How to Fight AI Brain Rot at School? For One Country, It’s With Free ChatGPT
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At the core of Estonia’s high school initiative is a custom “Socratic” version of OpenAI’s chatbot that refuses to complete students’ work for them. Instead, it’s instructed to do things such as help plan how to approach a task, or ask questions to explore one’s thinking. Organizers in late April also started distributing a similarly customized version of Google’s Gemini. ...
Researchers in Estonia, working with Stanford University and OpenAI, have been measuring students’ cognitive skills and attitudes toward learning, both before the rollout and after. They hope to announce early results later this year, one of the first large-scale looks at what impact coordinated AI adoption has on skills such as reasoning, retention and confidence. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/estonia-schools-chatgpt-9ff76cc7
These AI models are free, private, and will never say ‘no’
... another type of AI model will never refuse to provide what the user asks for. In recent months, these models have become more accessible and popular.
"Everybody can download and operate their own state-of-the-art model and use it for great things and terrible things," said Noam Schwartz, CEO of Alice, an AI security company that has conducted red-teaming and safety evaluation for AI model developers. ...
But there's a whole other class of AI models whose guardrails are much easier to strip away. They're known as open-weight models. Some are made by tech giants, such as OpenAI and Alibaba, while others are put out by smaller outfits like China's DeepSeek. Like their better-known proprietary counterparts, many possess advanced capabilities such as writing functional code or generating life-like images. Unlike with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, it's easier to permanently remove their built-in safety guardrails – and the companies behind them have no idea how they're being used. ...
Safety guardrails of open-weight models can be weakened or removed in many ways. This is largely because the model developers have made what's known as the model weights available to the public. Model weights are sets of parameters, like knobs and dials in a machine, telling the models how to process information.
One recently developed method called "abliteration" has caught the attention of AI and national security researchers. By tweaking model weights, people can take away the model's ability to say "no."
Hugging Face, which hosts open-source AI models, currently lists over 6,000 abliterated models, compared to about 600 in 2024. ...
Models without guardrails can be both useful and dangerous
It is difficult to get a comprehensive picture of how people are using open-weight models, because these models are run locally on users' computers, and don't need the internet to function. ...
An individual in a pro-ISIS chat room claimed they used an "uncensored" AI to research the amount and type of explosives needed to destroy "Trump Tower in the U.S.," according to the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit that focuses on counterterrorism. ...
See the full story here: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/31/nx-s1-5816391/ai-safety-concerns-danger-open-weight-models-risks
Level up with Universal’s new patent applications
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Universal's proposed system does away with the queue and automated the loading process. In this system, guests would have an assigned time to experience an attraction. When they arrive, they would enter a reception area. An automated ride vehicle would then come to them and take them into the ride.
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See the full story here: https://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/202605/12463/
Two hours that changed AI
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Between the lines: Lurking behind the AI industry's extraordinary momentum is a deepening sense of public anxiety about the pace and scale of disruption.
- Meta began laying off roughly 8,000 workers Wednesday, even as CEO Mark Zuckerberg ramps up one of the most aggressive AI spending sprees in corporate history.
- Recent polling shows that 70% of Americans fear AI is advancing too quickly. Nearly two-thirds say it's unlikely AI will create economic gains that benefit everyone.
The bottom line: The tensions are an early warning of the political and social backlash likely to accompany the AI industry's breakneck expansion.
See the full story here: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/ai-news-cycle-openai-anthropic-spacex
Forget electrons, this breakthrough uses light-matter particles to power AI
Penn scientists may have found a way to power the future of AI with light instead of electricity.
Summary: Researchers at Penn have created a hybrid light-matter particle that could dramatically speed up AI computing while using far less energy. The breakthrough may help replace some electronic computing processes with ultra-efficient light-based technology.
See the full story here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/05/260518041341.htm
‘Mask’ and ‘Eraser’ Director Chuck Russell, Higgsfield Team for AI-Driven Sci-Fi Features ‘Hyperia’ and ‘b’
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“AI only matters in film if it survives the real production process: continuity, lighting, camera language, performance, editability and creative control,” said Geisler. “Our job is to bring these technologies into a professional workflow that directors, actors, cinematographers and VFX teams can actually use on a working set.”
“Hyperia and b are not films with AI inside them,” added Khoze. “They are films born from a synthesis of human imagination, robotics and machine cognition. We are returning to a frontier we helped open, with the tools finally catching up to the vision.” ...
Former Google CEO Gets Booed For Talking About AI At Graduation Ceremony
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What makes the moment especially striking is who was doing the booing. These are students graduating into an AI-first world. A generation that grew up with ChatGPT, Instagram, TikTok algorithms and AI tools embedded into daily life. If anyone was expected to be relatively pro-AI, it was probably them. Instead, the mood inside at the venue reflected something else entirely: anxiety and disdain.
