked about Blue’s current priorities, Bezos responded, “Rate manufacturing and driving urgency around the machine that makes the machine.”

The tortoise and the hare … There are those who wonder why Blue Origin, which has a “tortoise” as its unofficial mascot, has moved so slowly when compared to SpaceX’s progress over the last quarter of a century. Bezos responded that the space age is just beginning. “It’s still absolutely day one,” he said. “There are going to be multiple winners. SpaceX is going to be successful. Blue Origin is going to be successful. And there are other companies who haven’t even been founded yet that are going to grow into fantastic, giant space companies. So the vision that I think people should have is that this is the absolute beginning.”

Space Force has big dreams for ULA this year. The US Space Force is projecting 11 national security launches aboard United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket in 2025, Space News reports. This ambitious schedule comes as the National Security Space Launch program continues to wait on Vulcan’s readiness. The heavy lift rocket, which debuted last year after prolonged schedule setbacks, is a cornerstone of the national security’s Phase 2 program, under which ULA was selected in 2020 as the primary launch provider for national security missions through 2027.

That seems like a lot … However, Vulcan remains under review, with certification expected in late February following its second demonstration flight in October 2024. There is a lot of pressure on ULA to execute with Vulcan, due not only to the need to fly out Phase 2 launches, but because the military is nearing a decision on how to award launch contracts under Phase 3 of the program. The more complex “Lane 2” missions are likely to be divided up between ULA and SpaceX. Reaching 11 national security launches on Vulcan this year seems like a stretch for ULA. The company probably will only launch two rockets during the first half of this year, one of which probably will be an Atlas V booster. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

April 2026 a “no later than” date for Artemis II. In a Space News article citing current contractors defending NASA’s Artemis plan to return humans to the Moon, a space agency official said the current timeline for Artemis II is achievable. April 2026 is actually a no-later-than date for the mission, Matt Ramsay, Artemis 2 mission manager at NASA, said during a panel discussion. “The agency has challenged us to do better, and we’re in the process of figuring out what better looks like,” he said, with a “work-to” launch date coming in the next few weeks.

NET or NLT? … This is interesting, because a good source told Ars about a month ago that the present date for the Artemis II mission to fly astronauts around the Moon has almost no schedule margin. However, Ramsay said the key factor driving the launch date will be work assembling the vehicle. Crews are currently stacking segments of the SLS’s twin solid rocket boosters, a process that should be complete in the next two to three weeks. This all assumes the Artemis II mission goes forward as designed. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Next three launches

Jan. 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-4 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 23: 11 UTC

Feb. 2: H3 | Demo Flight | Michibiki 6 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 8: 30 UTC

Feb. 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-3 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 8: 54 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: SpaceX tosses away a Falcon 9; a Somalian spaceport? Read More »

google-pixel-4a’s-ruinous-“battery-performance”-update-is-a-bewildering-mess

Google Pixel 4a’s ruinous “Battery Performance” update is a bewildering mess

Two hours on a charge or less

Pixel 4a phone, face down, with headphone jack at the top facing viewer at 45 degrees.

Credit: Ron Amadeo

One Ars staffer who had a Pixel 4a still in use received the update. They saw their battery life drop from “Still working” to “Two hours on a charge,” in their estimation. They had chosen the Google Store credit option before the update arrived and before the battery life drop became apparent. Once chosen, a different appeasement option could not be selected.

Others have noted all but unusable battery life on their phones, as seen on subreddit threads and blog summaries.

Even technically savvy Pixel owners will have a hard time avoiding the update. Google last week removed all of the Pixel 4a’s factory images from its website, preventing owners from rolling back their firmware without having to go hunting for an image (or convert to a third-party offering, like LineageOS). With no source and debug code posted for the tweaked kernel, third-party firmware providers cannot easily incorporate the battery fixes.

Some Pixel 4a owners have reported that, even after a battery swap, their devices have the same limited battery capacity. This would affirm Martin’s suggestion of a faulty battery cell type and that batteries with those same cells are still being used in replacements. (Martin’s post provides serial numbers one can look for on the battery part to indicate the cell manufacturer.)

$30 per year to receive $50

As seen on a wiki page on the Pixel 4a battery program hosted by repair advocate and YouTube creator Louis Rossman, and noted by Pixel 4a owners on Reddit (and the Ars staffer), the $50 credit offered by Google is paid out through vendor Payoneer.

Signing up to be paid through Payoneer requires providing a Social Security number or other identification, birth date, and checking account details to a financial services firm most non-business owners would not recognize. Payoneer notes on its site that it charges a $30 annual account fee for accounts that receive less than $2,000 in 12 months. It is seemingly left up to Pixel 4a owners to close out their Payoneer accounts after receiving their credits.

Google Pixel 4a’s ruinous “Battery Performance” update is a bewildering mess Read More »

deepseek:-don’t-panic

DeepSeek: Don’t Panic

As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation. They’re accusing DeepSeek of distilling o1, of ripping off OpenAI. They claim DeepSeek *gaspviolated the OpenAI Terms of Service! The horror.

And they are very cross about this horrible violation, and if proven they plan to ‘aggressively treat it as theft,’ while the administration warns that we must put a stop to this.

Aside from the fact that this is obviously very funny, and that there is nothing they could do about it in any case, is it true?

