AI’s Rapid Development and Growing Risks #1817

Lead story for Monday, April 28. Doctor Jeffrey Hinton, pioneer of neural network AI,

has escalated fears about AI's rapid development in a CBS News interview. Hinton outlined growing risk, including a 10 to 20 percent chance AI could take over, enhance cyberattacks, authoritarian misuse, and tongue tech company prioritization profits over safety. He compares AI to a dangerous hybrid cub. He warns humanity may be facing an unpredictable and perilous future. Welcome to episode 1,817.

I'm your host, Todd Cochran, and our lead story today. Again, AI is in the news in a way that says, oh, it's gonna kill you. And I think, you know, when these people speak, we have to listen just a little bit. But just like everything else in technology, AI has moved at just incredibly lightning speeds. And I know, just like everyone else that we're getting great utilization out of it. He he he said, I didn't think we'd get here in only forty years.

So, you know, this is someone that's been thinking about this for a long, long, long time. And, of course, this gentleman deserves deserve credit for building the foundation of virtually all neural networks and generative AI that we use today, and you can credit him in recent years with consistency. He still thinks the rapid expansion of AI development and use will lead some fairly dire outcomes. I think we're already seeing some of that already.

In this fresh sit down, the Nobel, prize winner is ratcheting up concerns admitting that when we figured out how to make a computer brain work more like a human brain, he didn't think we'd get here this quickly. And, yes, now we're here. And he basically had four takeaways. There's a ten to 20% risk that AI will take over. The number two, that AI is a cute cub that could grow up someday and bite the hand that feeds it. And we already know

that hackers will be more effective. Banks and such can be at risk. And we definitely know that authoritarians can misuse AI just like the Chinese and others do. Now I will contend to an extent that AI companies aren't focusing on safety. But I guess I just don't fully understand the safety risk at this point, to be to be honest with you. Time will tell on where all this falls out, and it may just be a matter of time for us to, you know, see how this all plays out.

And I'm sure we'll have a few scares along the way. We will see. That is for sure. I wanna welcome you to episode 1,817, and a shout out to our incredible sponsor at GoDaddy. Score exclusive deals and discounts at geatoncentral.com/godaddy. And to all of our listeners, you are the heartbeat of this show. And you wanna support GNC. All you gotta do is head over to ecommercecentral.com/insider and become a GNC insider.

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Join the conversation at geeknews.chat. Of course, you can email me [email protected], or you can hit me up on x at Geek News, and you can even catch me on Facebook. For some reason today, my my, RodeCaster just continues to connect, disconnect, and it's just driving me crazy. I hear it going ding in the background. And for those of you that are live, the audio drops out. For those of you listening later, it doesn't matter. What? Why? Why are you doing this? It's something to do with OBS.

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Share those links with family and friends because every time you use a code, it supports the Geek News Central team here. Thank you for keeping us online and going strong. Yeah. I don't know what's going on. You know? It's just, everything works. But as soon as I turn OBS on, it it it's OBS is what it is. But I hate to say it. OBS in my situation right now is the best solution. It really, really is. If everything would just stay up and running. I don't get it. I really don't. Hey.

Well, thank the Insiders on Thursday. Everything's going well here. Obviously, just a little under twelve or thirteen days to go before I head back to The United States. And, and then I'll be complaining about something in the studio in Michigan, of course. Something, something won't work. Story of my life right now. But, hope you're doing well. Let's go and get into the stack of content. Obviously, this major major power outage that happened in Spain and Portugal, leaving millions

in the dark. Lots of,

lots of rumors on what's going on, but it appears it's some sort of frequency mismatch. When the grid gets up and running in a specific region, even here in The United States, things have to sync.

And, there was some sort of spike that happened and, either power plants coming online or whatever it may be, the Spanish grid operator claims the outage is due to grid oscillation, a phenomenon that occurs when the system is unable to suppress oscillations normally happen as, source and loads enter and leave the system. You know that the cyberattack has been ruled out. Some are saying sun activity, earth magnetism, you name it. But they've been really brought into chaos here.

And, as of this reporting, all the power still was not on and things in Madrid were, were pretty crazy. So, I'm scheduled to go to Madrid in October now and speak at a podcast conference. So, first time going there, I believe. I don't think I've been in Madrid. Least to my recollection, I'm not. So should be interesting.

Hey. SpaceX has launched its 250 Starlink satellite. This happened, this past Sunday, and, it carried 23 of the company's Starlink Broadbeam satellites, including three with direct to cell capability, but, pretty amazing accomplishment. 250 launches by the SpaceX team. For those of you that are Android users, Google Wallet is finally getting one of Apple's Wallet's best features.

