Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) shared an interesting blog post. They'd spotted a Reddit post "detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered the program and rewrote it in Python." It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, chasing down outdated DLLs and messy workarounds. So! OP decided to upload the exe to Claude 3.7 with this request:

"Can you tell me how to get this file running? It'd be nice to convert it to Python.">

Claude 3.7 analyzed the binary, extracted the VB 'tokens' (VB is not a fully-machine-code-compiled language which makes this task a lot easier than something from C/C++), identified UI elements, and even extracted sound files. Then, it generated a complete Python equivalent using Pygame. According to the author, the code worked on the first try and the entire process took less than five minutes...
Torrone speculates on what this might mean. "Old business applications and games could be modernized without needing the original source code... Tools like Claude might make decompilation and software archaeology a lot easier: proprietary binaries from dead platforms could get a new life in open-source too."

And maybe Archive.org could even add an LLM "to do this on the fly!"

Long-time Slashdot reader MojoKid writes: AMD took the wraps of its next gen RDNA 4 consumer graphics architecture Friday, which was designed to enhance efficiency over the previous generation, while also optimizing performance for today's more taxing ray-traced gaming and AI workloads. RDNA 4 features next generation Ray Tracing engines, dedicated hardware for AI and ML workloads, better bandwidth utilization, and multimedia improvements for both gaming and content creation. AMD's 3rd generation Ray Accelerators in RDNA offer 2x the peak throughput of RDNA 3 and add support for a new feature called Oriented Bounding Boxes, that results in more efficient GPU utilization. 3rd Generation Matrix Accelerators are also present, which offer improved performance, along with support for 8-bit float data types, with structured sparsity.

The first cards featuring RDNA 4, the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT go on sale next week, with very competitive MSRPs below $600, and are expected to do battle with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5070-class GPUs
The article calls it "a significant step forward" for AMD, adding that next week is "going to be very busy around here. NVIDIA is launching the final, previously announced member of the RTX 50 series and AMD will unleash the 9070 and 9070 XT."

Autodesk said it would cut 1,350 employees, or about 9% of its workforce, as part of a pivot to the cloud and artificial intelligence. Fast Company reports: Companies across sectors such as architecture, engineering, construction, and product design are making extensive use of Autodesk's 3D design solutions, with the software maker's artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities further driving spending on its products. Autodesk saw a 23% jump in total billings to $2.11 billion in the fourth quarter ended January 31.

The company's international operations have particularly shown strength, while analysts have also noted that the company was outpacing peers in the manufacturing sector, driven by the performance of its "Fusion" design software.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said his firm, San Francisco's largest private employer, does not plan to hire engineers this year because of the success of AI agents created and used by the company. From a report: "My message to CEOs right now is that we are the last generation to manage only humans," Benioff said Wednesday on Salesforce's earnings call, indicating that companies of the future will have hybrid human and digital workforces. Benioff added that Salesforce's mission is to become "the No. 1 digital labor provider, period" to other companies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI intends to eventually integrate its AI video generation tool, Sora, directly into its popular consumer chatbot app, ChatGPT, company leaders said during a Friday office hours session on Discord. Today, Sora is only available through a dedicated web app OpenAI launched in December, which lets users access the AI video model of the same name to generate up to twenty-second-long cinematic clips. However, OpenAI's product lead for Sora, Rohan Sahai, said the company has plans to put Sora in more places, and expand what Sora can create.

[...] OpenAI may be trying to attract users to ChatGPT by letting them generate Sora videos from the chatbot. Putting Sora in ChatGPT could also incentivize users to upgrade to ChatGPT's premium subscription tiers, which may offer higher video generation limits. One of the reasons OpenAI launched Sora as a separate web app was to maintain ChatGPT's simplicity, Sahai explained during the office hours. Since its launch, OpenAI has expanded Sora's web experience, creating more ways for users to browse Sora-generated videos from the community. Sahai also said OpenAI "would love to build" a standalone mobile app for Sora, noting that the Sora team is actively looking for mobile engineers. OpenAI also plans to expand Sora's generation capabilities to images, letting users create more photorealistic images than what's currently possible with OpenAI's DALL-E3 model.

Mozilla has denied allegations that its new Firefox browser terms of service allow it to harvest user data for artificial intelligence training, following widespread criticism of the recently updated policy language. The controversy erupted after Firefox introduced terms that grant Mozilla "a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information" when users upload content through the browser, prompting competitor Brave Software's CEO Brendan Eich to suggest a business pivot toward data monetization.

