An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: What did Ilya see?” Two years ago, it was the meme seen ’round the world (or at least ’round the tech industry). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had been briefly ousted in November 2023 by members of the company’s board of directors, including his longtime collaborator and fellow cofounder Ilya Sutskever. The board claimed Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board,” undermining their confidence in him. He was out for less than a week before being reinstated after hundreds of employees threatened to resign. But observers wondered: What hadn’t Altman been candid about? And what led Sutskever to turn against him?

Now, new details have come to light in a legal deposition involving Sutskever, part of Musk’s ongoing lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI. For nearly 10 hours on October 1st, bookended by repeated sniping between Musk’s and Sutsever’s attorneys, Sutskever answered questions about the turmoil around Altman’s ouster, from conflicts between executives to short-lived merger talks with Anthropic. He testified that from personal experience and documentation he’d viewed, he’d seen Altman pit high-ranking executives against each other and offer conflicting information about his plans for the company, telling people what they wanted to hear.

The testimony paints a picture of a leader who could be manipulative and chameleon-like in the relentless pursuit of his own agenda — though Sutskever expressed hesitation about his reliance on some of the secondhand accounts later in testimony, saying he “learned the critical importance of firsthand knowledge for matters like this.” In a statement toThe Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said that “The events of 2023 are behind us. These claims were fully examined during the board’s independent review, which unanimously concluded Sam and Greg are the right leaders for OpenAI.” The comment echoes a 2024 statement by board chair Bret Taylor, following an investigation conducted by the company. Altman “exhibits a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another,” reads a quote from the memo Sutskever. Altman told him and Jakub Pachocki, who is now OpenAI’s chief scientist, “conflicting things about the way the company would be run,” leading to internal conflict and repeated undermining.

Sutskever said he also faulted Altman for “not accepting or rejecting” former OpenAI research executive Dario Amodei Dario’s conditions when he wanted to run all research and fire OpenAI president Greg Brockman, implying Altman played both sides.

Furthermore, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati surfaced claims that Altman left Y Combinator for “similar behaviors. He was creating chaos, starting lots of new projects, pitting people against each other, and thus was not managing YC well.”

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Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra has been delayed again. The project had already been pushed back in May from a planned 2025 release date to a rough early 2026 window. In a post on X today, Skydance Games said the title won’t be ready for even longer. “We’ve made the decision to shift our release window beyond 2026,” the statement reads.

Amy Hennig’s studio, which is part of Skydance, is the main driver of the project, which we know is a story-driven title with a quartet of Marvel characters in occupied Paris during World War II. Hennig was a core part of the creative team behind the Uncharted series, and was more recently a story consultant on Forspoken. She’s also been long tied to some mysterious Star Wars title, but that game has also been pretty light on details for a few years. 

That’s two high-profile AAA delays in one afternoon. Fans worldwide will have to wait longer for the eventual arrival of Grand Theft Auto 6. Rockstar’s eventual mega-hit has been pushed to a November 19, 2026 launch date.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/marvel-1943-rise-of-hydra-has-been-delayed-with-no-new-release-window-000121455.html?src=rss

Microsoft is launching a new MAI Superintelligence Team under Mustafa Suleyman to build practical, controllable AI aimed at digital companions, medical diagnostics, and renewable-energy modeling. “We are doing this to solve real concrete problems and do it in such a way that it remains grounded and controllable,” Suleyman wrote. “We are not building an ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence; we are building a practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity.” CNBC reports: The new Microsoft AI research group will focus on providing useful companions for people that can help in education and other domains, Suleyman wrote in his blog post. It will also pursue narrow areas in medicine and in renewable energy production. “We’ll have expert level performance at the full range of diagnostics, alongside highly capable planning and prediction in operational clinical settings,” Suleyman wrote.

As investors and analysts are increasingly voicing their concerns about overspending on AI without a clear path to profits, Suleyman said he wants “to make clear that we are not building a superintelligence at any cost, with no limits.”

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Tesla’s shareholders have voted in favor of a compensation plan that could see CEO Elon Musk become the world’s first trillionaire. The potential incentives were laid out in September, and the company’s shareholders have agreed to allow this all-or-nothing package for its chief exec, who spent the first half of this year decimating the US federal government rather than working on any Tesla-adjacent projects. 

The compensation plan lists several targets that the company must reach for Musk to reap the vast rewards. Tesla must reach a market value of $8.5 trillion, compared with its current worth of about $1.4 billion. Other requirements are metrics-based, such as selling a million robots with humanoid qualities, while others are strategic, such as establishing a succession plan for future Tesla leadership. Musk also has a lot of other irons in the fire across SpaceX and xAI, so the incentives may be an effort to keep the CEO focused on generating more money for this specific group of supporters.

