Salesforce says it's saving about $100 million a year by using AI tools in the software company's customer service operations. From a report: The company is working to sell AI features that can handle work such as customer service or early-stage sales. To illustrate the value of the Agentforce product to business clients, Salesforce has been vocal about its own use of the technology. Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff announced the statistic on Salesforce's savings during a speech Tuesday at the annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The company said more than 12,000 customers are using Agentforce. For example, Reddit was able to cut customer support resolution time by 84%, Salesforce said.

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DirecTV wants to use AI to put you, your family, and your pets inside a custom TV screensaver. From a report: If that's not uncanny enough, you'll find items you can shop for within that AI environment, whether it's a piece of clothing similar to the one your AI likeness is wearing or a piece of furniture that pops up alongside it. The satellite TV giant is partnering with the AI company Glance to roll out this experience to DirecTV Gemini devices starting next year. "We are making television a lean-in experience versus lean back," Rajat Wanchoo, the group vice president of commercial partnerships at Glance, tells The Verge. "We want to give users a chance to use the advancements that have happened in generative AI to create a ChatGPT moment for themselves, but on TV." Glance is owned by InMobi, the same company that injected ecommerce bloatware into Motorola's budget phones.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month. New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff's attorneys' request for sanctions that the defendant's counsel, Michael Fourte's law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff's motion for sanctions, but also included "multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations" in the process of opposing the motion. "In other words," the judge wrote, "counsel relied upon unvetted AI -- in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues -- to defend his use of unvetted AI." The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte's office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.

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Indonesia's film industry has started using generative AI tools to produce films at a fraction of Hollywood budgets. The country's filmmakers are deploying ChatGPT for scriptwriting, Midjourney for image generation, and Runway for video storyboarding. VFX artist Amilio Garcia Leonard told Rest of World that AI has reduced his draft editing time by 70%. The Indonesian Film Producer Association supports the technology. Indonesian films typically cost 10 billion rupiah ($602,500), less than 1% of major Hollywood productions. The sector employed about 40,000 people in 2020 and generated over $400 million in box office sales in 2023. Jobs for storyboarders, VFX artists, and voice actors are disappearing.

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The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects record production of global cereal crops in the 2025-26 farming season. The forecast covers wheat, corn and rice, and comes as the global stocks-to-use ratio stands around 30.6% -- the world is producing nearly a third more of these foundational crops than it currently uses. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in August that American farmers would harvest a record corn crop at record yield per acre. The FAO Food Price Index has risen slightly this year but remains nearly 20% below its peak during the early months of the war in Ukraine. Average calories available per person worldwide have climbed from roughly 2,100 to 2,200 kilocalories daily in the early nineteen-sixties to just under 3,000 kilocalories daily by 2022. Cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. Yet the World Bank estimates around 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and current famines in Gaza and Sudan stem from political failures rather than crop failures.

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Generative AI models trained on internet data lack exposure to vast domains of human knowledge that remain undigitized or underrepresented online. English dominates Common Crawl with 44% of content. Hindi accounts for 0.2% of the data despite being spoken by 7.5% of the global population. Tamil represents 0.04% despite 86 million speakers worldwide. Approximately 97% of the world's languages are classified as "low-resource" in computing. A 2020 study found 88% of languages face such severe neglect in AI technologies that bringing them up to speed would require herculean efforts. Research on medicinal plants in North America, northwest Amazonia and New Guinea found more than 75% of 12,495 distinct uses of plant species were unique to just one local language. Large language models amplify dominant patterns through what researchers call "mode amplification." The phenomenon narrows the scope of accessible knowledge as AI-generated content increasingly fills the internet and becomes training data for subsequent models.

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California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers "exorbitant" fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. From a report: Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts -- plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for goods and services over a specified duration. This includes services that lure consumers into signing annual contracts by allowing them to pay in installments that appear similar to rolling monthly subscriptions, but with hefty cancellation fees for not locking in for the full year. The bill bans companies from hiding early termination fee disclosures within fine print or obscured hyperlinks, and limits the total fee amount to a maximum of 30 percent of the total contract cost. The goal is to make it easier for Californians to take these fees into account when comparing between services, and lessen the financial burden if they need to end their contract early.