And, that involves you being able to basically just add a card very, very simply by holding the card up to the phone, scanning it, and putting in just a couple of details. This is something that, you've been able to do with the iPhone for some time so you don't have to manually enter, enter those numbers. Being warned at three actually, neurotech companies are selling your brain data.

And neurotech companies have access to some of users' most sensitive data and few regulations what they can do with it. Some senators are sounding alarm. And, in a letter to the FTC, they basically said, hey. How are these companies handling this information? What are they doing with it? Let's,

let's have a conversation. The one thing I'll I'll mention today is The Verge has become to almost inaccessible for me. They they'd continue to ask for money even though we're running ads. It just is almost a website that, politically as well has become so nasty. I removed a few articles today, just because it was just so over the top. It had been night you know, it's it's like in tech. Why do why does why do these, sites have to be, political? I just I just don't get it.

T mo has doubled prices because of tariffs. And, so basically, up to this point, there was a rule that allowed items to be imported to The US with a declared value of an hundred of $800. And, that has come to an end. And, and on May 2, no longer will you be able to order stuff that is under under $800 and not pay a tariffs on it. You'll have to. So the end is near in this regard. So T Mo's added the tax 45%. So potentially a $10 t shirt becomes $24.50.

We we will see if they adjust prices downwards. I'm expecting that's gonna happen to a, to a certain extent. That's for sure.

Or, you know and I I think what it is is, there's gonna be some pain here for a bit. I hope not long over deals made, but at some point, something has to give. But, yeah, if you're ordering from T Mobile, the party is over in that regard. WhatsApp is working on video and voice calls for the web app. I don't know if many of you even knew that WhatsApp has a web app. They do. Of course, you can make voice and video calls via your mobile device already, so this may be coming to the web.

And, with Skype and other, applications going out, it kinda makes sense.

Eco eco ecoFLOW has launched a new portable air conditioner and cooler just in time for the summer. So if you have one room that seems to run a little hot or you need air conditioning for a cabin or something like that, this is gonna become available for you to to be able to purchase. It packs 1,800 watts of cooling power, 2,000 watts of heating power, and its built in battery mean it's ideal for off grid usage. There's a 24 watt hour LFP battery inside. How long is it good for?

It'll charge in seventy five minutes, and you'll get up to forty three hours of cooling on a single charge. So, that's pretty significant. They've also have, obviously, some portable refrigerators as well. So, be aware of that. They got a Glacier series. So Ecoflow and Glacier series, for all your off grid needs. Yeah, you can take this big Ecoflow with you and put it in your,

in your if you're glamping, have a have a really fancy, camp. Kickstarter is adding a tariff manager to let creators add surcharges to previously funded products. Backers will have the option decline and get a full refund as well. So if you've backed something recently and it hasn't shipped yet, yep, you're going to have to pay an additional tariff on that. AI helps unveil the cause of Alzheimer disease, identifies a therapeutic candidate.

A new study found the gene recognized as a biomarker for Alzheimer's, which they say is actually a cause of it, was announced by the University of California, San Diego due its to its previous unknown secondary function. Researchers use AI to help unravel the mystery of Alzheimer's and discover a potential treatment that obstructs the genes is you know, basically, the genes of fact.

So a team led, by one of the professors at the university's bioengineering department had previously discovered a potential blood biomarker for

early detection of Alzheimer's called p g eight d h. But now they discovered the correlation, the more protein and RNA that it produces, again, back to RNA, the more advanced the disease and after more research, they end up with a therapeutic candidate, which demonstrated, efficiency that has a potential of being, something that could be tested in clinical trials. So, if this is the case and AI helped out with this, this is big news. This is very, very, very, very big news.

And, we'll see how this, how this develops, from a treatment standpoint and as if more, more diseases are are detected.

If you are an Android user, Google is giving Android its own showcase a week before, Google IO. And this is the first time Google has held such a showcase event before I o. The company says that people have been asking, for more for more ways to learn about how the Android experience is changing and giving the ecosystem its own spotlight ahead of the main event as one way to do that. So the Android show, IO edition, will air on May 13 at 1PM eastern.

Of course, Google IO takes place a week later starting on May 20. So, we'll have more details as this is is announced.

A scientist is claiming that the Big Bang theory is wrong and has sharing a new theory about how the universe was made. And, there's plenty of conspiracy theories, of course. And, of course, I always wanna know is what is the universe expanding into it. Richard Lou of the University of Alabama in Huntsville reckons it was a whole series rather than one individual mega explosion.

He publishes alternative theory that cosmos came about through a number of rapid fire burst, and he's built a model that may explain the missing dark matter and dark energy. So, link will be up in the show notes for those of you that are interested to read through, the full piece. As always, criminals are pretending the Microsoft, Google, and Apple in phishing attacks. Again, they're diverse, impersonating popular tech firms. This is just something that's continuing to happen.

