Exotic quantum rifts have been created with charged atoms, and they exist in a superposition of being in two places at once. This is a first step towards better understanding the behaviour of such quantum defects in everything from materials to an entire universe.

Defects are ubiquitous – think of tears in textiles or cloudy imperfections in shiny crystals – but in quantum systems, they can have the extra property of being topological. That means the overall structure of the…

Artificial intelligence makers have faced a mountain of criticism for borrowing from the work of others to train its models. Now the world’s largest publishing house is taking steps to ensure its authors don’t have their work plagiarized in the name of progress.

reports that Penguin Random House Publishing changed the copyright page at the front of its books to address using any of its titles as a source for AI training. Now the wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.”

The new wording also protects against data absorption by noting the publisher “expressly reserves [the titles] from the text and data mining exception.” This part of the amended text comes from a recent regarding text and data mining exceptions and ownership.

Penguin Random House is the latest publishing company to take action against encroaching AI models. Earlier this week,  issued a cease and desist letter to the AI startup Perplexity to spot using its articles and stories to help its AI model create answers for users.

Less than two months after Fluid Truck’s board ousted its sibling co-founders from their executive positions, the company has laid off 30% of its staff, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and found a potential buyer to take on the business, pending court approval, according to bankruptcy filings and information from a former employee. 

Fluid has also been approved on an interim basis as of today for a $7 million loan to keep the business operational and fund the restructuring and sale process through the end of the year.

The bankruptcy filing in a Delaware court comes as the company’s losses mount and it faces several lawsuits, including a class action filed on October 10 in Colorado, after it allegedly failed to pay money owed to members of its Fluid Vehicle Investor Program (FVIP) — a program that allowed individuals, including employees, and small business owners to purchase fleets of vans and trucks to be rented out on the platform under Fluid’s management. 

Fluid Truck has estimated that the number of creditors awaiting payment is at around 5,500. The company owes FVIP members $12 million, and owes vendors $26 million. That’s on top of the $20.6 million in cash losses Fluid Truck suffered in 2023. 

James Eberhard and Jenifer Snyder, Fluid Truck’s sibling co-founders and former CEO and chief legal counsel, respectively, founded the startup, which has been referred to as the Zipcar of commercial vehicles, in 2016. Since then, Fluid Truck has managed to raise more than $80 million in venture funds and expand to 400 cities in 32 states across the U.S. But the company soon found itself in a deep financial hole under the stewardship of Eberhard due to a combination of macroeconomic factors and mismanaged insurance claims. 

Fluid’s deficits accumulated and bad blood started festering between Eberhard and two minority shareholders on the board — Bison Capital and Ingka Investments — according to people familiar with the matter. Eberhard was unable to raise more capital to fund the company’s losses, and in July, the board voted to remove him and Snyder from their roles. 

Eberhard’s replacement, Scott Avila from Paladin Management, began exploring liquidation options in August, according to a declaration he filed in bankruptcy court on October 16.  

But then Fluid Truck received a large, long-awaited payment from a customer, and decided to use that momentum to try to sell the company. That’s when Kingbee Rentals, a van rental agency in West Valley City, Utah, came forward unexpectedly as a potential buyer. 

The only problem? Kingbee couldn’t afford to acquire all of Fluid Truck’s assets on its own. And Fluid Truck couldn’t afford to keep the lights on for much longer. So in its bankruptcy filing, Fluid Truck has asked the courts to approve emergency funding in the form of a $7 million debtor-in-possession (DIP) loan from Kingbee and some existing investors, and the court approved it on an interim basis on Friday.

“The DIP lenders basically said, ‘We’re going to loan you this money, but if the sale doesn’t close by December 31, you’re in default, and we can liquidate the business,” Adam Stein-Sapir, a bankruptcy expert at Pioneer Funding Group, told TechCrunch. “It gives them a hammer to do something if [Fluid] blows past that deadline.” 

It’s unclear how much Fluid Truck will be able to sell its assets for, but Stein-Sapir says it could be around that $7 million mark. That’s bad news for any unsecured lenders, like FVIP members, who will be among those last in line to be paid back. 

“For people who are just unsecured here, it’s looking pretty grim in terms of recovery,” Stein-Sapir said. “Unless they filed a lien or have some kind of security in those funds, they are in some trouble.” 

Fluid Truck did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Worldcoin, the cryptocurrency / human identity network / UBI project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is now known as World. Along with the name change, World introduced an updated version of its eyeball-scanning Orb device which is designed to solve a problem that does not currently exist: authenticating that someone is human “in the age of AI.”

People registered to the system get a World ID that they can use to “securely and anonymously” prove their humanness online, as well as a share of its associated WLD cryptocurrency token.

The new Orb is made with 30 percent fewer parts than its predecessor, which is supposed to make it easier and cheaper to build, and equipped with Nvidia’s robotics and AI platform, Jetson, for some reason. Rich Heley, the chief device officer of Tools for Humanity — the foundation behind the World project — said during an event on Thursday that the simplified design should help achieve the goal of making the Orb widely available.

“To provide access to every human, we need more Orbs. Lots more Orbs. Probably on the order of a thousand times more Orbs than we have today,” Heley said. “Not only more Orbs but more Orbs in more places.” In addition to ramping up production of the Orb, World will even let people purchase or rent their very own eyeball-scanning sphere so they can “start verifying unique humans” in their communities.

It’s also launching a new service called “Orb on Demand” (yes, it’s really called that) that will let people order Orbs “much like a pizza you would have delivered to your apartment,” Heley said. The Orb is also coming to more countries, including Costa Rica, Brazil, Indonesia, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and others.

World says it has verified nearly 7 million “unique humans” so far, despite privacy concerns about building a privately operated global database based on biometrics.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Elite chips have been the star of many AI PCs released to market in 2024, greatly enhancing performance and battery life compared to their previous gen iterations. However, the manufacturer’s recent endeavor to improve on one of its negative points hasn’t panned out.

Qualcomm has canceled its dev kit, a Snapdragon mini-PC powered by Windows on Arms. Originally, it was planned for a June 2024 release window but missed that entirely. Now, as part of an official announcement, Qualcomm has stated that the kit has been canceled because it “has not met our usual standards of excellence.”