A screenshot of the 2025 USAMO Problem #1 and a solution, shown on the AoPSOnline website. Credit: AoPSOnline The US Math Olympiad (USAMO) serves as a qualifier for the International Math Olympiad and presents a much higher bar than tests like the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME). While AIME problems are difficult, they require integer ..
Tag : Biz & IT
The FBI is offering $10 million for information about the China-state hacking group tracked as Salt Typhoon and its intrusion last year into sensitive networks belonging to multiple US telecommunications companies. Salt Typhoon is one of a half-dozen or more hacking groups that work on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. Intelligence agencies and ..
Cultivating the future So what might a sustainable ecosystem for human creativity actually involve? Legal and economic approaches will likely be key. Governments could legislate that AI training must be opt-in, or at the very least, provide a collective opt-out registry (as the EU’s “AI Act” does). Other potential mechanisms include robust licensing or royalty systems, such ..
Russian military personnel are being targeted with recently discovered Android malware that steals their contacts and tracks their location. The malware is hidden inside a modified app for Alpine Quest mapping software, which is used by, among others, hunters, athletes, and Russian personnel stationed in the war zone in Ukraine. The app displays various topographical ..
Owing to the aspirational state of things, OpenAI writes, “Our production models do not yet fully reflect the Model Spec, but we are continually refining and updating our systems to bring them into closer alignment with these guidelines.” In a February 12, 2025 interview, members of OpenAI’s model-behavior team told The Verge that eliminating AI ..
On Monday, OpenAI announced the GPT-4.1 model family, its newest series of AI language models that brings a 1 million token context window to OpenAI for the first time and continues a long tradition of very confusing AI model names. Three confusing new names, in fact: GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini, and GPT‑4.1 nano. According to OpenAI, ..
Nvidia announced plans today to manufacture AI chips and build complete supercomputers on US soil for the first time, commissioning over one million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. The politically timed move comes amid rising US-China tensions and the Trump administration’s push for domestic manufacturing. Nvidia’s announcement comes less than two ..
Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds. When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, ..
The current generative Quake II demo represents a slight advancement from Microsoft’s previous generative AI gaming model (confusingly titled “WHAM” with only one “M”) we covered in February. That earlier model, while showing progress in generating interactive gameplay footage, operated at 300×180 resolution at 10 frames per second—far below practical modern gaming standards. The new ..
A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that ..
