An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has quietly added a new AI feature to its Kindle iOS app -- a feature that "lets you ask questions about the book you're reading and receive spoiler-free answers," according to an Amazon announcement.

The company says the feature, which is called Ask this Book, serves as "your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without disrupting your reading flow."

Publishing industry resource Publishers Lunch noticed Ask this Book earlier this week, and asked Amazon about it. Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta told PubLunch, "The feature uses technology, including AI, to provide instant, spoiler-free answers to customers' questions about what they're reading. Ask this Book provides short answers based on factual information about the book which are accessible only to readers who have purchased or borrowed the book and are non-shareable and non-copyable."

As PubLunch summed up: "In other words, speaking plainly, it's an in-book chatbot." [...] Perhaps most alarmingly, the Amazon spokesperson said, "To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon Prime Video has pulled its AI-powered video recap of Fallout after viewers noticed that it got key parts of the story wrong. The streaming service began testing Video Recaps last month, and now they're missing from the shows included in the test, including Fallout, The Rig, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Upload, and Bosch.

The feature is supposed to use AI to analyze a show's key plot points and sum it all in a bite-sized video, complete with an AI voiceover and clips from the series. But in its season one recap of Fallout, Prime Video incorrectly stated that one of The Ghoul's (Walton Goggins) flashbacks is set in "1950s America" rather than the year 2077, as spotted earlier by Games Radar.

The Washington Post's top standards editor Thursday decried "frustrating" errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists. From a report: Earlier this week, the Post announced that it was rolling out personalized AI-generated podcasts for users of the paper's mobile app. In a release, the paper said users will be able to choose preferred topics and AI hosts, and could "shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology."

But less than 48 hours since the product was released, people within the Post have flagged what four sources described as multiple mistakes in personalized podcasts. The errors have ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source's quotes as the paper's position on an issue.

According to four people familiar with the situation, the errors have alarmed senior newsroom leaders who have acknowledged in an internal Slack channel that the product's output is not living up to the paper's standards. In a message to other WaPo staff shared with Semafor, head of standards Karen Pensiero wrote that the errors have been "frustrating for all of us."

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: More than 10,000 Docker Hub container images expose data that should be protected, including live credentials to production systems, CI/CD databases, or LLM model keys. After scanning container images uploaded to Docker Hub in November, security researchers at threat intelligence company Flare found that 10,456 of them exposed one or more keys. The most frequent secrets were access tokens for various AI models (OpenAI, HuggingFace, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq). In total, the researchers found 4,000 such keys. "These multi-secret exposures represent critical risks, as they often provide full access to cloud environments, Git repositories, CI/CD systems, payment integrations, and other core infrastructure components," Flare notes. [...]

Additionally, they found hardcoded API tokens for AI services being hardcoded in Python application files, config.json files, YAML configs, GitHub tokens, and credentials for multiple internal environments. Some of the sensitive data was present in the manifest of Docker images, a file that provides details about the image.Flare notes that roughly 25% of developers who accidentally exposed secrets on Docker Hub realized the mistake and removed the leaked secret from the container or manifest file within 48 hours. However, in 75% of these cases, the leaked key was not revoked, meaning that anyone who stole it during the exposure period could still use it later to mount attacks.

Flare suggests that developers avoid storing secrets in container images, stop using static, long-lived credentials, and centralize their secrets management using a dedicated vault or secrets manager. Organizations should implement active scanning across the entire software development life cycle and revoke exposed secrets and invalidate old sessions immediately.

President Trump signed an executive order establishing a single federal AI regulatory framework that preempts state-level rules, aiming to centralize oversight of the rapidly growing AI industry. "The Trump administration, with the aid of AI and crypto czar David Sacks, has been pursuing a path that would allow federal rules to preempt state regulations on AI, a move meant to keep big Democratic-led states like California and New York from exerting their control over the growing industry," notes CNBC.

Developing...

During the company's first "Autonomy & AI Day" event today, Rivian unveiled a major autonomy push featuring custom silicon, lidar, and a "large driving model." It also hinted at a potential entry into the self-driving ride-hail market, according to CEO RJ Scaringe. TechCrunch reports: Rivian said it will expand the hands-free version of its driver-assistance software to "over 3.5 million miles of roads across the USA and Canada" and will eventually expand beyond highways to surface streets (with clearly painted road lines). This expanded access will be available on the company's second-generation R1 trucks and SUVs. It's calling the expanded capabilities "Universal Hands-Free" and will launch in early 2026. Rivian says it will charge a one-time fee of $2,500 or $49.99 per month.