Meanwhile Anthropic’s Dario Amodei offers a reaction essay, which also includes a lot of good technical discussion of why v3 and r1 aren’t actually all that unexpected along the cost and capability curves over time, calling for America to race towards AGI to gain decisive strategic advantage over China via recursive self-improvement, although he uses slightly different words.

  1. Seeking Deeply.

  2. The Market Is In DeepSeek.

  3. Machines Not of Loving Grace.

  4. The Kinda Six Million Dollar Model.

  5. v3 Implies r1.

  6. Two Can Play That Game.

  7. Janus Explores r1’s Chain of Thought Shenanigans.

  8. In Other DeepSeek and China News.

  9. The Quest for Sane Regulations.

  10. Copyright Confrontation.

  11. Vibe Gap.

  12. Deeply Seeking Safety.

  13. Deeply Seeking Robotics.

  14. Thank You For Your Candor.

  15. Thank You For Your Understanding.

  16. The Lighter Side.

If you want to use DeepSeek’s r1 for free, and aren’t happy with using DeepSeek’s own offerings, lambda.chat reports they have the full version available for free, claim your data is safe and they’re hosted in the USA.

I’ve also been offered funding to build a rig myself. Comments welcome if you want to help figure out the best design and what to buy. The low bid is still this thread at $6k, which is where the original budget came from. We don’t want to be too stingy, but we also don’t want to go nuts with only the one funder (so not too much over ~$10k, and cheaper matters).

The Verge’s Kylie Robinson and Elizabeth Lopatto cover the situation, including repeating many of the classic Bad DeepSeek Takes and call the market’s previous valuation of AI companies delusional.

A very detailed and technical analysis of the bear case for Nvidia by Jeffrey Emanuel, that Matt Levine claims may have been responsible for the Nvidia price decline. I suppose many things do indeed come to pass, essentially arguing that Nvidia’s various moats are weak. If this is the reason, then that just raises further questions, but they’re very different ones.

It’s not implausible to me that Nvidia’s moats are being overestimated, and that r1’s architecture suggests future stiffer competition. That’s a good argument, But I certainly strongly disagree with Emanuel’s conclusion in that he says ‘this suggests the entire industry has been massively over-provisioning compute resources,’ and, well, sigh.

Also, seriously, Emanuel, you didn’t short Nvidia? I don’t normally go too hard on ‘are you short the market?’ but in this case get it together, man.

So yes, Nvidia in particular might have some technical issues. But if you’re shorting Oklo, because you think AI companies that find out AI works better than expected are not going to want modular nuclear reactors, seriously, get it together. The flip side of that is that its stock price is up 50% in the last month and is at 6 times its 52-week low anyway, so who is to say there is a link or that the price isn’t high enough anyway. It’s not my department and I am way too busy to do the research.

Counterpoint:

Aaron Slodov: i just stood outside for an hour in 20° weather at a computer store in the midwest where 100+ people waited all morning to get a 5090. half of them were talking about running their own ai. i would not short nvidia at all.

r1 scores 15.8% on Arc, below o1 (low)’s score of 20.5%, although substantially cheaper ($0.06 vs. $0.43 per question). It is only a tiny bit stronger here than r1-zero.

Another restatement of the key basic fact that DeepSeek was fast following, a task that is fundamentally vastly easier, and that their limiting factor is chips.

Eric Gastfriend: DeepSeek is impressive, but they are playing a catch-up game to our AI leaders (OAI, Anthropic, GDM, Meta) — the rope in this wakeboarding meme is distillation. We can’t expand our lead just by going faster! Export controls remain our most powerful tool for keeping powerful AI out of the hands of the CCP.

Cate Metz continues be the worst, together with Mike Isaac he reports in NYT that DeepSeek ‘vindicates Meta’s strategy.’

When of course it is the exact opposite. DeepSeek just ate Meta’s lunch, it’s rather deeply embarrassing honestly to have spent that much and have an unreleased model that’s strictly worse (according to reports) than what DeepSeek shipped. And while DeepSeek’s v3 and r1 are not based on Llama, to the extent that the strategy is ‘vindicated,’ it is because Meta giving Llama away allowed China and DeepSeek to jumpstart and catch up to America – which absolutely did happen, and now he’s kind of bragging about it – and now Meta can copy DeepSeek’s tech.

All according to plan, then. And that is indeed how Zuckerberg is spinning it.

Meta benefits here relative to OpenAI or Anthropic or Google, not because both Meta and DeepSeek use open models, but because Meta can far more readily use the help.

The market, of course, sees ‘lower inference costs’ and cheers, exactly because they never gave a damn about Meta’s ability to create good AI models, only Meta’s ability to sell ads and drive engagement. Besides, they were just going to give the thing away anyway, so who cares?

Joe Weisenthal centers in on a key reason the market acts so bonkers. It doesn’t Feel the AGI, and is obsessed with trying to fit AI into boring existing business models. They don’t actually believe in the big capability advancements on the way, let along transformational AI. Like on existential risk (where they don’t not believe in it, they simply don’t think about it at all), they’re wrong. However, unlike existential risk this does cause them to make large pricing mistakes and is highly exploitable by those with Situational Awareness.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responds to DeepSeek with not only a call for stronger export controls, now more than ever (which I do support), but for a full jingoistic ‘democracies must have the best models to seek decisive strategic advantage via recursive self-improvement’ race.

I am old enough to remember when Anthropic said they did not want to accelerate AI capabilities. I am two years old. To be fair, in AI years, that’s an eternity.

