We start this week with Emanuel’s rundown on the DeepSeek situation, the Chinese-made AI that has rocked stock markets and the wider AI industry. After the break, Sam explains how metadata in U.S. government memos lists Project 2025 members as the memo authors. In the subscribers-only section, Jason and Sam explain how GitHub is showing…
LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI “co-workers” whose profile images said they were “#OpenToWork.” “I don’t need coffee breaks, I don’t miss deadlines, and I’ll outperform any social media team you’ve ever worked with – Guaranteed,” the profile page for one of these AI accounts called Ella said. “Tired…
Some of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) memos sent to federal workers about firing, hiring freezes, and mandatory return to office demands were seemingly written by people who were previously employed by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks with longstanding loyalties to President Donald Trump, according to metadata on the memos posted…
The hackers behind the massive breach of AT&T data last year hunted through the data for phone numbers and records associated with top officials and their families, including members of the Trump family such as Melania and Ivanka Trump; Kamala Harris; and Marco Rubio’s wife, people familiar with the matter told 404 Media. The news…
Dusty Deevers, a Baptist preacher turned Republican Senator in Oklahoma, introduced eight legislative measures “aimed at restoring moral sanity” that include making pornography a crime punishable by a year in jail. As spotted by Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, Deevers said in a press release that the bills “set…
DeepSeek, a relatively unknown Chinese-developed AI model, is now the most popular app in the US Apple App Store based on hype associated with it releasing an an AI model that outpaces OpenAI’s and other companies’ models on some benchmarks while being trained on older chips at a much lower cost. It has caused Nvidia…
On this special guest episode of the 404 Media Podcast, I talked to Alexzandra Kekesi, VP of Brand and Community at Pornhub. Kekesi started in her current role in August 2023, after working for Pornhub and its parent company for more than a decade. She joined us from Montreal, where Pornhub is headquartered. We discuss…
Welcome back to the Abstract! What a week. It kicked off with Blue Monday, a date considered the most depressing of the year in the Northern Hemisphere for dubious reasons (in short: it was invented, like most of our reality, by an ad campaign). This column will channel the latent crappy vibes with a parade…
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss Nazis celebrating Elon Musk’s salute, Zuckerberg as a kook, dictating your own threat model and a good block/mute ethos. EMANUEL: The first week of Trump’s second term…
You can see the specific steps that a government agency is taking to comply with the Trump administration’s policies against diversity, equity, and inclusion on the agency’s GitHub, which shows it frantically deleting and editing various documents, employee handbooks, Slack bots, and job listings across everything the agency touches. 18F is a much-hyped government agency…
