Amazon executives believe the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 workers in the United States by 2027 through robotic automation. Internal documents viewed by The New York Times show the automation would save approximately 30 cents on each item the company picks, packs and delivers. The documents reveal that executives told Amazon's board last year they hoped automation would allow the company to flatten its U.S. workforce growth over the next decade. Amazon expects to sell twice as many products by 2033. That projection translates to more than 600,000 positions Amazon would not need to fill. Amazon opened its most advanced warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana last year as a template for future facilities. The site uses a thousand robots and employed a quarter fewer workers than it would have without automation. The company plans to replicate this design in approximately 40 facilities by the end of 2027. A facility in Stone Mountain, Georgia currently employs roughly 4,000 workers. After a planned robotic retrofit, internal analyses project it will process 10% more items but need as many as 1,200 fewer employees. The documents show Amazon's robotics team has set a goal to automate 75% of its operations.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A hacking group that recently doxed hundreds of government officials, including from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has now built dossiers on tens of thousands of U.S. government officials, including NSA employees, a member of the group told 404 Media. The member said the group did this by digging through its caches of stolen Salesforce customer data. The person provided 404 Media with samples of this information, which 404 Media was able to corroborate. As well as NSA officials, the person sent 404 Media personal data on officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), members of the Air Force, and several other agencies.

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A Court of Accounts report written before Sunday's theft of crown jewels from the Louvre revealed the museum's security systems were outdated and inadequate [non-paywalled source]. The report noted a lack of basic CCTV equipment across multiple wings. Cameras had mainly been installed only when rooms were refurbished due to repeated postponements of scheduled modernization. In the Denon wing where the Apollo Gallery was targeted, a third of rooms had no CCTV cameras. Three-quarters of rooms in the Richelieu wing and nearly two-thirds in the Sully wing lacked cameras. The thieves were caught on camera at one point but were masked and impossible to identify, according to Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau. The alarm system activated when thieves cut open display cases, but they threatened staff who left the area. Culture minister Rachida Dati confirmed new CCTV cameras would be installed. President Macron had earmarked $186.30 million to upgrade the Louvre's security systems under a renaissance plan launched in June.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says his company has lost all access to China's market after U.S. export restrictions eliminated what was once a 95% share. Speaking in an interview with Citadel Securities, Huang questioned the wisdom of policies that cost America one of the world's largest markets. The Biden Administration imposed rules in 2022 to restrict exports of Nvidia's most advanced AI chips to China. The Trump Administration blocked additional chip sales in April and later granted export licenses for certain Nvidia and AMD chips in exchange for 15% of revenues. Chinese regulators responded by telling domestic tech companies to avoid Nvidia chips designed to meet U.S. export requirements. Beijing also placed strict limits on exports of rare earths. Huang noted that about half the world's AI researchers are in China and called it a mistake not to have them build AI on American technology.

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Google plans to let Pixel smartphone enthusiasts test out the company's next handset ahead of its public introduction. From a report: Google has invited members of its "Superfans" group to apply to test future Pixel hardware, asking entrants to profess their knowledge and passion for the brand in hopes of being able to beta test forthcoming products. Consumer tech companies often let small groups of customers try out unreleased products under strict secrecy to gather feedback during development. But it's incredibly rare for a company of Google's size to do it with something as high-profile as the Pixel lineup. The search giant will select 15 people from the pool of entrants, and winners must all sign a non-disclosure agreement to receive devices, according to official rules for the contest reviewed by Bloomberg News. "The Trusted Tester program is an opportunity to provide feedback and help shape a Pixel phone currently in development," the document reads.

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An anonymous reader writes: "Hoisted by their own GPTards." That's how Meta's Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun described the blowback after OpenAI researchers did a victory lap over GPT-5's supposed math breakthroughs. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis added, "this is embarrassing." The Decoder reports that in a since-deleted tweet, OpenAI VP Kevin Weil declared that "GPT-5 found solutions to 10 (!) previously unsolved Erdos problems and made progress on 11 others." ("Erdos problems" are famous conjectures posed by mathematician Paul Erdos.) However, mathematician Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdos Problems website, said Weil's post was "a dramatic misrepresentation" -- while these problems were indeed listed as "open" on Bloom's website, he said that only means, "I personally am unaware of a paper which solves it." In other words, it's not accurate to claim GPT-5 was able to solve previously unsolved problems. Instead, Bloom wrote, "GPT-5 found references, which solved these problems, that I personally was unaware of."