And, just remember, Microsoft, Apple, and Google will not call you. You

need to make sure that you're telling your family members this, but, Mastercard is seeing a rise in fraud, and it just continues again, selling fake services, be aware, or getting a refund for a service that was never done and a charge that was never made. PCWorld is reporting on Brave's browser newest tool, which swats away those annoying cookie pop ups.

Cookie Crumbler, I like that word. Cookie Crumbler combines AI with manual human review to build a database of cookie pop ups and methods to get rid of them. This method for detecting and blocking these ubiquitous cookie consent notices across the web with a variety of approaches. Blocking these pop up was already built into Brave, but blocking the pop up wasn't the biggest problem. According to the announcement, it's doing so without breaking the page afterward.

It requires approaches almost tailored to each individual site as these notices are similar but not identical across the web. So CookieCumber aggregates all the addiction with a large language model combined with human reviewers who can iron out the wrinkles where LLMs make mistake. The bad news, Brave is publishing Cookie Crumbler as an open source tool, so it could be implemented and iterated by other teams. So if you prefer an alternate browser, I don't think that's bad

news. I think that's good news, to be honest with you. Next, Netflix Tundum, t u d u m, twenty twenty event will stream live next month. So Stranger Things, Squid Games, One Piece, and Frankenstein are all going to be there. So they dropped a a trailer teasing someone's going to be at this year's Tudum, which will be streamed live from Kia forms in Los Angeles on May 31. So, if you're interested in this, that's the

first I've heard of the event. I'm not super familiar with it. Feel free to check it out. The FBI finally has placed a bounty on salt typhoons ten million dollars for info on the infamous Chinese hacking group. It says relevant information can result in a bounty of up to $10,000,000. Of course, we know last week the FBI posted a new announcement, asked me for a buck for the public help, and, doesn't it doesn't always a good idea to throw a little bit of a reward on there. So, that's beautiful.

FBI is issuing this announcement to ask a public to report information about PRC affiliate activity. Investigation of these actors' activities have revealed a broad and significant cyber campaign to leverage access to networks and target victims. So, $10,000,000 if you have the, the right information.

That's for sure. 4,000,000 have been affected by Verisource data breach. Verisource says the personal information for a million people was compromised in February in a cyber attack. Also, there was one other one. I guess I don't have it next. It'd been nice if I had that as the next article. Right? So imagine an asteroid so valuable that it was worth $10.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $0.00 $00.

Yes. An an asteroid that was so much full of gold and rare earth minerals that it would make everyone earth a billionaire. Well, let's just realize that if they were actually able to capture this 43,000,000 miles excuse me, 40 40 43 mile asteroid

and get it back to Earth, instantly gold and everything would be worth nothing. Now this value is is is is meaningless meaningless in every way. There's absolutely no way to bring this this asteroid back to Earth. But, they are going to go out and and scientists are gonna be looking at it. And, we're gonna figure it out. But, again, there's goals and then there hills, and the money will be made by those people providing the tools to go get that their goal. That is for sure.

Interesting announcement by LG. They've introduced what they're calling the first QNED TV capable of transmitting audio and video wirelessly. Why do I need a TV that will transmit video wirelessly? This, I do not understand. I understand audio wirelessly. Go into a sound bar or something to that effect. But why do I need video transmitted wirelessly? Someone explained that one to me. A link will be up in the show notes.

If you try to get into Coinbase, they had a two f a factor two f a factor error, and, some people thought that their accounts were hacked. And, logs are showing failed log attempts as failed two FA codes and, no announcement from Coinbase. But whatever it was, they fixed it. So go check your Coinbase account. IOS and Android juice jacking defenses have been trivial to bypass for years.

You know what that is. Right? When you have a public charging system that you probably shouldn't trust, but you plug into otherwise. And if that charging source is connected to a data source, that data source then could get access to your phone. We know that decade ago, Apple and Google started updating iOS to Android that make them less susceptible to juice jacking. Now researchers are revealing that for years, the

mitigations have suffered from a fundamental defect that has made them trivial to bypass. An attacker has really been able to get in for a while, so they say there needs to be some additional security here. It's quite a, good write up of what is happening. Carry your own power banks, please. Do not, plug in to public power unless you absolutely need it. And then when you do, I recommend turning off your phone.

Here is an article from The Verge, and this is the the shit I'm talking about with, with, with The Verge. Elon Musk, Doge ties could get his company out of 2,000,000,000 in potential liability. Of course, this comes from report assembled by the Democratic staff for Assembly and Security and says that he could, if he really worked hard, get out of 2.37 and potential legal liability due to his influence.

