A Northeastern University student demanded her tuition money back after discovering her business professor was secretly using AI to create course materials. Ella Stapleton, who graduated this year, grew suspicious when she noticed telltale signs of AI generation in her professor's lecture notes, including a stray ChatGPT citation in the bibliography, recurring typos matching machine outputs, and images showing figures with extra limbs.

"He's telling us not to use it, and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told the New York Times. After filing a formal complaint with Northeastern's business school, Stapleton requested a tuition refund of about $8,000 for the course. The university ultimately rejected her claim. Professor Rick Arrowood acknowledged using ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and presentation generator Gamma. "In hindsight, I wish I would have looked at it more closely," he said.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from The Guardian, written by columnist Emma Brockes: Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a promotional tour to talk up the potential of AI in human relationships. I know; listening to Zuck on friendship is a bit like taking business advice from Bernie Madoff or lessons in sportsmanship from Tonya Harding. But at recent tech conferences and on podcasts, Zuck has been saying he has seen the future and it's one in which the world's "loneliness epidemic" is alleviated by people finding friendship with "a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do." In essence, we'll be friends with AI, instead of people. The missing air quotes around "knows" and "understands" is a distinction we can assume Zuck neither knows nor understands.

This push by the 41-year-old tech leader would be less startling if it weren't for the fact that semi-regularly online now you can find people writing about their relationships with their AI therapist or chatbot and insisting that if it's real to them, then it's real, period. The chatbot is, they will argue, "actively" listening to them. On a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel last month Zuck envisaged a near-future in which "you'll be scrolling through your feed, and there will be content that maybe looks like a Reel to start, but you can talk to it, or interact with it and it talks back." The average American, he said, has fewer than three friends but needs more. Hey presto, a ready solution.

The problem, obviously, isn't that chatting to a bot gives the illusion of intimacy, but that, in Zuckerberg's universe, it is indistinguishable from real intimacy, an equivalent and equally meaningful version of human-to-human contact. If that makes no sense, suggests Zuck, then either the meaning of words has to change or we have to come up with new words: "Over time," says Zuckerberg, as more and more people turn to AI friends, "we'll find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate why that is valuable." ... The sheer wrongness of this argument is so stark that it puts anyone who gives it more than a moment's thought in the weird position of having to define units of reality as basic as "person." To extend Zuckerberg's logic: a book can make you feel less alone and that feeling can be real. Which doesn't mean that your relationship with the author is genuine, intimate or reciprocated in anything like the way a relationship with your friends is.

Microsoft has stopped production of the Surface Laptop Studio 2 and will mark it as end-of-life in June, with no successor currently planned. Tom's Hardware reports: The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is being put out to pasture quietly, much like other devices that the company has sunset. The Surface Studio, a desktop PC that folded down into a creative studio for drawing, was formally discontinued in December without a successor. Microsoft's audio products, the Surface Headphones 2 and Surface Earbuds, have also quietly disappeared.

The Surface Laptop Studio's discontinuance comes at a hazy time for the Surface brand. On the one hand, two new devices -- the Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch -- were just announced and are set to release next week. On the other hand, the lineup lost its champion, former chief Panos Panay, who left Microsoft for Amazon in 2023, reportedly over budget issues and product cancellations. Panay was succeeded by Pavan Davuluri.

Since Panay's departure, the lineup has been cut down to just the Surface Laptop, Surface Pro, and the Surface Go 4, the latter of which is only sold to business customers at the moment. Without the Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft has removed systems with discrete GPUs from its hardware lineup, potentially alienating creatives and gamers. Prior to the Surface Laptop Studio, Microsoft's powerhouse system was the Surface Book, which combined a tablet with a base featuring a discrete GPU.

At its second annual Upfront 2025 event yesterday, Netflix announced that it has created interactive mid-roll ads and pause ads that incorporate generative AI. These new ad formats are expected to roll out in 2026. Ars Technica reports: "[Netflix] members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves," Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said. Netflix started testing pause ads in July 2024, per The Verge. Speaking to advertisers, Reinhard claimed that ad subscribers spend 41 hours per month on Netflix on average. The new ad formats follow Netflix's launch of its own in-house advertising platform in the US in April. It had previously debuted the platform in Canada and plans to expand it globally by June, per The Verge.

