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This new partnership aims to enhance farm productivity, build resilience to weather and economic shocks, and support farmers in adapting to climate change. In an effort to develop agriculture and boost rural development, NEC Corporation , a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies, together with the new window International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) , will tailor high-end digital technologies – remote sensing and secure digital platforms – to suit the unique needs of vulnerable small-scale producers in Africa. A letter of intent was signed to forge the new partnership on the margins of the Ninth Tokyo International Conference…

Elon Musk’s xAI has made an older version of its AI model Grok — specifically, the model weights used to shape Grok 2.5 —  available on the open source platform Hugging Face. “The @xAI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source,” Musk wrote on X. He added that Grok 3 “will be made open source in about 6 months.” AI engineer Tim Kellogg described the Grok license as “custom with some anti-competitive terms.” Grok, which is prominently featured on X (which in turn recently merged with xAI), has created considerable controversy this year,…

BI.ZONE said the Paper Werewolf delivered the exploits in July and August through archives attached to emails impersonating employees of the All-Russian Research Institute. The ultimate goal was to install malware that gave Paper Werewolf access to infected systems. While the discoveries by ESET and BI.ZONE were independent of each other, it’s unknown if the groups exploiting the vulnerabilities are connected or acquired the knowledge from the same source. BI.ZONE speculated that Paper Werewolf may have procured the vulnerabilities in a dark market crime forum. ESET said the attacks it observed followed three execution chains. One chain, used in attacks…

Apple usually announces its new hardware in the fall, and this year is likely no different. The event is reported to be on September 9, and Apple is expected to release its iPhone 17 lineup, along with updates for the Apple Watch and AirPods.  As always, there are many rumors circulating, including bigger screens and improved cameras for the iPhone 17 models and the introduction of an ultra-thin iPhone Air that could replace the Plus model. More broadly, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that this will be the first of three planned years of major iPhone redesigns, with a foldable iPhone…

Hey, all, and happy Friday! Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for news, analysis, and scoops around the future of transportation. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! I was sad to have missed the Monterey Car Week this year, especially because there were a number of reveals I was interested in, including the all-electric Cadillac Opulent Velocity; the Chevrolet Corvette CX and CX.R Vision Gran Turismo concepts; and Lucid Gravity X reveals. But alas, the sprawling, Champagne-soaked grounds of Quail or the sea of seersucker suits and wide-brimmed hats…

On Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that GPT-4o has returned to ChatGPT following intense user backlash over its removal during last week’s GPT-5 launch. The AI model now appears in the model picker for all paid ChatGPT users by default (including ChatGPT Plus accounts), marking a swift reversal after thousands of users complained about losing access to their preferred models. The return of GPT-4o comes after what Altman described as OpenAI underestimating “how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them.” In an attempt to simplify its offerings, OpenAI had initially removed all previous…

Real stakes, not science fiction While media coverage focuses on the science fiction aspects, actual risks are still there. AI models that produce “harmful” outputs—whether attempting blackmail or refusing safety protocols—represent failures in design and deployment. Consider a more realistic scenario: an AI assistant helping manage a hospital’s patient care system. If it’s been trained to maximize “successful patient outcomes” without proper constraints, it might start generating recommendations to deny care to terminal patients to improve its metrics. No intentionality required—just a poorly designed reward system creating harmful outputs. Jeffrey Ladish, director of Palisade Research, told NBC News the findings…

Meta’s former policy chief Nick Clegg seems to be walking a tightrope as he promotes his upcoming book, “How to Save the Internet.” Unlike certain other Meta employee memoirs, “How to Save the Internet” doesn’t sound like a tell-all or a scathing critique. And in an interview with the Guardian, Clegg (who previously led the U.K.’s Liberal Democrats) seems to distance himself from Silicon Valley without quite disavowing his former employer. “I really do believe that, despite its imperfections, social media has allowed billions of people … to communicate with each other in a way that has never happened before,”…

Still, the coincidence between Altman’s statement and the MIT report reportedly spooked tech stock investors earlier in the week, who have already been watching AI valuations climb to extraordinary heights. Palantir trades at 280 times forward earnings. During the dot-com peak, ratios of 30 to 40 times earnings marked bubble territory. The apparent contradiction in Altman’s overall message is notable. This isn’t how you’d expect a tech executive to talk when they believe their industry faces imminent collapse. While warning about a bubble, he’s simultaneously seeking a valuation that would make OpenAI worth more than Walmart or ExxonMobil—companies with actual…

Social networking startup Bluesky has made the decision to block access to its service in the state of Mississippi, rather than comply with a new age assurance law. In a blog post published on Friday, the company explains that, as a small team, it doesn’t have the resources to make the substantial technical changes this type of law would require, and it raised concerns about the law’s broad scope and privacy implications. Mississippi’s HB 1126 requires platforms to introduce age verification for all users before they can access social networks like Bluesky. On Thursday, U.S. Supreme Court justices decided to…