I think politicians need to be investigated. That's who we need to be looking at in a big, big way. How do these politicians get rich on their salaries? That's that's what we need to ask. It's being reported that Apple could be planning an affordable vision pro and smart glasses to launch by 2026.

Apple's continuing to expand its effort to extend virtual reality or the XR market and plans to launch more affordable version of its Vision Pro headsets in 2025, late '20 '20 '5, or early twenty twenty

six. So and potentially Apple Glasses. Time will tell on whether or not this happens or not. Oh, here it is. An Oregon agency won't say if hackers stole data in a cyber attack. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on Friday declined to confirm or deny reports that ransomware group Resideo was behind the cyberattacks and stole department data, including sensitive employee information.

The department said a news release on Friday that the claims referenced in recent media coverage were part of its investigation. The department said it had not engaged in ransomware discussions, but not that one had been requested. So, most of the servers were back online after a bit. So did they pay the ransom, or was there not an attack? Google is going cold on Europe, stops making

smart thermostats for continental conditions, and just about bricks some of its older models everywhere. The they slipped its euro plans into a post that announced first and second gen Nest smart thermostats will no longer receive updates as of October 2025. '3 models of exit support are the two thousand eleven first gen learnings thermostat, 2,012 gen learning thermostat, and 2,014 European version of the latter. Google's change means apps, its Nest and home apps won't be able

to remotely control the thermostats after that. So, they're also saying that they will no longer launch new Nest thermostats in Europe. Being that heating systems in Europe are unique and have a variety of hardware and software requirements that will make it challenging. So, that's it for Europe with Nest.

UK regulators wanna ban apps that can make deep fake nude images of children, and I think this is an absolutely fantastic, way to, try to regulate this. And, again, they're calling for a fan on AI deepfakes to create images of children in ways that should not ever be created. I did get an email from, one of our listeners. Let me go ahead and get this loaded for you. It came in from, from Michael. I think it came from oh, it came in from Beau. He said and I was talking about the

EU tax. Now when I say EU tax, I'm saying this in a tongue in cheek way, Bo. He says it's not an EU tax. The competition of laws is different in the EU and The US. I'm not an expert on that, but that is the problem. Meta and Apple have to adjust to the laws in the EU and operate in the EU. Well, the EU basically has made it so hard to do business and do anything and have so many regulations

that because they made it so difficult to operate, that these fines, which are fines and penalties for not following the EU's, you know, rules, they use it as a method to fill their tax coffers. That's what I mean by tax. They're very, very handy about every so often. Yeah. Here's an some more billions of dollars we need from you because you've done something we didn't like. So I I call it a EU government. Let's call it then just, just a raid on on US companies. Let's just do that.

Let's just call it a raid on on EU companies. Got an email from Michael. He said, hey, Todd. Would it be possible to include article links in the newsletter like you used to?

It would save me having to go to the website first to get them. Michael, I do put a link to the episode in, the show notes. I will try but can't promise to put the links in, the email going forward. I'd love it when you support, going to the website, loading the web page. It, always is, advantageous for me. It drives a signal to Google, etcetera. But if I can, I I will? It just adds a few extra steps takes

me a little bit longer. I have to run the the links through a decoder in, in AI to get it in a format that's readable, because we have it, pre produced in the system in HTML, which is not pastable into email unless someone knows how to exactly do that. Let me know, to make it so that it looks like it's on the website. I'll see if I can figure that out. But, again,

thank you for your feedback. I do apologize for complaining about my gear. I I made the choice here to do the things the way I've done. It's just USB devices, are driving me batshit crazy. And, like, for the rest of the show here, everything's been fine. The audio disc anywhere the audio recording's going good, The people that got hurt are people on the live stream.

So on YouTube now, I have to go and replace the video because there's, you know, about sixty seconds of dead air where the, where the road caster just basically flipped me the bird, then sometimes the and it's just because I I don't know if there's not enough power on the u, USB bus or or where the interruption is. Resetting the RODEcaster just does not seem to have any effect. And believe me, I've tried to isolate stuff as to the best of my ability, but I'm it it is what it is at this

point. I guess, you know, as long as we get a good audio recording, we're good. But, I wanna thank you all for being here. Thanks for me being part of the family. Thanks for tuning into the show. Again, thank you for your comments and a big thank you to the insiders out there. We'll recognize your cash donation shortly.

We are confirmed that we're getting Satoshis in again, so feel free to boost away. I wanna thank everyone for being here. Everyone take care. We'll see you on the next edition of the Gitmeid Central podcast on Thursday. Everyone take care. Bye bye.