Netflix considers its advertising business to be in its early stages, meaning customers can expect the firm's ad efforts to continue expanding at a faster rate over the coming years. The company plans to double its advertising revenue in 2025. "The foundations of our ads business are in place, and going forward, the pace of progress will be even faster," Reinhard said today. Further reading: Netflix Says Its Ad Tier Now Has 94 Million Monthly Active Users

The Federal Trade Commission has postponed enforcement of its consumer-friendly "click to cancel" rule from May 14 to July 14, giving businesses two additional months to comply. The regulation requires companies to make subscription cancellations as straightforward as the sign-up process, prohibiting practices like forcing customers who subscribed online to navigate through chatbots or call centers to cancel.

The rule, established under former Democratic Chair Lina Khan, unsurprisingly has garnered support from consumer advocates while facing legal opposition from industry groups. A coalition including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and organizations representing major telecom and media companies -- Charter Communications, Comcast, Disney Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Discovery -- has sued to block implementation, claiming the agency exceeded its authority.

Nvidia-backed CoreWeave plans to spend up to $23 billion this year on AI infrastructure and data center capacity, as it aims to meet the booming demand from clients. Reuters reports: The heavy spending plan weighed on its shares, which fell 5% after surging as much as 11% on better-than-expected revenue in its first results as a public company after debuting on the Nasdaq in March. The company's projected capital expenditure of between $3 billion and $3.5 billion for the second quarter was way above its revenue expectation of $1.06 billion to $1.1 billion. "While the revenue from Microsoft is likely secure for the next three years, CoreWeave represents overflow capacity for Microsoft, which may not need that capacity in the future," D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria said.

The company's revenue backlog was $25.9 billion as of March 31, with its five-year deal with OpenAI adding $11.2 billion to the pile up. As part of the deal signed in March, CoreWeave will provide AI infrastructure to OpenAI, while the ChatGPT maker will get a stake. CoreWeave expects annual revenue of $4.9 billion to $5.1 billion, above analysts' expectation of $4.61 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. It reported revenue of $981.6 million for the first quarter, beating the estimate of $852.9 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's DeepMind research division claims its newest AI agent marks a significant step toward using the technology to tackle big problems in math and science. The system, known as AlphaEvolve, is based on the company's Gemini large language models (LLMs), with the addition of an "evolutionary" approach that evaluates and improves algorithms across a range of use cases. AlphaEvolve is essentially an AI coding agent, but it goes deeper than a standard Gemini chatbot. When you talk to Gemini, there is always a risk of hallucination, where the AI makes up details due to the non-deterministic nature of the underlying technology. AlphaEvolve uses an interesting approach to increase its accuracy when handling complex algorithmic problems.

According to DeepMind, this AI uses an automatic evaluation system. When a researcher interacts with AlphaEvolve, they input a problem along with possible solutions and avenues to explore. The model generates multiple possible solutions, using the efficient Gemini Flash and the more detail-oriented Gemini Pro, and then each solution is analyzed by the evaluator. An evolutionary framework allows AlphaEvolve to focus on the best solution and improve upon it. Many of the company's past AI systems, for example, the protein-folding AlphaFold, were trained extensively on a single domain of knowledge. AlphaEvolve, however, is more dynamic. DeepMind says AlphaEvolve is a general-purpose AI that can aid research in any programming or algorithmic problem. And Google has already started to deploy it across its sprawling business with positive results. DeepMind's AlphaEvolve AI has optimized Google's Borg cluster scheduler, reducing global computing resource usage by 0.7% -- a significant cost saving at Google's scale. It also outperformed specialized AI like AlphaTensor by discovering a more efficient algorithm for multiplying complex-valued matrices. Additionally, AlphaEvolve proposed hardware-level optimizations for Google's next-gen Tensor chips.

The AI remains too complex for public release but that may change in the future as it gets integrated into smaller research tools.

Google has warned that the hacker group known as "Scattered Spider," which recently disrupted UK retailer Marks & Spencer, is now targeting U.S. retailers with aggressive and sophisticated cyberattacks. "U.S. retailers should take note. These actors are aggressive, creative, and particularly effective at circumventing mature security programs," John Hultquist, an analyst at Google's cybersecurity arm, said in an email sent on Wednesday. The Guardian reports: Scattered Spider is widely reported to have been behind the particularly disruptive hack at M&S, one of the best-known names in British business, whose online operations have been frozen since 25 April. It has a history of focusing on a single sector at a time and is likely to target retail for a while longer, Hultquist said. Just a day before Google's warning, M&S announced that some customer data had been accessed, but this did not include usable payment or card details, or any account passwords. The Guardian understands the details taken are names, addresses and order histories. M&S said personal information had been accessed because of the "sophisticated nature of the incident."