Presently, most times the Tesla name makes headlines, it’s not for good press. The company coupled record-high revenue with tumbling profits in its Q3 2025 financial results. Just during October, it was the subject of multiple investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and incurred the wrath of the California Department of Insurance.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/tesla-shareholders-approve-elon-musks-1-trillion-compensation-package-233217531.html?src=rss

Japan’s new competition rules are forcing Apple to open the iPhone to third-party app stores, and iOS 26.2 will quietly flip that switch ahead of the December deadline. MacRumors reports: According to a post shared on X by @Tzzlala, iPhones running the beta in Japan are able to install alternative app stores like AltStore PAL and Epic Games, and download apps from them, though Fortnite in-app purchases are currently region-blocked by Epic. […] The guidelines are set to come into effect by December 18, 2025, while Apple is expected to release iOS 26.2 in December, sometime between December 9 and December 16. Epic Games has already announced plans to bring Fortnite and its game store platform to iOS in Japan by late 2025.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In a submission for the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report (PDF), Cloudflare warns the U.S. government that site blocking efforts cause widespread disruption to legitimate services. The complaint points to Italy’s automated Piracy Shield system, which reportedly blocked “tens of thousands” of legitimate sites. Meanwhile, overbroad IP address blocks in Spain and new automated blocking proposals in France are serious concerns that harm U.S. business interests, Cloudflare reports. […]

Cloudflare urges the USTR to take these concerns into account for its upcoming National Trade Estimate Report. Ideally, it wants these trade barriers to be dismantled. These calls run counter to requests from rightsholders, who urge the USTR to ensure that more foreign countries implement blocking measures. With potential site-blocking legislation being considered in U.S. Congress, that may impact local lobbying efforts as well. If and how the USTR will address these concerns will become clearer early next year, when the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report is expected to be published.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Event Horizon Telescope only recently gave us the first images of the environment immediately surrounding a black hole. Since then, it has been boosting the resolution and filling in the details of an environment dominated by the most extreme gravity in the Universe.

But which gravity are we talking about? Because of its incompatibility with quantum mechanics and our current inability to explain dark matter, people have proposed all sorts of variants of gravity that go beyond general relativity and clean up some of the physics’ awkwardness. It’s possible that the extreme environment near a black hole amplifies the differences among at least some of these hypotheses. So, a group of physicists decided to see whether any of those differences might be large enough that the next generation of telescopes might be able to rule out some potential replacements for relativity.

Searching for subtlety

Any replacement for general relativity faces an awkward challenge: General relativity does pretty well at explaining everything from the large-scale structure of the Universe to phenomena we can measure right here on Earth. So, any alternative theories would have to differ from relativity in very subtle ways that might be extremely difficult to detect.

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The Wall Street Journal reported today that Ford may be on the verge of sunsetting the F-150 Lightning truck. The model is an electric pick-up truck, and the best-selling one in the US, but the publication cited Ford execs who said the company would consider halting production completely on the F-150 Lightning. We’ve reached out to Ford for comment and will update if we receive a statement.

The auto brand said it would cut back on production last January due to slowing demand for the vehicles. At the time, Ford shuffled several of the workers who had been building the F-150 Lightning to constructing other auto models. Then, a fire this October at an aluminum plant supplying Ford led the company to pause production of the Lightning trucks. In Ford’s third-quarter financial results, its Model e electric vehicle operation lost $1.4 billion, and has lost $3.6 billion over the first nine months of 2025. Rather than projects such as the F-150 Lightning, Ford has hinted that it will shift strategy to work on smaller, more affordable electric vehicles based on its Universal EV platform.

Ford may not be the only manufacturer to ramp down its EV plans in the US. A federal tax credit of $7,500 for purchasing EVs was abruptly ended in September under the current administration’s financial policies. After unveiling its latest EV models this week, Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe spoke to Engadget about the potential long-term impact: “With the Trump administration in place, we have a sense that maybe the EV growth has been moved back out by maybe five years or so into the future.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/ford-may-not-resume-production-of-the-f-150-lightning-221903848.html?src=rss

One of the world’s most ruthless and advanced hacking groups, the Russian state-controlled Sandworm, launched a series of destructive cyberattacks in the country’s ongoing war against neighboring Ukraine, researchers reported Thursday.

In April, the group targeted a Ukrainian university with two wipers, a form of malware that aims to permanently destroy sensitive data and often the infrastructure storing it. One wiper, tracked under the name Sting, targeted fleets of Windows computers by scheduling a task named DavaniGulyashaSdeshka, a phrase derived from Russian slang that loosely translates to “eat some goulash,” researchers from ESET said. The other wiper is tracked as Zerlot.

A not-so-common target

Then, in June and September, Sandworm unleashed multiple wiper variants against a host of Ukrainian critical infrastructure targets, including organizations active in government, energy, and logistics. The targets have long been in the crosshairs of Russian hackers. There was, however, a fourth, less common target—organizations in Ukraine’s grain industry.

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Tesla shareholders today voted to approve a compensation plan that would pay Elon Musk more than $1 trillion over the next decade if he hits all of the plan’s goals. Musk won over 75 percent of the vote, according to the announcement at today’s shareholder meeting.

The pay plan would give Musk 423,743,904 shares, awarded in 12 tranches of 35,311,992 shares each if Tesla achieves various operational goals and market value milestones. Goals include delivering 20 million vehicles, obtaining 10 million Full Self-Driving subscriptions, delivering 1 million “AI robots,” putting 1 million robotaxis in operation, and achieving a $400 billion adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization).

Musk has threatened to leave if he doesn’t get a larger share of Tesla. He told investors last month, “It’s not like I’m going to go spend the money. It’s just, if we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army? Not control, but a strong influence. That’s what it comes down to in a nutshell. I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”

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This is a looooong clip of Youtuber Emulated Vintage Gaming taking a 10-hour walk from the Shire to Mordor in The Lord Of The Rings Online, tracing Frodo’s steps as close to Tolkien’s legendarium as possible, accompanied by passages from The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King as read by Andy Serkis. I’m only four hours in but so far this has been quite the journey! Would make a great movie. Possibly several. Somebody call Vince Spielberg! “Steven?” You must have me confused with someone else. Steven sure must be handsome though!