“You realise you are looking into someone’s private life, but at the same time you’re just expected to do the job,” an anonymous Sama employee reportedly said.

Meta acknowledges using data annotators

In remarks given to the BBC on Wednesday, Meta said it “sometimes” provides content that users share with the Meta AI chatbot to contractors so they can review it “with the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do.”

“This data is first filtered to protect people’s privacy,” the statement added, citing, for example, blurring faces in images.

Meta’s privacy policy for wearables states that photos and videos taken with its smart glasses are transmitted to Meta “when you turn on cloud processing on your AI Glasses, interact with the Meta AI service on your AI Glasses, or upload your media to certain services provided by Meta (i.e., Facebook or Instagram). You can change your choices about cloud processing of your Media at any time in Settings.”

The policy also notes that video and audio from livestreams captured with Ray-Ban Metas are sent to Meta, along with text transcripts and voice recordings produced by Meta’s chatbot.

“We use machine learning and trained reviewers to process this data to improve, troubleshoot, and train our products. We share that information with third-party vendors and service providers to improve our products. You can access and delete recordings and related transcripts in the Meta AI App,” the policy states.

Meta’s wider privacy policy for the Meta AI chatbot adds: “In some cases, Meta will review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations with or messages to AIs, and this review may be automated or manual (human).”

Last summer, we at Ars argued that the company’s next Xbox should abandon a walled-garden design and simply run Windows. Now, newly appointed Microsoft Executive Vice President for Gaming Asha Sharma has strongly suggested that Microsoft may be headed exactly that way, saying the next-generation console will “play your Xbox and PC games.”

In a Thursday afternoon social post, Sharma said “our commitment to the return of Xbox” includes a console codenamed Project Helix that “will lead in performance and play your Xbox and PC games.” She added that she plans to talk about that commitment and the console with developers and partners at her first Game Developers Conference next week.

Sharma’s phrasing leaves room for Project Helix to be something other than a full Windows-based living-room PC. The incoming console’s access to PC titles could be limited to Microsoft’s existing PC Game Pass streaming, for example, or to games built with Microsoft’s Xbox-branded PC SDK and the Xbox app on PC.

Still, a straightforward read of Sharma’s words implies Microsoft may be preparing to let the next console run a full Windows install, enabling it to play tens of thousands of current PC games. That would not be entirely surprising: Microsoft already used the Xbox name on last year’s Windows-based ROG Xbox Ally (and its console-like full-screen “Xbox Experience”). Microsoft has also been gradually scaling back fully exclusive Xbox titles, which reduces the value of a closed-off console ecosystem (Sony, by contrast, this week reversed its recent push to port first-party games to PC). And Valve’s forthcoming Steam Machine is poised to bring a Windows-free PC gaming option into living rooms soon enough, adding pressure on the console space.

On Wednesday, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had granted its first construction authorization in nearly a decade. The approval allows work to start at a site in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by a company called TerraPower. Best known for having Bill Gates among its financial backers, the company is attempting to build a radically different reactor that is sodium-cooled and integrates energy storage into its architecture.

That authorization doesn’t guarantee the reactor will be licensed to operate, but it marks an important milestone for the company.

TerraPower’s design, dubbed Natrium and developed in collaboration with GE Hitachi, includes several innovative aspects. The most prominent is the use of liquid sodium for cooling and heat transfer. Using sodium keeps the primary coolant in liquid form, avoiding many of the issues associated with the high-pressure steam systems of water-cooled reactors. However, sodium is highly reactive with air and water, which introduces safety risks. Natrium is also a fast-neutron reactor, potentially enabling it to consume certain isotopes that would otherwise contribute to radioactive waste in more conventional reactor types.

The reactor is relatively small compared with most current nuclear stations (about 245 megawatts versus roughly one gigawatt) and incorporates energy storage. Instead of using the sodium’s heat to generate steam, the facility will load that heat into a salt-based thermal storage medium that can be dispatched to produce electricity immediately or held for later use. That capability allows the plant to operate alongside variable renewable generation, which might otherwise undercut it on price. The storage system also permits temporary output increases up to around 500 MW.

Based on recent remarks by Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command, we shouldn’t expect anything of that sort in whatever the government might publish in response to Trump’s forthcoming order.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, the commander of US Space Command.

Photo credit:
US Air Force/Eric Dietrich

“I can say, personally, I was very intrigued by the president’s announcement,” Whiting told reporters last week at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium in Colorado. “I look forward to seeing whatever data is released. As a space operator with 36 years’ experience who has spent substantial time with space-domain awareness sensors and tracking objects in space, I’ve only observed manmade items, so I’m not aware of anything extraterrestrial apart from comets and similar occurrences.

“I’m very interested in the subject,” he continued. “And if anything is disclosed, I’ll be interested as an American citizen.”

Space Command’s responsibilities include an area of responsibility (AOR) that stretches from the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere out to the Moon and beyond. One of its duties is to track, monitor, and catalog objects in space. Whiting indicated that everything he’s observed in orbit can be attributed to either human-made or natural causes.

“We would follow any presidential instruction to review our records, but I think the term of art now is UAP, and the A stands for aerial, so these refer to objects below the Kármán line (100 kilometers), within the atmosphere,” Whiting said. “I’ve seen some of the same videos and radar data many of you have, and my expectation is that the relevant services and combatant commands will hand that data over. I’m very interested in the topic, but I have no personal experience with those phenomena.”