"Today, we are writing to customers informing them that due to the sophisticated nature of the incident, some of their personal customer data has been taken," the company said. Hackers from the Scattered Spider ecosystem have been behind a slew of disruptive break-ins on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2023, hackers tied to the group made headlines for hacking the casino operators MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment. Law enforcement has struggled to get a handle on the Scattered Spider hacking groups, in part because of their amorphousness, the hackers' youth, and a lack of cooperation from cybercrime victims.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sony just announced its financial forecast for the next year, and it's expecting to be impacted by tariffs to the tune of 100 billion yen (about $680 million). To compensate, the company says it's considering options including moving manufacturing to the US and increasing prices for consumers.

Speaking to investors during the company's earnings call, Sony CFO Lin Tao confirmed that the company is considering "passing on" the price of tariffs to consumers in order to mitigate the impact on its bottom line. Tao didn't mention the PS5 by name though, and it's possible that Sony could try to protect pricing on its console through increases elsewhere in its electronics business. Sony has already increased the price of the PS5 this year, but only in the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has threatened to revoke EchoStar licenses for radio frequency bands coveted by rival firms including SpaceX, which alleges that EchoStar is underutilizing the spectrum. "I have directed agency staff to begin a review of EchoStar's compliance with its federal obligations to provide 5G service throughout the United States per the terms of its federal spectrum licenses," Carr wrote in a May 9 letter to EchoStar Chairman Charles Ergen. EchoStar and its affiliates "hold a large number of FCC spectrum licenses that cover a significant amount of spectrum," the letter said.

Ergen defended his company's wireless deployment but informed investors that EchoStar "cannot predict with any degree of certainty the outcome" of the FCC proceedings. The letter from Carr and Ergen's statement is included in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing submitted by EchoStar today. EchoStar's stock price was down about 8 percent in trading today. EchoStar bought Dish Network in December 2023 and offers wireless service under the Boost Mobile brand. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the firm "has spent years wiring thousands of cellphone towers to help Boost become a wireless operator that could rival AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, but the project has been slow-going. Boost's subscriber base has shrunk in the five years since Ergen bought the brand from Sprint." [...]

EchoStar will have to prove its case in the two FCC proceedings. The FCC set a May 27 deadline for the first round of comments in both proceedings and a June 6 deadline for reply comments. The proceedings could result in the FCC letting other companies use the spectrum and other remedies. "In particular, we seek information on whether EchoStar is utilizing the 2 GHz band for MSS consistent with the terms of its authorizations and the Commission's rules and policies governing the expectation of robust MSS," the FCC Space Bureau's call for comments said. "We also seek comment on steps the Commission might take to make more intensive use of the 2 GHz band, including but not limited to allowing new MSS entrants in the band." Last month, SpaceX urged the FCC to reallocate the spectrum, saying "the 2 GHz band remains ripe for sharing among next-generation satellite systems that seek to finally make productive use of the spectrum for consumers and first responders."

EchoStar countered that SpaceX's filing is "intended to cloak another land grab for even more free spectrum," and that its "methodology is completely nonsensical, given that EchoStar's terrestrial deployment is subject to population-based milestones that EchoStar has repeatedly demonstrated in status reports."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A new report claims that Nvidia has recently raised the official prices of nearly all of its products to combat the impact of tariffs and surging manufacturing costs on its business, with gaming graphics cards receiving a 5 to 10% hike while AI GPUs see up to a 15% increase.

As reported by Digitimes Taiwan, Nvidia is facing "multiple crises," including a $5.5 billion hit to its quarterly earnings over export restrictions on AI chips, including a ban on sales of its H20 chips to China.

Digitimes reports that CEO Jensen Huang has been "shuttling back and forth" between the US and China to minimize the impact of tariffs, and that "in order to maintain stable profitability," Nvidia has reportedly recently raised official prices for almost all its products, allowing its partners to increase prices accordingly.

The United States and China said Monday they reached an agreement to temporarily reduce the tariffs [non-paywalled source] they have imposed on each other in an attempt to defuse the trade war threatening the world's two largest economies. From a report: In a joint statement, the countries said they would suspend their respective tariffs for 90 days while they negotiate. Under the agreement, the United States would reduce the tariff on Chinese imports to 30 percent from its current 145 percent, while China would lower its import duty on American goods to 10 percent from 125 percent.

"We concluded that we have a shared interest," said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at a news conference in Geneva where U.S. and Chinese officials met over the weekend. "The consensus from both delegations is that neither side wanted a decoupling," he said. The agreement breaks an impasse that had brought trade between China and the United States to a halt. Many American businesses had suspended orders, holding out hope that the two countries could strike a deal to bring down the tariff rates while raising the spectre of price increases.

