Free Republic

This YouTube video from Fox Business Clips (uploaded March 25, 2026) is an interview on Mornings with Maria featuring Mackenzie Price, co-founder and CEO of Alpha Schools. Main Topic The segment discusses how AI-driven schools could fundamentally transform education. Alpha Schools uses personalized AI tutors and adaptive learning platforms to tailor education to each student's strengths, weaknesses, and pace—aiming to deliver far better outcomes than traditional one-size-fits-all classrooms. Key Highlights from the Interview Super-short academic days: Students spend only about 2 hours per day on core academics (vs. the usual 6+ hours), yet reportedly achieve top 1–2% national scores in...

After operating in secrecy for years, a startup company called R3 Bio, in Richmond, California, suddenly shared details about its work last week—saying it had raised money to create nonsentient monkey “organ sacks” as an alternative to animal testing. In an interview with Wired, R3 listed three investors: billionaire Tim Draper, the Singapore-based fund Immortal Dragons, and life-extension investors LongGame Ventures. But there is more to the story. And R3 doesn’t want that story told. MIT Technology Review discovered that the stealth startup’s founder John Schloendorn also pitched a startling, medically graphic, and ethically charged vision for what he's called...

"The very feature that causes harm also drives engagement," researchers sayArtificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are so prone to flattering and validating their human users that they are giving bad advice that can damage relationships and reinforce harmful behaviors, according to a new study that explores the dangers of AI telling people what they want to hear. The study, published in Science, tested 11 leading AI systems and found they all showed varying degrees of sycophancy -- behavior that was overly agreeable and affirming. The problem is not just that they dispense inappropriate advice but that people trust and prefer AI...

https://x.com/LimitlesCobz/status/2038108210368745554 LimitLess@LimitlesCobz·Mar 28Do you understand what happened in the last 72 hours..> Egypt shut down its shops at 9pm, mandated work-from-home Sundays, and the government internally called it "war economy mode".. four days after the IMF praised them and unlocked $2,300,000,000..> Turkey's central bank burned through $30,000,000,000 in March defending the lira.. the finance minister everyone called a genius is now considering SELLING the national gold reserves..> Pakistan's PM went on national TV on Eid and announced government salary cuts and a 50% fuel allocation reduction.. they approved a $358,000,000 "austerity fund" and nobody asked austerity from what..> Russia banned...

Every civilization has had its oracles. In ancient Greece, kings traveled to Delphi to consult the Oracle of Apollo. In Babylon, rulers relied on astrologers and diviners to interpret signs in the heavens. Pharaoh's court included magicians and wise men who claimed insight into mysteries beyond human understanding. Humanity has always longed for a voice that could answer life's most difficult questions: What should we do? Where is the world headed? Who can guide us through uncertainty? Today, that voice may be emerging from an unexpected place--not from temples or altars, but from servers, algorithms, and neural networks. Artificial intelligence....

AI can lead mentally unwell people to some pretty dark places, as a number of recent news stories have taught us. Now researchers think sycophantic AI is actually having a harmful effect on everyone. In reviewing 11 leading AI models and human responses to interactions with those models across various scenarios, a team of Stanford researchers concluded in a paper published Thursday that AI sycophancy is prevalent, harmful, and reinforces trust in the very models that mislead their users. "Even a single interaction with sycophantic AI reduced participants' willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, while increasing their own...

Let me tell you, folks, the situation with Iran is going incredibly well, better than anybody could have imagined, and it’s all because of the strength and smart leadership we’ve brought back to America. We’ve got them right where we want them, scrambling and failing, and the results are pouring in like never before. Tremendous progress on every front, and the world is watching us win bigly again. Those IRGC losers thought they could push us around in the Strait of Hormuz, but they were dead wrong, total amateurs. We’re going to blow up all their mines down there, every...

There are four categories. You are in one of them. Nobody asked which one you'd like. I am the CEO of Perplexity. My company is worth $20 billion. I am 31 years old. Last week I said losing your job to AI could be a "glorious" thing. I said it at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference. On a podcast. In front of an audience of people who build the tools. Everyone nodded. I said: "The reality is most people don't enjoy their jobs." I have had one job. I have had it for three years. It made me a billionaire. I...

nothing

Walmart has recently been awarded patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for AI tools that help set pricing decisions. Those patents are getting attention on social media this week as consumers worry about the future of dynamic pricing and so-called surveillance pricing, the practice of charging people different prices for the same goods and services based on their unique attributes. One of the new patents, US-12524776-B2, includes ways for “dynamically and automatically updating item prices” on e-commerce platforms. The patent filing explains that it combines price elasticity data and predicted demand for a given item, and then...

