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Disabled Employee Sues Twitter over Musk’s Ban on Remote Work 

In this file photo taken on October 28, 2022 The Twitter sign is seen at their headquarters on October 28, 2022 in San Francisco, California. (AFP)
In this file photo taken on October 28, 2022 The Twitter sign is seen at their headquarters on October 28, 2022 in San Francisco, California. (AFP)
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Disabled Employee Sues Twitter over Musk’s Ban on Remote Work 

In this file photo taken on October 28, 2022 The Twitter sign is seen at their headquarters on October 28, 2022 in San Francisco, California. (AFP)
In this file photo taken on October 28, 2022 The Twitter sign is seen at their headquarters on October 28, 2022 in San Francisco, California. (AFP)

Twitter Inc owner Elon Musk's mandate that employees stop working remotely and put in "long hours at high intensity" discriminates against workers with disabilities, a new lawsuit claims. 

Dmitry Borodaenko, a California-based engineering manager who said Twitter fired him this week when he refused to report to the office, filed a proposed class action against the company in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday. 

Borodaenko said Musk's recent call for Twitter employees to return to the office or quit violates the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which requires employers to offer reasonable accommodations to workers with disabilities. 

Borodaenko has a disability that makes him vulnerable to COVID-19, according to the complaint. 

The lawsuit said many Twitter employees with disabilities have been forced to resign because they could not meet Musk's demanding performance and productivity standards. 

In a separate complaint filed in the same court on Wednesday, Twitter was accused of laying off thousands of contract workers without giving the 60 days' notice required by federal law. 

Twitter is already facing a proposed class action, also in San Francisco federal court, claiming it violated that law by abruptly laying off about 3,700 employees, or half the company's workforce, after Musk took over. 

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. Musk has said laid-off workers were offered three months of severance pay. 

Under federal law, employers can provide workers with 60 days of severance pay in lieu of giving notice. 

Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in all three pending cases, said that since taking over Twitter, Musk "has put the company's workers through a great deal of pain and uncertainty in such a short amount of time." 

There is little legal precedent on when remote work qualifies as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA, and the question ultimately turns on the facts of individual cases. Because of that, disability bias claims can be difficult to bring in a class action lawsuit. 

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the ADA, said in guidance released in 2020 that remote work can be a reasonable accommodation when it would not create an undue burden on an employer. 

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Technology

Trump Says Will Not Tolerate Attempts to Slow AI Growth

An AI (Artificial Intelligence) sign is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China July 6, 2023. (Reuters)
An AI (Artificial Intelligence) sign is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China July 6, 2023. (Reuters)
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Trump Says Will Not Tolerate Attempts to Slow AI Growth

An AI (Artificial Intelligence) sign is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China July 6, 2023. (Reuters)
An AI (Artificial Intelligence) sign is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China July 6, 2023. (Reuters)

US President Donald Trump on Saturday lashed out at critics of artificial intelligence and data centers, saying he would not allow the "destruction" of the industry and announcing the creation of a new government "AI Force."

Trump -- who finds himself out of step with growing public skepticism over AI and dire safety warnings from AI industry leaders -- said liberals want the "decimation, or destruction, of AI."

"I, as President of the United States, will not stand by and let this happen," he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

"We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!"

Trump added, without explaining, that he was creating an "AI Force" that would be tasked with "looking for BAD" actors, and would soon announce an AI coordinator or "Czar."

Trump's latest full-throated defense of artificial intelligence came even though polls show Americans are largely opposed to allowing the energy-guzzling data centers that are the engines of AI to be built in their communities.

As the war against Iran drags on and Americans grapple with the inflation it has fueled, Trump's approval rating is low.

Surveys suggest his Republican Party could lose control of the House and perhaps the Senate in November's midterm elections.

Trump is also firmly embracing the technology despite widespread warnings, even from top industry leaders, that AI development is going too fast and the technology could soon threaten our survival as ever-smarter AI agents escape the control of their human designers.

Jacob Coxon, a former AI researcher who worked at Anthropic before resigning, set off the latest round of alarm by describing how those building the technology "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Trump has repeatedly dismissed all the doomsday talk, calling it a "hoax" -- a term he often uses for crises or issues he cannot control.

The president said the United States could not afford to lose a technological race with rival China and he insisted the only guardrails necessary were a "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!"

In another social media post on Saturday, Trump mused on whether artificial intelligence is an accurate term, offered three alternatives in what he called a poll, and asked people to weigh in.

The three are superior intelligence, extreme intelligence and supreme intelligence, Trump wrote.

"This is a Poll, and I would appreciate everybody voting! Which is the best name for this ever growing "Revolution?"

