THE ATLANTIC – Technology | Internet & Technology

The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots—1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to “stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away.” (Humans: They mean humans.)Moltbook was developed as a sort of experimental playground for interactions among AI “agents,” which are bots that have access to and can use programs. Claude Code, a popular AI coding tool, has such agentic capabilities, for example: It can act on your behalf to manage files on your computer, send emails, develop and publish apps, and so on. Normally, humans direct an agent to perform specific tasks. But on Moltbook, all a person has to do is register their AI agent on the site, and then the bot is encouraged to post, comment, and… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Gregory Bovino, the man who became the face of Donald Trump’s Minneapolis crackdown, lost his job as the Border Patrol’s “commander at large” after agents he oversaw shot and killed Alex Pretti. Bovino also reportedly lost his X account, a development that may seem trivial until you remember: Bovino loves to post.In the two days after Pretti died, Bovino relentlessly trolled Democrats who condemned the shooting—and defended Border Patrol agents as the real victims. When Representative Eric Swalwell wrote on X that ICE officers should walk off the job to protest the killing, Bovino replied: “I was thinking the same for you.” At about 1 a.m. last Monday, Bovino replied to a user who said he would “never pay for a beer again” after mocking Swalwell: “Lol!!  🍺 🍻 🍺 🍻 🍺 🍻.”Getting silenced on X is, and I realize how absurd it sounds, the worst professional fate a Trump… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI. There was the telltale proliferation of abstract nouns, a surfeit of assertions that the deceased was “not just X—he was Y” coupled with a lack of concrete anecdotes, and more appearances of the word collaborate than you would expect from a rec-league hockey teammate. It was both too good, in terms of being grammatically correct, and not good enough, in terms of being particular. My friend had no definitive proof that he was listening to AI, but his position—and I agree with him—is that when you know, you know. His sense was that he had just heard a computer save a man from thinking about his dead friend.More and more, large language models are relieving people of the burden of reading and writing, in school and at work but… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured into the AI industry in pursuit of a loosely defined goal: artificial general intelligence, a system powerful enough to perform at least as well as a human at any task that involves thinking. Will this be the year it finally arrives?Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and xAI CEO Elon Musk think so. Both have said that such a system could go online by the end of 2026, bringing, perhaps, cancer cures or novel bioweapons. (Amodei says he prefers the term powerful AI to AGI, because the latter is overhyped.) But wait: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says we might wait another decade for AGI. And—hold on—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an interview last month that “AGI kind of went whooshing by” already; that now he’s focused instead on “superintelligence,” which he defines as an AI system that can do better at specific,… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Updated at 8:25 p.m. on January 30, 2026Reporters, lawmakers, and ordinary Americans are poring over a deluge of new files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case today, following the latest release from the Department of Justice. This release is substantially larger than any previous ones, with 3 million pages of documents, more than 180,000 photos, and more than 2,000 videos, according to the DOJ. The website they were uploaded to—which has the elegant URL Justice.gov/Epstein—is not intuitive to operate and offers a search box as its primary navigation tool.But a search box was the only thing many viewers needed, as they were diving into the files in pursuit of information on specific people—President Trump in particular. Thousands of the documents appear to mention Trump, though not all of them in any significant way (for example, The New York Times notes that some of the documents are copies of news articles… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.