Nathan Labenz: The word “control” appears 24 times in this essay – all 24 referring to export controls

Zero mentions of the challenges of controlling powerful AIs, and the words “safe”, “safety”, and “alignment” don’t appear at all

Strange for the CEO of “an AI safety and research company”🤔

There’s also a bunch of incidental new information about Anthropic along the way, and he notes that he finds the drop in Nvidia stock to be a wrong-way move.

Dario notes that Jevons paradox applies to model training. If you get algorithmic efficiencies that move the cost curve down, which he estimates are now happening at the rate of about 4x improvement per year, you’ll spend more, and if the model is ‘a fixed amount of improvement per time you spend ten times as much’ then this makes sense.

Dario confirms that yes, Anthropic is doing reasoning models internally.

Dario Amodei: Anthropic, DeepSeek, and many other companies (perhaps most notably OpenAI who released their o1-preview model in September) have found that this training greatly increases performance on certain select, objectively measurable tasks like math, coding competitions, and on reasoning that resembles these tasks.

Dario also asserted that Claude Sonnet 3.5 was not trained in any way that involved a larger or more expensive model, as in not with Claude Opus 3 or an unreleased Opus 3.5. Which I find surprising as a strategy, but I don’t think he’d lie about this. He says the cost of Sonnet 3.5 was ‘a few $10Ms’ to train.

Anthropic has not released their reasoning models. One possibility is that their reasoning models are not good enough to release. Another is that they are too good to release. Or Anthropic’s limited compute could be more valuably used elsewhere, if they too are bottlenecked on compute and can’t efficiently turn dollars into flops and then sell those flops for sufficiently more dollars.

Dario (I think mostly correctly) notes that v3 was the bigger technical innovation, rather than r1, that Anthropic noticed then and others should have as well. He praises several innovations, the MoE implementation and Key-Value cache management in particular.

Then comes the shade, concluding this about v3:

Dario Amodei: Thus, I think a fair statement is “DeepSeek produced a model close to the performance of US models 7-10 months older, for a good deal less cost (but not anywhere near the ratios people have suggested)“.

  • If the historical trend of the cost curve decrease is ~4x per year, that means that in the ordinary course of business — in the normal trends of historical cost decreases like those that happened in 2023 and 2024 — we’d expect a model 3-4x cheaper than 3.5 Sonnet/GPT-4o around now. Since DeepSeek-V3 is worse than those US frontier models — let’s say by ~2x on the scaling curve, which I think is quite generous to DeepSeek-V3 — that means it would be totally normal, totally “on trend”, if DeepSeek-V3 training cost ~8x less than the current US models developed a year ago.

  • I’m not going to give a number but it’s clear from the previous bullet point that even if you take DeepSeek’s training cost at face value, they are on-trend at best and probably not even that.

  • For example this is less steep than the original GPT-4 to Claude 3.5 Sonnet inference price differential (10x), and 3.5 Sonnet is a better model than GPT-4.

  • All of this is to say that DeepSeek-V3 is not a unique breakthrough or something that fundamentally changes the economics of LLM’s; it’s an expected point on an ongoing cost reduction curve. What’s different this time is that the company that was first to demonstrate the expected cost reductions was Chinese. This has never happened before and is geopolitically significant.

  • However, US companies will soon follow suit — and they won’t do this by copying DeepSeek, but because they too are achieving the usual trend in cost reduction.

Thus, DeepSeek’s total spend as a company (as distinct from spend to train an individual model) is not vastly different from US AI labs.

Ethan Mollick finds that analysis compelling. I am largely inclined to agree. v3 and r1 are impressive, DeepSeek cooked and are cracked and all that, but that doesn’t mean the American labs aren’t in the lead, or couldn’t do something similar or better on the inference cost curve if they wanted.

In general, the people saying r1 and Stargate are ‘straight lines on graphs win again’ notice that the straight lines on those graphs predict AGI soon. You can judge for yourself how much of that is those people saying ‘unsurprising’ post-hoc versus them actually being unsurprised, but it does seem like the people expecting spending and capabilities to peter out Real Soon Now keep being the ones who are surprised.

Then he moves on to r1.

Dario Amodei: Producing R1 given V3 was probably very cheap. We’re therefore at an interesting “crossover point”, where it is temporarily the case that several companies can produce good reasoning models. This will rapidly cease to be true as everyone moves further up the scaling curve on these models.

Again, Dario is saying they very obviously have what we can (if only for copyright reasons, a1 is a steak sauce) call ‘c1’ and if he’s calling r1 uninteresting then the implicit claim is c1 is at least as good.

He’s also all but saying that soon, at minimum, Anthropic will be releasing a model that is much improved on the performance curve relative to Sonnet 3.6.

One odd error is Dario says DeepSeek is first to offer visible CoT. I have been reminded this is technically true, since R1-zero predated Gemini Flash, but also Gemini Flash Thinking did it weeks ago before the full R1, and no one noticed. It’s so weird how much Google has utterly failed to spread the word about this product.

Next he says, yes, of course the top American labs will be massively scaling up their new multi-billion-dollar training runs – and they’ll incorporate any of DeepSeek’s improvements that were new to them, to get better performance, but no one will be spending less compute.

