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Building a hill-climbing machine: Launching seven new MAI models

The title’s “hill-climbing machine” refers to Microsoft’s iterative, scientifically rigorous engineering framework. By tightly linking clean data pipelines, specialized training infrastructure, and reinforcement learning environments, they have created an optimization loop designed to steadily “climb” toward higher capabilities as compute scales.


Today we are announcing a family of seven new models developed in-house at Microsoft AI. Beyond these models, we’re building a superintelligence lab – a system and an approach we believe will define the next phase of AI.

This is an extraordinary time in technology. The compute used to train frontier models has increased by a factor of one trillion. Now we expect another thousand-fold increase over the next three years, which in turn means more advanced capabilities, and the continued rollout of ever more effective AI.

This epic compute ramp will change the nature of work, business and daily life. We all have to prepare for this reality. Our job at MAI is to help you do this – to push the frontier, and to build a hill-climbing machine to keep you at the frontier.

LLMs help robots understand vague instructions and focus on key details

Imagine working at a warehouse or office sometime in the near future, and you’re asked to help a new trainee learn the basics of their job. The catch: It’s a robot. To teach them, you might want to play a game of “show and tell”—that is, physically showing how to do something a few different ways, while also explaining what you’re doing.

Let’s say you asked the robot to place some coffee on your desk without disturbing you during a Zoom call. You’ll prefer that the robot doesn’t get close to you and the laptop so that it doesn’t interrupt your meeting. To enable this behavior, the robot should be trained with data that clearly demonstrates the full task. Computer scientists have attempted to explain manipulation tasks to robots by recording lots of physical demonstrations or writing extensive directions. But if you don’t have both, the machine is likely to misunderstand what it needs to do.

It’s laborious for humans to do all that showing and telling, so researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have automated the process of teaching a robot, while clarifying instructions automatically and using nearly five times less demonstration data.

Deep brain stimulation boosts myelination and shifts brain networks linked to depression

Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have uncovered the first direct evidence that deep brain stimulation (DBS) can remodel white matter pathways in the brain and alter communication across large-scale neural networks, revealing a previously unrecognized mechanism that may explain how the therapy helps patients recover from severe depression. The study, published June 1 in Nature Neuroscience, provides critical insight into the biological basis of DBS, an emerging therapy for treatment-resistant depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

Deep brain stimulation, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat essential tremor, Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, is a neurosurgical procedure involving placement of a neurostimulator (sometimes referred to as a “brain pacemaker”), which sends high-frequency electrical impulses through implanted electrodes deep in the brain to specific areas responsible for the symptoms of each disorder.

Although DBS has shown sustained clinical benefit for many patients with severe depression who do not respond to medications, psychotherapy, and electroconvulsive therapy, the mechanisms underlying its therapeutic effects have remained poorly understood.

Instagram users locked out after Meta AI abused to steal accounts

Multiple Instagram users had their accounts hijacked after attackers convinced Meta’s AI-powered support tools that they were the legitimate owners.

In many cases, impacted users are unable to recover access due to the platform’s use of automated assistance that involves only AI/chatbot loops and no human support agents.

On Monday, multiple holders of rare and high-value accounts reported suddenly losing access to their accounts, claiming that their identities had been verified via facial scans and that they had enabled safeguards such as two-factor authentication (2FA).

Authorities struggle to stop AI tools generating nude images without consent

There has been a sharp rise in so-called “nudification” technology. These AI-powered tools can generate realistic fake images and videos that depict people as undressed, often without their knowledge or consent. William Brangham reports on the growing concern over the technology and the efforts underway to rein it in.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Tech Whistleblower: You Only Have 3 Years Left Before It Hits! — Mo Gawdat

AI Expert Mo Gawdat returns to The Diary Of A CEO to reveal why AGI has already arrived, why 30% of jobs will disappear by 2027, and why the most dangerous thing about AI isn’t the technology — it’s the people in charge of it.

Mo Gawdat is the former Chief Business Officer at Google X, founder of One Billion Happy, and co-founder of Emma. Love. He is a 4x international bestselling author, and his upcoming book ‘Alive: A Human’s Guide to Living in the World of AI’, will be released in October 2026.

He explains:
◾How AI can give you a 400-point IQ boost, and why most people are wasting it.
◾ Why Mo actually wants a machine smarter than all of humanity to take control.
◾Why Sam Altman said AI will \.

How AI & Quantum Computing Will Transform Zero Trust Cybersecurity

By Chuck Brooks, president of Brooks Consulting International and one of Executive Mosaic’s GovCon Experts

In Zero Trust cybersecurity protocols there is no implicit trust of identity or privilege – inside or outside the network perimeter, and every person, device, application and transaction must be continuously verified.

Zero Trust is a framework that is adaptive and it has to be in today’s digital ecosystem. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing are no longer merely enablers but core disruptors. They broaden attack surfaces, but also offer significant defenses, and call for a rethinking of Zero Trust systems.

The PROOF We’re In A Simulation Is Hiding In Plain Sight

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Welcome back to Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu. In today’s episode, Tom Bilyeu dives deep into one of the most provocative questions facing science and philosophy: Do we really have free will, or are we all just highly sophisticated NPCs—non-player characters—running a program inside a vast, resource-efficient simulation? Drawing on groundbreaking neuroscience experiments, the story of Phineas Gage, quantum mechanics, and the work of leading thinkers like Robert Sapolsky, Tom Bilyeu challenges everything we think we know about choice, consciousness, and the true nature of reality.

But this isn’t an episode about nihilism. Instead, Tom Bilyeu reveals why embracing the truth of a stochastically deterministic universe can actually make life feel more meaningful, freeing us from the weight of the past and inspiring us to make the most of every moment—programmed or not. Get ready to question your assumptions and see the world from a whole new perspective.

00:00 — Intro.
01:38 — Part 1: It’s Biology All The Way Down.
14:22 — Part 2: Quantum Mechanics Bury the Notion of Free Will.
19:53 — Part 3: The Last Hiding Places of Free Will.
27:51 — Part 4: Why Being An NPC Is The Best News You’ll Ever Get.

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Jacque Fresco: Apply the Methods of Science to the Social System!

I have to confess something about this interview.

I really liked Jacque Fresco. Not as a thinker I was supposed to admire, but as a person: the humor, the humility, the scientific curiosity still burning at 97.

That made the disagreements harder, not easier.

Fresco spent almost a century arguing one idea. We apply the methods of #science to engineering, to medicine, to flight. Then we run our economies and our politics on opinion, tradition, and the preferences of the financial elite.

He thought we had it exactly inverted. Rigor for the machines, guesswork for the humans.

“Technology was never the hard part. The harder question is what kind of society we want it to serve.”

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