General Motors provided accommodation so Ars could visit its battery lab. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

WARREN, Mich.—If you've been following General Motors' development of electric vehicles on its Ultium platform, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it hasn't gone entirely smoothly. While plagued by some initial hiccups, GM has worked through those issues and now has a total of 12 EVs on the road. By my count, that's nine more than Ford, the crosstown rival that had a significant lead in this generation of EVs.

Furthering GM's advancement is the development of new battery technologies. Kurt Kelty, the company's newest head of batteries (after spending 12 years at Tesla), told me that new technology is a way to get to mass adoption of EVs.

"There needs to be price parity between gasoline and electric," he told me. "Without the tax credit."

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General Motors provided accommodation so Ars could visit its battery lab. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

WARREN, Mich.—If you've been following General Motors' development of electric vehicles on its Ultium platform, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it hasn't gone entirely smoothly. While plagued by some initial hiccups, GM has worked through those issues and now has a total of 12 EVs on the road. By my count, that's nine more than Ford, the crosstown rival that had a significant lead in this generation of EVs.

Furthering GM's advancement is the development of new battery technologies. Kurt Kelty, the company's newest head of batteries (after spending 12 years at Tesla), told me that new technology is a way to get to mass adoption of EVs.

"There needs to be price parity between gasoline and electric," he told me. "Without the tax credit."

Read full article

Comments

General Motors provided accommodation so Ars could visit its battery lab. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

WARREN, Mich.—If you've been following General Motors' development of electric vehicles on its Ultium platform, you'd be forgiven for thinking that it hasn't gone entirely smoothly. While plagued by some initial hiccups, GM has worked through those issues and now has a total of 12 EVs on the road. By my count, that's nine more than Ford, the crosstown rival that had a significant lead in this generation of EVs.

Furthering GM's advancement is the development of new battery technologies. Kurt Kelty, the company's newest head of batteries (after spending 12 years at Tesla), told me that new technology is a way to get to mass adoption of EVs.

"There needs to be price parity between gasoline and electric," he told me. "Without the tax credit."

Read full article

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These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn’t already know, she conducts a multistep background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based nonprofit, says she’ll run the person’s information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn’t quite seem right, she’ll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call—with their camera on.

If Yelland sounds paranoid, that’s because she is. In January, before she started her current nonprofit role, Yelland says, she got roped into an elaborate scam targeting job seekers. “Now, I do the whole verification rigamarole any time someone reaches out to me,” she tells WIRED.

Digital imposter scams aren’t new; messaging platforms , social media sites, and dating apps have long been rife with fakery. In a time when remote work and distributed teams have become commonplace, professional communications channels are no longer safe, either. The same artificial intelligence tools that tech companies promise will boost worker productivity are also making it easier for criminals and fraudsters to construct fake personas in seconds.

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These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn’t already know, she conducts a multistep background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based nonprofit, says she’ll run the person’s information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn’t quite seem right, she’ll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call—with their camera on.

If Yelland sounds paranoid, that’s because she is. In January, before she started her current nonprofit role, Yelland says, she got roped into an elaborate scam targeting job seekers. “Now, I do the whole verification rigamarole any time someone reaches out to me,” she tells WIRED.

Digital imposter scams aren’t new; messaging platforms , social media sites, and dating apps have long been rife with fakery. In a time when remote work and distributed teams have become commonplace, professional communications channels are no longer safe, either. The same artificial intelligence tools that tech companies promise will boost worker productivity are also making it easier for criminals and fraudsters to construct fake personas in seconds.

Read full article

Comments

These days, when Nicole Yelland receives a meeting request from someone she doesn’t already know, she conducts a multistep background check before deciding whether to accept. Yelland, who works in public relations for a Detroit-based nonprofit, says she’ll run the person’s information through Spokeo, a personal data aggregator that she pays a monthly subscription fee to use. If the contact claims to speak Spanish, Yelland says, she will casually test their ability to understand and translate trickier phrases. If something doesn’t quite seem right, she’ll ask the person to join a Microsoft Teams call—with their camera on.

If Yelland sounds paranoid, that’s because she is. In January, before she started her current nonprofit role, Yelland says, she got roped into an elaborate scam targeting job seekers. “Now, I do the whole verification rigamarole any time someone reaches out to me,” she tells WIRED.

Digital imposter scams aren’t new; messaging platforms , social media sites, and dating apps have long been rife with fakery. In a time when remote work and distributed teams have become commonplace, professional communications channels are no longer safe, either. The same artificial intelligence tools that tech companies promise will boost worker productivity are also making it easier for criminals and fraudsters to construct fake personas in seconds.

Read full article

Comments

Imagine a world where AI-powered bots can buy or sell cryptocurrency, make investments, and execute software-defined contracts at the blink of an eye, depending on minute-to-minute currency prices, breaking news, or other market-moving events. Then imagine an adversary causing the bot to redirect payments to an account they control by doing nothing more than entering a few sentences into the bot’s prompt.

That’s the scenario depicted in recently released research that developed a working exploit against ElizaOS, a fledgling open source framework.

ElizaOS is a framework for creating agents that use large language models to perform various blockchain-based transactions on behalf of a user based on a set of predefined rules. It was introduced in October under the name Ai16z and was changed to its current name in January. The framework remains largely experimental, but champions of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)—a model in which communities or companies are governed by decentralized computer programs running on blockchains—see it as a potential engine for jumpstarting the creation of agents that automatically navigate these so-called DAOs on behalf of end users.

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Imagine a world where AI-powered bots can buy or sell cryptocurrency, make investments, and execute software-defined contracts at the blink of an eye, depending on minute-to-minute currency prices, breaking news, or other market-moving events. Then imagine an adversary causing the bot to redirect payments to an account they control by doing nothing more than entering a few sentences into the bot’s prompt.

That’s the scenario depicted in recently released research that developed a working exploit against ElizaOS, a fledgling open source framework.

ElizaOS is a framework for creating agents that use large language models to perform various blockchain-based transactions on behalf of a user based on a set of predefined rules. It was introduced in October under the name Ai16z and was changed to its current name in January. The framework remains largely experimental, but champions of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)—a model in which communities or companies are governed by decentralized computer programs running on blockchains—see it as a potential engine for jumpstarting the creation of agents that automatically navigate these so-called DAOs on behalf of end users.

Read full article

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Imagine a world where AI-powered bots can buy or sell cryptocurrency, make investments, and execute software-defined contracts at the blink of an eye, depending on minute-to-minute currency prices, breaking news, or other market-moving events. Then imagine an adversary causing the bot to redirect payments to an account they control by doing nothing more than entering a few sentences into the bot’s prompt.

That’s the scenario depicted in recently released research that developed a working exploit against ElizaOS, a fledgling open source framework.

ElizaOS is a framework for creating agents that use large language models to perform various blockchain-based transactions on behalf of a user based on a set of predefined rules. It was introduced in October under the name Ai16z and was changed to its current name in January. The framework remains largely experimental, but champions of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs)—a model in which communities or companies are governed by decentralized computer programs running on blockchains—see it as a potential engine for jumpstarting the creation of agents that automatically navigate these so-called DAOs on behalf of end users.

Read full article

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