"What that means is you can get into the vehicle at your house, plug in the address to where you're going, and the vehicle will completely drive you there," Scaringe said Thursday, describing a point-to-point navigation feature. After that, Rivian plans to allow drivers to take their eyes off the road. "This gives you your time back. You can be on your phone, or reading a book, no longer needing to be actively involved in the operation of vehicle." Rivian's driver assistance software won't stop there; the EV maker laid out plans on Thursday to enhance its capabilities all the way up to what it's calling "personal L4," a nod to the level set by the Society of Automotive Engineers that means a car can operate in a particular area with no human intervention.

After that, Scaringe hinted that Rivian will be looking at competing with the likes of Waymo. "While our initial focus will be on personally owned vehicles, which today represent a vast majority of the miles driven in the United States, this also enables us to pursue opportunities in the ride-share space," he said. To help accomplish these lofty goals, Rivian has been building a "large driving model" (think: an LLM but for real-world driving), part of a move away from a rules-based framework for developing autonomous vehicles that has been led by Tesla. The company also showed off its own custom 5nm processor, which it says will be built in collaboration with both Arm and TSMC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be coming to an end. There has been legal wrangling over the role of copyright in the AI era, but the mother of all legal teams may now be gearing up for a fight. Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company's AI tools are infringing Disney's copyrights "on a massive scale." According to the letter, Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate's intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a "large corpus" of Disney's works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google's image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters -- they couldn't do that without feeding the models lots of Disney data.

The C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing "copies of its protected works" to consumers. So all those memes you've been making with Disney characters? Yeah, Disney doesn't like that, either. The letter calls out a huge number of Disney-owned properties that can be prompted into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars. The company calls on Google to immediately stop using Disney content in its AI tools and create measures to ensure that future AI outputs don't produce any characters that Disney owns. Disney is famously litigious and has an army of lawyers dedicated to defending its copyrights. The nature of copyright law in the US is a direct result of Disney's legal maneuvering, which has extended its control of iconic characters by decades. While Disney wants its characters out of Google AI generally, the letter specifically cited the AI tools in YouTube. Google has started adding its Veo AI video model to YouTube, allowing creators to more easily create and publish videos. That seems to be a greater concern for Disney than image models like Nano Banana. "We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them," Google said in a statement. "More generally, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built additional innovative copyright controls like Google-extended and Content ID for YouTube, which give sites and copyright holders control over their content."

The cease and desist letter arrives at the same time the company announced a content deal with OpenAI. Disney said it's investing $1 billion in OpenAI via a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate AI-powered short videos and images featuring more than 200 characters.

Google's Chrome team has built an experimental browser called Disco that takes a query or prompt, opens a cluster of related tabs, and then generates a custom application tailored to whatever task the user is trying to accomplish. The browser launched Thursday as an experiment in Google's Search Labs.

GenTabs, the core feature powering Disco, are information-rich pages created by Google's Gemini AI models -- ask for travel tips and the system builds a planner app; ask for study help and it creates a flashcard system. Disco -- named partly for fun and partly as shorthand for "discovery" -- started as a hackathon project inside Google before catching the team's imagination.

Parisa Tabriz, who leads the Chrome team, said that Disco is not intended as a general-purpose browser and is not an attempt to cannibalize Chrome. The experiment aims to test what happens when users move from simply having tabs to generating personalized, curated applications on demand. The capability relies on features in the recently launched Gemini 3, which can create one-off interactive interfaces and build miniature apps on the fly rather than just returning text or images.

Cisco's stock price touched $80.25 on Wednesday, finally eclipsing its dotcom-era peak of $80.06 set on March 27, 2000 -- when the networking giant briefly surpassed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company. The journey back took 25 years, eight months and 13 days. The company's fundamentals improved dramatically over that period, of course. Revenues have nearly quintupled since 1999, profits have quadrupled, earnings per share have grown eightfold, and margins have remained healthy throughout. Investors who bought at the peak still lost money to inflation for a generation.

Cisco's trajectory draws obvious comparisons to Nvidia, today's dominant "picks and shovels" supplier for the AI boom. Nvidia trades at a price-to-earnings ratio above 45 and an enterprise value-to-sales ratio near 24. At its 2000 peak, Cisco traded at a P/E above 200 and EV/sales of 31.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Thursday signed two bills aimed at regulating the use of AI in entertainment, requiring disclosure when ads feature AI-generated performers and mandating consent from heirs before a deceased person's likeness can be used commercially. Hochul described both measures as "first in the nation" policies during a signing ceremony at SAG-AFTRA's New York City offices.