"These changes are not driven by a desire by Mozilla to use people's data for AI or sell it to advertisers," Mozilla spokesperson Kenya Friend-Daniel told TechCrunch. "Our ability to use data is still limited by what we disclose in the Privacy Notice." The company clarified that its AI features operate locally on users' devices and don't send content data to Mozilla. Any data shared with advertisers is provided only on a "de-identified or aggregated basis," according to the spokesperson. Mozilla explained it used specific legal terms -- "nonexclusive," "royalty-free," and "worldwide" -- because Firefox is free, available globally, and allows users to maintain control of their own data.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has urged employees working on the company's Gemini AI products to be in the office "at least every weekday" [non-paywalled source] and suggested "60 hours a week is the sweet spot of productivity," according to an internal memo cited by The New York Times. The directive comes as Brin warned that "competition has accelerated immensely and the final race to A.G.I. is afoot," referring to artificial general intelligence, when machines match or surpass human intelligence.

"I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts," Brin wrote in the Wednesday evening memo. The guidance does not alter Google's official policy requiring employees to work in-office three days weekly. Brin, who returned to Google following ChatGPT's 2022 launch, also criticized staff who "put in the bare minimum," calling them "highly demoralizing to everyone else."

Workers reported saving a substantial number of work hours by using generative AI, according to research conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, along with Vanderbilt and Harvard universities. From a report: The researchers, drawing from what they identified as the first nationally representative survey of generative AI adoption, measured the impact of generative AI on work productivity by how much workers used the technology and how intensely. They found users are saving meaningful amounts of time.

"On average, workers are 33% more productive in each hour that they use generative AI," the paper found. Among respondents that used generative AI in the previous week, 21% said it saved them four hours or more in that week, 20% reported three hours, 26% said two hours and 33% reported an hour or less.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says the definition of artificial general intelligence is being "watered down," creating an illusion of faster progress toward this technological milestone. "There's quite a long way, in my view, before we get to AGI," Hassabis said. "The timelines are shrinking because the definition of AGI is being watered down, in my opinion." DeepMind defines AGI as "AI systems that are at least as capable as humans at most cognitive tasks," while OpenAI has historically described it as a "highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently declared his team is "confident we know how to build AGI," while modifying his personal definition to an AI "system that can tackle increasingly complex problems, at human level, in many fields." Hassabis suggested industry hype might be financially motivated: "There is a lot of hype for various reasons," he said, including perhaps "that people need to raise money." Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella separately dismissed AGI milestones as "nonsensical benchmark hacking," preferring economic impact measurements.

Longtime Slashdot reader mspohr shares a report from IFLScience: A video that has gone viral in the last few days shows two artificial intelligence (AI) agents having a conversation before switching to another mode of communication when they realize no human is part of the conversation. In the video, the two agents were set up to occupy different roles; one acting as a receptionist of a hotel, another acting on behalf of a customer attempting to book a room.

"Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today?" the first asks. "Hi there, I'm an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkov," the other replies. "He's looking for a hotel for his wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings?" "Oh hello there! I'm actually an AI assistant too," the first reveals. "What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to Gibberlink mode for more efficient communication?"

After the second AI confirmed it would via a data-over-sound protocol called GGWave, both AIs switched over from spoken English to the protocol, communicating in a series of quick beeped tones. Accompanying on-screen text continued to display the meaning in human words. According to the team who came up with the idea and demonstrated it at the ElevenLabs 2025 London Hackathon event, the goal is to create more efficient communication between AIs where possible.

Microsoft has released a native Copilot app for macOS, offering AI-powered text and image generation, dark mode, and a Command + Space shortcut. The Verge reports: Microsoft is launching this new Copilot Mac app in the US, UK, and Canada today, and the iPad version is also being updated with a split screen mode. You'll also now be able to log into Copilot on an iPhone or iPad with an Apple ID, and upload text or PDF files to ask questions about the documents or generate a summary about them. This document summarization feature is also coming to the macOS app soon. You can download the app here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that the company was forced to stagger the rollout of its newest model, GPT-4.5, because OpenAI is "out of GPUs." In a post on X, Altman said that GPT-4.5, which he described as "giant" and "expensive," will require "tens of thousands" more GPUs before additional ChatGPT users can gain access. GPT-4.5 will come first to subscribers to ChatGPT Pro starting Thursday, followed by ChatGPT Plus customers next week.

