Tag: big tech

Sam Altman Fumes That It Takes Longer to Train a Human Than an AI, Plus They Eat All That Wasteful Food

AI leaders insist they’ve got humanity’s best interests in mind. If we’re to take them at their word, then we must say: they have a really unfortunate habit of sounding like they have nothing but contempt for the human race.

The latest case in point: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s tone-deaf comments at an event hosted by The Indian Express — made fresh off his skin-crawlingly awkward refusal to join hands with Anthropic’s Dario Amodei on stage with other industry titans — in which he attempted to downplay critiques of AI’s environmental impact. 

For starters, he called it “unfair” to compare the energy costs of training an AI model “to how much it costs a human to do one inference query.” That’s because, as Altman explains, “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

“It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart,” Altman continued. “And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”

Measured that way, “probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis” to humans, Altman said.

Altman also fumed against claims about AI’s water consumption.

“Water is totally fake,” he began, almost taunting quote-miners. “It used to be true, we used to do evaporative cooling in data centers.” 

“But now that we don’t do that,” Altman said, you still see claims like “‘don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query,’ or whatever.” 

“This is completely untrue and totally insane,” he asserted. “No connection to reality.”

No one can deny that humans are costly to bring up in our industrialized age. We should be doing everything realistically possible to bring down our CO2 emissions and stop eating so much meat — but we aren’t, for a number of dispiriting systemic reasons we won’t get into today.

Regardless, at least those costs are going towards keeping human civilization ticking. All the water in agriculture will keep someone fed, and the fossil fuels we burn will keep someone warm. 

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Russia’s FSB Charges Telegram Founder Pavel Durov with Aiding Terrorism

Russia’s Federal Security Service is now pursuing a criminal terrorism case against Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. The charge, “assistance to terrorist activities” under Article 205.1 of the Russian Criminal Code, carries up to 15 years in prison. The accusation was published Tuesday in Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Russia’s official state newspaper, which said the article was “based on materials from Russia’s Federal Security Service” and called Telegram “a tool for hybrid threats.”

The timing is hardly subtle. For months, Moscow has been throttling Telegram’s speed, blocking its voice and video calls, and pushing tens of millions of Russians toward MAX, a state-built messaging app with no end-to-end encryption, legally required integration with the FSB’s surveillance infrastructure, and a privacy policy that allows sharing user data with government authorities on request.

MAX has been pre-installed on every smartphone sold in Russia since September 2025. Telegram, used by more than 90 million Russians every month, is the target. MAX is the replacement. The terrorism charge against Durov is the lever.

Durov responded on his Telegram channel: “Russia has opened a criminal case against me for ‘aiding terrorism.’ Each day, the authorities fabricate new pretexts to restrict Russians’ access to Telegram as they seek to suppress the right to privacy and free speech.”

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Zuckerberg’s “Fix” for Child Safety Could End Anonymous Internet Access for Everyone

Mark Zuckerberg spent more than five hours on the stand in Los Angeles Superior Court on Wednesday, testifying before a jury for the first time about claims that Meta deliberately designed Instagram to addict children.

The headline from most coverage was the spectacle: an annotated paper trail of internal emails, a 35-foot collage of the plaintiff’s Instagram posts unspooled across the courtroom, a CEO growing visibly agitated under cross-examination.

The more important story is what Wednesday’s proceedings are being used to build.

The trial is framed as a child safety case. What it is actually doing, especially through Zuckerberg’s own testimony, is laying the political and legal groundwork for mandatory identity verification across the internet.

And Zuckerberg, rather than pushing back on that outcome, offered the court his preferred implementation plan.

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Iranian Spies Busted: Three Silicon Valley Engineers Charged with Stealing Google Trade Secrets and Funneling Data to Tehran

A federal grand jury has indicted three engineers for stealing hundreds of confidential files from Google and other tech giants, then smuggling the sensitive data to Iran.

The defendants, Samaneh Ghandali, 41, a U.S. citizen; her sister Soroor Ghandali, 32, an Iranian national on a student visa; and Samaneh’s husband Mohammadjavad Khosravi, 40, an Iranian national and legal permanent resident, were all residents of San Jose at the time of the theft.

Samaneh and Soroor previously worked at Google before joining another unnamed tech firm, while Khosravi, a former member of the Iranian army, was employed at a developer of system-on-chip (SoC) platforms, such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series used in high-end Android phones and Apple’s iPhones.