The first bill compels ad producers to disclose the use of synthetic performers, and the second requires companies to obtain consent from heirs or executors before using a person's name, image, or likeness for commercial purposes after their death. "We will have responsible AI policies in the state of New York," Hochul said. "It's a time where we do want to embrace innovation. But not to the detriment of people."

The signing came the same day Disney announced a partnership allowing users of OpenAI's Sora to create clips featuring Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters.

OpenAI on Thursday released GPT-5.2, its latest and what the company calls its "best model yet for everyday professional use," just days after CEO Sam Altman declared a "code red" internally to marshal resources toward improving ChatGPT amid intensifying competition from Google's well-received Gemini 3 model. The GPT-5.2 series ships in three tiers: Instant, designed for faster responses and information retrieval; Thinking, optimized for coding, math, and planning; and Pro, the most powerful tier targeting difficult questions requiring high accuracy.

OpenAI says the Thinking model hallucinated 38% less than GPT-5.1 on benchmarks measuring factual accuracy. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of applications, denied that the launch was moved up in response to the code red, saying the company has been working on GPT-5.2 for "many, many months." She described the internal directive as a way to "really signal to the company that we want to marshal resources in this one particular area."

The competitive pressure is real. Google's Gemini app now has more than 650 million monthly active users, compared to OpenAI's 800 million weekly active users. In October, OpenAI's head of ChatGPT Nick Turley sent an internal memo declaring the company was facing "the greatest competitive pressure we've ever seen," setting a goal to increase daily active users by 5 percent before 2026. GPT-5.2 is rolling out to paid ChatGPT users starting Thursday, and GPT-5.1 will remain available under "legacy models" for three months before being sunset.

Stanford researchers spent much of the past year building an AI bot called Artemis that scans networks for software vulnerabilities, and when they pitted it against ten professional penetration testers on the university's own engineering network, the bot outperformed nine of them. The experiment offers a window into how rapidly AI hacking tools have improved after years of underwhelming performance.

"We thought it would probably be below average," said Justin Lin, a Stanford cybersecurity researcher. Artemis found bugs at a fraction of human cost -- just under $60 per hour compared to the $2,000 to $2,500 per day that professional pen testers typically charge. But its performance wasn't flawless. About 18% of its bug reports were false positives, and it completely missed an obvious vulnerability on a webpage that most human testers caught. In one case, Artemis found a bug on an outdated page that didn't render in standard browsers; it used a command-line tool called Curl instead of Chrome or Firefox.

Dan Boneh, a Stanford computer science professor who advised the researchers, noted that vast amounts of software shipped without being vetted by LLMs could now be at risk. "We're in this moment of time where many actors can increase their productivity to find bugs at an extreme scale," said Jacob Klein, head of threat intelligence at Anthropic.

Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and has entered into a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate AI-powered short videos and images featuring more than 200 characters from its Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar franchises.

The new features are expected to launch in 2026 through Sora, OpenAI's short-form video platform, and ChatGPT. A selection of user-generated short videos will also be available to stream on Disney+. The licensing agreement excludes any talent likenesses or voices. Disney will receive warrants to purchase additional OpenAI equity as part of the arrangement, and its employees will gain access to OpenAI tools including ChatGPT for building new products.

Opera has opened its AI-powered browser Neon to the public after a couple of months of testing, and anyone interested in trying it will need to pay $19.90 per month. The Norway-based company first unveiled Neon in May and launched it in early access to select users in October. Like Perplexity's Comet, OpenAI's Atlas, and The Browser Company's Dia, Neon bakes an AI chatbot into its interface that can answer questions about pages, create mini apps and videos, and perform tasks. The browser uses your browsing history as context, so you can ask it to fetch details from a YouTube video you watched last week. The subscription also grants access to AI models including Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.1.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: OpenAI says the cyber capabilities of its frontier AI models are accelerating and warns Wednesday that upcoming models are likely to pose a "high" risk, according to a report shared first with Axios. The models' growing capabilities could significantly expand the number of people able to carry out cyberattacks. OpenAI said it has already seen a significant increase in capabilities in recent releases, particularly as models are able to operate longer autonomously, paving the way for brute force attacks.