Business Insider tells the story in three bullet points:

- Big Tech companies depend on content made by others to train their AI models.

- Some of those creators say using their work to train AI is copyright infringement.

- The U.S. Copyright Office just published a report that indicates it may agree.

The office released on Friday its latest in a series of reports exploring copyright laws and artificial intelligence. The report addresses whether the copyrighted content AI companies use to train their AI models qualifies under the fair use doctrine. AI companies are probably not going to like what they read...

AI execs argue they haven't violated copyright laws because the training falls under fair use. According to the U.S. Copyright Office's new report, however, it's not that simple. "Although it is not possible to prejudge the result in any particular case, precedent supports the following general observations," the office said. "Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative. The extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs — all of which can affect the market."

The office made a distinction between AI models for research and commercial AI models. "When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training," the office said. "But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."
The report says outputs "substantially similar to copyrighted works in the dataset" are less likely to be considered transformative than when the purpose "is to deploy it for research, or in a closed system that constrains it to a non-substitutive task."

Business Insider adds that "A day after the office released the report, President Donald Trump fired its director, Shira Perlmutter, a spokesperson told Business Insider."

OpenAI is currently in "a tough negotiation" with Microsoft, the Financial Times reports, citing "one person close to OpenAI."

On the road to building artificial general intelligence, OpenAI hopes to unlock new funding (and launch a future IPO), according to the article, which says both sides are at work "rewriting the terms of their multibillion-dollar partnership in a high-stakes negotiation...."

Microsoft, meanwhile, wants to protect its access to OpenAI's cutting-edge AI models... [Microsoft] is a key holdout to the $260bn start-up's plans to undergo a corporate restructuring that moves the group further away from its roots as a non-profit with a mission to develop AI to "benefit humanity". A critical issue in the deliberations is how much equity in the restructured group Microsoft will receive in exchange for the more than $13bn it has invested in OpenAI to date.

According to multiple people with knowledge of the negotiations, the pair are also revising the terms of a wider contract, first drafted when Microsoft first invested $1bn into OpenAI in 2019. The contract currently runs to 2030 and covers what access Microsoft has to OpenAI's intellectual property such as models and products, as well as a revenue share from product sales. Three people with direct knowledge of the talks said Microsoft is offering to give up some of its equity stake in OpenAI's new for-profit business in exchange for accessing new technology developed beyond the 2030 cut off...

Industry insiders said a failure of OpenAI's new plan to make its business arm a public benefits corporation could prove a critical blow. That would hit OpenAI's ability to raise more cash, achieve a future float, and obtain the financial resources to take on Big Tech rivals such as Google. That has left OpenAI's future at the mercy of investors, such as Microsoft, who want to ensure they gain the benefit of its enormous growth, said Dorothy Lund, professor of law at Columbia Law School.
Lund says OpenAI's need for investors' money means they "need to keep them happy." But there also appears to be tension from how OpenAI competes with Microsoft (like targeting its potential enterprise customers with AI products). And the article notes that OpenAI also turned to Oracle (and SoftBank) for its massive AI infrastructure project Stargate. One senior Microsoft employee complained that OpenAI "says to Microsoft, 'give us money and compute and stay out of the way: be happy to be on the ride with us'. So naturally this leads to tensions. To be honest, that is a bad partner attitude, it shows arrogance."

The article's conclusion? Negotiating new deal is "critical to OpenAI's restructuring efforts and could dictate the future of a company..."

"The romantic partner of Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes has launched a start-up that sounds eerily similar to the venture that landed his girlfriend behind bars," writes The Daily Beast.

He's incorporated "Haemanthus" in Delaware a year and a half ago (though the company operates out of his neighborhood in Austin), according to the New York Times. Haemanthus appears to have around 10 employees.

From The Daily Beast: California hotel heir Billy Evans' new company is a blood-testing firm that markets itself as "the future of diagnostics," offering "a radically new approach to health testing," according to The New York Times. In other words, exactly what Theranos said it would do. Holmes is even advising the start-up from the Texas prison where she is serving out an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, sources told NPR... Evans has managed to raise nearly $20 million in funds from both friends and established investors in Austin and San Francisco, according to the investor materials.
The Times reports that Evan's company "plans to begin with testing pets for diseases before progressing to humans, according to two investors pitched on the company."

