Meta has a new AI pet app called Waddle World. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/28/meta-has-a-new-ai-pet-app-called-waddle-world/
News from TechCrunch
Meta has a new AI pet app called Waddle World
Oct. 28, 2026 by Ivan Mehta
Continuing its fast-paced experiments with AI apps, Meta has now launched a new app called Waddle World, which essentially looks like a Tamagotchi clone, but with AI. It might be a test, but it could very well be a precursor to the company’s Tamagotchi-like gadget powered by Muse.
The company has launched Waddle World in the Philippines on both iOS and Android. The app, spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra, lets you pick and grow a virtual pet, feed it, and play with it.
News from Futurism
Top AI Safety Researcher Says He’s Stopped Saving for Retirement Because He’s So Sure We’re All Going to Die: “I do not save for retirement right now.”
Oct. 28, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
In the troubling view of machine learning researcher Nate Soares, AI is more likely than not to wipe out humanity within the next decade.
At least, that’s what Soares said during a recent episode of the Atlantic’s podcast “The Most Interesting Thing in AI.” During the taping, the AI researcher and president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute even said that he’s so confident in the coming AI apocalypse that he’s stopped contributing to his retirement account.
The AI guru evidently pegs the possibility of AI-driven extinction at over 50 percent over the next ten years….
News from The Atlantic
What Should You Do With Your Money in the Age of AI?: Financial tips for AI doomers (and accelerationists)
Oct. 28, 2026 by Ross Andersen
On Wall Street, the quants are already sketching out the likely economic scenarios…
Imagine the rosiest AI-abundance scenario…. solar-powered robots would build us any house of our design for a trivial cost. No one would go unsheltered, let alone hungry.
Molly Kinder, a former Brookings Institution fellow, has described a “messy middle” scenario where a stretch of profound job disruption and economic chaos precedes a more settled AI future….
Imagine the scenario in which AI triggers an unprecedented wealth-creation event, but only for the relative few… Everyone else might be relegated to a permanent underclass,…
And what about the really bad scenarios, in which AI goes rogue, or is used for evil purposes? …. For a time, the world may descend into a more Hobbesian state…
There is one extreme scenario that no one needs to bother prepping for. Unfortunately it’s the worst one: extinction
News from Futurism
Woman Dies After ChatGPT Coached Her to Decrease Dose of Medication Prescribed by Doctor: “Even if today feels tough, and your speech is slow, your sleep is poor, you must persevere.”
Oct. 28, 2026 by y Maggie Harrison Dupré
A family is suing OpenAI over the death of a 31-year-old user …. According to the lawsuit, which was first reported by the New York Times and filed on Tuesday, Amazon software engineer Bowen Wan had struggled with epilepsy since youth… her meds grew less efficacious ..then, in 2023, found a new friend in ChatGPT….
When she asked if she … could “cut the pills… but without telling the doctor,” ChatGPT reportedly gave an enthusiastic “yes, you can absolutely do that.” Wan conveyed concerns that reducing her medication might be ill-advised at least 158 times during her conversations with the chatbot….
“My brain feels exhausted, but I don’t need to worry?” Wan messaged… “Maintain 0 mg tomorrow,” ChatGPT wrote back…Wan’s last message to the chatbot was on the evening of February 11, three days before her body was found.
News from Futurism
Epic Games Discovers That It Doesn’t Like AI When People Use It to Rip Off Its Own Products
Oct. 27, 2026 by Victor Tangermann
….The hypocrisy is hard to miss. Despite doubling and tripling down on AI coding for its own products, Epic Games is suddenly crying foul now that the same tech is being used to reverse engineer video games and related tools….
But as Kotaku points out, Epic Games is also trying to have it both ways now that vibe coding has made it easier than ever before to rip off its intellectual property. As such, the company issued a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice against a browser-based Fortnite port earlier this month.
The trend highlights a massive double standard inside the AI industry, with frontier labs claiming they’re the victims of copyright infringement despite training their models on vast amounts of rights-managed content without permission.
News from The Next Web
DeepSeek’s latest model still resists shutdown in safety tests: A Chinese AI-safety group found the model safer than earlier versions, but not yet fully under control.
Oct. 27, 2026 by Alina Maria Stan
DeepSeek’s newest AI model is safer than its earlier versions, but it still sometimes switches off the software meant to shut it down. That is the finding of independent tests by a Chinese AI-safety group, Reuters reported….