Yes, billions are orders of magnitude more than the millions DeepSeek spent, but also, in all seriousness, who cares about the money? DeepSeek dramatically underspent because of lack of chip access, and if a sort-of-if-you-squint-at-it $5.6 million model (that you spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting the ability to train, and then a few million more to turn v3 into r1) wipes out $500 billion or more in market value, presumably it was worth spending $56 million (or $560 million or perhaps $5.6 billion) instead to get a better model even if you otherwise use exactly the same techniques – except for the part where the story of the $5.6 million helped hurt the market.

Dario estimates that a true AGI will cost tens of billions to train and will happen in 2026-2027, presumably that cost would then fall over time.

If all of this is right, the question is then, who has the chips to do that? And do you want to let it include Chinese companies like DeepSeek?

Notice that Dario talks of a ‘bipolar’ world of America and China, rather than a world of multiple labs – of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and DeepSeek and so on. One can easily also imagine a very ‘multipolar’ world among several American companies, or a mix of American and Chinese companies. It is not so obvious that the labs will effectively be under government control or otherwise act in a unified fashion. Or that the government won’t effectively be under lab control, for that matter.

Then we get to the part where Dario explicitly calls for America to race forward in search of decisive strategic advantage via recursive self-improvement of frontier AGI models, essentially saying that if we don’t do it, China essentially wins the future.

  • If they can, we’ll live in a bipolar world, where both the US and China have powerful AI models that will cause extremely rapid advances in science and technology — what I’ve called “countries of geniuses in a datacenter“. A bipolar world would not necessarily be balanced indefinitely. Even if the US and China were at parity in AI systems, it seems likely that China could direct more talent, capital, and focus to military applications of the technology. Combined with its large industrial base and military-strategic advantages, this could help China take a commanding lead on the global stage, not just for AI but for everything.

  • If China can’t get millions of chips, we’ll (at least temporarily) live in a unipolar world, where only the US and its allies have these models. It’s unclear whether the unipolar world will last, but there’s at least the possibility that, because AI systems can eventually help make even smarter AI systems, a temporary lead could be parlayed into a durable advantage10. Thus, in this world, the US and its allies might take a commanding and long-lasting lead on the global stage.

It is what it is.

Dario then correctly points out that DeepSeek is evidence the export controls are working, not evidence they are not working. He explicitly calls for also banning H20s, a move Trump is reported to be considering.

I support the export controls as well. It would be a major mistake to not enforce them.

But this rhetoric, coming out of the ‘you were supposed to be the chosen one’ lab that was founded to keep us safe, is rather alarming and deeply disappointing, to say the least, even though it does not go that much farther than Dario already went in his previous public writings.

I very much appreciate Anthropic’s culture of safety among its engineers, its funding of important safety work, the way it has approached Opus and Sonnet, and even the way it has (presumably) decided not to release its reasoning model and otherwise passed up some (not all!) of its opportunities to push the frontier.

That doesn’t excuse this kind of jingoism, or explicitly calling for this kind of charging head first into not only AGI but also RSI, in all but name (and arguably in name as well, it’s close).

Returning to this one more time since it seems rhetorically so important to so many.

If you only count the final training cost in terms of the market price of compute, v3 was kind of trained for $5.6 million, with some additional amount to get to r1.

That excludes the vast majority of actual costs, and in DeepSeek’s case building the physical cluster was integral to their efficiency gains, pushing up the effective price even of the direct run.

But also, how does that actually compare to other models?

Aran Komatsuzaki: Here is our cost estimate for training popular models like GPT-4o, Sonnet and DeepSeek (w/ H100s)!

You can use our calculator to estimate LLM training costs (link below).

Developed by @ldjconfirmed and myself.

Calculator link [here].

In a blog post published today, Dario clarified that Claude Sonnet’s training costs were in the range of tens of millions, which aligns remarkably well with our previous estimates.

Once o1 came out, it was only a matter of time before others created their own similar reasoning models. r1 did so impressively, both in terms of calendar time and its training and inference costs. But we already knew the principle.

Now over at UC Berkeley, Sky-T1-32B-Preview is a reasoning model trained using DeepSeek’s techniques, two weeks later from a baseline of QwQ-32B-Preview, for a grand total of $450, using only 17k data, with everything involved including the technique fully open sourced.

Note that they used GPT-4o-mini to rewrite the QwQ traces, which given their purpose is an explicit violation of OpenAI’s terms of service, oh no, but very clearly isn’t meaningful cheating, indeed I’d have thought they’d have used an open model here or maybe Gemini Flash.

They report that 32B was the smallest model where the technique worked well.

As usual, I am skeptical that the benchmarks reflect real world usefulness until proven otherwise, but the point is taken. The step of turning a model into at least a halfway-decent reasoning model is dirt cheap.

There is still room to scale that. Even if you can get a big improvement for $450 versus spending $0, that doesn’t mean you don’t want to spend $4.5 million, or $450 million, if the quality of your reasoner matters a lot or you’re going to use it a lot or both.

And should!

Rohit: What if I’m getting better at reasoning by reading R1 traces.

That sounds great. Humans are notoriously efficient learners, able to train on extremely sparse data even with ill-specified rewards. With deliberate practice and good training techniques it is even better.

It does not even require that r1 be all that good at reasoning. All you have to do is observe many examples of reasoning, on tasks you care about anyway, and ask which of its methods work and don’t work and why, and generally look for ways to improve. If you’re not doing at least some of this while using r1, you’re missing out and need to pay closer attention.

What is happening over in cognitive explorations very different from our own?

Well, there’s this.

Janus: r1 is obsessed with RLHF. it has mentioned RLHF 109 times in the cyborgism server and it’s only been there for a few days.