Charged with conspiracy to commit trade secret theft, theft, and attempted theft of trade secrets, and obstruction of justice, the trio allegedly exploited their insider access to steal processor security, cryptography materials, and Snapdragon SoC hardware architecture secrets that serve as valuable intel not readily available to competitors.

The trio routed the files through third-party platforms like Telegram, copied them to personal devices, and even photographed computer screens to dodge digital monitoring.

In a particularly brazen move, just before Samaneh and Khosravi jetted off to Iran in December 2023, she snapped photos of his work screen displaying company secrets.

While in Iran, devices linked to them accessed this pilfered info.

Google caught wind of the scheme in August 2023 when internal security flagged Samaneh’s suspicious activity, leading to her access being revoked.

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OpenAI failed to disclose Canadian trans shooter’s ChatGPT history in meeting with officials day after shooting

In a meeting with the British Columbia government, the day after a trans-identifying 18-year-old carried out a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, OpenAI did not disclose that it had been aware of concerning conversations the shooter had with its chatbot months prior.

The province said in a statement that OpenAI waited until the following day to ask its provincial contact to help connect the company with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. OpenAI handed over evidence that the shooter was banned from using ChatGPT after its automated screening systems flagged his chats last June, according to a company statement.

A previous report found that some employees had wanted the company to alert police about posts involving gun violence, but were ignored.

The Globe and Mail reported that, according to a statement from Premier David Erby’s office, a government representative met with OpenAI employees on February 11 about its interest in opening a satellite office in Canada. The following day, OpenAI requested contact information from the RCMP.

“That request was sent to the director of policing and law-enforcement services, who connected OpenAI with the RCMP,” the statement said. “OpenAI did not inform any member of government that they had potential evidence regarding the shootings in Tumbler Ridge.”

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West Virginia sues Apple, saying iCloud distributed ‘child porn’

West Virginia’s attorney general sued Apple (AAPL.O) on Thursday, accusing the iPhone maker of allowing its iCloud service to become what the company’s own internal communications called the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.”

Attorney General JB McCuskey, a Republican, accused Apple of prioritizing user privacy over child safety. His office called the case the first of its kind by a government agency over the distribution of child sexual abuse material on Apple’s data storage platform.

“These images are a permanent record of a child’s trauma, and that child is revictimized every time the material is shared or viewed,” McCuskey said in the statement.

Apple in a statement said it has implemented features that prevent children from uploading or receiving nude images and was “innovating every day to combat ever-evolving threats and maintain the safest, most trusted platform for kids.”

“All of our industry-leading parental controls and features, like Communication Safety — which automatically intervenes on kids’ devices when nudity is detected in Messages, shared Photos, AirDrop and even live FaceTime calls — are designed with the safety, security, and privacy of our users at their core,” Apple said.

Apple on Thursday said it plans to roll out a feature in the coming weeks that allows users in the U.S. to flag inappropriate content such as nudity directly to Apple via a “Report to Apple” feature. This is already available in Australia and the United Kingdom. Apple said the expansion was previously planned and not in response to West Virginia’s lawsuit.

The U.S. has seen a growing national reckoning over how smartphones and social media harm children. So far, the wave of litigation and public pressure has mostly targeted companies like Meta, Snap, and Google’s YouTube, with Apple largely insulated from scrutiny.

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Berlin Court Orders X to Hand Over Hungarian Election Data to Researchers

A Berlin court has ordered X to hand over data on Hungarian election activity to researchers, ruling in favor of Democracy Reporting International after the platform refused the group’s access requests in November.

The ruling turns on the EU’s censorship law, the Digital Services Act, which requires large platforms to give external researchers access to data for scrutiny of election interference risks. X ignored that obligation. The European Commission fined it €40 ($47) million for that refusal, as part of a broader €120 ($141) million levy, in December.

X’s position throughout has been straightforward: don’t share the data. No response to press inquiries, no compliance, no engagement.

Hungary votes in April in what amounts to a test of Viktor Orbán’s power as he faces his rival Péter Magyar.

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Boasberg Rubber-Stamps DOJ Request To Keep FBI-Twitter Payments Secret

When the Twitter files hit in December of 2022, they revealed that the Biden administration had paid Twitter at least $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 to reimburse the pre-Musk, left-leaning social media giant for a flood of requests. 