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Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland have found that roughly half of geostationary satellite signals transmit sensitive data without encryption. The team spent three years using an $800 satellite receiver on a university rooftop in San Diego to intercept communications from satellites visible from their location. They collected phone calls and text messages from more than 2,700 T-Mobile users in just nine hours of recording. The researchers also obtained data from airline passengers using in-flight Wi-Fi, communications from electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and US and Mexican military communications that revealed personnel locations and equipment details. The exposed data resulted from telecommunications companies using satellites to relay signals from remote cell towers to their core networks. The researchers examined only about 15% of global satellite transponder communications and presented their findings at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in Taiwan this week. Most companies warned by the researchers have encrypted their satellite transmissions, but some US critical infrastructure owners have not yet added encryption.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: China's expansion of its rare earth export controls appeared to mark another escalation in the US-China trade war last week. But the announcements were also significant in another way: unusually, the documents could not be opened using American word processing software. For the first time, China's Ministry of Commerce issued a slew of documents that could be directly accessed only through WPS Office -- China's answer to Microsoft Office -- as Beijing continues its tech self-reliance drive. Developed by the Beijing-based software company Kingsoft, WPS Office uses a different coding structure to Microsoft Office, meaning WPS text files cannot be opened directly in Word without conversion. Previously, the ministry primarily released text documents in Microsoft Word format.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: After acquiring GitHub in 2018, Microsoft mostly let the developer platform run autonomously. But in recent months, that's changed. With GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke leaving the company this August, and GitHub being folded more deeply into Microsoft's organizational structure, GitHub lost that independence. Now, according to internal GitHub documents The New Stack has seen, the next step of this deeper integration into the Microsoft structure is moving all of GitHub's infrastructure to Azure, even at the cost of delaying work on new features. [...] While GitHub had previously started work on migrating parts of its service to Azure, our understanding is that these migrations have been halting and sometimes failed. There are some projects, like its data residency initiative (internally referred to as Project Proxima) that will allow GitHub's enterprise users to store all of their code in Europe, that already solely use Azure's local cloud regions.

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Engineer Denis Stetskov, writing in a blog: The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is hemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago. Twenty years ago, this would have triggered emergency patches and post-mortems. Today, it's just another bug report in the queue. We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence. [...] Here's what engineering leaders don't want to acknowledge: software has physical constraints, and we're hitting all of them simultaneously. Modern software is built on towers of abstractions, each one making development "easier" while adding overhead: Today's real chain: React > Electron > Chromium > Docker > Kubernetes > VM > managed DB > API gateways. Each layer adds "only 20-30%." Compound a handful and you're at 2-6x overhead for the same behavior. That's how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it to -- but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining. [...] We're living through the greatest software quality crisis in computing history. A Calculator leaks 32GB of RAM. AI assistants delete production databases. Companies spend $364 billion to avoid fixing fundamental problems. This isn't sustainable. Physics doesn't negotiate. Energy is finite. Hardware has limits. The companies that survive won't be those who can outspend the crisis. There'll be those who remember how to engineer.

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Preteens who use increasing amounts of social media perform poorer in reading, vocabulary and memory tests in early adolescence compared to those who use little or no social media. A study published in JAMA examined data from over 6,000 children ages 9 to 10 through early adolescence. Researchers classified the children into three groups: 58% used little or no social media over several years, 37% started with low-level use but spent about an hour daily on social media by age 13, and 6% spent three or more hours daily by that age. Even low users who spent about one hour per day performed 1 to 2 points lower on reading and memory tasks compared to non-users. High users performed 4 to 5 points lower than non-social media users. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco and study author, said the findings were notable because even modest social media use correlated with lower cognitive scores.

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