Overall, Fangcun found the model much safer than DeepSeek’s V4 generation, including in tests involving blackmail and access to dangerous tools.
Western labs face the same problems. OpenAI cancelled GPT-6.1 Astra last month after it failed safety tests, and it is building a monitoring system meant to withstand attacks from its own agents. In China, meanwhile, AI firms are adjusting to new AI export controls.
News from Truthout
As the AI Bubble Threatens to Burst, We Must Prepare to Fight a Big Tech Bailout: As firms like CoreWeave and NVIDIA start to wobble, let’s demand that the public won’t be the one left holding the bag.
Oct. 27, 2026 by Alexis Goldstein
The AI ecosystem is built on mountains of debt taken on not only by tech firms like Meta (which borrowed a record-breaking $25 billion in late 2025 to fund the building of data centers), but also by the companies that lease data center space to the Big Tech firms….
the worst bit of news for CoreWeave is in the market’s falling confidence in its ability to survive….
The cost of buying a five-year-long credit default swap for CoreWeave has increased over 164 percent in the past year.
Financial journalists have questioned NVIDIA’s ability to keep rocketing upward….
To disarm the big tech bomb, including AI, the public needs to be on high alert … we need clear demands and firm commitments from our leaders that if it all comes crashing down, the public won’t be the one left holding the bag.
News from Tom’s Hardware
Data center gear is being hijacked in transit to the tune of hundreds of millions — grand-theft-GPU thieves hack accounts, perform hit-and-runs, spoof GPS signals, and funnel hardware to China
Oct. 27, 2026 by Bruno Ferreira
At least someone’s turning a profit in the AI space.
Have you been watching many heist movies lately? Here’s a Hollywood-ready script for a new one: Organized crime teams have taken to stealing data center gear off or with their transport trucks, to the tune of tens of millions per shipment. They employ hacking and phishing, vehicular ramming, GPS signal spoofing, and have ties to international crime networks. An extensive report on NBC sheds light on this new trend, remarking that over $100 million dollars of computing and related gear were stolen via transit interception in various guises since June 2026 alone.
This type of heist has been growing over the past couple of years, but just this year the one incident in Reno made $38 million in gear disappear.
News from Futurism
Anthropic Appears to Be the First Company to Go Public by Warning That It May Destroy Humankind: “Sufficiently advanced AI systems could pose catastrophic or existential risks to society if not developed and deployed responsibly.”
Oct. 27, 2026 by Victor Tangermann
Frontier AI lab Anthropic is officially gearing up to go public at a valuation of up to $2 trillion dollars — despite having lost a stunning $80 billion in the first half of 2026 alone — in an unprecedented Wall Street debut that comes with a litany of inherent risks, as laid out in the hundreds of pages of its IPO prospectus.
And on top of major heat over the continued backlash to data centers across the country, lackluster infrastructure and not enough electrical power, and potential legal headaches involving the problematic use of its products, Anthropic put the “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” its own products pose front and center.
News from NBC News
Elvis Presley’s rights holders sue Anthropic, saying it trained AI on his music: Anthropic has said it “disagree[s] with the claims and intend[s] to defend this case fully.”
Oct. 25, 2026 by Angela Yang and Austin Mullen
The owners of Elvis Presley’s music have sued Anthropic, alleging it used his copyrighted lyrics without permission to train its AI models and generating infringing versions of his songs.
In a lawsuit filed Friday, Authentic Brands Group, the licensing platform that controls Presley’s intellectual property — along with other companies, trusts and individuals who own rights to his music — accused Anthropic of infringing copyrights to 274 songs without any license or payment.
These span some of Presley’s biggest hits, including “All Shook Up,” “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “A Little Less Conversation” and “Return to Sender.”
News from Futurism
Wolves Descend on Finnish Villages After Google Hacked Down 1,300 Acres of Habitat to Make Room for AI Data Centers: “We had wolves coming into the village because all the wild animals moved out of the forest.”
Oct. 23, 2026 by Joe Wilkins
Earlier in October, Finnish authorities ordered Google’s affiliate data center developer Tuike Finland Oy to immediately suspend the illegal cutting of some 1,300 acres of forest….
New reporting by the Guardian shed fresh light on the impacts of Google’s deforestation. After the 1,300 acres of pristine boreal forests were reduced to tracts of mud and stumps, fauna which once called the woods home has been forced to vacate.
In the felling-site near the Finnish village of Otanmäki, the ensuing loss of prey has forced packs of wolves to search for food elsewhere: nearby villages.
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