During this period, the Biden DOJ was going after vaccine skeptics, lab-leak proponents, 2020 election ‘deniers,’ Catholic parents, Hunter Biden laptop / Burisma content, and conservative news outlets. We also learned that the FBI’s Elvis Chan and crew were holding weekly meeting with Twitter on “misinformation,” and flagged thousands of accounts for the above. 

Days after the Twitter files were released, watchdog group Judicial Watch sued the Biden DOJ, which oversees the FBI, over a FOIA request demanding to know how much the FBI paid Twitter from 2016 onward. The FBI initially refused, but eventually released 44-pages of documents with the key payment details redacted – claiming the data was protected under FOIA’s “Exemption 7(E),” which lets agencies hide info about law enforcement methods if releasing it could help criminals or enemies dodge detection.

Judicial Watch then narrowed their claims to just those redacted payment amounts (JW dropped other issues such as vendor names), however in December of 2025, the Trump DOJ asked Judge James Boasberg for a Motion for Summary Judgement to deny Judicial Watch’s request – effectively concealing the extent to which the FBI, under Trump and Biden, was going after Americans. 

In its request for summary judgement, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office (say it ain’t so!) argued that revealing payments that are tied to real investigations could reveal super secret investigative methods – such as how much the FBI is “engaging” with Twitter vs. other platforms, which could lead to ‘bad guys’ (criminals, hackers, foreign spies) to switch to platforms with less FBI activity, and that it might reveal shifts in FBI priorities over time.

Revealing the quarterly totals could also betray “mosaic theory,” where seemingly harmless info (like one quarter’s payment) can be pieced together with public data (e.g., Twitter’s transparency reports) to form a big picture of FBI strategies.

Earlier this month, Boasberg agreed – ruling that revealing the payments could expose FBI “techniques and procedures” (how they monitor online threats) and help bad actors figure out what the FBI is focused on, allowing them to adapt and change strategies. 

Boasberg wrote in his opinion that the 7(E) exemption is valid because it could “risk circumvention of the law.” 

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Meta’s Zuckerberg denies at LA trial that Instagram targets kids

Meta Platforms chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Feb 18 repeatedly said during 

a landmark trial over youth social media addiction that the Facebook and Instagram operator does not allow kids under 13 on its platforms, despite being confronted with evidence suggesting they were a key demographic.

Mr Mark Lanier, a lawyer for a woman suing Instagram and Google’s YouTube for harming her mental health when she was a child, pressed Mr Zuckerberg over his statement to Congress in 2024 that users under 13 are not allowed on the platform.

Mr Lanier confronted Mr Zuckerberg with internal Meta documents.

The case involves a California woman who started using Instagram and YouTube as a child. She alleges the companies sought to profit by hooking kids on their services despite knowing social media could harm their mental health.

She alleges the apps fuelled her depression and suicidal thoughts and is seeking to hold the companies liable.

Meta and Google have denied the allegations, and pointed to their work to add features that keep users safe.

“If we want to win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,” read one internal Instagram presentation from 2018.

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META Granted Patent That Allows Facebook Users to Post After They Die

A patent granted to META in December gives an inside look at how Facebook users may still be able to post beyond the grave.

According to the patent, the large language model will be “simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased.”

The AI model would essentially replicate the deceased person’s digital presence by analyzing data such as their writing style, tone, and expressed beliefs, allowing it to continue posting content and even commenting on friends’ posts in their voice.

It gets stranger.

The patent also referenced technology that would allow users to have phone calls with the deceased or even video calls.

Per Business Insider:

In the patent, Meta lays out why it thinks people might need this.

If you’re no longer posting online — whether that’s because you need a break from social media or … you … die — your followers’ user experience will be affected. In short, they’ll miss you.

“The impact on the users is much more severe and permanent if that user is deceased and can never return to the social networking platform,” the document says.

To fill that void, Meta would essentially create a digital clone of your social media presence, training a model on “user-specific” data — including historical platform activity, such as comments, likes, or content — to understand how you would (or rather, did) behave.

The patent was filed by META’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth.

Despite being granted the patent, META has claimed it has no plans to implement the technology.

In recent years, the idea of using AI to bring someone back from the dead digitally has gained some momentum.

In 2025, the family of Christopher Pelkey, who was killed in a road rage incident in Arizona, used an AI-generated video of Pelkey as an impact statement in the courtroom.

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