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The Trump administration has launched a process to try to strip Columbia University of its accreditation over a finding the school had failed to meaningfully protect Jewish students from harassment. On Wednesday, the U.S. Education Department notified the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Columbia’s accreditor, that the school was in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws and accordingly does not meet the commission’s standards. The government issued the finding May 22. “Just as the Department of Education has an obligation to uphold federal anti-discrimination law, university accreditors have an obligation to ensure member institutions abide by their standards,” Education Secretary…

Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is leaving the Democratic Party and promoting a new book expected to offer insight into her time serving under President Joe Biden. “Independent,” Jean-Pierre’s upcoming tome, vows to deliver a hard-hitting analysis of “America’s broken two-party system,” while urging readers to “embrace life as Independents,” the Hachette Book Group announced Wednesday. A description of “Independent” indicates Jean-Pierre elected to leave the Democratic Party — a decision she didn’t take “lightly” — after Biden dropped out of the presidential election and Trump returned to office. “She takes us through the three weeks that led…

It’s becoming a little easier to build sophisticated robotics projects at home. Earlier this week, AI dev platform Hugging Face released an open AI model for robotics called SmolVLA. Trained on “compatibly licensed,” community-shared datasets, SmolVLA outperforms much larger models for robotics in both virtual and real-world environments, Hugging Face claims. “SmolVLA aims to democratize access to vision-language-action [VLA] models and accelerate research toward generalist robotic agents,” writes Hugging Face in a blog post. “SmolVLA is not only a lightweight yet capable model, but also a method for training and evaluating generalist robotics [technologies].” SmolVLA is a part of Hugging…

A friend of Casandra “Cassie” Ventura testified in Manhattan Federal Court on Wednesday, alleging she was held over the edge of a Los Angeles high-rise by an unhinged Sean “Diddy” Combs. Bryana Bongolan, 33, a creative and marketing director, said the disturbing incident occurred in September 2016. She said she and a girlfriend were staying at Ventura’s place smoking marijuana and taking other drugs when the rap mogul turned up and began banging on the door. Bongolan said she sent her girlfriend to hide in the bathroom, where Ventura was, and then went out to the balcony. Bongolan, who said…

Reddit is suing Anthropic for allegedly using the site’s data to train AI models without a proper licensing agreement, according to a complaint filed in a Northern California court on Wednesday. Reddit claims in the complaint that Anthropic’s unauthorized use of the site’s data for commercial purposes was unlawful, and alleges the AI startup violated Reddit’s user agreement. Reddit’s lawsuit makes it the first Big Tech company to legally challenge an AI model provider over its training data practices, joining a litany of publishers that have sued tech companies on similar grounds. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and…

“My wife taught me something,” Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told the crowd at London SXSW. He was addressing the headlines about the company looking to hire human workers after previously saying Klarna used artificial intelligence to do work that would equate to 700 workers. “Two things can be true at the same time,” he said. Siemiatkowski said it’s true that the company looked to stop hiring human workers a few years ago and rolled out AI agents that have helped reduce the cost of customer support and increase the company’s revenue per employee. The company had 5,500 workers two years…

AMD’s latest acquisition could help reduce Nvidia’s market dominance when it comes to AI hardware. Semiconductor giant AMD on Wednesday announced it acquired AI software optimization startup Brium. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Brium is a startup that appears to be in stealth mode. The startup builds machine learning applications to enable AI inference, the process a trained AI model uses to draw conclusions from new data, across a variety of different hardware options, according to a blog post on Brium’s bare-bones website. Cutting through that jargon a bit, Brium can help retrofit AI software to work with…

Snap has launched a stand-alone Lens Studio iOS app and web tool, the company announced on Wednesday. The new tools are designed to make it easier for anyone to create AR Lenses through text prompts and simple editing tools. With the Lens Studio app, users will be able to do things like generate their own AI effects, add their Bitmoji, and browse trending templates to create customized Lenses. Up until now, Lens Studio has only been accessible via a desktop application for professional developers. While the desktop application will remain the primary tool for professionals, Snap says that the new…

As one of the most famous fixers in Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City, it’s no surprise that people trying to make it to the major leagues in the Afterlife attempt to woo Rogue Amendiares. However, Rogue isn’t just going to give anyone the time of day, which is why V’s so lucky to have Johnny Silverhand in their head, slowly eating away at their brain and providing them with an opportunity to right some wrongs. Related Cyberpunk 2077: How to Romance Judy This comprehensive guide will take players through every step they need to take in order to romance Judy Alvarez…

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is adding new features for business users, including integrations with different cloud services, meeting recordings, and MCP connection support for connecting to tools for deep research. As part of the launch, ChatGPT is gaining connectors for Dropbox, Box, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Google Drive. This allows ChatGPT to look for information across users’ own services to answer their questions. For instance, an analyst could use the company’s slide deck and documents to build out an investment thesis. OpenAI said that the new feature will follow an organization’s access control hierarchy. Recording and transcription of meetings, now a table-stakes feature…