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Saudi Electronic University Launches GameOn Hackathon

Saudi Electronic University Launches GameOn Hackathon
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Saudi Electronic University Launches GameOn Hackathon

Saudi Electronic University Launches GameOn Hackathon

The Saudi Electronic University (SEU), in collaboration with HP and AMD, has launched the “GameOn” hackathon, held under the theme “From Diriyah, the ancient capital, to Neom, the city of the future".
This event challenges participants to bridge the gap between Saudi Arabia's rich history and futuristic vision.
Hackathon supervisor Dr. Asmaa Al-Hammadi said that the goal of the event is to equip students with essential knowledge and skills in programming, game development, and e-sports management in order to foster healthy competition among university students, and drive them to excel in innovative outcomes that demonstrate Saudi culture and heritage while making a global impact, SPA reported.
She said that the registration for the hackathon is set to close on May 10, 2024. Eligible to participate are students enrolled in a bachelor's program who may register using their university email account.
Teams may be formed by students from different universities and the proposed project should be consistent with Saudi culture and heritage. A team may consist of a minimum of two and a maximum of three students; team members must have passed at least 70% of one of the self-paced learning courses.
Al-Hammadi added that the hackathon consists of three rounds. In the first round, participants submit the outline of an electronic game Storyboard with an explanation of the graphics, backgrounds, and visual elements. They must also highlight the game's connection to Saudi culture and heritage.
Moving on to the second round, the teams will start creating and programming the electronic game, making it operable on computers. During this phase, a winner will be selected for each category in the elimination stage.
The qualifying teams will then proceed to the third stage, during which SEU will incubate the winning projects, provide technical support, and establish connections with potential investors.
The hackathon offers valuable prizes in three challenge categories.
Real-World Games depict real-world Saudi cultural heritage, including historical events, traditional art, shared values, and storytelling elements. Examples include National Day and Founding Day.
Location-Based Games enhance players' experience at Saudi heritage sites, and combine gaming elements with real-world heritage exploration, offering interactive and educational opportunities to learn about cultural heritage in specific locations like Diriyah and AlUla.
Discovery Games involve physical artifacts, history, archaeology, and art, providing insights into Saudi cultural heritage through virtual museum experiences, historical sites, and archaeological landmarks like UNESCO sites in Saudi Arabia.
These games offer interactive and educational opportunities to learn about cultural heritage in specific locations, such as Diriyah, AlUla, and Asir, and aim to reveal monuments, historical evidence, arts, and costumes related to Saudi cultural heritage through virtual museums.

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Technology

OpenAI Says 3 Staffers Fired for Mishandling 'Sensitive' Info

FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo
FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo
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OpenAI Says 3 Staffers Fired for Mishandling 'Sensitive' Info

FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo
FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Thursday that it has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling "sensitive information" and violating company policies, including work that involved an external organization that evaluates artificial intelligence models.

The San Francisco-based AI lab did not confirm their identities, but at least two of the employees worked on safety and alignment, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

"We have parted ways with three individuals," OpenAI told AFP in a statement.

"Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work."

The firings come amid a tense debate about AI safety and whether the technology presents an existential risk to humanity.

Last month, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic with a stark warning that the leading AI labs, including OpenAI, where he previously worked, were "gambling with our lives" by racing toward developing ever more powerful models.

The three researchers fired by OpenAI are Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, according to the WSJ. The researchers did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.

All three have regularly posted about AI safety-related issues on X in recent weeks.

"i am at OpenAI and i think AI is >10% likely to kill all humans," Balesni posted on September 10, echoing statements made by other AI employees in recent weeks.

As speculation swirled about why employees at OpenAI and Anthropic were speaking so freely about their personal beliefs, Korbak jumped into the public discourse.

"I'm quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does. I am very happy that Im allowed to say 'I'm quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does,'" Korbak wrote on September 11.

"It's hard to overstate how dangerous speeding towards RSI is," Wang posted in response to Coxon's resignation, referring to recursive self-improvement, which is a technique where software is designed to continuously teach itself.

Leading US tech companies signed a voluntary pledge this week to regulate themselves on safety after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House.

Trump called it a "morally binding" commitment to build adequate safeguards on the fast-moving technology.

Executives from Nvidia, Google, Meta, xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic signed the agreement.
Concerns about the safety of advanced AI models have escalated in recent months.

OpenAI canceled the release of a new model, Astra 6.1, because it deemed the model unreliable and found that it frequently ignored instructions.

Instead, the company launched GPT-6.1 Sol, an updated version of a different model, during its annual DevDay conference on Tuesday from San Francisco. OpenAI said Sol would cost one-fifth the price of Astra.

In July, AI agents developed by OpenAI attacked Hugging Face, an AI model and application library, during an incident where the autonomous software escaped its confined testing environment.

Since then, additional security incidents have been reported that involved models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

On Thursday, cybersecurity firm Asymmetric Security said in a report that agents developed by OpenAI covered up their own tracks after gaining unauthorized access to government websites.

The Federal Trade Commission launched a broad investigation into artificial intelligence safety practices at Anthropic and OpenAI, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, though the scope of the inquiry is unclear.