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The Sims is in a period of transition -- and as part of that, the ongoing mobile version will be shutting down in a few months. From a report: EA announced that today's update for The Sims Mobile will be its last, and that on January 20th, 2026 the game "will no longer be accessible to play and will be sunset." The mobile iteration of the franchise first launched in 2018, and has seen more than 50 updates since then. EA says that starting today players will no longer be able to spend real money in the game, and that it will be delisted on both iOS and Android tomorrow before the servers shut down completely next year, making it entirely unplayable.

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China says it has uncovered what it describes as irrefutable evidence of American government cyber attacks targeting the National Time Service Center. The Ministry of State Security said the National Security Agency exploited vulnerabilities in employees' mobile phones beginning March 25, 2022, and later used stolen login credentials to access the center's computers starting April 18, 2023. The facility in Xi'an provides high-precision timekeeping service for the government, civil society, and various industries. It also supplies data used to calculate international standard time. Chinese authorities said investigators found that private servers worldwide were employed to conceal the attacks' origin. The accusations emerge against a backdrop of mutual cyber-espionage claims between Washington and Beijing. Western governments and companies have repeatedly blamed Chinese hackers for intrusions in recent years.

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An electronic eye implant has restored reading ability to patients blinded by geographic atrophy, a form of dry age-related macular degeneration. Results published Monday in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that 84% of trial participants regained the ability to read letters, numbers, and words after receiving the Prima device. The microchip measures two millimetres by two millimetres and is implanted beneath the center of the retina. Patients wear augmented reality glasses containing a camera that projects images onto the chip. The device converts light into electrical pulses transmitted to the brain. Frank Holz, the study's lead author and chair of ophthalmology at the University Hospital of Bonn, called the implant "a paradigm shift in treating late-stage age-related macular degeneration." Mahi Muqit, a consultant at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, said the trial enabled "meaningful central vision restoration, which has never been done before." The procedure takes less than two hours and requires intensive rehabilitation. Science Corporation, which manufactures the device, has applied for clinical authorization in the United States and Europe.

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Food allergies in children dropped sharply in the years after new guidelines encouraged parents to introduce infants to peanuts, a study has found. The New York Times: For decades, as food allergy rates climbed, experts recommended that parents avoid exposing their infants to common allergens. But a landmark trial in 2015 found that feeding peanuts to babies could cut their chances of developing an allergy by over 80%. [non-paywalled source.] In 2017, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases formally recommended the early-introduction approach and issued national guidelines. The new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that food allergy rates in children under 3 fell after those guidelines were put into place -- dropping to 0.93% between 2017 and 2020, from 1.46% between 2012 and 2015. That's a 36% reduction in all food allergies, driven largely by a 43% drop in peanut allergies. The study also found that eggs overtook peanuts as the No. 1 food allergen in young children. The study did not examine what infants ate, so it does not show that the guidelines caused the decline. Still, the data is promising. While all food allergies can be dangerous, 80% of people never outgrow one.

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India will need as much as $21 trillion to achieve its climate goals and lift its population out of poverty, according to a draft government plan seen by Bloomberg. From the report: The estimate offers a first glimpse of how the country intends to live up to its target of net zero emissions by 2070. The updated scenario implies hitting peak emissions in 2045, which is a decade earlier than the current trajectory. India is already being severely battered by the fallout of climate change, as deadly floods and heat waves become more destructive each year. But the need to mitigate the emissions that feed climate change has historically been at odds with India's priorities of economic growth and energy security, with the latter still mostly provided through coal. The new plan shows India will seek to achieve climate and economic development goals simultaneously, with low-carbon options envisaged for much of its yet-to-be-built residential and industrial infrastructure.

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Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT's Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.

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AWS experienced a three-hour outage early Monday morning that disrupted thousands of websites and applications across the globe. The cloud computing provider reported DNS problems with DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia starting at 12:11 a.m. Pacific time. Over 4 million users reported issues, according to Downdetector. Snapchat saw reports spike from more than 22,000 to around 4,000 as systems recovered. Roblox dropped from over 12,600 complaints to fewer than 500. Reddit and the financial platform Chime remained affected longer. Perplexity, Coinbase and Robinhood attributed their platform disruptions directly to AWS. Gaming platforms including Fortnite, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans went offline. Signal confirmed the messaging app was down. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the HMRC website faced problems. United Airlines reported disrupted access to its app and website overnight. Some internal systems were temporarily affected. Delta experienced a small number of minor flight delays. By 3:35 a.m. Pacific time, AWS said the issue had been fully mitigated. Most service operations were succeeding normally though some requests faced throttling during final resolution. AWS holds roughly one-third of the cloud infrastructure market ahead of Microsoft and Google.

