‘This will be a stressful job’: Sam Altman offers $555k salary to fill most daunting role in AI

The maker of ChatGPT has advertised a $555,000-a-year vacancy with a daunting job description that would cause Superman to take a sharp intake of breath.In what may be close to the impossible job, the “head of preparedness” at OpenAI will be directly responsible for defending against risks from ever more powerful AIs to human mental health, cybersecurity and biological weapons.That is before the successful candidate has to start worrying about the possibility that AIs may soon begin training themselves amid fears from some experts they could “turn against us”.“This will be a stressful job, and you’ll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately,” said Sam Altman, the chief executive of the San Francisco-based organisation, as he launched the hunt to fill “a critical role” to “help the world”.The successful candidate will be responsible for evaluating and mitigating emerging threats and “tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm”

‘Why should we pay these criminals?’: the hidden world of ransomware negotiations

They call it “stopping the bleeding”: the vital window to prevent an entire database from being ransacked by criminals or a production line grinding to a halt.When a call comes into the cybersecurity firm S-RM, headquartered on Whitechapel High Street in east London, a hacked business or institution may have just minutes to protect themselves.S-RM, which helped a high-profile retail client recover from a Scattered Spider cyber-attack has become a quiet, often word-of-mouth, success.Many of the company’s senior workers are multilingual and have a minimal online footprint, which reveals scant but impressive CVs suggestive of corporate or government intelligence-based careers.S-RM now claims the UK’s largest cyber-incident response team

Louis Gerstner, man credited with turning around IBM, dies aged 83

Louis Gerstner, the businessman credited with turning around IBM, has died aged 83, the company announced on Sunday.Gerstner was chair and CEO of IBM from 1993 to 2002, a time when the company was struggling for relevance in the face of competition from rivals such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.After becoming the first outsider to run the company, Gerstner abandoned a plan to split IBM, which was known as Big Blue, into a number of autonomous “Baby Blues” that would have focused on specific product areas such as processors or software.IBM’s current chair and CEO, Arvind Krishna, told staff in an email on Sunday that this decision was key to the company’s survival because “Lou understood that clients didn’t want fragmented technology, they wanted integrated solutions.”“Lou arrived at IBM at a moment when the company’s future was genuinely uncertain,” he wrote

Nvidia insists it isn’t Enron, but its AI deals are testing investor faith

Nvidia is, in crucial ways, nothing like Enron – the Houston energy giant that imploded through multibillion-dollar accounting fraud in 2001. Nor is it similar to companies such as Lucent or Worldcom that folded during the dotcom bubble.But the fact that it needs to reiterate this to its investors is less than ideal.Now worth more than $4tn (£3tn), Nvidia makes the specialised technology that powers the world’s AI surge: silicon chips and software packages that train and host systems such as ChatGPT. Its products fill datacentres from Norway to New Jersey

From shrimp Jesus to erotic tractors: how viral AI slop took over the internet

Flood of unreality is an endpoint of algorithm-driven internet and product of an economy dependent on a few top tech firms In the algorithm-driven economy of 2025, one man’s shrimp Jesus is another man’s side hustle.AI slop – the low-quality, surreal content flooding social media platforms, designed to farm views – is a phenomenon, some would say the phenomenon of the 2024 and 2025 internet. Merriam-Webster’s word of the year this year is “slop”, referring exclusively to the internet variety.It came about shortly after the advent of popular large language models, such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, which democratised content creation and enabled vast swathes of internet denizens to create images and videos that resembled – to varying degrees – the creations of professionals.In 2024, it began to achieve peak cultural moments

More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds

More than 20% of the videos that YouTube’s algorithm shows to new users are “AI slop” – low-quality AI-generated content designed to farm views, research has found.The video-editing company Kapwing surveyed 15,000 of the world’s most popular YouTube channels – the top 100 in every country – and found that 278 of them contain only AI slop.Together, these AI slop channels have amassed more than 63bn views and 221 million subscribers, generating about $117m (£90m) in revenue each year, according to estimates.The researchers also made a new YouTube account and found that 104 of the first 500 videos recommended to its feed were AI slop. One-third of the 500 videos were “brainrot”, a category that includes AI slop and other low-quality content made to monetise attention