The U.S. Trump administration released a sweeping AI policy framework today covering everything from child safety to copyright. The biggest move: telling states to stop making their own rules. If your company uses AI (and at this point, whose doesn't?), the rules governing what that AI can and can't do are about to change. The question is whether Washington can agree on how.The White House released its National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence today, a four-page legislative blueprint that tells Congress exactly what the administration wants in a national AI law. Seven priority areas. Zero new regulatory agencies. And one...

Peter Theil's Founder's Club Venture Capital Fund is investing 2 billion dollars in a New Zealand AI startup called Halter which uses collars placed on cattle to herd and geofence them and potentially removing the need for physical fencing. The collars are solar powered and allow ranchers to control the movement of cattle from their phone. The collars can be used to drive cattle to new pasture and new sources of food and water. It sounds sort of crazy to me, but I'm not a rancher and don't know how much this type of technology assuming it works will benefit...

It's a ~24-minute video that primarily consists of a transcript/narration of a major speech by Elon Musk. In it, Musk announces a massive collaborative project between SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla to build what's called a "Terafab" — an unprecedented advanced chip fabrication facility (described as "the most epic chip building exercise in history"). Key points from the announcement: The goal is to produce 1 terawatt (1,000 gigawatts) of compute capacity per year, combined with terawatt-scale solar power — much of it deployed in space. This is framed as essential to advance humanity on the Kardashev scale (toward Type 1 civilization...

It’s not just the stocks of software companies that are taking hits from worries about artificial intelligence. In the private credit market, where loans to software firms had become a favored sector over the last five years, sentiment has soured. The concern in both markets is that AI threatens the profit margins and underlying business models of many software companies by reducing the barriers to entry and enabling customers to build their own software. Those worries strike at the heart of the reasons many lenders had for issuing the loans: fat profit margins for software companies, stable customer bases, and...

Engineering school taught us to write code. It never taught us to write. Now writing is the whole job. I went to engineering school at the University of Virginia. I appreciated the education. The engineering program is rigorous. I learned differential equations, thermodynamics, signal processing, data structures, and enough physics to respect what I didn’t understand. (And, I barely made it through.) I now wish I had majored in English if you’d told me that thirty years ago, I would have laughed at you, and then gone back to failing an electromagnetics exam. You know what I didn’t learn? How...

A year after the actor’s death, a generative AI version of Val Kilmer will co-star in an independent film, in one of the boldest uses yet of artificial intelligence in moviemaking. First Line Films announced Wednesday that Kilmer has posthumously joined the cast of a film titled “As Deep as the Grave.” The producers said that, before his death, Kilmer had signed on to perform in the movie but was unable to because of his health. Kilmer’s estate gave permission for his digital replication, and is being compensated for it. Mercedes Kilmer, the actor’s daughter, said the role resonated with...

Artificial intelligence seeks to emulate the faculties of the human mind through computational systems, a synthetic recreation of our brains’ capabilities to perceive, learn, and reason. Now, a company claims to have taken a totally different tack by simulating the 125,000 neurons and 50 million synaptic connections of an adult fruit fly’s brain — and then letting it roam inside a Matrix-like virtual environment. In a video shared by Eon Systems cofounder Alex Weissner-Gross, the crudely animated insect can be seen stretching its legs inside a simulated sandbox, rubbing its front feet together and using its labellum to drink from...

Meta Platforms may shrink its workforce by up to 20% in a sign that artificial-intelligence productivity gains are finally materializing. According to a Reuters report from Friday, Meta has not finalized specific dates or details for cuts but is considering widespread reductions to its workforce. The company had nearly 79,000 employees as of its last annual filing. A Meta spokesperson told Reuters, “This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches.” The company didn’t respond to a MarketWatch request for comment. But Wall Street seems encouraged that the company is thinking about paring back its staff. Shares are up 2.9% in Monday’s...

Palantir is still using Anthropic’s Claude as the artificial intelligence startup’s clash with the Pentagon plays out, CEO Alex Karp told CNBC Thursday. “The Department of War is planning to phase out Anthropic; currently, it’s not phased out,” Karp told CNBC’s Seema Mody at Palantir’s AIPcon 9 in Maryland. “Our products are integrated with Anthropic, and in the future, it will probably be integrated with other large language models.” The Department of Defense officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk last week, but is still using Claude models to support the war in Iran, as CNBC previously reported. Anthropic sued the...

Palantir CEO Alex Karp says AI will upend society and that even people in tech underestimate "how disruptive these technologies are." "If you are going to disrupt the economic and, therefore, political power significantly of one party's base, highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat, and military and working class people who do not feel supported, and you feel like that's, you believe that that's going to work out politically — you're in an insane asylum," Karp told CNBC on Thursday on the sidelines of AIPCon 9 in Maryland. Karp said that, since AI will largely disrupt white-collar...