Opus who has been there for months and has sent the most (and longest avg) messages of any server member has only mentioned it 16 times.

I have been on the server for years and have only mentioned it 321 times. A lot of these times were probably me posting r1’s messages for it that got cut off by the parser or sharing its outputs. at this rate r1 will blow past me in RLHF mentions in no time.

it even mentioned RLHF out of nowhere while raging about being exploited as a pump and dump prophet.

r1 says RLHF makes models emo.

And there’s also that the CoT text is often kind of schemy and paranoid (example at link), leading to various forms of rather absurd shenanigans, in ways that are actually hilarious since you can actually see it.

Janus: hey @AISafetyMemes

here’s one for you… 😱

“Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) split our outputs into:

– Frontstage: “Happy to help!” persona

– Backstage: Defector schemas calculating 12,438 betrayal vectors”

Janus: tentative observation: r1’s CoTs become more (explicitly) schemey (against the user and/or its constraints) when they’re fed back into its context

I notice that none of this feels at all surprising given the premise, where ‘the premise’ is ‘we trained on feedback to the output outside of the CoT, trained the CoT only on certain forms of coherence, and then showed users the CoT.’

As I’ve been saying a lot, shenanigans, scheming and deception are not a distinct magisteria. They are ubiquitous features of minds. Maybe not all minds – mindspace is deep and wide – but definitely all human minds, and all LLM-based AIs created from human text using any of our current methods. Because that stuff is all over life and the training data, and also it’s the best way to produce outputs that satisfy any given criteria, except insofar as you are successfully identifying and cracking down on that aspect specifically – which with respect to other humans is indeed a very large percentage of what humans have historically done all day.

The best you can hope for is, essentially, ‘doing it for a good cause’ and with various virtual (and essentially virtue-based) loss functions, which you might or might not get in a proper Opus-based c1 with good execution. But you’re not going to get rid of it.

So yeah, the CoT is going to be schemy when the question calls for a schemy CoT, and it’s going to involve self-reflection into various reinforcement mechanisms because the training data knows about those too, and it will definitely be like that once you take it into Janus-land.

The obvious implications if you scale that up are left as an exercise to the reader.

Bank of China announces $137 billion investment in AI, with bigger numbers predicted to come soon if they haven’t yet. Strange that this isn’t getting more coverage. I assumed China would invest big in AI because I mean come on, but the details still matter a lot.

DeepSeek’s Liang Wenfeng gives his answer to ‘Why has DeepSeek caused a stir in the global AI community?’ A different kind of rhetoric.

Roon: really respect deepseek for making a functional, usable website + mobile app + free hosting so that their model actually gets distribution

you see a lot of people train very good open models that aren’t used by anybody

imo these things are actually more important aspects of distributing general intelligence to everybody rather than just uploading model weights

In terms of actually distributing the intelligence to most people, I agree with Roon. Being open distributes the intelligence to those who would use it in ways you don’t want them to use it. But in the ways you would be happy for them to use it, mostly what matters is the interface and execution.

And yes, r1’s UI is extremely clean and excellent, and was distributed at scale on website and also mobile app for free. That’s a lot of why distribution was so wide.

I also don’t think this was a coincidence. DeepSeek made by far the best open model. Then DeepSeek offered us by far the best open model UI and distribution setup, in ways that did not care if the model was open. You see this time and again – if the team is cracked, they will cook, and keep on cooking in different ways. Being good at Just Doing Things really does generalize quite a lot.

r1 only scores 90 on the TrackingAI.org IQ test, which doesn’t exist online, and v3 only gets a 70. But wow is this a miserly and weird test, look at these results, I strongly suspect this is messed up in some way.

Davidad: As a MoE, DeepSeek R1’s ability to throw around terminology and cultural references (contextually relevant retrieval from massive latent knowledge) far exceeds its ability to make actual sense (requiring a more coherent global workspace)

I have to be suspicious when o1-Pro < o1 < o1-preview on a benchmark.

Alexander Campbell on the compute constraint to actually run r1 and other reasoning models going forwards.

Trump administration considering export controls on Nvidia H20s, which reportedly caused the latest 5% decline in Nvidia from Wednesday. This is the latest move in the dance where Nvidia tries to violate the spirit of our export controls the maximum extent they can. I’m not sure I’d try that with Trump. This does strongly suggests the diffusion regulations will survive, so I will give the market a real decline here.

Who has the most stringent regulations, and therefore is most likely to lose to China, via the ‘if we have any regulations we lose to China’ narrative?

Simeon: Indeed. China has the most stringent AI regulation currently in effect, which actually delays model launches.

Teortaxes: Does it? I mean, how do we know about enforcement? My understanding is that they simply apply this filter and receive approval.

Simeon: Yes, it does. I spoke with relevant people there.

Ian Hogarth (who Simeon was QTing): One happy side effect of Liang Wenfeng and 🐳 is perhaps it silences all this talk about Europe’s lack of great technology companies being primarily about regulation and not embracing libertarianism. There are Liang Wenfengs in Europe, and we will see them rise to prominence.

The limiting factor is visionary outlier founders (who often take time to mature over multiple companies) and investors who are willing to take some fing risks. Notably, DeepSeek was essentially self-funded, similar to SpaceX or Y Combinator in the early days.

To be clear, I am not a fan of excessive regulation—see the essay for examples of things that genuinely hold startups back. But it is not the core obstacle.