The company notes that GPT-5 scored a 27% on a capture-the-flag exercise in August, GPT-5.1-Codex-Max was able to score 76% last month. "We expect that upcoming AI models will continue on this trajectory," the company says in the report. "In preparation, we are planning and evaluating as though each new model could reach 'high' levels of cybersecurity capability as measured by our Preparedness Framework." "High" is the second-highest level, below the "critical" level at which models are unsafe to be released publicly. "What I would explicitly call out as the forcing function for this is the model's ability to work for extended periods of time," said OpenAI's Fouad Matin.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple on Wednesday released its annual list of the most downloaded apps and games for the year. For the U.S. market, OpenAI's ChatGPT topped the ranks of free iPhone apps (not including games) with the most installs in 2025. The AI app was followed by Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, and Google's Gemini. ChatGPT made it to No. 4 last year, but the top spot was taken by Chinese shopping app Temu. In 2023, the AI app didn't make the top-10 list despite being released on the iPhone in May 2023 to a strong debut.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organizations, with payments then distributed to creators. The proposal argues that this "mandatory blanket license" would lower compliance costs for AI firms while ensuring that writers, musicians, artists, and other rights holders are compensated when their work is scraped to train commercial models. [...]

The eight-member committee, formed by the Indian government in late April, argues the system would avoid years of legal uncertainty while ensuring creators are compensated from the outset. Defending the system, the committee says in a 125-page submission (PDF) that a blanket license "aims to provide an easy access to content for AI developers reduce transaction costs [and] ensure fair compensation for rightsholders," calling it the least burdensome way to manage large-scale AI training. The submission adds that the single collecting body would function as a "single window," eliminating the need for individual negotiations and enabling royalties to flow to both registered and unregistered creators.

Qualcomm has acquired RISC-V startup Ventana to strengthen its CPU ambitions beyond mobile, "reinforcing its commitment and leadership in the development of the RISC-V standard and ecosystem," the company said in a press release. CRN Magazine reports: The San Diego-based company said Ventana's expertise in RISC-V, a free and open alternative to the Arm and x86 instruction set architectures, will enhance its CPU engineering capabilities and complement "existing efforts to develop custom Oryon CPU technology." Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Qualcomm, which has already been using RISC-V for some products outside the PC and server markets, said Ventana's contributions will boost its "technology leadership in the AI era across all businesses," indicating the broad impact expected by this acquisition. "We believe the RISC-V instruction set architecture has the potential to advance the frontier on CPU technology, enabling innovation across products," Durga Malladi, executive vice president and general manager of technology planning, edge solutions and data center for Qualcomm, said in a statement. "The acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems marks a pivotal step in our journey to deliver industry-leading RISC-V-based CPU technology across products."

Further reading: Qualcomm Is Buying Arduino, Releases New Raspberry Pi-Esque Arduino Board

Longtime Slashdot reader MadCow42 writes: Canonical just announced that they're packaging AMD's ROCm libraries (for AIML and HPC with both data-center GPUs as well as desktop/laptop GPUs), directly into the Ubuntu Universe archive. You can run ROCm on Ubuntu today but you have to install it via a script from AMD and manually remove and reinstall for any upgrades or bug fixes. Having it in Ubuntu as a normal Debian package will make it much easier to install and also to maintain in the long run via normal apt tooling ('apt upgrade'). This also means that ROCm can be an automatically-installed dependency for other packages, which doesn't happen today.

And, interestingly, Canonical has committed to providing long-term-support for ROCm in Ubuntu -- which is particularly exciting for edge and IoT devices that may have a long life in the field and need regular security patches and updates.

Adobe is integrating Photoshop, Express, and Acrobat directly into ChatGPT so users can edit photos, design graphics, and tweak PDFs through the chatbot. The Verge reports: The Adobe apps are free to use, and can be activated by typing the name of the app alongside an uploaded file and conversational instruction, such as "Adobe Photoshop, help me blur the background of this image." ChatGPT users won't have to specify the name of the app again during the same conversation to make additional changes. Depending on the instructions, Adobe's apps may offer a selection of results to choose from, or provide a UI element that the user can manually control -- such as Photoshop sliders for adjusting contrast and brightness.

The ChatGPT apps don't provide the full functionality of Adobe's desktop software. Adobe says the Photoshop app can edit specific sections of images, apply creative effects, and adjust image settings like brightness, contrast and exposure. Acrobat in ChatGPT can edit existing PDFs, compress and convert other documents into a PDF format, extract text or tables, and merge multiple files together.

The Adobe Express app allows ChatGPT users to both generate and edit designs, such as posters, invitations, and social media graphics. Everything in the design can be edited without leaving ChatGPT, from replacing text or images, to altering colors and animating specific sections. If ChatGPT users do want more granular control over a project they started in the chatbot, those photos, PDFs, and designs can be opened directly in Adobe's native apps to pick up where they left off.