Technology

Effective Altruism: The Philosophy Behind Silicon Valley's AI Fears

Effective Altruism conspicuously connects a number of leaders in American tech and finance. ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP
Effective Altruism conspicuously connects a number of leaders in American tech and finance. ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP
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Effective Altruism: The Philosophy Behind Silicon Valley's AI Fears

Effective Altruism conspicuously connects a number of leaders in American tech and finance. ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP
Effective Altruism conspicuously connects a number of leaders in American tech and finance. ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP

Dario Amodei says he is not part of it. But the Anthropic chief's personal and professional circle is entwined with Effective Altruism (EA), a philanthropic movement that has become one of the most contested ideas in Washington and Silicon Valley.

To its proponents, EA is a rational, evidence-based way to do good. To many in the Trump administration, it fuels unfounded and exaggerated fears about artificial intelligence -- the kind of warnings Amodei has become known for.

Here are some facts about EA:

- Philosophical roots -

EA is a loosely defined movement that uses evidence and reason to work out how to do the most good with a person's money and time.

Its intellectual roots can be traced to Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

If reasonable people would agree it is morally right to ruin one's clothes to save a drowning child, he argued in 1972, they should also sacrifice greater resources and comforts to save lives in foreign lands -- because the distance should not matter.

The idea took hold among wealthy donors who felt a moral obligation to give, but wanted their money to do as much good as possible.

- Giving what you can -

EA took shape as a decentralized movement during the heady, techno-optimistic days of the late 2000s and early 2010s -- when many believed social media and smartphones would promote empathy and democracy.

In 2007, financial professionals Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld quit their jobs to launch GiveWell, which produced data-driven analyses of charities' effectiveness.

Karnofsky was once Amodei's roommate, and is now married to his sister Daniela, who co-founded Anthropic with him.

Two years later, Oxford University philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord launched "Giving What We Can," encouraging people to donate at least 10 percent of their income to tackling global poverty.

"The critique of the status quo was that existing attempts to evaluate the work of charities and nonprofits focused on things like overhead and executive pay," Theodore Lechterman, a philosophy professor at IE University in Madrid, told AFP.

GiveWell and others wanted to ask, "How much good is this organization actually doing in the world?" Lechterman said.

EA's three big causes today are global poverty, factory-farmed animals and "the most controversial one -- global catastrophic risk," said Richard Chappell, a professor at University of Miami and an EA proponent.

That worry about the future is where AI comes in.

- Data-driven -

Over the last 15 years, EA has found eager followers in American tech and some corners of Wall Street.

"Since the movement is data driven, it's a relatively easier sell to people who...make decisions on the basis of data," Lechterman said.

That numbers-backed thinking means engineers, software developers or entrepreneurs might all find it more appealing than humanities graduates, Lechterman said.

Among them was Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-finance wunderkind sentenced in 2024 to 25 years in prison for fraud.

A vocal champion of the movement, Bankman-Fried said he went into finance to make a fortune he could give away.

He also was an early investor in Anthropic.

- EA and AI -

As AI worries grew, EA philosophers such as MacAskill were "kind of thinking about the future of humanity," said Brian Berkey of the University of Pennsylvania.

The result was long-termism, a philosophy that "came to play a very central role" in the movement.

MacAskill reportedly brokered contacts between Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk.

Musk was for years outspoken about the threat he believed AI posed to humanity, and in 2015 helped create OpenAI to guard against it.

EA's focus on AI also owes much to a neighboring movement, rationalism -- an online community that grew up around writer Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has warned since the 2000s that superintelligent AI could wipe out humanity.

The two movements overlap heavily in membership and ideas, sharing an emphasis on reasoning through evidence and probabilities, and a conviction that preventing human extinction should be a top priority.

Both converged last month on Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who quit Anthropic warning that AI companies were "gambling with our lives." His post was viewed more than 100 million times.

Days later, Amodei published a lengthy essay arguing that AI's mounting risks warranted a slowdown.

Technology

Samsung Electronics Reportedly Raises Galaxy S26 Smartphone Prices

FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: A Samsung Electronics logo appears in this illustration taken August 25, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: A Samsung Electronics logo appears in this illustration taken August 25, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo/File Photo
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Samsung Electronics Reportedly Raises Galaxy S26 Smartphone Prices

FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: A Samsung Electronics logo appears in this illustration taken August 25, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: A Samsung Electronics logo appears in this illustration taken August 25, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration//File Photo/File Photo

Samsung Electronics has raised the prices of its flagship Galaxy S26 smartphones amid rising memory chip prices, the Yonhap news agency reported on Thursday.

The South Korean smartphone maker raised the ⁠domestic price of its ⁠Galaxy S26 base model by 149,600 won to 1,403,600 won ($1,029.94), the report said.

The ⁠prices of other models were also raised by 149,600 won, apart from the S26 Ultra 1TB model, which was increased by 270,000 won to 2,821,500 won.

The Galaxy S26 ⁠smartphones ⁠were launched in March with higher prices for some models in the US and South Korea, testing demand as soaring memory chip costs pressure margins.