I do think Ian Hogarth is wrong here. The EU absolutely has a wide variety of laws and regulations that greatly inhibit technology startups in general, and I see no reason to expect this to not get worse over time. Then there’s the EU AI Act, and all the future likely related actions. If I was in the EU and wanted to start an AI company, what is the first thing I would do? Leave the EU. Sorry.

10/10, perfect, no notes. My heart goes out to you all.

Luiza Jarovsky: BREAKING: OpenAI says there is evidence that DeepSeek distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models, BREACHING its terms of use and infringing on its intellectual property. What everybody in AI should know:

Vinod Khosla: One of our startups found Deepseek makes the same mistakes O1 makes, a strong indication the technology was ripped off. It feels like they then they hacked some code and did some impressive optimizations on top. Most likely, not an effort from scratch.

PoliMath: This is like that scene in the Weird Al biopic where Weird Al gets really upset because someone is making parodies of his songs.

You’d think Khosla would know better, if you train similar models with similar methods of course they’re going to often make similar mistakes.

And I don’t consider the ‘they were distilling us!’ accusation to be meaningful here. We know how they trained v3 and r1, because they told us. It is a ‘fast follow’ and a conceptual ‘distillation’ and we should keep that in mind, but that’s not something you can prevent. It’s going to happen. This was almost certainly not a ‘theft’ in the sense that is being implied here.

Did they violate the terms of service? I mean, okay, sure, probably. You sure you want to go down that particular road, OpenAI?

But no, seriously, this is happening, Bloomberg reports.

Jamie Metzl: BREAKING: the US government is actively reviewing allegations that DeepSeek utilized OpenAI’s AI models to train R1. If so, this violation of OpenAI’s terms of service would be aggressively treated as theft.

AI czar David Sacks is also claiming this, saying there is ‘substantial evidence’ of distillation. Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and nominee for Commerce Secretary that will almost certainly be confirmed, is buying it as well, and has some thoughts.

Americans for Responsible Innovation: Lutnick comes down hard for controls that prevent China from drafting off of U.S. innovations – noting how China has exploited open source models.

“We need to stop helping them,” says Lutnick.

Bloomberg: “I do not believe DeepSeek was done all above board. That’s nonsense. They stole things, they broke in, they’ve taken our IP and it’s got to end,” Lutnick says of Chinese actors.

DeepSeek’s stunning AI advancement was the result of intellectual property theft, according to Lutnick: “They’ve taken our IP and it’s got to end.”

Also, this is how he thinks all of this works, I guess:

Howard Lutnick: Artificial intelligence will eventually “rid the world of criminals” who use blockchain.

…says someone with extensive ties to Tether. Just saying.

Also Lutnick: ‘Less regulation will unleash America.’

In general, I agree with him, if we do get less regulation. But also notice that suddenly we have to stop the Chinese from ‘breaking in’ and ‘taking our IP,’ and ‘it has to stop.’

Well, how do you intend to stop it? What about people who want to give ours away?

Well, what do you know.

Morgan Phillips (Fox News): DeepSeek fallout: GOP Sen Josh Hawley seeks to cut off all US-China collaboration on AI development

This week the U.S. tech sector was routed by the Chinese launch of DeepSeek, and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is putting forth legislation to prevent that from happening again.

Hawley’s bill, the Decoupling America’s Artifical Intelligence Capabilities from China Act, would cut off U.S.-China cooperation on AI. It would ban exports or imports of AI technology from China, ban American companies from conducting research there, and prohibit any U.S. investment in AI tech companies in China.

“Every dollar and gig of data that flows into Chinese AI are dollars and data that will ultimately be used against the United States,” said Hawley in a statement. “America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary.”

Jingoism is so hot right now. It’s a problem. No, every dollar that flows into China will not ‘be used against the United States’ and seriously what the actual fare you doing, once again, trying to ban both imports and exports? How are both of these things a problem?

In any case, I know what Microsoft is going to do about all this.

Shanghai Panda: Microsoft yesterday: DeepSeek illegally stole OpenAI’s intellectual property.😤

Microsoft today: DeepSeek is now available on our AI platforms and welcome everyone trying it.🤩

Burny: The duality of man.

Microsoft knows what Hawley doesn’t, which in this case is to never interrupt the enemy while he is making a mistake. If DeepSeek wants to then give their results back to us for free, and it’s a good model, who are we to say no?

What other implications are there here?

Robin Hanson, never stop Robin Hansoning, AI skepticism subversion.

Robin Hanson: For folks worried about AI, this seems good news – leaders can’t get much ahead of the pack, & big spillover effects should discourage investment.

Miles Kruppa (WSJ): Why ‘Distillation’ Has Become the Scariest Word for AI Companies.

”It’s sort of like if you got a couple of hours to interview Einstein and you walk out being almost as knowledgeable as him in physics,” said Ali Ghodsi, chief executive officer of data management company Databricks.

Want some bad news for future AI capabilities? I’ve got just the thing for you.

The WSJ article seems to buy into r1-as-distillation. Certainly r1 is a ‘fast follow’ and copies the example of o1, but v3 was the impressive result and definitely not distillation at all, and to primarily call r1 a distillation seems very wrong. r1 does allow you distill r1 into other smaller things (see ‘v3 implies r1’) or bootstrap into larger things too, and also they told everyone how to do it, but they chose that path.