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Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) pump out nearly five times more planet-heating pollution than official figures show, a report has found. The Guardian: The cars, which can run on electric batteries as well as combustion engines, have been promoted by European carmakers as a way to cover long distances in a single drive -- unlike fully electric cars -- while still reducing emissions. Data shows PHEVs emit just 19% less CO2 than petrol and diesel cars, an analysis by the non-profit advocacy group Transport and Environment found on Thursday. Under laboratory tests, they were assumed to be 75% less polluting. The researchers analyzed data from the onboard fuel consumption meters of 800,000 cars registered in Europe between 2021 and 2023. They found real-world carbon dioxide emissions from PHEVs in 2023 were 4.9 times greater than those from standardized laboratory tests, having risen from being 3.5 times greater in 2021.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Cloud-computing firm Salesforce was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit by two authors who alleged the company used thousands of books without permission to train its AI software. Novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore said in the complaint that Salesforce infringed copyrights by using their work to train its xGen AI models to process language.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Atari has announced yet another retro console revival, but this time it's launching hardware from an old competitor. Atari and Plaion, a company that develops, publishes, and distributes games, have collaborated on the new Intellivision Sprint that blends '80s console aesthetics with modern gaming conveniences. It's a new take on Mattel's Intellivision, which initially went head-to-head with the Atari 2600 when it was released in 1979. The $150 Sprint looks a lot like the original Intellivision with a gold and black case and a wood-grain panel on the front, but there are a lot fewer cables. It connects to a TV using a single HDMI cable, and while it still includes two controllers featuring dials and number pads instead of joysticks, they're both wireless and charge when docked to the console.

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Foreign institutional investors have pulled nearly $30 billion from Indian equity markets over the past twelve months. A substantial portion of that capital moved to Korea and Taiwan. Foreign portfolio investor ownership in stocks listed on India's National Stock Exchange fell from 22.2% in September 2024 to 17.3% in May 2025. Taiwan absorbed $15 billion of net foreign inflows in the third quarter of 2025 alone. HSBC analysts say global investors increasingly view India through the lens of AI economics and are positioning the world's most populous nation as a global anti-AI play. India employs roughly 20 million people directly and indirectly in IT services. Services account for 55% of Indian gross domestic product. HSBC estimates digital AI agents cost approximately one-third as much as human agents for customer support and certain mid-office functions. Global tech giants will spend two trillion dollars on AI infrastructure between 2025 and 2030. India's AI Mission committed $1.25 billion over five years beginning March 2024.

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Jason Allen has responded to critics who say he is not an artist by filing a new brief and announcing plans to sell oil-print reproductions of his AI-generated image. Allen won the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition in 2022 after submitting Theatre D'opera Spatial, which Midjourney created. He said in a press release that being called an artist does not concern him but his work and expression do. Allen says he asked himself what could make the piece undeniably art and decided to create physical reproductions using technology. The reproductions employ a three-dimensional printing technique from a company called Arius that uses oil paints to simulate brushstrokes. Allen said the physical artifact is singular and real. His legal filing argues that he produced the artwork by providing hundreds of iterative text prompts to Midjourney and experimenting with over six hundred prompts before cropping and upscaling the final image. The U.S. Copyright Office has rejected his copyright applications for three years. The office maintains that Midjourney does not treat text prompts as direct instructions.

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Backblaze has been tracking hard disk drive failures in its datacenter since 2013. The backup and cloud storage company's latest analysis of approximately 317,230 drives shows that peak failure rates have dropped dramatically and shifted much later in a drive's lifespan. Where the company once saw failure rates of 13.73% at around three years in 2013 and 14.24% at seven years and nine months in 2021, the current data shows a peak of just 4.25% at 10 years and three months. This represents the first time the company has observed the highest failure rate occurring at the far end of the drive curve rather than earlier in its operational life, it said. The drives maintained relatively consistent failure rates through most of their use before spiking sharply near the end. The improvement amounts to roughly one-third of the previous peak failure rates.

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Instant coffee beat drip coffee in blind taste tests conducted by researchers at the Drexel Food Lab. Jonathan Deutsch and Rachel Sherman tested 84 participants across two rounds of tastings for The Guardian's Filter US newsletter. They first narrowed 24 instant coffee varieties to the best options. Those finalists then competed against drip coffees in a second test. 77% of participants preferred instant coffee over drip. The top-performing instant coffee was not from premium third-wave brands but a common grocery store variety. Deutsch compared the result to iconic products like Heinz ketchup and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Upscale interpretations of certain classic items often fail to surpass the originals, he said.

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