Tracking code that Meta and Russia-based Yandex embed into millions of websites is de-anonymizing visitors by abusing legitimate Internet protocols, causing Chrome and other browsers to surreptitiously send unique identifiers to native apps installed on a device, researchers have discovered. Google says it’s investigating the abuse, which allows Meta and Yandex to convert ephemeral web identifiers into persistent mobile app user identities.
The covert tracking—implemented in the Meta Pixel and Yandex Metrica trackers—allows Meta and Yandex to bypass core security and privacy protections provided by both the Android operating system and browsers that run on it. Android sandboxing, for instance, isolates processes to prevent them from interacting with the OS and any other app installed on the device, cutting off access to sensitive data or privileged system resources. Defenses such as state partitioning and storage partitioning, which are built into all major browsers, store site cookies and other data associated with a website in containers that are unique to every top-level website domain to ensure they’re off-limits for every other site. — Read More
Monthly Archives: June 2025
The Shape of Things to Come
Amazon ‘testing humanoid robots to deliver packages’: Amazon is reportedly developing software for humanoid robots that could perform the role of delivery workers and “spring out” of its vans.
… The Information reported that the robots could eventually take the jobs of delivery workers. It is developing the artificial intelligence software that would power the robots but will use hardware developed by other companies. — Read More
Walmart and Wing expand drone delivery to five more US cities: Wing, the on-demand drone delivery company owned by Alphabet, is spreading its commercial wings with help from Walmart.
The two companies announced Thursday plans to roll out drone delivery to more than 100 Walmart stores in five new cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, Orlando, and Tampa. Walmart is also adding Wing drone deliveries to its existing market in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. — Read More
AGI Is Not Multimodal
The recent successes of generative AI models have convinced some that AGI is imminent. While these models appear to capture the essence of human intelligence, they defy even our most basic intuitions about it. They have emerged not because they are thoughtful solutions to the problem of intelligence, but because they scaled effectively on hardware we already had. Seduced by the fruits of scale, some have come to believe that it provides a clear pathway to AGI. The most emblematic case of this is the multimodal approach, in which massive modular networks are optimized for an array of modalities that, taken together, appear general. However, I argue that this strategy is sure to fail in the near term; it will not lead to human-level AGI that can, e.g., perform sensorimotor reasoning, motion planning, and social coordination. Instead of trying to glue modalities together into a patchwork AGI, we should pursue approaches to intelligence that treat embodiment and interaction with the environment as primary, and see modality-centered processing as emergent phenomena. — Read More
Duolingo said it just doubled its language courses thanks to AI
Duolingo is “more than doubling” the number of courses it has available, a feat it says was only possible because it used generative AI to help create them in “less than a year.”
The company said today that it’s launching 148 new language courses. …Duolingo says that building one new course historically has taken “years,” but the company was able to build this new suite of courses more quickly “through advances in generative AI, shared content systems, and internal tooling.” The new approach is internally called “shared content,” and the company says it allows employees to make a base course and quickly customize it for “dozens” of different languages. — Read More
Neuralink competitor Paradromics completes first human implant
Neurotech startup Paradromics on Monday announced it has implanted its brain-computer interface in a human for the first time.
The procedure took place May 14 at the University of Michigan with a patient who was already undergoing neurosurgery to treat epilepsy. The company’s technology was implanted and removed from the patient’s brain in about 20 minutes during that surgery.
Paradromics said the procedure demonstrated that its system can be safely implanted and record neural activity. — Read More
Human Brain Cells on a Chip for Sale: World-first biocomputing platform hits the market
In a development straight out of science fiction, Australian startup Cortical Labs has released what it calls the world’s first code-deployable biological computer. The CL1, which debuted in March, fuses human brain cells on a silicon chip to process information via sub-millisecond electrical feedback loops.
Designed as a tool for neuroscience and biotech research, the CL1 offers a new way to study how brain cells process and react to stimuli. Unlike conventional silicon-based systems, the hybrid platform uses live human neurons capable of adapting, learning, and responding to external inputs in real time. — Read More
Why do people disagree about when powerful AI will arrive?
Few would argue that AI progress over the past few years has not been rapid.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have provided an unexpected path to increasingly general capabilities. In 2019, OpenAI’s GPT-2 struggled to write a coherent paragraph. In 2025, LLMs write fluent essays, outcompete human experts at graduate-level science questions, and excel at competition mathematics and coding. The most advanced multi-modal AI models now produce images and video that are hard to distinguish from reality.
These models are impressive (and useful!) but they still fall short of the north star that frontier AI companies are working towards. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which OpenAI describes as “a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work” has been the ultimate ambition of AI researchers for many decades.
Most experts agree that AGI is possible. They also agree that it will have transformative consequences. There is less consensus about what these consequences will be. Some believe AGI will usher in an age of radical abundance. Others believe it will likely lead to human extinction. One thing we can be sure of is that a post-AGI world would look very different to the one we live in today.
So, is AGI just around the corner? Or are there still hard problems in front of us that will take decades to crack, despite the speed of recent progress? This is a subject of live debate. Ask various groups when they think AGI will arrive and you’ll get very different answers, ranging from just a couple of years to more than two decades.
Why is this? We’ve tried to pin down some core disagreements. — Read More
Create videos with your words for free – Introducing Bing Video Creator
Questions deserve answers, ideas beg for realization, and curiosity seeks satisfaction. Two years ago, we brought this belief forward with Bing Image Creator, helping users everywhere create whatever they can imagine through words—for free. Last month, we continued the next evolution of search with Copilot Search in Bing, blending the best of traditional and generative search to meet you where you are at in your discovery journey.
Today we’re taking the next leap with Bing Video Creator, allowing you to turn your ideas into videos, for free. Powered by Sora, Bing Video Creator transforms your text prompts into short videos. Just describe what you want to see and watch your vision come to life. — Read More
Can intelligent computing business save “independent cloud vendors”?
Smiling bitterly, computing industry professional Wang Zhi said, “In the future, intelligent computing business will definitely become the main pillar of independent cloud vendors’ revenue, otherwise there will be no other pillars.”
At the end of 2022, the independent cloud vendor where Wang Zhi worked was also scarred in the price war of selling CDN (content delivery networks) and public cloud services. At that time, the cloud computing market was concentrated at the top, leaving little room for small and medium-sized vendors; even UCloud, QingCloud, Kingsoft Cloud, etc., which have successfully listed, continued to decline in revenue and increase in losses, which made investors lose confidence.
It was only the emergence of generative AI when independent cloud vendors saw new hope, and Wang Zhi’s company began its first attempt in the field of intelligent computing: selling resources. He clearly remembers the first thought that came to his mind after completing the first A800 machine transaction in early 2023:
“I bet right!” — Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 