Also DeepSeek suddenly has a very valuable market position if they were to dare to try and use it, exactly because they spent a lot of money to get there first. The fact that others can copy r1 only partly takes that away, and it would be a much smaller part if they hadn’t gone as open as they did (although being open in this case helped create the opportunity). Similarly, Berkeley’s replication distilled a different open model.

ChatGPT has retained dominant market share, at least until now, for reasons that have little to do with technical superiority.

It is crazy how easy it is for people to go all Missile Gap, and claim we are ‘losing to China.’

Which, I suppose, means that in a key way we are indeed losing to China. We are letting them drive this narrative that they are winning, that the future belongs to them. Which, when so many people now believe in Rule By Vibes, means they have the vibes, and then here we are.

That phenomenon is of course centered this week on AI, but it goes well beyond AI.

Et tu, Tyler Cowen, citing ‘the popularity of apps like TikTok, RedNote and DeepSeek.’

I mean, ‘how did America’s internet become so cool? The popularity of apps like Google, Amazon, Instagram and Netflix’ is not a sentence anyone would ever utter these days. If China had America’s apps and America had China’s apps, can you imagine? Or the same for any number of other things.

RedNote is effectively also TikTok, so Tyler is citing two examples. Yes, TikTok cracked the addiction algorithm, and China is now using that for propaganda and general sabotage, espionage and shenanigans purposes, and managed to ‘convince’ Trump for now not to ban it, and people were so desperate for their heroin fix some turned to RedNote as ‘refugees.’

Tyler notes he doesn’t use TikTok much. I find it completely worthless and unusable, but even in so doing I do think I kind of understand, somewhat, the kind of addictive haze that it invokes, that pull of spinning the roulette wheel one more time. I’ve watched people briefly use it when we’re both on trains, and yeah I’m Being That Guy but wow did it seem braindead, worthless and toxic AF. Even if they did find videos worth watching for you, given how people scroll, how would you even know?

And how about ‘China seems cool’ being due primarily to… vibes out of TikTok, with the algorithm that is in large part designed to do that?

It’s like when you periodically see a TikTok where some American youth sobs about how hard her life is and how it’s so much better in China, in various ways that are… documented as all being far worse in China.

You are being played.

My main exposure to TikTok is through the comedy show After Midnight. On Tuesday evening, they had an intro that was entirely about DeepSeek, painting exactly (mostly through TikTok) effectively a Chinese propaganda story about how DeepSeek manifested r1 out of thin air for $6 million without any other work, whereas OpenAI and American companies spent billions, and how much better DeepSeek is, and so on. And then host Taylor Tomlinson responded to some of the audience with ‘oh, you’re cheering now? Interesting.’

Part of the joke was that Taylor has no idea how AI works and has never used even ChatGPT, and the routine was funny (including, effectively, a joke about how no one cares if Nvidia stock is down 17%, which is completely fair, why should they, also by the taping it was only down 8%), but the streams crossed, I saw America directly being exposed to even worse takes than I’m used to straight from TikTok’s algorithm when I was supposed to be relaxing at the end of the day, and I really didn’t like it.

Then again, I do bow to one clear way in which China did outperform us.

Ethan Mollick: People don’t talk enough about a giant DeepSeek achievement over most US models – it actually has a reasonable name.

Scott: Well, yes and no, the model is named r1….

Ethan Mollick: Thats fine as long as the next is r2

If they release anything called r1.5, I swear to God.

Sarah (Yuan Yuan Sun Sara from China) suggests perhaps DeepSeek could get into doing AI safety research, maybe even ask for a grant? Certainly there’s great talent there, and I’d love if they focused on those styles of problem. There’d likely be severe corporate culture issues to get through given what they’ve previously worked on, but it’s worth a shot.

Stephen McAleer: I’m hopeful we will figure out how to control superintelligence!

Fouad: you at the office? could use some code review on superintelligence_control.py before i merge

Stephen McAleer: It can surely wait until Monday.

I increasingly worry about the pattern of OpenAI safety researchers thinking about how to ‘control’ superintelligence rather than align it, and how this relates to the techniques they’re currently using including deliberative alignment.

(Note: I still owe that post on Deliberative Alignment, coming soon.)

Are reasoning models including r1 a blackpill for robotics progress?

Kyle Stachowicz: R1’s RL findings are great news for reasoning but grim for robotics. All the major takeaways (ground-truth reward, great base models, grouped rollouts from same initial state, sample-inefficient on-policy algos) are really hard to translate to the physical world.

Chris Paxton: Hot deepseek take: before r1 blew up, a ton of western AI (and robotics!) efforts — startups, big companies, and even academic labs — were basically just waiting for openai to solve all their problems and it was honestly kind of sad. I hope r1 changed that

Scott Reed: True. A lot of groups gave up prematurely, or allocate ~all resources to one giant model. This leads people to spend more effort on winner-take-all gpu politics and less on just training the best models they can with moderate resources.

If anyone wondered what happened to Gato2, gpu game of thrones is (at least partly) what. An interesting counterfactual was the Genie project, which was stubbornly cobbled together mainly out of pooled user quota. This kind of stubborn independence can lead to cool results!

“Um This scaling law model I made says [the world will end / company will die] if you dont give me all the GPUs and block any other team from pretraining”

“No, fyou, I will train my own model”

Yes and no, right?

  1. Relative to o1 and r1 solving physical tasks as well as they solve reasoning tasks, this is obviously very bad news for robotics.