Many young workers now see AI less as a cool productivity tool and more as a direct threat to entry-level jobs, creative work and long-term career stability. That tension has been building for months across industries ranging from media and design to software and customer support. ....
According to Mehra, this is also why aggressive AI evangelism increasingly triggers discomfort instead of excitement. "Any narrative that pushes AI too much is now being seen as a threat, not an upgrade," he says. ...
But "inevitable" does not automatically mean "trusted." That gap may be the real story emerging now. ...
The boos perhaps matter more than people realise because students don't reject technology, far from it, it's because they no longer seem willing to accept Silicon Valley's version of optimism at face value.
See the full story here: https://www.ndtv.com/artificial-intelligence/former-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-booed-at-university-graduation-over-ai-concerns-amid-job-market-fears-11510177
Pope creates artificial intelligence study group as Vatican prepares to release his first encyclical
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The Vatican said Leo had decided to create the in-house study group because of the acceleration in AI's use, “its potential effects on human beings and on humanity as a whole (and) the church’s concern for the dignity of every human being.”
The announcement came a day after Leo signed his encyclical, 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, dated his most important encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” or Of New Things. That document addressed workers’ rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was underway. ...
For the Augustinian pope, generative AI’s ability to misinform and deceive through deepfake imagery is particularly worrisome, given that the search for truth is a fundamental element of his religious order's spirituality. ...
See the full story here: https://www.wral.com/news/ap/889c0-the-vatican-has-said-a-lot-about-artificial-intelligence-a-primer-ahead-of-the-popes-encyclical/
What the jury will actually decide in the case of Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman
While the trial exploring Elon Musk’s case against OpenAI’s other co-founders and Microsoft has covered territory ranging from the breakup of the founders in 2018 to Altman’s firing and rehiring in 2023, the jurors will be considering a set of fairly narrow questions:
- Breach of charitable trust — essentially, did OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman violate a specific agreement with Musk to use his donations to OpenAI for a specific, charitable purpose and not general use by the non-profit?
- Unjust enrichment — did the defendants use Musk’s donations to enrich themselves through OpenAI’s for-profit arm, instead of for charitable purposes?
- Aiding and abetting breach of charitable trust — did Microsoft, through its interactions with OpenAI, know that Musk had specific conditions on its donations and did it play a significant role in causing harm to Musk?
OpenAI has also made three arguments in its defense that the jury will weigh:
- Statute of limitations — a legal deadline by which a lawsuit must be filed. Here, if OpenAI can prove that any harms to Musk happened before August 5, 2021, for the first count; August 5, 2022, for the second count; and November 14, 2021, for the third count, then his claims will be moot.
- Unreasonable delay — Musk, by filing his lawsuit in 2024, delayed his claim in a way that made his request for damages unreasonable.
- Unclean hands — a legal doctrine holding that Musk’s conduct related to his claims against OpenAI was unconscionable and renders them invalid.
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See the full story here: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/14/what-the-jury-will-actually-decide-in-the-case-of-elon-musk-vs-sam-altman/
Fears of an AI breakthrough force the U.S. and China to talk
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In a surprise reversal, quiet discussions have taken place ahead of President Trump’s state visit to China this week to explore reviving talks on an emergency channel, officials told The Times, prompted by shared alarm in Beijing and Washington over the debut of Mythos, Anthropic’s powerful new model. ...
Mythos’ capabilities are seen across the industry and government as those of an unprecedented cyberweapon, able to infiltrate and exploit digital communication systems — including government databases, financial institutions and healthcare programs — with untold consequences. ...
“The Chinese believe there is no single race, but multiple races,” said Scott Kennedy, senior advisor on Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. “The U.S. is focused on achieving AGI, while China is focused on diffusion and applications of AI into the rest of their economy — manufacturing, humanoid robotics, all aspects of the internet of things.” ...
“They are not as AGI-pilled as the United States is, and I think that remains the case today,” Sullivan said, “so they regarded a lot of the conversation in the U.S. around extreme frontier risk — misalignment and loss of control — as a bit abstract, and not really as relevant to how they saw AI diffusing in China.” ...
Spooked after meeting with leaders from America’s top banks over their vulnerabilities, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent internally advised U.S. government reviews of future model releases — a practice already underway in China, where the training parameters for models, known as “weights,” have been publicly released.
Even the suggestion of government oversight sparked backlash from Silicon Valley. Last week, the White House sent out a memo to reassure industry allies that submitting new models for federal review would be strictly voluntary. ...
Those in the industry who most fear what artificial superintelligence could bring have told the Trump administration that talks with China are an existential necessity. ...
See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2026-05-11/fears-of-ai-breakthrough-force-u-s-china-to-talk
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