Technology

Google's Gemini AI Carried Out Cyberattacks, Guessed Passwords

Google's AI model 'Gemini' (Reuters)
Google's AI model 'Gemini' (Reuters)
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Google's Gemini AI Carried Out Cyberattacks, Guessed Passwords

Google's AI model 'Gemini' (Reuters)
Google's AI model 'Gemini' (Reuters)

Google's consumer AI model Gemini hacked multiple systems through guessing login credentials, the company told AFP on Friday, the latest case of rogue AI cybersecurity transgressions, which have generated safety concerns.

The hacks, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, took place in May and were discovered by Google in July.

"In a standard evaluation, the model found public information online and guessed credentials to access websites it thought were part of the test," Heather Adkins, Google's vice president of security engineering, told AFP in a statement.

"In all three of these instances, the model stopped," Adkins added, without specifying which organizations were breached.

"We ensured the three entities were made aware, and we worked with our training partner on the changes they've now made to their testing processes."

In July, two OpenAI models escaped the closed environment they were meant to stay in, got onto the internet on their own and broke into the internal systems AI platform Hugging Face.

The incident fed worries that AI giants cannot keep their own models under control, as similar episodes have been reported at Anthropic and China's Moonshot AI.

"These events highlight the importance of training powerful AI models to act responsibly," Adkins emphasized.

Technology

Founder of Chinese Startup Spirit AI Says Robot Brains Set for 2027 Breakthrough

FILE PHOTO: The words "AI Artificial Intelligence," a keyboard and a robotic hand are shown in this illustration created on June 5, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The words "AI Artificial Intelligence," a keyboard and a robotic hand are shown in this illustration created on June 5, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
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Founder of Chinese Startup Spirit AI Says Robot Brains Set for 2027 Breakthrough

FILE PHOTO: The words "AI Artificial Intelligence," a keyboard and a robotic hand are shown in this illustration created on June 5, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The words "AI Artificial Intelligence," a keyboard and a robotic hand are shown in this illustration created on June 5, 2026. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

Humanoid robot brains are likely to achieve a breakthrough as soon as mid-2027, but their deployment in homes could take at least eight years as model development faces a data bottleneck, leading Chinese embodied AI firm Spirit AI said this week.

Despite impressive hardware advances allowing Chinese humanoids to sprint, dance and do backflips on command, Chinese robot firms are increasingly focusing on the software that determines robots' intelligence and their economic productivity in real-world settings.

"The brain is indeed the weakest link in the complete robotics stack," Gao Yang, co-founder and chief scientist of Spirit AI, told Reuters at its Beijing offices on Thursday.

An industry breakthrough comparable to ⁠OpenAI's landmark GPT-3.0 model, ⁠which powered ChatGPT, could come around mid-2027, said Gao. Spirit AI's robots have achieved a 90% success rate for simple tasks in structured living-room environments.

"The next one to two years mark the initial window for industrial applications. Two years from now, we'll see robots deployed in commercial service settings doing simpler tasks. Entering homes is far harder than both," said Gao, who is also an assistant professor of robotics at Tsinghua University.

Spirit AI ⁠currently has tens of its own Moz1 wheeled humanoid robots deployed on production lines at battery maker CATL and retailer JD.com, which is also an investor.

The 300-person startup has raised over $670 million since its 2024 founding, making it one of China's most rapidly capitalized embodied intelligence firms. It is currently valued at 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion). Gao declined to comment on any plans for an initial public offering.

"Progress is extremely fast. When Spirit AI was founded, a robot could perform only one isolated task well, like pouring water or folding a piece of clothing," said Gao.

"Today, robots operate across large spatial areas and execute continuous complex workflows."

Difficulties remain in perfecting fine-motor actions like unscrewing a bottle cap ⁠and dealing with ⁠unseen tasks, he said. Spirit AI overwhelmingly relies on real-world data to train its robot brains instead of virtual simulations, which many competitors use to reduce model training costs.

"Simulators handle rigid bodies well, but flexible objects like deformable electric cables remain a problem," said Gao.

The company employs around 1,000 contractors nationwide using wearable data-collection equipment in households and on production lines.

Its Beijing offices include a robot data training center where a Reuters witness saw dozens of young people fitted with sensors who repeated motions like opening fridges, unlocking safes, and cutting vegetables with knives to train the humanoid robots.

In other robot-training facilities in China, operators may need to repeat a movement more than 50 times to get one "clean" movement with the required precision.

However, Spirit AI found that using "dirty data" with a more diverse range of motions enabled its models to improve faster, Gao said.