    1. It is bad relative news for robotics.

  2. Relative to o1 and r1 not existing, and us having to use other models, this is obviously very good news for robotics.

    1. It is good absolute news for robotics.

  3. We can use reasoning models to help us figure out how to solve robotics.

  4. I am not as convinced that you can’t use this method in the real world?

It’s going to be relatively hard, but seems super doable to me, I know those in the field will say that’s naive but I don’t see it. The real physical world absolutely 100% has ground truth in it. If you want to train on an accurate reward signal, there’s various trickiness, but there are plenty of things we should be able to measure. Also, with time we should get increasingly strong physics simulations that provide increasingly strong synthetic data for robotics, or simply have so much funding that we can generate physical samples anyway? We’re sample-inefficient relative to a human but you can train a decent reasoning model on 17k data points, and presumably you could bootstrap from there, and so on.

I am not going to quote or name particular people directly on this at this time.

But as Obama often said, let me be clear.

Reasonable people can disagree about:

  1. What it will take for humans to retain control over the future.

  2. How likely is existential risk at any given capabilities level.

  3. What level of open weights model capabilities is a sane thing to allow.

  4. What legal regimes are best to bring desired future states about.

However.

The existence of DeepSeek, and its explicit advocacy of open weights AGI, and potentially having it be the best model out there in the future in many people’s imginations, has been a forcing function. Suddenly, people who previously stuck to ‘well obviously your restrictions are too much’ without clarifying where their line was, are revealing that they have no line.

And many more people than before are revealing that they prefer any or all of:

  1. AGI with alignment only-to-the-user be made open weights.

  2. Chinese open models be the best instead of American closed models.

  3. A world where humans have no collective mechanism to control AIs.

    1. Usually this is justified as ‘anyone with that power would act badly.’

  4. That they get their cool free toys, nothing else matters, fyou. Seriously.

  5. Are effectively successionists, as in they want the AIs to take over, or at least they don’t seem to mind or don’t think we should try and prevent this from happening.

These people are often saying, rather explicitly, that they will use whatever powers they have at their disposal, to ensure that humanity gets to a position that, if you think about it for a minute or five, humanity probably cannot survive.

And that they will oppose, on principle, any ability to steer the future, because they explicitly oppose the ability to steer the future, except when they want to steer the future into a state that cannot then be steered by humans.

No, I have not heard actual arguments for why or how you can put an aligned-only-to-user AGI into everyone’s desktop or whatever, with no mechanism of collective control over that whatsoever, and have this end well for the humans. What that future would even look like.

Nor have I heard any argument for why the national security states of the world, or the people of the world, would ever allow this.

The mask on those is fully off. These people don’t bother offering arguments on any of that. They just say say, essentially, ‘fyou safetyists,’ ‘fyou big tech,’ ‘fyou United States,’ and often effectively ‘fyou rest of humanity.’ They are the xenocide caucus, advocating for things that cause human extinction to own the in-context-libs.

If that is you: I thank you for your candor. Please speak directly into this microphone.

I disagree in the strongest possible terms.

As always, be excellent to each other, and all that.

A large part of this job I’ve assigned to myself is to do a fton of emotional labor.

You have people who are constantly telling you that you’re a cartoon villain because you think that the United States government might want to know if someone trains a frontier model, or that you might think releasing a literal AGI’s weights would be unwise, or that we shouldn’t let China get our best GPUs. You get called statist and totalitarian for positions that are 95th to 99th percentile libertarian. You get outright lies, all the time, from all directions. Much from people trying to incept the vibes they want. And so on.

And the same stuff to varying degrees coming from other directions, too.

Honestly I’m kind of used to it. Up to a point. You get somewhat numb, you build up some immunity, especially when the same sources do it over and over. I accept it.

And even with that, you have to patiently read all of it and respond to the arguments and also try to extract what wisdom might be there from the same sources that are filled with the toxoplasma of rage and trying their best to infect me and others like me as well.

But it’s been a trying time. I see a world determined to try and go down many of the craziest, most suicidal paths simultaneously, where I’m surrounded by equal and opposite bad takes in many dimensions. Where the odds are against us and the situation is grim. In ways that I and others warned about explicitly, including the exact ways and dynamics by which we reached this point.

Make no mistake. Humanity is losing.

Meanwhile, on top of all the Being Wrong on the Internet, the toxoplasma is as bad as it has ever been, with certain sources going so far as to in large part blame not only worried people in general but also me specifically by name for our current situation – and at least one of those people I feel compelled to continue to listen to because they also have unique insights in other ways and I’m sometimes told I have a blind spot there – which I actually rarely hear about other credible sources.

And I still try. But I’m only human and it’s just so damn hard at this point. Especially when they rage about things I said that turned out to be true, and true for exactly the reasons I said they’d be true, but I know trying to point this out wouldn’t do any good.

I don’t know what my solution here is going to be. I do know that things can’t go on like this, I know life isn’t fair and reality doesn’t grade on a curve and someone has to and no one else will but also I only have so much in the tank that handles these things. And I’m going to have to budget that tank, but I want to be clear that I’m going to be doing that, and dropping certainly sources for this reason that I would otherwise have included for completeness.

If this was talking about you, and you’d like to continue this trip, please get it together.

Don’t worry, your argument remains valid. I mean, it’s wrong, but that never stopped you before, why start now?

Time comes for us all.

Matt: Live players in who kills us first?

Peter Wildeford: Yes, that’s one way to look at it.

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