Which jobs are most threatened by AI? "Programmers, software engineers and other tech industry employees," goes one common answer. "But many economists are more concerned about a different, larger group of white-collar workers," reports the New York Times: customer service reps, bookkeepers, payroll clerks and HR specialists, "who fly under the radar but collectively account for tens of millions of jobs..." They are spread across the country and throughout the economy, working in every industry, in big cities and small towns, at major corporations and mom-and-pop businesses... These jobs typically offer a middle-class salary or a pathway to achieving one — much as manufacturing jobs did for men before decades of globalisation and automation wiped many of them away... For now, such an outcome is a fear, not a forecast. Despite high-profile layoffs in tech and finance, there is little firm evidence that AI has hurt the labour market as a whole. Economists have become increasingly convinced that disruptions are likely, but they say it is too early to know where or how widespread they will be. They remain broadly sceptical of claims that the technology will lead to mass unemployment in the near future. Some AI industry leaders have walked back such predictions in recent weeks. But given the extraordinary pace at which companies are adopting AI — and at which the technology is improving — economists say policymakers need to consider the potential effects on the labour market. And they say they are concerned that the public debate has focused too much on software engineers and a relative handful of other high-status careers — lawyers, consultants, economists — rather than the workers who could be most vulnerable... Economists at Northwestern University recently recalculated measures of AI exposure based on the makeup of the total workforce, not just the people using the technology. Administrative and front-line roles, such as customer service representatives, rose to the top of the list. "The most affected jobs are secretaries, are routine clerks," said Michelle Yin, one of the working paper's authors. "They're not computer scientists or data scientists at all." The article also includes this counterpoint from an economist at the University of Illinois who has studied earlier waves of white-collar automation: that like other disruptive technologies, AI likely will also create new jobs. So the possibility exists AI will make workers more productive and allow them to earn more. "I would be cautious about just focusing on what are we losing as opposed to what are we going to gain on the other side."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linus Torvalds once said LLMs might bring a 10X increase to programmer productivity. But speaking at Open Source Summit India 2026, he now says that number was "not scientific," reports ZDNet. "That was pulled out of my ass number, obviously." Today, he continued, "we're at the point where hopefully it creates more productivity than it takes away," but "we certainly saw more junk being generated by LLMs than we saw useful code up until the like early this year.... it can actually be a huge drain on resources when it takes humans a lot of effort to figure out that, hey, this machine-generated report was not true." Even now, he said, "most of the good ones require more than just the LLM," because "we've had to push back quite a bit... if you find a bug with an LLM, it's not enough to just ask the LLM to make a bug report and then throw it over the fence to us. We want to see a suggested patch; we want to see the human who ran the LLM act as a kind of back-and-forth." Torvalds described many AI-generated patches as "mindless band-aid kind of patches... they may fix the immediate problem, but the kind of bug remains, and it just is waiting in the hallway to hit you in another place." For his own toy projects, he uses LLMs as prototypers: "I use them as a way to prototype things... quite often the code is not usable in that form, but it's a great way to try something out," while insisting that for kernel-level fixes, "LLMs, in my experience, have not been at that level yet." Torvalds acknowledged that some AI-found issues have been "absolutely, stunningly, I mean, interesting in a painful kind of way," especially security problems that "show up in the technology press two days later." Despite the embarrassment, he said, "I'm very much not a shoot-the-messenger kind of person. I think we're much better off with LLMs finding bugs, even when they are embarrassing, and they are things that we should probably have found two decades ago." Torvalds also said he's using AI "for my own toy projects... Every time I travel to some new place, and this is the first time I've been to India, I send the kids pictures of where I am, and for some strange reason, Godzilla seems to follow me around and gets added to those pictures." ZDNet notes that Torvalds concluded, "There are many useful and less useful uses for AI," and "I think Godzilla is a great place to stop." Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Elon Musk and Sam Altman criticized each other in new posts on X," reports CNBC, "highlighting the billionaires' long-standing tussle over OpenAI's evolution." This week, SpaceX released the Grok 4.5 generative AI model, while OpenAI debuted its own GPT-5.6 Sol. For days, Musk and Altman have hyped up their respective releases, but on Saturday the rivalry got personal. In response to a post about Apple filing suit against OpenAI on Friday over alleged theft of trade secrets, Musk wrote, "Scam Altman strikes again ...." Minutes after his post, Musk doubled down, writing, "He takes scamming to a whole new level." Next, Musk published a photo of Altman that included the words, "I'm doing this because I love it." "By 'this' he means scamming," Musk wrote, including two rolling-on-the-floor-laughing emojis. Musk then replied to that post, writing, "He might literally love scamming more than any human alive!" The flurry of social activity got Altman's attention. "[H]omeboy you're the one sellling public market investors on short-term space datacenters," Altman wrote in an X post of his own that garnered over 11 million views. "We start flying them next year. Maybe you can come see them if your parole officer approves," Musk fired back. Separately, Altman put Musk's fresh wave of attention in the context of OpenAI's fresh model release. "[T]here are a lot of benchmarks that suggest 5.6 sol is the best model in the world right now, but the most reliable way to tell is that elon is obsessed with me again," Altman wrote on X. Reacting to another post, Altman wrote that he was "not afraid of apple, but i have tremendous respect for them. s-tier company," CNBC reports — leading to a sarcastic response from X's head of product. "Incredible trade secrets as well, some of the best." And CNBC notes that Musk "replied with a face-with-tears-of-joy emoji."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal says "an intense 27-year-old activist who had been leading sit-ins at OpenAI to protest the dangers of AI" was just part of a larger movement. "The Bay Area's AI boom is drawing young disillusioned men and women to join the fight against it. They are upending their lives and leaving behind careers for think tanks, nonprofits and street protest groups." Their cause is now riding a surge of anti-AI backlash. Many Americans are souring on the technology amid mass layoffs, data center sprawl, reports of chatbot-fueled attacks by unstable users and hacking tools that have panicked cybersecurity professionals. Seventy percent of U.S. adults believe AI will cost jobs, and 55% believe it will do more harm than good in their daily lives, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. But for activists on the front lines, the driving fear is often more dramatic: human extinction. They cling to dire predictions, like Geoffrey Hinton's. The Nobel laureate, dubbed the "godfather of AI" for his work on artificial neural networks, warns of a 10% to 20% chance AI will wipe out humans. At its most extreme and troubling end, some believe they must stop an AI apocalypse by any means necessary. In April, an unknown assailant fired 13 shots at the home of an Indianapolis councilman, leaving a note: "no data centers." That same month, authorities arrested a 20-year-old Texas college student for an attack on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's home in San Francisco, and charged him with attempted murder and arson. The student was carrying an anti-AI document with a section on "our impending extinction," according to a federal criminal complaint. He has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said his actions appear to have been driven by an "acute mental-health crisis, not a desire to harm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

À la une de la rubrique tech de Numerama cette semaine : face à la pénurie de climatiseurs mobiles en France, les pompes à chaleur réversibles pourraient offrir une solution. Doctolib lance un projet d’IA utilisant les données de ses utilisateurs, qui peuvent toutefois s’y opposer. Enfin, OpenAI transforme son mode vocal - et le résultat est bluffant.