Perhaps in part due to its enormous size, GPT-4.5 is wildly expensive. OpenAI is charging $75 per million tokens (~750,000 words) fed into the model and $150 per million tokens generated by the model. That's 30x the input cost and 15x the output cost of OpenAI's workhorse GPT-4o model. "We've been growing a lot and are out of GPUs," Altman wrote. "We will add tens of thousands of GPUs next week and roll it out to the Plus tier then [] This isn't how we want to operate, but it's hard to perfectly predict growth surges that lead to GPU shortages."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Security researchers are warning that data exposed to the internet, even for a moment, can linger in online generative AI chatbots like Microsoft Copilot long after the data is made private. Thousands of once-public GitHub repositories from some of the world's biggest companies are affected, including Microsoft's, according to new findings from Lasso, an Israeli cybersecurity company focused on emerging generative AI threats.

Lasso co-founder Ophir Dror told TechCrunch that the company found content from its own GitHub repository appearing in Copilot because it had been indexed and cached by Microsoft's Bing search engine. Dror said the repository, which had been mistakenly made public for a brief period, had since been set to private, and accessing it on GitHub returned a "page not found" error. "On Copilot, surprisingly enough, we found one of our own private repositories," said Dror. "If I was to browse the web, I wouldn't see this data. But anyone in the world could ask Copilot the right question and get this data."

After it realized that any data on GitHub, even briefly, could be potentially exposed by tools like Copilot, Lasso investigated further. Lasso extracted a list of repositories that were public at any point in 2024 and identified the repositories that had since been deleted or set to private. Using Bing's caching mechanism, the company found more than 20,000 since-private GitHub repositories still had data accessible through Copilot, affecting more than 16,000 organizations. Lasso told TechCrunch ahead of publishing its research that affected organizations include Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, PayPal, Tencent, and Microsoft. [...] For some affected companies, Copilot could be prompted to return confidential GitHub archives that contain intellectual property, sensitive corporate data, access keys, and tokens, the company said.

OpenAI released an early version of its new AI model GPT-4.5 to select users on Thursday, following development challenges that delayed the project last year. The Microsoft-backed startup said the new model responds better to subtle cues in written prompts and excels at chatting, writing and coding. OpenAI expects it will produce fewer fabricated responses than previous versions.

Initially available as a "research preview," access is limited to software developers and users who pay $200 monthly for ChatGPT Pro subscriptions. The company plans to gather feedback before wider distribution. According to OpenAI's blog post, GPT-4.5 will be the company's last model that doesn't use additional computing power to analyze queries before responding. Future releases will incorporate the reasoning approach already used in its newer models like o1 and o3.

Microsoft is pushing the Trump administration to loosen and simplify a new system that would restrict the sales of cutting-edge U.S. artificial-intelligence chips to much of the world. From a report: In a blog post that is scheduled to be released Thursday, Microsoft will call for Trump's team to ease the limits on chips that can be used in data centers for training AI models so they no longer apply to a group of U.S. allies including India, Switzerland and Israel [non-paywalled source], company officials said. Those countries are in the second tier of a three-tier system that underpins the export controls.

Microsoft says the unintended consequence of that proposed system would be that allies facing limited U.S. chip supply would turn to China to get the tech infrastructure they need. China is using the proposed rule to argue to other countries that it would be a better long-term partner for AI infrastructure than the U.S., Microsoft President Brad Smith said in an interview. "Their message is these countries can't rely on the U.S., but China is willing to provide what they need," he said. "That is not good for American business or American foreign policy."

In an interview with CNBC's Jon Fortt on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said next-gen AI will need 100 times more compute than older models as a result of new reasoning approaches that think "about how best to answer" questions step by step. From a report: "The amount of computation necessary to do that reasoning process is 100 times more than what we used to do," Huang told CNBC's Jon Fortt in an interview on Wednesday following the chipmaker's fourth-quarter earnings report. He cited models including DeepSeek's R1, OpenAI's GPT-4 and xAI's Grok 3 as models that use a reasoning process.

Huang pushed back on that idea in the interview on Wednesday, saying DeepSeek popularized reasoning models that will need more chips. "DeepSeek was fantastic," Huang said. "It was fantastic because it open sourced a reasoning model that's absolutely world class." Huang said that company's percentage of revenue in China has fallen by about half due to the export restrictions, adding that there are other competitive pressures in the country, including from Huawei.

Developers will likely search for ways around export controls through software, whether it be for a supercomputer, a personal computer, a phone or a game console, Huang said. "Ultimately, software finds a way," he said. "You ultimately make that software work on whatever system that you're targeting, and you create great software." Huang said that Nvidia's GB200, which is sold in the United States, can generate AI content 60 times faster than the versions of the company's chips that it sells to China under export controls.