And TechCrunch reminds readers that Elizabeth Holmes said in a recent interview "that she remains 'completely committed to my dream of making affordable healthcare solutions available to everyone.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Using AI can be a double-edged sword, according to new research from Duke University. While generative AI tools may boost productivity for some, they might also secretly damage your professional reputation. On Thursday, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a study showing that employees who use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini at work face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from colleagues and managers. "Our findings reveal a dilemma for people considering adopting AI tools: Although AI can enhance productivity, its use carries social costs," write researchers Jessica A. Reif, Richard P. Larrick, and Jack B. Soll of Duke's Fuqua School of Business.

The Duke team conducted four experiments with over 4,400 participants to examine both anticipated and actual evaluations of AI tool users. Their findings, presented in a paper titled "Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI," reveal a consistent pattern of bias against those who receive help from AI. What made this penalty particularly concerning for the researchers was its consistency across demographics. They found that the social stigma against AI use wasn't limited to specific groups. "Testing a broad range of stimuli enabled us to examine whether the target's age, gender, or occupation qualifies the effect of receiving help from Al on these evaluations," the authors wrote in the paper. "We found that none of these target demographic attributes influences the effect of receiving Al help on perceptions of laziness, diligence, competence, independence, or self-assuredness. This suggests that the social stigmatization of AI use is not limited to its use among particular demographic groups. The result appears to be a general one."

Huawei has launched its first laptop running HarmonyOS instead of Windows, complete with AI features and support for over 2,000 mostly China-focused apps. The product is largely a result of U.S. sanctions that prevented U.S.-based companies like Google and Microsoft from doing business with Huawei, forcing the company to develop its own in-house solution. Liliputing reports: Early version of HarmonyOS were basically skinned version of Android, but over time Huawei has moved the two operating systems further apart and it now includes Huawei's own kernel, user interface, and other features. The version designed for laptops features a desktop-style operating system with a taskbar and dock on the bottom of the screen and support for multitasking by running multiple applications in movable, resizable windows.

Since this is 2025, of course Huawei's demos also heavily emphasize AI features: the company showed how Celia, its AI assistant, can summarize documents, help prepare presentation slides, and more. While the operating system won't support the millions of Windows applications that could run on older Huawei laptops, the company says that at launch it will support more than 2,000 applications including WPS Office (an alternative to Microsoft Office that's developed in China), and a range of Chinese social media applications.

CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that became a household name after causing a massive global IT outage last year, has announced it will cut 5% of its workforce in part due to "AI efficiency." From a report: In a note to staff earlier this week, released in stock market filings in the US, CrowdStrike's chief executive, George Kurtz, announced that 500 positions, or 5% of its workforce, would be cut globally, citing AI efficiencies created in the business.

"We're operating in a market and technology inflection point, with AI reshaping every industry, accelerating threats, and evolving customer needs," he said. Kurtz said AI "flattens our hiring curve, and helps us innovate from idea to product faster," adding it "drives efficiencies across both the front and back office. AI is a force multiplier throughout the business," he said. Other reasons for the cuts included market demand for sustained growth and expanding the product offering.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Panasonic will undertake a major restructuring across a range of its business, including consumer electronics, cutting 10,000 jobs globally, as the Japanese company plans to streamline, spinning out struggling divisions in hopes of reversing its dwindling market share and fending off fierce Chinese competition. Panasonic did not say which businesses it intended to shrink. The company expects to book structural reform costs of roughly $900 million this business year. Panasonic ended the fiscal year

Facing deep staffing cuts, the IRS plans to lean heavily on AI to maintain tax collection efforts, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stating that smarter IT and the "AI boom" will offset reductions in revenue enforcement staff. The Register reports: When asked by Congressman Steny Hoyer (D-MD) whether proposed reductions in the IRS's IT budget, along with plans to cut additional staff, would affect the agencies ability to collect tax revenue, Bessent said it wouldn't, thanks to the current "AI boom." "I believe through smarter IT, through this AI boom, that we can use that to enhance collections," Bessent told Hoyer and the Committee (24:29 into the video linked [here]). "I expect collections would continue to be very robust as they were this year."

Bessent's comments didn't explain how the IRS intends to deploy AI. Given how much it has slashed its enforcement staff since Trump took office, the agency definitely needs to do something. [...] Bessent's comments didn't explain how the IRS intends to deploy AI. Given how much it has slashed its enforcement staff since Trump took office, the agency definitely needs to do something. "There is nothing that shows historically that bringing in unseasoned collections agents will result in more collections," Bessent told the Committee. "IRS already uses AI for business functions including operational efficiency, compliance and fraud detection, and taxpayer services," the agency told The Register. "AI use cases must follow all relevant IRS privacy and security policies."