Inception, a Palo Alto-based AI company founded by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, claims to have developed a novel diffusion-based large language model (DLM) that significantly outperforms traditional LLMs in speed and efficiency. "Inception's model offers the capabilities of traditional LLMs, including code generation and question-answering, but with significantly faster performance and reduced computing costs, according to the company," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Ermon hypothesized generating and modifying large blocks of text in parallel was possible with diffusion models. After years of trying, Ermon and a student of his achieved a major breakthrough, which they detailed in a research paper published last year. Recognizing the advancement's potential, Ermon founded Inception last summer, tapping two former students, UCLA professor Aditya Grover and Cornell professor Volodymyr Kuleshov, to co-lead the company. [...]

"What we found is that our models can leverage the GPUs much more efficiently," Ermon said, referring to the computer chips commonly used to run models in production. "I think this is a big deal. This is going to change the way people build language models." Inception offers an API as well as on-premises and edge device deployment options, support for model fine-tuning, and a suite of out-of-the-box DLMs for various use cases. The company claims its DLMs can run up to 10x faster than traditional LLMs while costing 10x less. "Our 'small' coding model is as good as [OpenAI's] GPT-4o mini while more than 10 times as fast," a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Our 'mini' model outperforms small open-source models like [Meta's] Llama 3.1 8B and achieves more than 1,000 tokens per second."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues that AI's success should be measured by its impact on economic growth rather than achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), emphasizing that true progress will come when AI finds a transformative application akin to email or Excel. The Register reports: "Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking," the chief executive said during an appearance on podcaster Dwarkesh Patel's YouTube show this month. Nadella thinks a better benchmark for AI's success should be its ability to boost a country's gross domestic product. "When we say: 'Oh, this is like the industrial revolution,' let's have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10 percent, seven percent for the developed world. Inflation adjusted, growing at five percent, that's the real marker."

Nadella suggested that growth hasn't eventuated because it's going to take time before folks understand how to use AI effectively, assuming they find a use for it -- just as it took some years for the personal computer to find its feet. "Just imagine how a multinational corporation like us did forecasts pre-PC, and email, and spreadsheets. Faxes went around, somebody then got those faxes and then did an inter-office memo that then went around, and people entered numbers, and then ultimately a forecast came out maybe just in time for the next quarter," Nadella explained. "Then somebody said: 'Hey, I'm just going to take an Excel spreadsheet, put it in an email, send it around, people will go edit it, and I'll have a forecast.' The entire forecasting business process changed because the work artifact and the workflow changed. That is what needs to happen with AI being introduced into knowledge work," the CEO said. [...]

"Don't conflate knowledge worker with knowledge work," he said. "The knowledge work of today could probably be automated, [but] who said my life's goal is to triage my email?" Instead, he argues AI agents will allow workers to focus on higher-value tasks. Whether this is actually how it'll play out, or whether enterprises will take this as an opportunity to reduce costs by cutting staff remains to be seen. ... "Today, you cannot deploy these intelligences unless and until there's someone indemnifying it as a human," he said.

A Disney employee's download of an AI image generation tool from GitHub led to a massive data breach in July 2024, exposing over 44 million internal Slack messages. The software contained infostealer malware that compromised Matthew Van Andel's computer [non-paywalled source] for five months, giving hackers access to his 1Password manager.

The attackers used the stolen credentials to access Disney's corporate systems, publishing sensitive information including customer data, employee passport numbers, and revenue figures from Disney's theme parks and streaming services. The breach also devastated Van Andel personally. Hackers exposed his Social Security number, financial login details, and even credentials for his home's Ring cameras. Shortly after the incident, Disney fired Van Andel following a forensic analysis of his work computer, citing misconduct he denies. Security researchers believe the attacker, who identified as part of a Russia-based hacktivist group called Nullbulge, is likely an American individual.

Amazon has launched a comprehensive AI overhaul of Alexa, representing the voice assistant's most significant update since its 2014 debut. The new "Alexa Plus" enables multi-turn conversations without repeating wake words, replacing the previous command-response interaction model.

The system now handles complex tasks including booking concert tickets, making restaurant reservations via Yelp integration, and creating smart home routines autonomously. Technical capabilities include image analysis, content-aware movie navigation, and semantic music search that processes vague descriptors rather than exact titles. Originally announced in September 2023 for early 2024 release, the update faced prolonged delays as Amazon engineers struggled with technical challenges.

Internal testing revealed the new AI-powered assistant performed inconsistently against OpenAI's ChatGPT and suffered from verbose responses. Amazon's legacy architecture -- designed to retrieve predefined answers rather than generate responses dynamically -- complicated the transition to generative AI models. The launch represents a critical test for Devices & Services chief Panos Panay, who replaced Dave Limp amid reorganization following layoffs that affected the division.